The Girl Who Was Taken (Renesme Cullens Twin Sister)

Epilogue

AUTHOR NOTE—

If you want to leave this story on a happy note, please stop reading right now. Don't even read this next sentence. (My cousin told me the last chapter is better than this one.) Seriously, it only gets sad from here on out. I warned you.

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Eighty-seven years later

Strawberries were my favorite berry season. I liked to go every year to a field and pick them myself. Usually I'd bring grand nieces and nephews, or Paul would join me, but this year just worked out that I was heading there all on my own. It was okay, I'd been asking if anyone else wanted to go, but it was a busy year with school and activities and everything else, and this was the last weekend they were open, so I made the executive decision to just go it alone. I don't think being there with other people would have changed the outcome of the day. In fact, it was probably for the best that it was just me. This way, the bloodshed was lessened to just one body.

I didn't suspect a thing. Later on, I'd have a lot of time to think about everything that could have been different, all the ways in which I might have found out. I wondered if Alice had seen it in a vision, or if it was all by coincidence and that the decisions that brought the consequences were made in such a split second moment that she didn't even see it coming. It had to be. He had no idea that I'd be there that day, or that he'd smell my scent on the wind a mile away as he was traveling sixty miles an hour with his windows rolled down.

He must have recognized the scent, muttering to himself, how is it possible. Maybe he thought it must have been someone else, that in the eighty-seven years, another child was born of the same likeness to me and he could try it all over again, do it right this time.

But he didn't find another person on the strawberry field, he found me, the same girl he was convinced was dead and gone. He was a dark figure on the edge of the field, standing stark between other fields that went on for a mile, where more strawberries and blueberries were growing. I watched warily from where I was, squatted down, looking under leaves for the berries that hadn't been picked yet. I already had a pretty good haul in my basket, and I didn't recognize the figure from afar, but the hair on my arms were standing on end despite the ninety degree weather and I was always smart when it came to knowing when to run.

So I gathered my basket and got up to leave, turning away from the figure, walking down the aisle of strawberry plants. I knew I needed to be faster, and I even hopped over a few rows of strawberries to get closer to the parking lot. But I had been living a simple life for the last eighty years, no blood the entire time, and I wasn't as sharp as I used to be. I was breathing heavy as I hurried, and the man who had been on the very edge of the field just moments before was now stepping through the brittle straw behind me.

"Devo essere in paradiso," Demetri said. I must be in heaven.

I swallowed hard, recognizing his voice. It hadn't changed at all. There was no use in running any farther. I would not be able to outrun him. I turned around, trying to stay steady, and face him. He looked the same, even after all these years. His hair hadn't grown, his face hadn't aged, but I supposed mine hadn't aged so much either. Although as the years went on, without drinking blood, I was starting to notice some differences that only grew starker when I stood next to Renesme who was still drinking an all blood diet and hadn't aged at all. Demetri looked at me in wonderment, and with the pain of loss in his eyes. "How are you here?" he asked in the language I hadn't spoken in so long.

It came back to my tongue easily, like I hadn't stopped using it for half a lifetime. "It's not the girl you knew," I said. "You should go."

He stepped closer. "Stormy," he breathed. He reached his hand out for my face, and I startled at his touch, fumbling with the basket of strawberries, spilling out a good portion of them. "It is you," he insisted. "I'd recognize your soul anywhere. It is mine."