Hi there! Wow, it's been a long time (five months!) since I've updated this and I'm very sorry about that. I hope this chapter isn't boring. Thanks for reading!

Edward spent the morning in the garden, smiling quietly to himself. He weeded and watered and enjoyed himself thoroughly.

But after a couple hours, a disquieting feeling stole over him while he was gathering apples. He frowned, wondering what Jane was doing. He had only been in that town two or three times, but he remembered it vividly. There were fast cars and unsmiling store owners and…police.

Edward shivered even though he was standing in the warm sunlight and hugged the wicker basket full of fruit to his chest. He didn’t like or trust the police at all.

Now that he thought about it, there were so many things that could harm her in that place. His eyes widened in horror. Why hadn't he warned her of all the dangers? What if she tripped and hurt herself? What if she was hit by a car?

What if she decided she liked it better down there? Away from this cold house. Away from him.

“She said she would come back,” Edward murmured to himself. “And she will come back.” He nodded decisively and moved on to the pear trees, trying to ignore how anxious he was.

Jane waved goodbye to Edward and walked happily through the courtyard, thoroughly enjoying the bright, sunny morning. The tall hedge sculptures towered over her and she squinted up at them, still amazed at how life-like they were.

She was so amazed, in fact, that she forgot to watch where she was going and tripped over a loose stone in the walkway. She stumbled for a few feet before crashing to the hard ground.

Jane rolled onto her back, experiencing the very uncomfortable sensation of having all the air driven from her lungs.

“Ow,” she groaned and scowled darkly. It was ridiculous how many times she had tripped in the last few days. From her position on the ground, she examined the huge expanse of blue sky above her. It was stunning in its simplicity. She lay there for a few seconds, absorbing the beauty of it, feeling her sour expression melt away.

After hauling herself to her feet, she glanced around carefully, trying to be casual. It seemed that Edward hadn’t seen her trip. Jane sighed in relief and kept walking.

As she got further away from the mansion and closer to the gates, her surroundings became somehow colder. She realized it was because Edward’s influence was decreasing. The plants lining the short lane to the gate were scraggly and unkempt. Most were weeds. Despite the fact that it was still a beautiful morning, the world seemed to have lost some of its color.

She passed quickly through the iron gates, feeling no urge to linger in such a forbidding area.

At the top of the hill, she stopped to take in the sight of the neat rows of pastel-colored houses below her. Everything was so organized. Maybe too organized.

It wasn’t long before she was walking through the neighborhoods, down the same streets she had walked through during the storm, when she had been trying to find shelter. Had it only been three days ago?

Jane glanced around uneasily. The houses were painted soothing, friendly colors, but there was something…wrong about them. Maybe it was the fact that everything was so uniform. It all looked too perfect.

Maybe it was because of what Edward had told her about the people he had met here. Granted, that had been countless years ago, but human nature doesn’t change much.

Or maybe it was because this place fiercely reminded her of the home she had once had.

After she had been abandoned by Creedy, she had been put in the hospital. Apparently some distant neighbor had called the police after hearing an odd shrieking sound (Jane’s panicked shouts) coming from the large manor house where the old scientist lived. At first she had been panicked and hysterical, scared to death of the needles and beeping monitors. After a while, she stopped talking, just stared out of the window at some stunted trees and gray sky.

The doctors treated her for malnourishment, dehydration, and lots of other things with big names that she hadn’t understood.

The doctors had frightened her. Their smiles had been too wide and bright to be natural. They explained things to her in condescending tones and when she stared at them blankly, they acted annoyed.

After her blood tests had come back from the lab (whatever a lab was, she had thought then), it had gotten worse. Her blood was supposedly very interesting. Special. Abnormal. The tests and blood samples and doctors with smiles that didn’t reach their eyes went on and on.

Lying in that narrow bed, Jane had heard the nurses gossiping to each other several times. The nicer ones referred to her as “Jane Doe” and “the poor dear.” The not-so-nice ones referred to her as “creepy,” “emotionless,” and “freak.” But both kinds muttered about the doctors.

“So eager to run thousands of pointless tests. Think they’ll discover something fancy and be able to get their picture on the cover of a medical journal,” one nurse had whispered to another darkly. They had belonged to the not-so-nice tribe.

After a while, long after Jane had stopped wondering when the whole circus was going to stop, a nice man had appeared at her bedside. She had been curled up on her side, watching leaves fall of the sickly trees. She still remembered what he had said to her.

“Hello there. How are you feeling today?” he had asked kindly.

“Okay,” Jane had answered automatically without looking at him. Her voice was barely more than a whisper.

