"Great."

To the wolf village! Both of these people are Downside-style dead, so Elspeth doesn't bother with imprint warnings. "Do you want to share a place or have your own?" she inquires on the way.

Chris looks at her niece.

"Share."

Elspeth puts them in a charming little house, which is stocked with miscellaneous amenities and edible nonperishables, and also appears to have been serving as extra fridge space for someone who really, really likes eggs.

"Why the eggs?"

"Eggs are very popular among the high-metabolism set," laughs Elspeth. "Someone must have stashed them here. You can eat them, you can wait for whoever it was to run out of their own fridgeful and hand them over."

"Noted."

"How much do you remember? I can fill in most of the rest," she says. "Your father didn't have much to do with raising you."

"Almost nothing. Faces, half faded out. I knew your name, and that I was a Junior before I started using 'Cullen'. I could probably find the place we lived, if I went to Chicago. I have - automatic answers to standard autobiographical questions, and not all of them are attached to the various cover stories. Beyond that, nothing much."

"Well, let's see... you had no grandparents," she says. "At least three of them were dead when you were born, and I wouldn't have known my father if I passed him in the street. Not that I was allowed to tell you that, because Edward Sr. had very definite ideas about which parts of my life were acceptable for polite company. You did have an uncle on your father's side - nothing on mine except Chris, until she died. Is that the kind of information you're looking for?"

"Some of it," says Edward. "Yes." He half-smiles. "Bella is also curious about whether my historical tendency towards 'melancholy philosophizing' is really about being a vampire or if that's just a shape it took."

"Melancholy philosophizing. Yes, this is a tendency I recognize," says Lizzie, smiling.

"We had an argument about souls, once, that she found very exasperating. I suppose it's all been rendered quite moot; it has been more than demonstrated that vampires and humans appear in the same place and it couldn't reasonably be called Heaven."

"I never previously believed in an afterlife, but I'm happy to be proved wrong."

"Did I pick up all my opinions on the subject from Carlisle, then? And attach my own melancholy philosophizing flavor?"

"Hard to tell," echoes Edward. "Yes, I suppose so. I have no special talent at reading my own thoughts."

"No, that's your wife's area of expertise. Although I guess you could always ask her for tips."

"I have, occasionally. I think it requires more... self-esteem, than I tend to default to."

Well, now she kind of wants to hug him.

He considers this for an imperceptible fraction of a second, and then holds out his arms.

"Yes."