Isaac!" the loud, exasperated shout caught us both of-guard and we jumped away,

My mouth fell open when my brown eyes met his black eyes, "Erik?" I muttered, shocked,

"Anastasia?" His expressions mirrored mine,

Isaac looked between us, "You know each other?"

Erik flushed red, "We happened to meet each other on the night when I visited my mother,"

Isaac's brows shot up, "It's a small world,"

"What are you doing here?"

He seemed to recall his mission to shout at Isaac. He turned to him, his eyes exasperated again, "You skipped your medications, again, Isaac. We need to get your fever down,"

I frowned, "But he isn't burning,"

Erik's eyes flashed at me, "He will still need to complete his course,"

"Are you his doctor?"

He shook his head, "I am his paramedic,"

Isaac groaned, "And I don't need you,"

Erik raised his eyebrows, "Tell that to yourself. Now, go and take your medicines. Sophie is ready with it,"

Isaac turned to me and pulled me into a hug again, without asking permission this time, I didn't object.

"I'll see you," He kissed my forehead without permission and spun around to pass a glance at Erik, "No getting cosy with the boss's daughter,"

Erik laughed.

He walked over to me, just a foot away, his hands in the pocket of his blue jeans, "So, you're his daughter, huh?"

I pursed my lips at the choice of his words.

He chuckled, "I know, I know. Isaac has told me about your aversion towards him," he gave three friendly pats on my shoulder,

The reason I had been talkative to him the other night was because I wanted to set Christian off and now, I had no reason to have curtsies with him. I didn't like the way he was so casual and over-friendly just like… like…

I started choking, my head spinning splitting his image to four. My balance pushed me down to the ground. It was the panic attack and I was caught off guard by it, there hadn't been any since I was twenty. I panted, sweating bullets, my whole body freezing. I rested my hand on the car, trying to balance my weight so I didn't fall.

"Ana? Ana, are you alright?" his tone was shocked and frantic, afraid if he was the reason for it, "Geez, breathe till ten, come on,"

I closed my eyes, tightly and counted till ten. Picturing my mother, Ray, the new born girls in my little arms, my breaths calming with each count and each soothing memory. I inhaled deeply again and pulled myself together, shaking my head to clear the thoughts that haunted me to a panic attack.

"I am so sorry. I am fine." I assured him with a tiny gasp. What was wrong with me? I was in a safe environment and he was safe. I gritted my teeth, forcing myself to push out those misconceptions and reminders of Ri – him.

His eyes were wide, his mouth open, "What did I say? That was an attack,"

"I am sorry," I shook my head, my breaths still struggling to turn back to normal "You didn't do anything. It's just me."

"You want to talk about it?" He asked, concerned,

"I am fine," I said, dismissively, breathing very slowly. "So, you – you know his condition?"

His shoulders relaxed when he was sure that I was okay, "I am," he smiled,

"What's wrong with him?" I focused on the part that was most important to me and my voice abruptly went to a low shriek,

He was professional then and I relaxed. He is safe, I repeated in my head.

"Would you like to sit while I tell you about it?" he waved his hand towards the steps on the porch.

I nodded.

He held his five fingers up towards the driver and led me forward.

We sat beside each other and he decided to sit at a wider distance, precautionary, eyeing me from the corner of his eyes, "Isaac is a special case of Aortic Stenosis,"

A chill ran through my spine, "Aortic Stenosis? You mean his aortic valve is shrinking or something?"

He looked surprised, "Yes, that's…exactly right. How do you know?"

"My father's a doctor," I mumbled and he narrowed his eyes, questioningly "But the illness you're talking about is supposed be easily treated, isn't it?" I moved on.

"He's a special case and a lucky one,"

I frowned. Lucky? "He'll be okay?"

His mouth turned into a sad smile and he gently shook his head, "The doctors classify him as the sever stage, he can't be treated."

I whimpered, "But you said he was lucky!" I pressed, petulantly,

"Ana," he gently patted my shoulder again, "This illness results into some painful symptoms. You'll feel like being held in a cage and your chest is tightening, chest pains that are sometimes unbearable, even breathing becomes a tedious task, stretching feels like a four-hour workout at the gym,"

He went on the list and I couldn't get the point of it, "Wait, how's he lucky then?" I made it sound like a dirty word,

"Because he has no symptoms, no pain," he met my confused gaze, "Doctors like to call his condition symptomatic aortic stenosis."

That didn't give me any calm. He was dying but he was lucky? How sick.

