I was not one of those types of girls. I wasn't wild and crazy, not after that incident when I was sixteen. I didn't meet total strangers and turn them into friends. I was just your average girl, eighteen, finally finished high school. I wasn't spectacular, that's for sure. I had two best friends and a little sister who was overly protective but loved me more than anyone. But everything changed that summer that I met Duncan. Duncan took everything in my life and turned it upside down, and I was unable to go back. Ever.

I'd had a practically normal childhood, growing up in Tampa, Florida, after my father moved my sister and me there from a small town outside of New York City. I was born in New York; my parents were newlyweds and had just paid off their house. Everything was perfect for them. Perfect. My mother was pregnant again within a year and my sister was born just before I turned two. I can practically remember my parents dropping me off at my grandmother's house, where I spent the next week, barely seeing my father at all. I didn't understand it; I just wanted to see the new baby and my mommy and daddy. My dad later sat me down and tried to explain that Mommy was up in heaven because she wanted baby Ashleigh to live. I didn't understand, I was two, and I wanted my Mommy back. My dad was a good dad, he was twenty-eight when the three of us settled in Tampa; Ashleigh was only four months old. He raised us to be well-behaved and he loved us. But neither of us ever had a Mommy again.

My dad met Jackie when I was seven, Ashleigh was five. She was about five years younger than him and when she moved in to our house just months after they'd met, Ashleigh and I were not pleased. She was my father's first girlfriend; he had never dated after our mom died, not until he met Jackie. She loved Ashleigh and me, and she loved my father, although I didn't know it until years later. I was eight when the new baby was born, a boy, who they named Adam Thomas. I have to admit I didn't really like him for his first couple of years; to me he was just the baby who cried and got all the attention. But I grew attached to him as he grew up, after I realized that he wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

I had just turned eleven years old when I realized something about myself. Music was beginning to play a huge part in my life. I found myself buying cassette tapes, old and new, and then I began to buy CDs. In just a few months my collection was up to a hundred. I had music playing at all times. In school, I would practically go crazy because I couldn't have music on. At lunch I'd play my walkman while my friends discussed boys or homework. At first, my dad questioned it and wondered if there was something wrong with me. Until I started to sing. For the first couple of months, I just listening, learned all the words, and kept them inside. One day, at eleven and a half, I sat in my bedroom and started to sing. I sung and sung before I knew it Ashleigh was standing in the doorway, with my dad and Jackie, holding baby Adam, right behind her. They just stood there, their mouths opened, staring at the little dark haired with the huge voice. That same day, my father went out and bought me a microphone, one of the "professional" ones. He hooked it up in my basement with the stereo and told me it was all mine. So I continued to sing.

Which brings me to that summer. I graduated with honors, along side my two best friends since kindergarten, Melissa Wyatt and Kayla Grey. Although I hadn't hated high school, man, I was happy to get out. I was working at Sam's Diner, a locally owned restaurant near my house, which I'd worked at since my sixteenth birthday. It was an average night, slow, and I was so ready to go home and crawl into bed and go to sleep. But then he walked in. And the world as I knew it would never be the same again.