Natasha stared at her father in horror she couldn't believe what he had just said. She sat and glared at his feet as he stood in front of where she was sitting, hardly believing what she was hearing.
"So you're telling me that because of your new cushy job, I have to go and live with a woman who abandoned me when I was one. No thanks. I'll stay here on my own."
"No chance. Why you live under my roof you'll - "
"Ah, but I won't be living under your roof will I? I'll be living with that btch."
Her father changed track. "Listen sweetheart. I have been wanting to go on this research trip for years. These weather phenomena are few and far between and I really want to take this chance. It's the last one I've got."
"I understand that, but why do I have to live with her?"
May 12th. The day had come, and she watched the car pull away, her father off for eighteen months in who knows where in the arctic. She trudged up the pathway to the imposing oak front door. She's done well for herself, she thought. Shame she didn't care about me, or me and Dad wouldn't have been living in that creepy flat for the last seventeen years.
She rang the doorbell and watched the distorted shape of a woman through the glass panel in the door and heard a woman's quick stride stabbing against the marble floor.
The door swung open and the two came face to face.
One saw a woman standing on a highly polished floor. Sharp designer suit trousers (the jacket having been discarded on entrance), narrow heels, a silk shirt clinging to every curve, and short brown hair, as perfect as her makeup.
One saw a seventeen-year-old girl hunching on her porch. Slouched boy jeans, frayed at the edges, acidic pink converse trainers, a man's grey hoodie, dirty blond hair scraped into pigtails, too much eye-makeup.
But what they were drawn to, the thing they really noticed, were the two pairs of chocolate brown, almond-shaped eyes. The same penetrating eyes staring from different sides of the threshold, from different sides of the cty, from different lives.
"You must be Natasha," the brunette pronounced.
"You must be Connie," the blond winced.
The brunette sighed. Here on her front porch was everything she had longed for, and at the same time, everything she had longed to forget.
"You'd better come in.