"How much time?" I choked, cutting to the chase,

"A year would be a blessin'," he looked ahead, "Doctors will be keeping a close eye on his health for now and be treating any other cardiac conditions he may have,"

I sprinted to my feet in an abrupt moment, wiping my cheeks, swiftly, "Thanks for letting me know."

I smashed the door close as I shuffled into the car, "Heathcliff, please."

I entered the hotel room through the wooden panelled pathway to the bedroom and kept my bag on the teak modern TV unit. The room smelled of lavender and bleach. The large window showed out to the busy city, in front of it were kept two comfortable grey couches and a coffee table.

I flopped on the bed and pulled the blanket over me and relaxed down on the bed.

I switched on my phone and flinched when it started vibrating with short pauses, recklessly in my hand. There were thirteen missed calls from my father and eight from Christian along with two voicemails. My father wasn't tech-savvy so a voicemail definitely wasn't from him.

I pressed on the first voicemail. I had been right, it was Christian.

"Ana," I could sense him gritting his teeth and mashing them together, "Why do you insist on crossing me the first chance you get?"

He took a deep breath, calming himself down, his voice was softer when he spoke again, affectionate even, "I really don't understand you. Was it so difficult to accept something I did for you? Anyway, call me when you land."

The line ended with a beep. I sighed. Didn't he understand why I refused? Was it so difficult for him to understand that I can't owe to anyone? First class isn't joke, after all.

I pressed another voicemail and my whole body went rigid when I heard him. He wasn't even totally conscious while he had pressed the button to call me. He spoke from the other end, slurring his words and mixing up together, his tongue twisting with alcohol to even get the simplest word out. I heard my teeth clench in a smack,

"Ana," he chuckled without reason, "I am drunk, I am sorry. I am so damaged, completely destroyed. I know you wanted me sober but it's so – I can't do it with those flashbacks that blind me, there's a ton of shit I'll never tell you," he slurred and I heard something crash down and a scream that followed, loud piercing scream of pain.

I gasped, throwing my hand in the air to catch him and soon realised he was out of my reach.

He was screaming, "Save me, save me" his screams muted down to low painful pants, "Please," he whispered and it went silent with a beep.

Tears flowed down my cheeks and I tightly wrapped my hands around me, rubbing my shoulders and letting it go, screaming and shouting out my helplessness. I was weak, maybe strong enough to have shouldered the upbringing of my sisters and my father but not enough, not enough to swallow his pain, his addiction that burdened him down to nothing.

His screams echoed in my head and I was suddenly afraid, afraid if the screams meant more than they sounded on the phone. I quickly stabbed the letters on my logbook and called Taylor, telling him to make sure he was okay.

He called me back twenty minutes later, telling me that he slipped in his bathroom and crashed the vase which explained a few things. I asked him to make sure that he got on the flight on time.

I still knew only what he chose to tell me and tons of shit that I didn't, as he pointed out. My mind suddenly narrowed down to his diary, diary that I'd brought here with me.

I opened the first page this time, wiping the blurry obstruction that made the ink on the paper looking like splatters of blue paint.

The date marked down to when he would have been thirteen. His writing was less uniform and tidy then it had been when I had last read it but his language was still mature with perfect articulation and formality. It is also the longest entry of around four pages.

Dr Flynn is a young shrink who had gain fame in a really small time, it seems. He requested me to write down my feeling because I wasn't willing to tell him anything since he had been with me.

Grandma took me there when she saw my drinking problem and bitterness with almost everyone but Grandpa and Ana, my best friend since sixth grade.

I am rude to grandma, too. She is a grandMOTHER and no mother is good and I know she is different but I cant help it.

If only I could just run away and never return back. My stepmother is back to have a look at me, feigning worry for me in front of my grandparents when really, she just wanted to make sure that I did not open my mouth and she could continue her tradition of torturing me.

This, as you know, happens every year when she pays me a visit for the whole month and my grandparents go to my aunt's to pay her a visit, leaving me alone with her.

She is making me do those things again. She whips me with the extension cord and I don't even do anything. I am glad that I am able to send Mia away so that she doesn't have to see it, although, she suspects something is wrong with me.

Ana came to pay me a visit yesterday (as she usually does nowadays to play with me and she even lets Mia mess with her hairs. She doesn't like it though.) Elena, my stepmother, laid her eyes on her and threw me smirk. I know she wouldn't touch Ana but it still made me go rigid with anger.

I couldn't hold it and I made a mistake. I yelled at her to stay away from Ana and in return she repeated everything she did with me again as a punishment.

