Previously…

She smiled and then moved my hand to her stomach. I held it there until he kicked my hand, and then I stared adoringly into Bella's eyes. "Maybe we should go and break the news? Tell Alice to start buying blue?"

"Maybe we should," she agreed with a smile, pulling me to my feet and taking another lick of her ice cream as we headed for the car.

I stuck my free hand into my pocket, brushing the tips of my fingers against the scan photo and feeling a bubble of excitement rise inside of me. The midwife had warned us that raising a baby would be hard work, but that was okay. I was willing to do anything for Bella and the ba… Ethan. Besides, I think Bella and I both liked to learn our lessons the hard way… as long as we learnt together.

AN- No song this time because I don't know if I could find one that would fit ;) Going back to the style of the prologue now- hope you enjoy :D

The Hard Way To Learn A Lesson

Epilogue

The man's eyes skimmed over the calendar in front of him, reading the pencil notes scribbled on almost every day. Or, really, it was the singular of the word note because it was the same name over and over again: Cullen. Today, the 22nd March, was no different.

"Enter, Cullen," Mr Marshall called in a bored voice. He was used to 'Cullen' being right outside his office. In fact, he didn't even have to wait for the harsh rap of knuckles on the door anymore. And that had nothing to do with the fact that there was a window in the door of the office.

The door opened and an extraordinarily good-looking girl came in with an entertained smile on her pretty face. "Mr Marshall," she greeted as she sat down in the chair opposite her head teacher. She sat back in the chair, the light glinting off of the honey highlights running through her dark blonde hair. Her big blue eyes were teasing, a cheeky glint passing through them as she put her feet up on the desk as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Which, to her, it probably was.

Mr Marshall rolled his eyes. "Feet off the desk, Jane."

"Yes, Sir," Jane replied with a smirk, taking her feet off of the desk.

Mr Marshall sighed and twirled slightly in the swivel chair that was still a novelty, even though he had been in this post now for almost a whole term. "Why are you here this time then, Cullen?"

"For speaking the truth," the girl answered in an innocent voice.

Marshall pinched the bridge of his nose to hide a smile in his palm. "Speaking the truth to whom?"

"That Stanley girl." Her tone turned bitter and cross when she spoke and her perfect face turned into an expression so menacing, even a vampire would have been scared.

"I presume you mean Jessica Stanley?" Mr Marshall sighed, knowing the history that the two girls had. "Look, Jane, I understand why you don't like her but… well, can't you just leave her alone? There's no need to say nasty things."

"I said that I told the truth not that I said nasty things to her." Jane smirked at her head teacher. Then she turned her smirk into a glare. "Besides, she's trying to steal my boyfriend!"

"Miss Stanley tries to steal everyone's boyfriends," Mr Marshall reminded her. He swivelled his chair again. "I know you've had a tough time in the past, but you have to put it behind you and stop squandering your talents to make trouble." He looked the girl right in the eye. "I am not going to punish you, Jane."

Jane smiled sweetly. "Thank you."

"But you have to stop taking advantage of my blatant favouritism for you Cullens," Mr Marshall said, leaning back in his chair. "It makes me look bad."

"So setting the fire bell off so that I can miss the exam next period is a bad idea?" she asked in a serious tone.

"Now that," Mr Marshall said in a stern voice that didn't match the smile on his face, "I will punish you for."

Jane laughed and stood up, turning and heading for the door. "Thanks Mr M. Nice doing business with you."

"Whatever, Miss C," he called after her. "Just leave the poor Stanley girl alone!"

Marshall shook his head, chuckling to himself and started to arrange the pencils on his desk in a neat row. This head teacher business was fun. But then there came a knock at the door, slightly nervous and scared. Mr Marshall smiled, knowing who it would be from just the sound of the knock; only one person in the school had been wandering around this week that anxiously.

"Come in," he said.

The door was pushed open and Forks High's head boy came into the room, biting his lip. "Can I talk to you?"

"Of course," Marshall replied. "Shut the door behind you and come and take a seat." He waited until the boy had taken the seat opposite him and then said, "Your sister was in here just a moment ago."

Edward blinked at him. "Alice?"

"No, Jane."

Understanding lit his face. "Oh. What's she done now?"

"She called Jessica Stanley a scheming, slutty little whore." Mr Marshall laughed lightly with another shake of his head. "It was all I could do not to pat her on the back and congratulate her."

