I suffered from a huge overdose of the book series I am reading after I finished the second book. I decided not to go on to the third book straight away. I intended to take a break and read something else instead. We were at the dinner table, Mac, my niece, Sarah Jane and me when it came up as a topic of discussion. My niece, who is here a lot now days because we pay her to be, was incredulous that I wasn't desperate to find out what happened to Edward. She had read the entire series straight through.

"How can you not be totally in love with Edward?" She asked.
"I just don't think it is real." I said.
She looked at me curiously. "What do you mean?"
"Well," I said, trying to put into words what I was feeling. "Their love is so, unreal. It is too intense. She can't let him go anywhere, she can't do anything without him. She stopped functioning when he was gone. He was living half a life being away from her. They die a little without each other. Love like that doesn't exist."

My niece stared at me with her fork frozen halfway to her mouth. Mac looked at me obviously amused.

"What?" I said to the two of them, blushing because I knew what I had said.
"You die a little inside when Mac leaves." She said.
"I let Him go to work!" I sounded defensive and I knew the argument was lost.
"Yeah." My darling niece sniggered. "But it is always a hard thing for you to do. You deal much better when he is here."
"Hush and eat your dinner." I said, blushing. Definitely lost.
"Eat dinner!" Sarah Jane piped up from her high chair where she was putting a pea onto her spoon with her fingers, then putting the spoon into her mouth. Sometimes she actually manages to get the pea into her mouth too.
We all smiled at her indulgently and she grinned back at us. Then my niece turned on me again.
"That is why you are not in love with Edward, isn't it?" She said. "You have your own Edward! Don't try and tell me that love like that doesn't exist! I am surrounded by it every day." She sighed.
I grinned and looked at Mac. He was grinning at me too.

And I gave in. I have continued on with the story and it is killing my niece that I am not finished yet. Everyday I tell her my new theory on where the story is going and what is going to happen and she pretends that she doesn't know and just agrees with every possible variation I come up with. We discuss the bits I do know and how they fit into each other. We talk about them like they are friends of ours and because we do, we slip easily into conversation about her boyfriends, both the current and the ex and I am learning much more about her than I ever imagined I would get to know.

I have to be careful not to give advice unless she asks for it and even then I have to be careful that I am offering her the advice as a friend and not as her aunt who wants to protect her from the world. But it is fun, realising that there is more to her than I had the time to know before. My little baby niece has grown up into a woman and I almost missed it.

These books have given me the chance to know the woman she is.

(And she was right. I did compare Edward to Mac and Mac won. He is better than a vampire any day, even though Edward does sparkle in the sun!)