Prolog 2

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our days

It's been a whole fourteen years since Yuna was born. She is now fourteen years old, finishing ninth grade at a charter school. Her dream is to become a surgeon like her mom. Her mom still works at San Jose St. Bonaventure Hospital, she has been promoted to chief of surgery, and Neil Melendez is her deputy. Yuna looks a lot like Audrey, practically a copy of her. The same light wavy hair of strong coffee color framing her face, tall height, lean body, bulging bones, thin waist, graceful nose, beautiful curve of pink lips, even chin. And the small, almost almond-shaped, dark green eyes with golden speckles, long eyelashes, and thick eyebrows that seemed to frown, giving her a gloomy look, but in fact were not, were like Kashal's. Yuna weighed less than normal at birth and that remained to this day. Her eating disorder haunted her throughout her life, starting in childhood.

The baby spent her early childhood in the hospital under the careful supervision of doctors. There were two reasons for this, firstly, she had a low body mass index at birth and her birth weight was almost 500 grams less than normal, and secondly, in addition to this she had a very weak immune system and no one could understand the cause of this illness. even for a child with an underweight body, her immune system was too weak, her body did not produce some blood forming elements and therefore her life outside the hospital was in great danger.
For the first couple of months after her birth, Yuna was in the NICU at the same hospital where her mother was doing her residency. It was very convenient, because Audrey could visit her unlimited number of times during the day, and also the child was under 24-hour close supervision of specialists, which at that moment was very necessary for him. The management went to meet the resident and in order to diagnose the baby several consiliums of doctors were convened, but they were of little use. They did not make any diagnoses. There was even leukemia in the circle of possible diagnoses, but at first it did not yield to any treatment, then stood still, then disappeared altogether, as if vaporized, so soon this theory was forgotten.
Audrey's story looked sad enough to her coworkers, the exhausting 36 hour shifts, and a child with an unknown and complicated disease that was initially untreatable. In fact, it was even sadder than others could imagine. Audrey always tried to be strong and kept all her emotions and worries to herself. No one could see how much she was really suffering. Nine months into her pregnancy, Audrey couldn't get used to the idea that she was about to become someone's mother. She was not at all prepared for this child, and then for his illness. All of these factors combined led to severe postpartum depression, for which she almost killed herself. At that moment Neil appeared in time to notice what was wrong with her and practically saved her life. However, their relationship did not go beyond good friendship, at that moment she was not ready for a new love. Previous bitter experiences in relationships had their consequences. After leaving the relationship, she experienced PTSD and for the first time could not let go of the past, she had nightmares and had to work through the trauma with a therapist, to whom she did not want to go for a long time, despite all the persuasions from her mother. The therapist very accurately identified the problem and prescribed her a couple of medications. Gradually she began to feel better, the nightmares passed and the residency in the new place helped her to distract herself from the disturbing thoughts. All the resentment, pain, bitterness, anger and the memory of it she took out on physical activity with music.  However, even after a year she was still afraid to start a relationship with the opposite sex, she was afraid that this horror would happen to her again. The hope that she would ever have a healthy relationship had long since left her and she tried to focus entirely on her career as a trauma surgeon.
In 14 years, the hospital staff had changed a lot, many of the doctors Audrey had started her career with had moved to other states for promotions, and many new doctors had joined, so not everyone knew that Audrey had a child, and she herself had never voiced this fact.

Because Yuna's mom was always at work, most of her childhood was spent in Taipei with her grandparents, so she spoke Mandarin very well as she went to the local kindergarten and then elementary school there for a couple of years.
Every summer vacation she would go to her mother's house and her mother would visit them at Christmas. Yuna looked forward to these meetings with great anticipation. Every call they made ended in bitter child's tears and heartbreaking cries of "Mommy, I want to come to you!", it hurt Audrey, so she tried to avoid it as long as she could. Gradually Ann began to wean herself off her mom and then she came to terms with the fact that her mom couldn't take her to her and their relationship turned cold. Audrey blamed herself for not being involved in her daughter's life, only helping her financially, but she also realized that with her her childhood would have been even worse than with her grandmother, because Audrey would not have been able to pay proper attention to her, her career and her ambitions were in first place for her. She hated herself for it, but there was nothing she could do about it. And besides, it was safer for the little girl to be in Taiwan, because no matter how free-spirited she was, the things she had no control over continued to haunt her, namely her ex-boyfriend Kashal, she only had time to move from place to place, and the girl did not know what he did with their child.
After a while Yuna's grandfather died, she was 7 at the time. Grandmother became hard to bring up her granddaughter alone, so Yuna had to move to America to her mother. And Audrey had to change the apartment again and buy a car, because her old apartment was clearly not enough for the two of them, and the Bugatti to take her daughter to school was dangerous. She had also decided to file a police report against Kashal, and then he had stopped stalking her.
But it was still hard for her to imagine her life with her daughter, because she didn't know her at all and was completely immersed in her work. At first it was hard for Yuna to get used to the idea that her grandfather was gone, she had a very close relationship with him and loved him very much. Because of this she refused to eat anything, so she lost another seven kilograms. Gradually this problem was solved. However, there was another problem, Yuna did not speak English well, because in Taiwan she did not need it at all, and with all her relatives and friends the girl communicated exclusively in Chinese. When she came here, at first it was hard enough for her to adapt, because only her mother understood her, but for Yuna she was a stranger, and she still had no time for her daughter, because almost all her time she spent in the hospital. So she was happy to leave all her worries about Yuna in the hands of the nanny, for which she felt remorse. The nanny did not even speak Chinese, but communication with her helped Yuna to speak English.
Also in Taipei, Yuna had gone to acrobatics, so in San Jose she persuaded her mother Audrey to enroll her there again. It was the first place where she made friends and it was the only activity that lifted her spirits. Because at elementary school, no one would talk to her because of her accent. When school was over and vacations began, her mother sent Yuna to Taipei to stay with her grandmother, who was happy to see her.
Once Yuna grew up a bit and went to middle school, most of her problems were solved and she became more independent. Now she took the school bus to school, which reduced her contact with Audrey even more. She also finally started to live the life she wanted. She made a lot of friends and started to do more acrobatics and win competitions, but it was frustrating that none of her competitions and performances were attended by her mother because of her busy schedule at work. However, they still tried to maintain a close relationship in the beginning. Yuna also discovered a lot of abilities, she was a prodigy with a good memory, the girl grasped everything on the fly. She became interested in science, math and programming, won Olympiads, sometimes even a class or even 2 above her.
So soon she received an invitation from a cool charter high school. Studying and sports began to occupy all the girl's free time, so she became estranged from her mother. They began to barely see each other, despite the fact that they lived in the same apartment. However, Audrey always tried to spend all her free time with her.
When Yuna became older and no longer needed constant attention Audrey had more time for a personal life. However, the bitter experience of her previous relationships reminded her of itself every time she had prospects with someone...

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