Edward rolled his eyes, but was too concerned to manage a laugh. "Yeah, she's a crack-up. When she's with Mason, they are the comedy duo of the century."

"Mmm," the head teacher agreed absently, abruptly very focussed on lining the pencils up again. "What did you want to talk about?"

Edward shuffled nervously in his chair, running a hand through his messy coppery-coloured hair. His glittering green eyes were tired and worried, just like the rest of him.

Mr Marshall sensed that he wasn't ready to say anything yet, so he asked, "How's Bella?"

Edward smiled slightly at the mention of his girlfriend's name. "Freaking out, of course. She hates being so fat- keeps saying that not being able to see her feet doesn't help her already awful balance. Keeps worrying that she doesn't have everything she'll need. Keeps complaining about this maternity leave thing- she's bored." Edward laughed, and then sighed. "What if… what if he doesn't like me?" he whispered after a long pause.

Mr Marshall looked up at one of his favourite students and appraised the worry in his tone, the heavy bags under his eyes, the way he twisted his hand through his hair, and then he smiled. "Edward, of course he's going to like you. We're talking about your son, correct?"

Edward nodded warily.

Mr Marshall abandoned his pencils and leant across his desk to look the boy in the eye. "The love between a parent and child is something that can never be broken or bettered. You and Bella are going to do perfectly, I can tell."

"But how can you tell?" Edward said. "How do you know that we're not going to screw up and drop him or hurt him or… ugh! There's so much we can do wrong!"

"I can tell because I was in the very same position as you are once," the older man admitted with a sigh.

Edward blanched, that being the thing he least expected to hear. "What?"

"When I was in high school, I fell in love with the most beautiful girl. We got together and decided to run away and get married. So as soon as we graduated we got married, even though both of our parents were against it; we never saw any of our parents again." He sighed. "Less than a year later, we had a baby girl; the prettiest little girl in the world. So pretty that Sara, her Mum and my wife, put her up for modelling behind my back. I didn't like it at all and we fought about it. So badly that when I got home from work one day, she had upped and left me; taken our baby and gone.

"It was only recently that I discovered that my little girl knew nothing about this. Her Mum married another man – another teacher, ironically enough – and told my daughter that he was her father." Mr Marshall's eyes were distant- elsewhere. "But it turns out that Sara died in a car accident when our child was five and, since no one knew that this other man wasn't her biological father, he got custody.

"My little girl moved in with him at his posh boarding school and I was none the wiser. But then his boarding school lost money and went from the nicest one in the state to the crappiest of the crap." Then Mr Marshall smiled at Edward, returning to the present. "You know what her name was?"

"What?" The boy was utterly absorbed in the man's story.

Mr Marshall looked at his door and then said, "Jane. Her name was Jane."

Edward was silent for a long while, and then he said, "You mean… Jane – our Jane – is your daughter?"

The head teacher's eyes drifted back to the boy's face as he nodded. "But you can't tell anyone. She's happy now and that's all I want. Besides, I know she's in good hands." He shot Edward a meaningful look.

Edward was speechless. "But…"

"Edward," Mr Marshall sighed, "my point is this- no matter what happens in the future, you will always love your son and he will always love you. That is one bond that simply cannot be broken."

"But Jane will never know?" Edward whispered sadly.

Marshall shrugged slightly. "Maybe one day she'll find out. But I don't think there's a better family she could have been 'adopted' into. I've had to live without her for all this time and I'd rather see her happy with your family than not at all."

"But what about all the things you can do with her?" Cullen asked; he hadn't missed the loving tone when the older man spoke of his daughter. And he couldn't help but wonder whether Mr Marshall was aware of how much he was missing out on.

"What, you mean like give her the money she wants for new clothes while she's a teenager? Be there at her graduation ceremony crying with pride? Walk her down the aisle on her wedding day?" He sighed wistfully. "I'd give anything to be able to do all of that."

"What's stopping you?"

Mr Marshall smiled, but it was almost patronising in its sarcasm. "The very same things that you're feeling now. Fear. Anxiety. Worry. Being a parent isn't an occupation you can just quit. It's a full time, stressful and exhausting duty. But it's a nice duty to have. And maybe one day I can come clean to Jane. But she's not my baby girl any more, Edward. She's a young lady who is perfectly capable of making her own decisions."

