Prologue: 4 years before the story begins. A frightened but determined girl makes the decision to leave home and follow her passion.
Tomorrow is the day she will leave everything that she knows behind. Her family, her friends, her security and everything she's known her whole life to be up until that moment. It will all be gone come daylight. She doesn't know when she'll be able to come back, if ever. So as she lies on her makeshift bed and takes a look around, she tries to commit her surroundings to memory. It's not much, she knows that but it is or it was her home and she doesn't know when she'll get another chance to do so. No matter how hard she tries she can't get herself to relax and go to sleep so her mind wanders to the last conversation she had with her father. Charlie Swan. He had insisted that if she does leave tomorrow, which she will, he will have no choice but to no longer consider her his daughter. Just like that. Not for the first time since making her decision final a sense of panic flutters inside her chest but she quickly stops herself from crying with a quick reminder of her goal. Tomorrow morning she will leave this town and life behind and go into the city, and she will become a nurse. She has to.
She awakes to the first sign of daybreak shining through the window; her heart in her mouth. This is it. After taking a quick moment to compose her nerves, she gets herself up and begins to pack away the last of her things. The clothes she had slept in and her toothbrush are amongst the last items to fit in her small bag. With one last look around and a wistful glance at her mother and father's room, she walks out, bag in hand and unshed tears sparkling in her eyes. The walk to the train station has always been a long one but without her cousins or friends walking alongside her, it seems at the moment to be impossibly longer. With what her mother taught her about the sun's position in the sky and its relevance to being able to tell the time, she figures that she has about 10 minutes until the train will pull away from the station. She grabs onto her bag tighter and begins to jog; she can't possibly miss the beginning of her journey. As she approaches the station she slows down to a brisk walk, surreptitiously checking every other minute or so that her money is still in her pocket. She can't help but think back to how many months she's been saving up for this and all the sacrifices her mom has made for her to be able to pursue this. Her poor mother, Renee, hasn't eaten a full meal in weeks and has worked harder than anyone she's ever known in order to provide for her to follow her dream. Even against Charlie's wishes. She wasn't about to throw that sacrifice away.
After boarding one of the cars at the back of the train, she shudders, having never left home before except for school it suddenly hits her how little she knows of the world. The eyes of fellow passengers seem to zone in on her, small for her age and unknowingly pretty, she quickly becomes an object of interest for one of the men on the train in particular. His stare draws her attention to his face and a feeling of unease floods her stomach, the man has cold blue eyes and dirty blonde hair that falls sodden with sweat into his face. She takes a tighter hold onto her bags but something in his expression tells her he isn't interested in the little she has as luggage.
Several hours later, she releases a sigh of relief. She's made it into the city, her stomach aching with hunger she goes to leave her train car but before she can begin to get her bearings, someone grabs her from behind and before she thinks to scream, they hasten to cover her mouth with their hand. She struggles against their body as they drag her around a corner, dropping her bag in the process. Once they make it around the corner, they spin her around and her eyes widen with horror and disbelief. In front of her stands the man from the train, the one with the chilling blue eyes. His hand lowers to grab her and with a muffled whimper against his hand she realizes what he is about to do, before he can touch her there, she brings her knee up quickly and plunges it into his groin while wrenching her body away from his directly afterwards. She sprints around the corner her chest heaving up and down, and spotting her bag a few meters away she makes a move to grab it, as her hand closes around the handle she hears a shout, and she runs harder than she's ever had to run in her life, tears flowing incessantly down her face, blinding her from her path.