“My name is Matthew Green,” he said. “What’s yours?”

She looked up then and saw with some surprise that his friendly smile actually reached his bright blue eyes. He wasn’t wearing a white coat either, but a nice black suit with a shockingly red tie that seemed too bright for the drab hospital room. Both of these factors, his eyes and his clothes, made her lower her guard slightly.

“Jane.”

His eyebrows went up, nearly disappearing into his wiry black hair. “You remember your name? That’s wonderful! Is there anything else you can remember about yourself?”

Jane had frowned innocently, taken aback by his enthusiasm. “I…uh, well…the nurses said…” She stopped talking, confused as to what he wanted her to say, and just examined his alarming tie curiously.

The man also looked confused. Jane hadn’t bothered to remember what his name was. “The nurses said…what?”

She was egged on by his friendly eyes. “They said my name was Jane. Jane Doe. But I don’t think that’s my real name. I don’t think so anyway…” Her voice trailed off vaguely and she looked out the window again with a vacant expression. She was growing bored. If the man was going to perform more tests, why didn’t he just get on with it?

“I’ll need to have a talk with them about that. I'm sorry if they upset you,” he said, sounding as though he might be angry or disappointed.

Jane hadn’t responded to that. After an expanse of silence, she murmured quietly, “I like the name Jane, though.” She sighed.

The man spoke again. “Would you like to get out of this hospital?” he said briskly.

That got her attention. She looked at him, reassured by his calming presence. “Yes,” she answered immediately, feeling a bit of hope return.

He smiled. “Would you mind living at my house for awhile?”

She smiled. Barely. “No. When can we leave?”

It had turned out that he was the head administrator of the hospital. He had realized after a while that Jane was becoming a major distraction for his staff. They would rather try to figure out why her DNA was so unique than treat their own patients.

Also, he realized that the effects the constant attention was having on the young girl were anything but beneficial. Not trusting that she would be safe in a foster home or halfway house, he decided to pull some strings and let her live with him and his family.

The car ride from the hospital to his house had been enlightening for both.

“What is this?” Jane had asked, looking around the inside of the car curiously. She pulled her long hair over one shoulder and nervously ran her fingers through it.

The man’s cheery smile faltered. “This? It’s a car. You know that, don’t you?”

She shook her head, continuing her attempt to look at everything at once. Creedy had only let her outside on rare occasions and that was only in the dusty courtyard behind his house. The sights and sounds of the parking lot were a bit frightening but very exciting.

The car started to move out of the parking lot and Jane sat up straight. “What’s happening?” she asked sharply, fearfully. Green’s eyebrows went up and his smile flickered half-heartedly before completely disappearing. He soothingly explained how a car worked (or tried to at least, his knowledge of such things was very limited) and Jane calmed down somewhat.

They finally reached his house and Green helped Jane inside, trying not to notice his neighbors’ curious stares. It was a nice house; two stories, red brick, dark green shutters, basketball hoop in the driveway.

It had been a difficult transition for everybody. Modern technology was completely foreign to the girl, along with everyday things like refrigerators, sofas, and cats. The first time Jane saw the family cat, Smoky, she had fled the room in terror. Matthew had run after her, wondering why he had thought bringing her here had been a good idea.

Matthew had a wife named Marcy, who was charming, pretty, and infinitely patient. She worked tirelessly to make Jane feel at home. They had a daughter named Jennifer who was eight years old when Jane first moved in. She had regarded the older, wraith-like girl with suspicion and frustration at first, but the two had quickly become inseparable.

“I wish I could remember what they looked like,” Jane said in a soft voice to herself as she left the last of the eerie houses behind. The residential areas had given way to busy streets and shops.

Jane wandered along the bustling sidewalks for several blocks until she found a thrift store. She bought jeans, shorts, a pair of white sneakers, hair clips, and armfuls of t-shirts. The clerk kept glancing uneasily at Jane, who was too busy smiling pleasantly and staring out the window to notice.

The rest of the morning went by quickly. Jane’s initial happiness decreased with every strange look she received. A town this size was quick to notice any newcomers. She began to feel nervous. At around noon, she decided to end her search for a bookstore and just return to the mansion.

The trip up the hill wasn’t enjoyable at all. The plastic shopping bags were heavy and cut red marks into her palms. The residential houses stirred up more memories of her stay with the Greens. Jennifer teaching her to braid hair, Marcy teaching her to cook, Matthew teaching her to read.

Jane shook her head sharply, trying to banish the feelings of nostalgia and sadness, and only succeeded in causing her hat to fall off.

She moved quickly through the gates to the mansion and jogged up the path to the house.