The Differences Between Fantasy and Reality Sneak Peek

A brief teaser of Chapter 26 - Party:

Alice laughed, and the sound was all silver, a wind chime. “Of course you’ll enjoy it. Everyone is supposed to be nice to you today and give you your way, Bella. What’s the worst that could happen?” She meant it as a rhetorical question.

“He knows why,” I grumbled under my breath. It was actually about more than just my fear of Edward taking off. There was also the very real issue that in less than a year I'd have to be off at college and leaving my father to fend for himself. While part of me was excited to start my future and move out from under my father's thumb, there was this much larger part of me which feared leaving him. As I'd told Edward when we first met, there is a symbiotic relationship between parent and child, and it was especially there for me given how much we'd only had each other to rely on.

Alice was staring at Edward and apparently he'd answered her without either of them actually speaking, because suddenly she turned to me. “Isn't eighteen a little young to be worrying about your age?”

“It’s older than Edward,” I mumbled.

He sighed.

“Technically,” she said, keeping her tone light. “Just by one little year, though.”

“You're right, and if I thought for a second that these last months had swayed him in the slightest to an eventuality which doesn't end in me dead or having to give up loving him for my own sanity's sake it wouldn't matter, but currently it's just a reminder of how little time there really is for us.” All because Edward was dead set against any future that changed me. Any future that made me like him – that made me immortal, too.

An impasse, he called it.

I couldn’t really see Edward’s point, to be honest. After all, he claimed to love me, and yet he was completely unwilling to keep me. It made me once again question if he really did care.