The new girl was a hyped topic within the Maison everyone was curious to get to know— really they just wanted a piece of her personal story. Their motives were selfish, and she didn’t play into it.

Georgiana Mendoza was silence personified though in the inside she was a hurricane, a thunderstorm, and an earthquake of a mess. She was screaming inaudibly.

There was one person who saw through her or actually, she didn’t mind being seen by one Abigail “Abby” No Last Name— at least everyone else had no idea and neither did Georgiana.

For Georgiana, the Maison was her refuge. Though it was often loud with curiosity wafting around, it was still quieter than back home. There was peace in knowing she wasn’t surrounded by family and friends whose expectations of her caused her world to crumble in the first place.

Family failed her once. No one listened, and she was hurt by those she trusted. She cried alone. She cut. She died in her waking moments and tried to live in her dreams. She wished she could just disappear into the arms of a faceless dream.

There was something about reopening scars that first attracted her to retrace old cuts. Seeing them throbbing red was a reassurance that she was indeed alive because most days, she felt dead and hollow. She tortured herself so to know that she could breathe.

Somehow, she felt Abigail was the same or for the most part at least. After all, Abby’s soul didn’t feel hollow, just tightly locked away. She wouldn’t know how deeply hidden and tucked away until later though. She didn’t know whether she wanted to know it in the first place.

Somehow, she felt, she had no right unless she shared first. She did.

Talking was difficult. Strangers were strangers, they needed details. The Fathers and Mothers at the Maison were soundboards, they just needed to hear something. But Abby was different.

She was a kindred spirit. She would know when something’s been omitted, and that would be it, the trust would be lost.

There was something about the way Abby saw her that let Georgiana believe she could be saved from the depths of hell just by sharing her story. She would talk and talk to Father Peter, who listened and smiled. She would hear Mother Ani lecture and tease her into painting but with Abby, there was understanding from self-experience.

Yet, even with all the ears turned to her, waiting for her to speak all that she had to say, she was still unable to completely share the inner demons that swallowed her whole and left her for dead in a black pit of toxic. Not until she was pushed to the edge did she realize depression worked like an hourglass.

At the bottom where she sat and waited to be buried was also the top where she fought to not slip through if flipped over.

But depression wasn’t so simple either. Added in with Georgiana’s bouts of social anxieties, the hourglass worked like a watermill. It continuously flipped itself as it filled, and it jostled so that every sand would most definitely fall in. She didn’t want to drown. She wasn’t in the sea wandering happily but most people think, it’s so easy to swim against the current.

The Maison was a sanctuary and a home, but it was also not. It was strangers roaming around together, lost but not completely. It was where they wanted and needed to be but also not.

Georgiana loved and hated being where she was, physically. She simply hated her emotional and mental illness.

She couldn’t get passed the idea of being broken.

Not Sebastian.

Amongst all the other residents of the Maison, there was the guy who played the piano and was openly curious about her while she shut away from her curiosity of him.

Sebastian Daniels was like dark chocolate. He was good for the soul. He was a healer. He bandaged her wounds and redressed them when necessary. He let her scream, shout, cry, and break apart, and he tried to assist in piecing her back together.

She met Sebastian on a day she was not at her best. She would continue to meet him at her worst moments. Despite the ugly, she would show him, he never walked away.

He would not be the first yet she felt good having him around. With Sebastian, there was a sense of security she was afraid would disappear. Still, though to him she talks, she also keeps secrets.

The thing about Georgiana isn’t that she’s been hurt, it’s that she wants to never be again.

To Georgiana, Sebastian was someone who’d successfully healed himself not only once. He was somewhat like a role model, a goal. If she could achieve what he could, then maybe she’d find success, freedom, and happiness the same as he has.

She fears, and she is held back.

So she refrains from calling out his name and things stay as they are.