Hello everyone!

Proxy-Blue22 and Elementalmoon: Thank you so much for the feedback!

The following two chapters were a bit short, so I decided to post two chapters today instead of just one. I hope you'll like it.

CHAPTER 1
Liz

"Welcome to our firm, Ms. Parker." His handshake was firm and Elizabeth liked him immediately.

"Thank you, Mr. Smith," Elizabeth answered with a warm smile. "I'm looking forward to working with you."

Her new boss, Eugene Smith, returned her smile with a slightly crooked one of his own. "Just let me know if you have any questions. Serena will help you to your office." He gestured to a petite redhead who was standing quietly behind her superior and she took his gesture as her cue.

She extended her hand to Elizabeth with a welcoming smile. "Pleased to meet you."

Elizabeth nodded. "Likewise."

Moving her freckled arm in a wide arc to highlight the wide corridor leading to the south of the building, Serena requested, "Please come this way, Ms. Parker."

The walls of the corridor were lined with architectural drawings of grand commercial buildings and impressive private homes. Elizabeth could feel a flutter in the pit of her stomach. This was her first real job as an architect after graduating with her Masters in Architecture only a month prior to landing the position. The firm was well-respected and had a large, and fairly wealthy, clientele. Which meant that there were fewer limits to the designs, something that was really exciting to the aspiring young architect.

The firm had been thrilled to have her. She had been at the top of her class and had received words of praise from her teachers as well as the people she had worked with as an intern.

"Here you go," Serena said and opened a glass door to a fairly generous office.

"Thank you," Elizabeth said, trying to remain professional when all she wanted to do was giggle with excitement. Her very first office.

"Let me know if you have any questions, Ms. Parker."

Elizabeth turned around just as Serena was starting to close the door. "Please, call me Liz."

Serena smiled and nodded in affirmation.

As the door closed behind her, Liz tried to take it all in. She stood there for about two minutes before taking a deep breath and taking a seat behind the desk, gently spreading her hands over the surface of her desk in wonder. She lifted the receiver to the red phone in the right top corner of the large desk and punched in a familiar phone number.

"Jeffrey speaking."

"Dad, hi," Liz smiled into the receiver.

"Oh, hi baby. I didn't recognize the number. Where are you?"

"I'm calling you from my office," Liz smiled, biting down on her lower lip to contain an exuberant squeal.

"Oh, sweetheart." Liz could hear her father's smile in his voice. "That's so exciting. How does it feel? Is it a good place? Are they treating you well?"

Liz laughed softly. "So far, so good. I'm so excited to get to work."

"Finally. After all of your hard work," Jeffrey answered. "I hope you'll have a blast."

Liz couldn't help but roll her eyes at her father's attempt at being a bit 'groovy', as he called it. "I'm sure I will. I'm having a meeting with my boss, Mr. Smith, in about…" Liz glanced at her wrist watch, "four minutes, and he's going to go through my first project with me. I can't believe this is happening. I'm finally an adult!"

Her father was somewhat subdued when he replied, "My little girl is growing up."

"Don't get all mushy on me now, Daddy," Liz smiled as she played with the spiral telephone cord.

Jeffrey cleared his throat. "I'm not. You should get prepared for that meeting, sweetheart."

"Okay," Liz replied. "I'll call you later."

"I'll be waiting."

Liz hung up with a smile. Since the death of her mother, Liz and her father had grown really close. The emergency personnel arriving at the horrific freak accident that had killed her mother had told Jeffrey Parker that it was a miracle that his daughter had survived, something that had made Jeffrey treasure every second with his daughter thereafter.

The force of the impact of the metal pipe through the car, spearing her mother, had propelled Elizabeth through the windshield and caused her to end up several feet from the car. Elizabeth couldn't remember much from the accident; she had only been four at the time. But apparently she had been covered in blood, without having a scratch on her. Except for a faint cut across her left eyebrow. The scar tissue over her eye was today the only remaining visible trace. The people working at the scene had assumed that the girl had been splashed with her mother's blood before being expelled from the car. It wasn't the most plausible explanation, since there hadn't been very much blood spread out in a projectile pattern inside the car, but it was the only one they could come up with.

