20 ∘ Secrets: Part One (BPOV)

                                    

                                          
September 20th, 2016
                          
How was I possibly going to fix this? I couldn’t say it out loud. There would be no going back. If I told him, he would completely look at me differently. At Edward and at his granddaughter, too. All of us.
                          
He may have reacted fairly well to Jacob, but vampire is not quite the same thing as werewolf.
                          
He was looking directly into my eyes. “Isabella.”
                          
Oh, crap.
                          
“Charlie, relax.” Jake was almost completely standing up now.
                          
“Relax?! Damnit, guys! What the hell is going on?”
                          
There was no way out of this. If I were to ever tell him, this was definitely not a way I imagined it going. I was afraid he’d have a heart attack, or at least a panic attack. It felt like I was having one. I was frozen. I didn’t know what to say, or do.
                          
“Maybe you should take a seat,” Edward suggested, and I felt his cold grip on my upper arms. He was talking to Charlie, but I thought it was good advice. I sat across from him, the furthest I could absolutely be.
                          
In a octave lower than Charlie could hear, Edward said to Renesmee, “Sit next to him.” That was good. He was always happy when she was with him. That’s exactly what he needed. And what I needed.
                          
“It’s okay,” she told my dad, and patted his arm. He smiled, but his eyes didn’t correlate.
                          
“I think it’s time you knew the truth, Charlie,” Carlisle started. I didn’t know when he got it, but he handed him a glass of water. “It’s a pretty long story.”
                          
“Well, that’s the understatement of the century.” Alice skipped inside and sat next to me. Great timing. “Sorry,” she mumbled to me.
                          
Jake now sat on the other side of Nessie, and Jasper stood next to Charlie, who relaxed instantly. I couldn’t possibly be more grateful for his gift right now. I reminded myself to thank him later.
                          
“It all started the day I moved here. Edward was in my biology class, but we didn’t speak,” I started.
                          
“We’ll go back to the reason why later, but I had to leave. I ditched the rest of school, and drove up north to stay with family-friends. When I finally came back, I introduced myself.” Charlie kept looking back-and-forth between us. Edward continued. “We got along fine, but I tried to keep my distance. I didn’t want her to get hurt... But it wasn’t long until I began another conversation with her. I just couldn’t stay away.”
                          
“Neither could I.” I remembered as much as I possibly could, but a lot of it went away after my transformation. My human eyes, my human ears, my human brain... it didn’t catch as much as I thought.
                          
“There was this one night that changed everything. She went out with her friends to Port Angeles, and I wanted to protect her, so... I followed them,” Edward admitted. Charlie narrowed his eyes out of confusion. “And it’s a damn good thing I did.” He shivered, and sat next to me. I wrapped one arm around his shoulders.
                          
“He saved me.” This is one moment of my life I’d never forget. “Angela, and Jessica went to a restaurant after they picked out dresses. I told them I wanted to stop by a bookstore first, so they went without me. On my way to them...” I lowered my head, not being able to look at Charlie when I said this. Not to mention, my daughter was next to him. “I was almost attacked. Had it not been for Edward so close by, I would have been seriously hurt. Or maybe even dead.”
                          
“Mom...” Nessie was tearing up.
                          
I knew at least two members of our family were already aware of this. Edward told me Carlisle helped make sure one of them got caught by the authorities. And Rosalie hinted that she knew when I slept over here before the battle with Victoria’s newborn army, the night she told me about her human life. The rest of them probably did as well. They didn’t keep secrets.
                          
I sighed. “He took me to the restaurant, but so much time had passed that the girls already ate. Edward made sure I did, too, after they went back home. That’s when I demanded answers from him.”
                          
“About what?” Charlie asked.
                          
“How he knew where I was that night, how he got to me in time the day of the accident, how he stopped that van from crushing me. I couldn’t let it go. But of course, I got no real answers. He was too stubborn to tell me what I already knew.” I paused to nudge him. “The next day, after more research, I confronted him... I found out what he was.”
                          
“What he... What?” Charlie was growing more confused and impatient by the second. I took a few deep breaths, but I couldn’t get it out. The word was stuck in my throat.
                          
“I’m a vampire,” Edward told him for me.