"Sebastian Bonasera was your father Stella. I knew him very well" a bittersweet Mac told Stella. "He died in a car crash when you were five years old", he told a sobbing Stella, apparently a blend between scared of the 'new' life that she was heading towards and also the knowledge of how close she came towards actually ending up at a mental institution. "How did you get her to Michael City Stella? How did you survive all this time?" Mac asked Stella, with a sad fascination considering how few people survived more than two years, let alone eight, on the streets of Michael City.

"Stella, you were declared legally dead back in Philadelphia in 1999 and you were here, in Michael City all this time! How did you get here?" Mac asked Stella, his voice was now raised almost to where he was ordering her to do something. "Huh?" He continued.

"Me, Jess and Aiden, all got on a freight train in a railyard, one night after we escaped a drug kingpin. He was chasing all three of us and after several minutes of non-stop running, we had lost him. What we thought might have been an escape route, we had jumped off an overpass into a freight car that was directly below the bridge. We had landed in the debris and after an hour or so, we fell asleep. It was very dark that night, and though it was probably too dark for him to see us, it probably was sheer luck he didn't see us in the car below." Stella told Mac, after going through difficulty of recollecting what happened.

"We fell asleep that night, barely but when we did, we were out like lights. The next day though, we woke up and realized that the train was moving, moving at some high speed. There was no way we were going to get out at that speed, fearing that we would be crushed under the weight of the cars had we landed on the tracks or been pulled under the wheels. We stayed in there until it stopped which seemed like forever."

Mac listened, fascinated yet heartbroken at her story. "When the train stopped, we had found ourselves in a totally different place, different city, and different life. When we looked outside, we recognized the skyline. We had ended up 912 miles away, in Michael City. We were alone."

Stella, handed him a photo of her, Jess, Aiden and five others who were in the gang she and the others were in. Mac looked at them, knowing about this gang. "Jess and Aiden are both dead. I don't know what happened to the others but they vanished shortly after the shootout on Albert St." Stella told him, holding her hands together trying to hide her sobbing from him.

Mac then talked to her. "These five others, you, Jess and Aiden, were with…they're all dead. Of these eight, you are the only one still alive. You were the only one that survived." he calmly told her. Stella broke out in tears, in grief and in deep sadness, the mental effects of those eight years had left her shattered and reduced to practically nothing. Now the new fear was now potentially confronting the consequences of what she had done, especially after that night she was apprehended by the cops that night.

Sometime later...

Mac woke up late in the middle of the night, it was the fall of 2003 and it was cold and windy. The curtains were fluttering with the wind, the sound of fallen leaves rustling along the streets of Czarnik Ridge, a suburb roughly 5 miles west of where Stella was apprehended but in a far safer, and affluent neighborhood.

Mac was wondering where Stella was when he suddenly felt a figure climbing onto the bed, it was Stella herself. She was in a gray bathrobe which revealed near perfectly fit legs and strong-looking feet. Her normally curly hair was mostly wavy and somewhat straight.

Just as Mac was about to lift himself out of bed, Stella had shoved him back onto the bed, laid herself on top of him, Mac was like "Stella what are you doi….". Before he could finish his sentence, he felt their lips latch together, her hair shielding both of their faces from the outside world.

The next morning...

Mac woke up one morning to find that Stella was not on the bed even though it was barely sunrise. He was groggy but darted off the bed worried about Stella when he couldn't find her. "Stella? Stella?" Mac yelled out, hoping to catch her attention but no answer. Mac then saw the window was opened, wide open and he looked out the window and found her, latched onto a branch with her legs wrapped around it to ensure she doesn't slip.

"Stella. Get down from there!" Mac raised his voice, trying to talk to her but she didn't budge. She was perched on the tree, roughly 50 or so feet off the ground. Apparently, she had climbed out the window and up the tree and climbed as far up the tree as she felt comfortable going. Her face was looking roughtly east-southeast, the direction where the autumn sun was rising. A neighbor came out of her house to see what was happening and was gasping in shock at the sight; a grown woman was near the top of the tree.

Stella was wearing a green and sky-blue sundress and while seemingly dangerously dangling over the edge, did not seem slightly afraid. She was enjoying the view of the sunrise and did not seem to know or care that she was scaring the neighbors below. Mac clearly wasn't necessarily afraid that thick branch would snap and she fall and badly hurt herself but he was eager for her to come down. This kind of behavior, at least to Mac seemed more associated with disciplining a young child. Of course, the effects of eight years of homelessness and over a year of heavy rehabilitation though weren't going to just vanish overnight either.

*Peter Gabriel's "Quiet and Alone" in the background*