she crawls into the front seat, slamming the front door.

"ragazza dolce, why are you soaking, you could get pneumonia, do you not know how dangerous this is?" her nonna tuts, reaching into the backseat pulling out a blanket and pointing to the takeaway mug of a steaming hot chocolate.

she looks over at evangeline, seeing her bloodshot eyes and sad expression, "eva, would you like to tell me what happened?" she tenderly smiles; coaxing evangeline to tell her.

she misguidedly pushes the blanket towards evangeline budding her to keep warm.

"nonna, there was a man, i wasn't supposed to have feelings for him but i did"

"mia caro, you cannot help who you feel for."

"i know nonna, but it was bad, he's older"

"eva, you are fifteen and to me you are a woman already. but tell me, how did he feel for you?"

"he was told me he cared, that he shared the feelings i had for him. i know he did not promise himself to me, but i saw him with another woman and it hurt so bad" evangeline whispers

her body remains curled- up in the blanket- in the front seat as her head rests upon the cold window, letting her hot breath fog up a small circle of glass.

"did you talk to him, bambina?"

"no nonna, i left before he noticed i saw him. he had already been avoiding me for days prior to that."

she speaks again looking out at the passing street lights as they zip past, possibly 20 kilometres over the suggested speed limit, but this area was isolated, so it never mattered.

"i know it may not seem like there is an explanation for his actions, but often what you see is not what is happening."

"i should have stayed but i couldn't i did not want to be humiliated when what i saw was already enough to make me want the earth to open up and swallow me whole"

"bambina, i understand what you are going through, i too had a similar experience"

evangeline's turns to her nonna, completely and utterly shocked.

"you did?" her nonna chuckles at evangeline's question

"si, when i was eighteen i fell in love with my english tutor" her nonna smiles nostalgically at the memory

"what happened then?" evangeline questions her

"he was 25 but sadly he was married already, however i confessed my feelings to him. he told me i was the most beautiful girl in the entire world but he could not leave his wife."

"why couldn't he leave her, if he thought you were beautiful?"

"eva, in this life there is attraction and there is love but they are not the same thing, at the time i did not realise that."

evangeline nods for her to continue the story,

"over the course of the year, i gave him more and more pieces of myself because i wanted him to be the person i spent the rest of my life with" she tells evangeline softly.

"one day he told me he was in love with me and a few weeks later i fell pregnant with his baby; your mother"

evangeline holds in a gasp at the revelation, this was a story she had never been told.

"a month before the birth of your mother" she continues the story.

"he killed himself."

"i was shattered, mia caro, i was destroyed. but a few days after, his wife came to my door with a note in her hands, it was from her husband to both of us, she told me she knew what had happened between him and i, she told me that she understood."

"what was in the note nonna?" evangeline asks

"he wrote that he loved both of us, he wrote that he could not live with himself if he was ruining his marriage and his relationship with me. he left me sums of money and a wife who- over time- i grew to love."

"was nonna karenina his wife?" evangeline inquisitively asks.

"si bambina"

evangeline sits in silence for a little while wondering just how much of her childhood had been a lie, her grandmothers were caught of the ends of an affair and her mother was the product of the affair.

evangeline sits up a little in her mess of blankets and glances over at her nonna,

"nonna, i have feelings for my best friends older brother" she breathes out in a gasp. feeling as if all the struggle and weight on her shoulders has been released.

"i always did hope that harry boy would be the one you would marry, eva he helped raise you to be the woman you are today."

"he doesn't feel for me the way i feel for him" she sits back sadly in her seat.

"eva, i may not know him now, but i know the way he used to look at you with his eyes so full of love and joy, that was the way your grandfather used to look at me and nonna karenina." she sighs with a small smile, leaving evangeline with hundreds of questions she still wanted to ask.

but instead she sat in silence, watching the night go by, letting go of all the sorrow and all the pain in her heart.

she only had one life, and if she spent a quarter of it being sorrowful and hating it, then she had already wasted it.

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