"Oh, kind of like you and Bella?" I'd quipped, effectively ending the conversation. I should have cut Max a little more slack. After all, he had just gone through a nasty breakup himself, no matter how he denied it. Obviously, he had transferred the situation with Bella onto Nathan and me to avoid dealing with his feelings.

"I don't think I can handle talking to him right now," I said, knowing full well how lame that sounded.

"It'll only get worse the longer you wait." Max knew he had a perfectly valid point. I could tell from the gleam of triumph in his blue eyes. "And if it's horrible, so what? We're going down to Navy Pier tonight. You can drown your sorrows in cotton candy. No one can be sad with cotton candy."

I raised one eyebrow, "Not even a vampire with a profoundly screwed up love life?"

"Cotton candy is to vampire suffering as kryptonite is to Superman." He reached for the cordless phone on the nightstand and handed it to me. "Call him."

Helpless, I looked from the alarm clock to the phone. The days had gotten longer. Though the sun wasn't down yet in Chicago, it was almost nine Michigan time. Nathan would be getting ready to open the store. If I called now we wouldn't have long to talk. That was a good thing, considering I had no clue what I would say to him.

I took the phone and punched in the number, a pang of homesickness assailing me as I imagined Nathan navigating the cluttered living room to get to the phone in the kitchen. An overwhelming desire to be home again gripped me, and my heart pounded in my chest in anticipation of speaking to him. The line clicked and I wet my lips, preparing to answer his "Hello?"

"Nathan Grant's residence," a sleepy, female voice purred over the line.

As quickly as my heart had warmed to the prospect of speaking to Nathan, it froze again with the realization of who this was.

"Hello?" she asked, the word marked with a distinct Italian accent. "Is anyone there?"

Bella.

With shaking hands, I hung up the phone. I couldn't look at Max. How would I break it to him that Bella, the only woman he'd ever had feelings for, no matter how he tried to deny them, had apparently extended her stay at Nathan's apartment by a good three weeks?

I was having a hard enough time explaining it myself. My mind jumped from one possibility—Bella's employers, the Voluntary Vampire Extinction Movement, had discovered she'd helped us find a cure for Nathan, leaving her with no job or residence—to the next—she'd missed her plane and had to wait for a much, much later flight—but none of them dislodged the sick feeling in my stomach.

"Carrie, what's wrong?" Max frowned at me as though he'd be able to discern my thoughts if he stared hard enough.