Edward opened his mouth to say something else, but was interrupted by his phone ringing. He jumped and grabbed his phone out of his pocket answering it and bringing it straight to his ear. "Bella, are you okay? What's happened?" He listened intently to what she was saying and Mr Marshall watched his concentrated expression with a slight laugh. Edward leapt to his feet then, knocking the chair over as he did so. "I'll come right now. Remember to breathe."

Mr Marshall could hear Bella laugh from where he was sat. "It's okay, Edward," she told him. "I'm having a baby, not dying."

Edward scowled. "Well, I'll be there as soon as I can anyway. See you in a bit." He hung up and looked anxiously at Mr Marshall as he backed toward the exit. "I have to go."

The man nodded understandingly. "Go. And Edward?"

"Yeah?"

"Make the most of her laughing. In not so long she'll be threatening to rip you into pieces." He shot the boy a wink and went back to organising his pencils.

Edward, who had his hand on the door handle, let go of the handle and went back to Marshall's side. "Thank you," he said fervently. "For everything."

Mr Marshall nodded. "Anytime."

"And Mr M?"

Marshall grinned and looked up. "Yeah Mr C?"

"Make sure you tell Jane before she graduates? Maybe you'll get a chance to walk her down the aisle after all. I'm going to face my fears right now; maybe you should too."

Mr Marshall thought about that. "You know, maybe I will," he said, but when he looked back at Edward, he found that the boy had already gone. He bit his lip and opened his drawer. He took out the photo frame he had had for almost seventeen long years and looked at the adorable baby girl in the picture, her face all dimples, her blonde hair sticking out by her chin and her blue eyes shining with happiness. How times had changed. "One day," Marshall promised the girl in the photo. "But not anytime soon." And then he put the photo back in the drawer and finished lining his pencils up.

For a moment, Mr Marshall wondered what the now-retired Mr Hudson would think of Edward's improvement. And then he grinned. He grinned because he, Stephen Marshall, had been the one to prove that there was not an un-teachable student in the world, including Edward Cullen. After all, one can never over-estimate the power of the human mind… and the psychology behind it…

THE END

~X~X~X~X~X~X~X~X~X~X~X~

Boo hoo hoo :'(

I really hope that this ending did it justice. Anyone that read AMMM will know that I am NOT a fan of those epilogues that go 'oh and this is 7 years later and they're happily married and living in Spain with their six children, seven dogs, three cats and fifty-nine mice'. That is boring and clichéd lol. So I went back to the prologue and based this on that, chucking in a few surprises here and there to give it a nice little quirk. Because I think that everything I write has a nice little quirk… just like me hahaha

Gosh. I can't believe that this is the last ever AN I will write for this story :( Well… let's get started

I am going to start on a negative note addressed to one reviewer in particular. They were anonymous and called :) and right now I actually really do not like you : I SAID that I didn't want to hear any Remember Me spoilers because I want to see it. Ruining like that was totally unnecessary and I was so angry. Not funny at all- now I am gonna go see it (with my whole box of tissues- thanks for the suggestions other people) knowing how it ends which is so annoying. You might think spoilers are funny but I don't. And that is why I don't want to hear ANYTHING else about Remember Me now until I've seen it.

… Phew. Okay. Sorry, I had to get that out of my system. I was so angry that I cried when I first read it :L Right…

Okies. Now. I am having a little dilemma :S I have my exams coming up in about eight weeks time- and these are important exams. I also will have three stories of my own on the go and a collaboration and I don't know if I'll be able to continue with all of them. So I have put a poll on my profile asking which two of 'Victim of a Teenage Nobody', 'Foundation of Memories' and the Mason/Jane story that you absolutely would not be able to bear me stopping for a few weeks. I will not be stopping it forever, just during the weeks I am doing my exams. So please go and vote and send PMs/ emails telling me your opinions :S

Okay- Mason and Jane story. I have to admit that it's looking like a go-ahead at the moment. And I am admitting this because I really think that I have bitten off more than I can chew with all of these stories at the moment XD I have a vague idea with where I'm going (hence the Jane foreshadowing in this epilogue XD) with it but advance warning- if I post it, there is a possibility that it will trail off into nothing. Hopefully that won't happen. As I've said before, it won't be a sequel as such and it will kind of be a completely different story. But Bella and Edward will be in it, as will little Ethan :) It would start off from about where the last chapter ended- as though you're forgetting this chapter- so there will be more about Bella's pregnancy but more to do with Mason and Jane's relationship and how it develops. So… here is a tiny bit of what I have written because… well, because I want to post it and see what you think :)

It is in Mason's POV:

