Sorry that this chapter's so short. It's just a prologue. But I promise the next few chapter's will be longer. I have no idea how many chapter's there'll be but... Whatever. We'll go with the flow won't we y'all? By the way I don't own OTH much to my disappointment. I went to an auction and tried bidding for it but I didn't get it. When I'm a billionaire I'll buy it, though, and make sure that Peyton suddenly disappears so Lucas would end up with Brooke. The song lyrics at the start are from Pink's Family Portrait.

So on with the show... Scene 1, act 1. And ACTION

In our family portrait we look pretty happy
We look pretty normal, let's go back to that
In our family portrait we look pretty happy
Let's play pretend, act like it comes naturally

You never know what it's really like when you're looking in from the outside. All you can see is large smiles and roaring laughter. You never know what it's really like. Not really.

The family photo hung over the fireplace in a shiny golden frame. There was a man, a woman and a little girl, each with blond hair and blue eyes. They looked perfect. The man had his arm around the woman's shoulder and the woman had her hand on the girl's shoulder and you could tell she was squeezing it gently as if to say 'smile at the camera, honey'. They each had smiles that spread across their faces. And it wasn't just in the photo they all showed this smile to the world. They'd reveal it at parties and at the little girl's parent's evenings. No one would think that this smile wasn't their real one.

It was their show smile. Not that anyone knew that. It was a smile that a good actor might put on after experiencing a great loss but managed to cover it up just before going onto the stage. Because the world was the couple's stage. Even though behind closed doors they were so sad, the moment those doors opened they'd paint on their smiles and pretend to be okay. They were good at that now. They'd had practice.

No one knew that they didn't love each other anymore. They didn't know that the woman would stare out of the window each night for at least an hour hoping her own prince charming would drive down the road and whisk her away from this life. Nobody knew that she longed for a boy she'd lost years ago. They didn't see the desperate look in her eye although her mouth was smiling. They didn't know that whenever she saw her daughter she'd always hope that the girl was his. People didn't see that she'd search a street in desire of seeing the man she loved. She hated how selfish and hopeless she'd become.

They didn't see the man scan the parties for the brunette girl and when his eyes would land on her they didn't notice the true smile spread across his face which would quickly disappear and turn into the show smile once again. They didn't know that the man would look through a box of letters at least twice a week. They didn't know how hard his hear pumped whenever she spoke to him. They didn't understand the pain he felt when she'd leave her spot talking to him to go and find her fiancé. They didn't know that his heart would break a little then at the fact she wasn't in love with him anymore.

Nobody knew that the little girl would always wonder why her parents didn't love each other like the other children's parents at school. She'd always died a little at the other parents smiling in a real way at each other while her parents were gritting their teeth in the resemblance of a smile. She'd occasionally glimpsed her mum sitting in the window seat of her parent's room drawing a man that she'd never met but had been hanging over the household for as long as she could remember. She'd never told anybody about the fact she'd seen her mum's drawing of the man or the fact that she'd stumbled across a letter to the woman she'd called aunt from her father telling her he loved him. She knew that the letter would never be received. She knew that it was too late for her father and the girl he loved. It was too late for her mother and the boy she loved. It was too late. Too late.

Yes, you can never know what's behind the fake smiles in the family photo. You can never know truly what's going on in a household that seems so perfect.