I block Anastasia out sometimes. It must be abrupt to her but not to me. I keep debating with myself if I should not allow her to become my friend. I am messed up.

I remember the day when I first met his stepmom, she was curvaceous and fake blonde. She didn't look this sadistic to me but now when I look back at her green, cat eyes, I can see it. I can see the joy that came to her when she punished his stepson till he loathed himself.

Christian told me it all started when he was six and remained the same until she left his father seven years later. I did the simple math and came up with thirteen. He was thirteen when he wrote it and thirteen when his stepmom left them.

This would have been the last year she ever touched him, I tried to give myself some relief from that. What did she do to him?

I turned the page, feeling almost disappointed because I couldn't make the young Christian to continue and write about all the things that she did to him - with specifics.

I realised my feet were digging into the soft bed, the back of them sweating. The little boy writing it seemed to help me when I turned the page and saw it's description.

When I was six years old, she whipped me with the burning iron. It was like I was kept on fire and wasn't allowed to diffuse it.

When I told my dad that I wanted to go to grandpa, she took me away and locked. When dad went, she called an orphanage (a place where children live when there parents don't want them or are dead) in front of me and asked them to take me away. She took me to a street crowded with men who used bad words and fought with each other.

They all seemed drunk. It was a bad neighbourhood. She left me there and took her car away saying that the orphanage will come and take me.

I don't know how long went but it became dark and I was scared when she came back and told me that I am so bad that they refused to take me and so would my grandparents.

She always does that whenever she wants me to know I am an evil. She's right. If I wasn't, my own mother wouldn't have left me and my father would tell me he loves me every time he came back home.

Every time I misbehaved, she made me eat all her medicines and scare me that I would die soon, her fingernails dig on my neck as she makes me vomit in a bucket and then she forces me to swallow it.

She hit me with a baseball bat on my private part just one time so that I don't die, I think.

Yesterday, she did all of that to me again.

I reread it again and again and again. His words assaulting me with its cruelty. I traced my finger on the part where he wrote how she made him consume drugs and how Christian's sentence became in present tense all of a sudden as if he was reliving it again as he wrote it down.

She was worse than a paedophile and all I do is stop myself from finding her and burn her to ashes, alive.

I smoothed down the dent on the diary that would have formed when he forced his pen down, forcing himself to write the words that I knew would have made him feel all of it, all over again.

The little bubbles that formed on the page were visible to me, they were thinner than the rest of the uniform page where the ink had dispersed on the page. He was crying.

With silent tears refusing to stop streaming down my face I turned the page.

By the way, Ana is beautiful.

She ignored me when I first tried to shove her away. I didn't like any company but she forced me to sit with her. I knew her. She was tough and bold and blunt but kind.

There was a little boy who was teased just because he was smaller and healthier than the rest. Three boys of my age kicked him down. I would have helped the little boy if I wanted to but I willed myself to mind my own business.

That was when I first saw her, running and pushing through the crowd to help the boy up while other kids just laughed at him or were too scared to say anything. She frowned up in anger at the boys that looked thrice the size she was. She was so tiny and cute as she angrily kept her hand on her waist.

I automatically stood up to protect her when Professor Day jumped in. It almost made me laugh at her overconfidence to scare the boys away with her glare.

Two weeks later, I was forced to sit with her and eat lunch and then I liked it as well. She is my best friend ever since.

I laughed, unexpectedly, a little throaty, thick laugh with the nose that was blocked by the continuous tears.

I remembered that day. The little fat kid was Justin and I was dead scared of the huge monsters that glowered down at me. I felt a little happy at the fact that my face didn't show the fear that my trembling legs would have given away if I wasn't wearing a frilly skirt.

Trying to move myself into the slumber of those happy days where I wasn't damaged as I was now and unaware of his bizarre world, I sang myself to sleep singing the poem my mother once sang to me -- my voice not as soothing and beautiful as hers -- and I almost felt her arms encircled around me, I could taste her scent in the air,

"In spite of war, in spite of death,

In spite of all man's sufferings,

Something within my daughter laughs and sings

And she must praise with all her breath.

In spite of war, in spite of hate

Lilacs are blooming at her gate,

Tulips are tripping down the path

In spite of war, in spite of wrath.

"Courage!" the morning-glory saith;

"Rejoice!" the daisy murmureth,

And just to live is so divine

When pansies lift their eyes to shine."

NEXT COMING UP. STAY TUNED.