I was back in Jacksonville. It was better here. I wasn’t waiting for anyone, I remembered pretty much nothing. I’d managed to block everything out.

I’d been sent to a counsellor. I felt really terrible for Renee-she was having to fork out huge amounts for the sessions, and I don’t really think I was getting anywhere. I barely talked to him. He thought I was depressed-but I didn’t think I was. I just felt empty. Not like before. Not like there was a hole. I felt like there was nothing to make a hole in. There was nothing left of me. Everything I’d been through just caught up with me, and it had sapped my life.

Well. Maybe not my life. More like my soul. If, of course, I was willing to believe such a thing existed.

The counsellor worked tirelessly, and I could tell that he was honestly a good guy. He was really sweet, and seemed to truly care about me. He asked me all sorts of questions, and I barely registered them-I didn’t even realise I was replying. I could have been lying. I could also have spilled out every truth I’d been keeping since I’d moved to Forks. But I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted to sink away, into oblivion.

Apparently, I was so bad that I couldn’t go to school anymore. That meant no college. My parents were distraught, both Charlie and Renee. They didn’t seem to understand what had gone wrong. They knew that I had cut my hand, and somehow lost a large, large amount of blood, and that I therefore had to be rushed to hospital. Perhaps the doctors warned about something it could do to my brain. Or maybe they just thought that the experience was so traumatizing that I was affected in pretty much the same way I had when Edward left. Although, at the same time, it was completely different.

For the first while I was with my mother, she tried to squeeze the story out of me, trying to get me to confess to something, or at least open up a bit. Renee always was fantastic at sensing things-although she didn’t need her special perception skills here. It was blatantly obvious that I was upset. My mother got the message good and strong after a while that I wasn’t going to talk about it. She was visibly distressed-but I, new heartless creature that I was, simply could not find the will to care.

Phil tried to give me some lessons, but he was caught up with his job. Renee had never been particularly academic, but she did her best-before giving in to her frustration. It seemed that I refused to learn-or at least, couldn’t. I’d become a shell-like a moving vegetable. It must have seemed that there was nothing inside me in the form of a mind or spirit. And that’s what it felt like.

I was stripped-empty and deserted. Everything that was me no longer seemed to exist. If I’d had any sort of thoughts about my condition, I would have wished for the company of a friend, and to be right again. But I was in no state to be wishing.

I might as well have been dead.