Apart from the bottomless grief from losing a mother, Liz's life changed forever that day. To the sharp and attentive objective bystander, those changes all took effect the second Liz opened her eyes in the arms of a strange woman in the middle of a frozen concrete road at the end of February. But due to the young age of the girl at the time of the tragedy, her personality, traits and intelligence had not quite formed yet, making it hard to discern what had in essence been added on that day and what had already been there.

Elizabeth Parker grew up as a careful child and up until her teenage years she was considered introverted and attended a therapist on a regular basis between the age of 10 to 12. This was when the nightmares had started. The therapist preferred to call them night terrors because of their seemingly real texture. The concept of having nightmares after having lost your mother to a traumatizing freak of circumstances was perhaps not that strange. But Liz was not dreaming about the accident. She was dreaming of mud, blood, green skies and abortions. An odd combination of dreams for a young girl to have.

The night terrors abruptly stopped one day in October in Liz's fifteenth year of life and hadn't returned since then. In their absence, Liz blossomed. She tentatively tested her place in this life and started to make use of all the traits that had been growing inside of her but which had been subdued as a result of Liz's conscious exclusion of the outside world.

Shortly after the cessation of the nightly terrors, Liz picked up German from a TV-show called Anna, Schmidt and Oscar which her father had brought home on a business trip. Her father initially explained Liz's talent at suddenly speaking German as "Even TV can be very educational, I guess", but in the span of merely two years Liz was effortlessly fluent in not only German, but also French, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Finnish and Mandarin. During this period, Liz was moved to a school for gifted children, where she excelled in everything that was thrown at her. By the age of 21, Liz had taken on ballet, played the piano, the guitar, the saxophone and taught a group of deaf 7-to-8-year-olds mathematics in sign language. At one point, Jeffrey Parker was even convinced that his daughter possessed telepathic abilities.

But she couldn't stand the rain. Her reaction to this essential part of Earth's water cycle could almost be compared to someone's reaction to precipitation in the form of acid. The therapist never was very successful in finding the root to this phobia of rain. An ombrophobia which would have been traced back to a time before the day of the car accident.

Liz was in the midst of placing pencils in the top drawer of her desk when there was a knock on the door. Looking up, she recognized her boss, who looked more like an old professor than an architect with his metallic round glasses and unruly white hair. Her smile froze on her lips as she spotted the man standing behind her most recent employer. Her eyes only momentarily caught the man's gaze, but it was enough to send her heart into a nervous flutter. There was something about him that sent dark chills through her body. She forced a polite smile back on her face and rose from her position behind the large wooden desk.

"Ms. Parker. How are you finding your office?" Mr. Smith asked.

"Large," Liz smiled, uncomfortably aware of the strange man's intense stare. She decided to get the whole thing over with and walked up to the man, extending her hand. "I don't believe we have met; I'm Elizabeth Parker."

A slow dark semi-smile spread across the man's thin lips and Liz felt the room shrink. She barely registered the man moving in to take her hand as she was distracted by the feeling of oxygen being sucked out of the room. The touch of his palm against hers jolted her back to reality.

"The pleasure is all mine, Ms. Parker." His voice was dark, as dark as his black hair, tanned skin and black eyes. Those same eyes that still pierced through her very essence. She presumed that he was considered an attractive man by society's standards, but Liz only felt danger.

"Ms. Parker, this is David Perkins. He's one of our head architects and you'll be working very closely with him on this project."

Liz barely restrained the shudder that wanted to rattle through her at the prospect of spending a lot of time in the vicinity of this man. Similar to how she'd had a good feeling about her boss, she had a bad feeling about David Perkins.

"Oh, okay," Liz said, relieved that her voice sounded neutral.

"Let me take you through the ropes," Mr. Smith said lightly and gestured towards Liz's desk. "Shall we?"

