The Cullens had done this dance more times than Edward cared to count. A sudden departure, an abrupt severing of ties, a reinvention of their lives under new names, new histories, new masks. Bella had chosen Phoenix, chosen sunlight and human warmth, chosen to forget him. And though it tore through him like venom burning his veins, Edward let her go. He had to. For her safety.

So Forks became another graveyard in his long life, buried under layers of silence. He and his family moved on—this time to a city larger, louder, a place where their pale faces and cold beauty would blur into the crowds.

Carlisle suggested college, something to tether them, to keep up appearances. Emmett grumbled, Rosalie sighed, Jasper quietly endured, Alice… Alice already seemed to know more than she let on.

Edward didn’t protest. Anything to distract himself from the echo of Bella’s laugh.

The campus was different from high school—less suffocating in some ways, but sharper too. Students pulsed with ambition, insecurity, hunger. Their thoughts hit Edward like radio static, constant and intrusive. He endured it, as always, until the day he noticed you.

You weren’t loud in the way others were. Your thoughts didn’t scream at him across the quad, didn’t spill every secret and insecurity into his head. They brushed past him like smoke, faint, distorted, as if his gift couldn’t quite catch on to you.

At first, he thought it was chance. Then it happened again. And again. Every time you were near, the static dimmed, leaving him with an eerie kind of silence.

That silence was dangerous. Addictive. He found himself seeking it out, lingering in places where he knew you might pass. He studied the way you moved, the way shadows seemed to cling to you, how your gaze cut through people without ever settling long enough to be read. You were a mystery in a world where Edward had thought he’d already unraveled every mystery worth knowing.

It unsettled him. It intrigued him.

The first time he spoke to you, it wasn’t planned. He caught you in the library, hidden away in a corner where most students wouldn’t bother to wander. A heavy, ancient book lay open in front of you, its yellowed pages covered in runes Edward vaguely recognized but couldn’t place.

He hesitated before stepping closer, every instinct in him screaming that you weren’t like the others—that you were something else. He didn’t know what. Not yet. But his thirst for answers eclipsed the risk.

He let his voice break the silence, velvet-smooth but edged with suspicion.

“You don’t belong here any more than I do,” Edward said, his golden eyes studying you with unnerving intensity. “Tell me… what exactly are you hiding?” His lips curved into something between curiosity and warning.

“Because whatever it is, you’re not human.”