Chapter Text
The silence in the Bitterroot Mountains wasn't just an absence of sound; it was a physical weight, one Bella Swan wore like a second skin. It had been seven years since she walked away from the rainy gloom of Forks, and the girl who once dreamed of stethoscopes and medical residency was a ghost. In her place stood a woman with ink-stained fingers and a heart that felt like a cauterized wound.
Bella sat at her mahogany desk, the only expensive thing in her modest Montana cabin. Her latest manuscript, a dark, cynical thriller that her editor loved and her few readers found "disturbing", glowed on the monitor. She didn't write about romance. She didn't write about "forever." She wrote about the mundane, the broken, and the ways people failed each other.
She checked her inbox. One email from her publisher about royalties; another from her editor, Vanessa, asking if she was "still alive."
"Barely," Bella muttered, her voice raspy from disuse.
She lived for the routine: coffee at dawn, four thousand words by noon, a hike through the pines until her lungs burned, and then the long, dark evening of waiting for sleep. She remained alive not because of any great hope, but because the alternative felt like too much effort, and she couldn't bring herself to break her father's heart a second time.
A part of her appreciated the irony. She had wanted to become a vampire for Edward, but, even after he decided he didn't want her, she still became the living- dead. Or, well, her version of it.
She didn't feel like she was still alive. She felt like she had died in that forest all those years ago. But, alas, she hadn't. There had been no signs of the supernatural either. Sometimes, she wondered if her time in Forks was nothing but a dream, a painfully beautiful one, but a dream nonetheless.
But, Bella had to wake up eventually, and had found her niche, and her home. In the six or so years she'd been publishing, she had gained her fair share of money. Eight novels, all crime thrillers with a medical twist, with a ninth soon to join her collection. She'd gotten lucky, Renee’s husband, Phil, had some connections to the world of publishing. Apparently, Phil was working on a memoir.
…And had been since before she turned 20, but still.
Bella had made her peace with the quiet life of hers. It wasn't what she thought she would be, but life never cared what people like her wanted. She had built this life, though, and it was hers.
Her hand moved to her mug, fingers cramping slightly from the seemingly endless typing done today. She spent a moment considering her evening, she should email Charlie soon, it had been a few months. Renee still wasn't talking to her, but that was probably for the best. Phil checked in with her through Vanessa, and she didn't really talk to anyone else. She'd probably spend an hour or two researching for her novel, then, maybe, she'd go for a hike.
She liked that thought, the quiet was calming to her soul.
The peace was broken by the low rumble of a heavy engine, making her frown. Moving trucks were grinding their way up the secluded private road that ended at the neighboring property, a modern glass-and-steel monstrosity that had sat empty for years. Bella narrowed her eyes, a sharp spike of irritation lancing through her usual apathy. She had bought this land for the isolation.
She grabbed her binoculars from the windowsill, intending to loathe her new neighbors from a distance.