I grabbed up my mug from the coffee table and took it through to the kitchen, dumping it in the sink before flicking off all the lights downstairs and heading up to my bedroom. I turned the light on in my tiny little box room and noticed the photo on the floor, so I bent down to pick it up; my wall was so full of photos now that they were overlapping- I would have to start on the ceiling soon. . I turned the photo over in my hand and smiled when I realised that it was the most recent photo I had stuck up. Esme had taken it a few weeks back and it was of Edward, Bella, Alice, Jane and I all sat on Edward and Bella's bed, laughing like lunatics. My eyes passed over my best friend and his girlfriend and sister, and settled on the newest addition to the Cullen family. Her mousy brown wavy hair curled round her face in the most perfect of ways and her startling green eyes shone as she giggled. She was so pretty. Beautiful, in fact. My feelings were starting to confuse me. Whenever I looked at Jane, I got the same feelings in my chest that I used to get when I looked at Bella… just a lot… stronger.

I sighed and stuck it back on the wall, in its space next to the photo of Jane and I sat on the stairs. Then I stepped back and looked at the wall as a whole. It was a little embarrassing to see that there were a lot of photos of her on my wall now.

Aw bless XD lol I am in love with Mason XD

Guys! Guess what... someone reviewed asking whether I had ever tried a peanut butter and strawberry ice cream sandwich… and I realised that I hadn't. Shocker, I know. SO because this story is ending, yesterday I decided that I should do the honours… and I ate a peanut butter and strawberry ice cream sandwich!!! :D It was actually very nice- a little cold but nice XD

Now… I think that is all I have to say. Apart from the obvious thing. This is the epilogue of the story- also known as the end. So, of course, there are the thank yous.

Thank you all so, so, so much for showing this story (and me XD) so much devotion and for getting it way past 10,000 reviews and into the 12,000s. There are not words that can explain how much that means to me. Some people have asked if I even read all of the reviews and I cannot tell you how much that shocks me XD Because I read and remember every single one of your comments. Thank you to those of you who tell me to update, those of you who tell me how much you loved the chapter, those of you who quote your favourite parts, those of you who give me constructive criticism… all of you. Huge thank yous to the people that claim yourselves as 'fans' and send me death threats when I don't update lol and to those of you who are very critical and help me to improve. I appreciate your support so much and I think you are all the nicest people in the world :D

And individual thank yous too- thank you to Steph, Glittershine_AR, Becky, magentafunbubble, morethanwolfgirl, harcad and xxilovejasperxx for all of the icons, banners and pictures in the THWTLAL photo album :D

Thank you also to ToTouchTheseInnocentLips for the awesome trailer she put on youtube :D

Thank you to cullensroc for doing the outtake which I am still yet to read but am going to do the minute I've posted this :)

Thank you also to MyBoyfriendEdwardSparkles, TeamEJforeverloveTWILIGHT and xXEternallyDazzledXx because… well, you know why.

Congratulations to XColourOfAngelsX who guessed Ethan's whole name the second I posted chapter 59 (unbelievable XD)

And, lastly, thank you to Laura :D She is a fantastic author and I would recommend checking out her stories and she is a very nice person :D She never fails to make me smile and reads everything I send her and tells me how good it is… even if it's total crap XD Also, happy birthday for Monday! Your peanut butter handmade by RPatz is in the post as we speak ;)

All of your lovely comments have made me smile and I really hope that you'll keep in contact via facebook and my email, and my other stories.

Well… that is pretty much it. I'm so sorry about the long AN but… well, it's the last chapter- was I really gonna do a short one?! XD

Don't take this off alert yet though because I plan to post an AN when I post the Mason and Jane story and also to tell you the results of the awards this story is nominated in- though I highly doubt I've won anything XD The competition was awesome

So… that's pretty much it. Please leave your usual reviews- as I know you will. First-time reviewers are always welcome too ;) And I would really appreciate it if you could tell me any of your favourite parts or any bits that have stuck in your head etc.

Also, what did you think of the epilogue?! Sorry, seems like a long time ago now I bet XD And what about Mr Marshall/Jane?! No one guessed that but that's not surprising really XD And who noticed that Ethan's birthday is the day that New Moon comes out on DVD? ;) in this country anyway XD Also Laura's birthday… lucky thang XD

Thank you all so, so much- and I know I keep saying that and it's probably annoying, but I really do mean it :)

Over and out for the last time :(

Steph