Prologue
Alice sits on Jasper’s lap in the lounge room, both of them listening to Edward compose on the piano. The song is melancholic and lonely, a genre of bittersweet longing that he excels at creating. There are no words. Simply Edward’s heart torn into keys and arranged into a rhythm. Jasper curls his hands around Alice’s thighs, holding her tight, trying not to lose himself in the depths of Edward’s emotions—his perpetual hatred for himself; his desire for love; his longing for something other than loneliness; his grief for being unable to find it.
Jasper can understand him. These are all things he felt before Alice in some way. Not to the same extent. Jasper was always too busy, too reserved, trained to feel less and block the emotions dragging him down. They had existed, though. Jasper often wonders how he would have survived living near Edward, someone so consumed by emotions, if he hadn’t spent so many years blocking them. Alice tenses in his hold and he rocks her gently through her new vision, feeling the abrupt change in her emotions: elation, comfort, love.
Edward continues to play as he watches Alice’s vision. It is unfocussed at first, fuzzy and changing as they are when someone has yet to make a decision. It disappears and reappears at the edges, the house in view changes, from a cabin to a cottage to a manor and back, the person within looks old and young and then blonde and then red haired.
It finally settles with startling clarity on a teenager, no older than eighteen, with tanned skin and round glasses covering haunting green eyes, a mess of black curls dripping down his forehead and a unique lightning scar cutting across his face. The vision changes, until Edward is standing next to the teen, running his fingers along his jaw and wrapping the teen in a hug so tight Edward wonders why the human isn’t killed. Just as the vision is ending the green-eyed teen looks over vision-Edward’s shoulder, arms still wrapped around him, and looks directly into them—into Alice and Edward, living the vision now.
It ends abruptly and Edward stops playing, pulling his fingers from the keys slowly.
“Who was that?” He asks Alice, although he knows she, too, doesn’t yet know.