Twenty minutes later, there was a knock on the door and a blonde pretty girl peeked in apologetically. "Sorry for interrupting…"

"What is it, Ms. Evans?" Mr. Smith asked.

"Can I borrow David? It'll only take a minute."

Mr. Smith didn't look too pleased with the request, but waved David in direction of the door. "Come on, Mr. Perkins, don't let a pretty girl wait."

Liz caught the girl's eyes and the blonde smiled. But the second the easy smile settled into the red-painted lips, it started to fall. The girl's lips turned into a question mark as she frowned, seemingly in deep thought.

David chose that moment to step into Liz's field of vision and, taking a deep collecting breath, Liz refocused her eyes on the notes in front of her. What's up with you today?

Mr. Smith got back to the matter at hand, but as he continued talking, Liz let her eyes wander towards the glass door, through which she could see David and the blonde talking. As if feeling that she was being watched, the girl turned her head and looked at Liz, making Liz divert her eyes towards her boss.

In less than a minute, David had returned to the office and the blonde girl had left.

"I'm Isabel," a voice said behind her.

Liz turned her head and saw the blonde that had spoken to David earlier, standing next to the table at which Liz had chosen to eat her lunch.

"Liz," Liz introduced.

Isabel smiled, the ease having returned to her manners. "I'm sorry about before…"

Liz averted her eyes and poked the microwave-heated pasta bolognese in front of her with her fork. "What do you mean?"

Isabel gracefully slid into the chair next to Liz. "I have a feeling I was acting a bit peculiar earlier."

Liz gave her an incredulous look, "You were?"

Isabel paused for a second, as if to gauge Liz's response. "Well, good thing you didn't seem to notice. I just… I just had a feeling that I'd seen you before. I guess my face went into this stupid gawking expression as I was trying to figure that out."

Liz, slightly uncomfortable with the conversation, shrugged. "That's alright."

Isabel paused again and Liz could see how the easy smile was turning insecure. Liz cleared her throat. She wasn't used to being stared at. Not so uninhibited. Well, not since earlier this morning when David Perkins had done so. Of course, while Mr. Perkins' stare had installed something close to fear in her, Isabel's presence was merely…uncomfortable.

Isabel sighed and Liz glanced at her long enough to see her guilty expression. "Sorry. I just did it again. It's just so weird, you know. It's just not only that I have a feeling that I've seen you before, it's like I know you."

Isabel had gained Liz's full attention. What an odd thing to say.

"You really say what's on your mind, don't you?" Liz asked, trying to make her voice light.

Fortunately, Isabel took it in the right way. She laughed. "Yep, that's me. Foot in mouth disease."

"I'm sorry. I'm pretty sure I've never met you before," Liz added.

"Yeah. Yeah, you're probably right. Where did you go to college?"

"Harvard."

Isabel whistled. "One of those, huh? Nah, wouldn't have met you at college."

Liz was finding this whole encounter stranger by the second. Isabel seemed unnervingly certain that they had indeed met. It was only a question of figuring out where.

"Where did you grow up?"

"Um…" Liz started to look around herself, but didn't see anyone else that was inclined to join them at their table and incidentally interrupt this interrogation. "Chicago."

"Hmm…never been," Isabel mused.

Liz's light laughter interrupted Isabel's musings. "Sorry, but I'm pretty sure we've never met before. I have, for the record, a fairly good memory."

Isabel bit her lower lip thoughtfully and looked more closely at Liz. "So do I. I'm never wrong. Maybe you know my brother Max Evans? Or my friend Michael Guerin? Or maybe…maybe Maria. Maria DeLuca?"

Liz gave a short laugh. "Look. I'm pretty sure going through your contact book won't make it any more true that our paths have previously crossed."

Isabel pursed her lips. "Maybe…" And then shrugged. "Ah well."

Completely changing tracks, Isabel smiled beautifully and started unpacking her lunch box. "You don't mind if I sit with you?"

Liz returned the smile and shook her head. "Why not?"

Maybe Isabel Evans wasn't so bad after all.

TBC… (in the next post)