45.4347 N, 4.3903 E - These are the coordinates for Saint-Etienne, France. A small city with a population of 321,703... well, give or take. Now the question begs, how did a girl born in France wind up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn? Well, I'll tell the tale and by the end, perhaps you'll feel satisfied with the answers.

Our story starts on a dark and stormy night, the night Dr. Grayson Vawer met Simone Marceau. All the lights in the city of Paris had gone out, flickering for a brief instant before the city was plunged into total darkness. They hadn't searched one another out, happenstance led them to the very same restaurant and the very same time with her on the arm of another man. The other man was Grayson's opposite in every way. Older, fair, and seemed to lack the passion he had for the woman on the other man's arm. She was tall, taller even in ridiculously towering heels. It was her eyes that attracted him. They were green like emeralds and seemed to follow him everywhere throughout the room. It was a charity event that his sister had dragged him along to, not exactly the way he had wanted to spend his final night on vacation, but the minute, the second he laid sight on Simone? There was nowhere else in the world he would have rather been. Darkness fell and as quite common in moments such as those, inhibitions were cast aside. Lips met in the darkness, words whispered about how they shouldn't, they couldn't... but it didn't matter, they were already in far too deep to ever stop. It was love at first sight, lust at first touch, and that's where it ended. One perfect night under the cover of darkness in an amazing city, a true magical vacation moment. Grayson would have been fine, simply going back to New York and resuming his life, which he did in fact do. Dr. Vawer carved out a reputation, quite literally one supposes, in his field as a Cardiothoracic surgeon, a well respected and sometimes feared reputation. He didn't put up well with ignorance, with acting like you were stupid for the sake of it. If you were stupid? Fine, that could always be corrected through education, through the learning process. But pretending you were? That was lower than low in his book. It was going swimmingly, his life, he had even managed to find a spare few seconds in his jam packed schedule to date around, never all that interested in the women, they never held a candle to the woman with the green eyes, the woman who's accent tinged utterance of his name practically made his toes curl.

The world has this idea of who a person should be with, who they were meant to be with. Fate, is what some people with call it, or perhaps kismet. Turns out fate had such a plan for Grayson Vawer and Simone Marceau. During a fateful trip to New York with a friend, two years after their first encounter, Simone was strolling through the streets, her purse nestled in the crook of her arm. As luck would have it, people are far ruder in New York than they were in Paris and bodies collided, her purse being up ended on the street. The bumper didn't so much as bother attempting to help her, but a tall, dark and handsome stranger who wasn't such a stranger after all, came to her rescue. It wasn't until all the items were back in the bag that she registered where she knew him from, and it wasn't until her oversized sunglasses were pushed up over her forehead that those eyes, the memory of those eyes, flooded him. From that moment, that second, he vowed never to let her get away again. He demanded, requested, hoped, wished, prayed, that she let him take her to dinner. The request was granted and dinner was had, as well as breakfast the next morning, and lunch, and yet another dinner, and yet another breakfast. She was everything he wanted, fascinating in the way no other woman was to him. She made him laugh, and vice versa. Two more dinners, two more breakfasts, two more lunches... he asked her to marry him, producing a ring bought in a spare second of solitude. The immediate answer was yes. It wasn't a lavish affair as one would expect, but rather a plane trip to a little town called Las Vegas, and an Elvis impersonator playing the role of minister.

Their life was everything they wanted, despite the constant back and forth between New York and Saint-Étienne, Simone's hometown, and became even more so with the arrival of a daughter nearly ten months to the day of their nuptials. Stella Marie Vawer. She was a quiet child, always exploring with her eyes,. Simone refused to trudge back and forth between countries with a child on her hip and so a decision was made, and Stella was to be raised in France, with Grayson doing all the traveling. Yeah, the situation sucked but people in love have done crazier things to make it work. This arrangement lasted all of five years, five years in which Stella flourished, growing out of her shell and curiously asking of everything. New York was amazing, as was Saint-Etienne, but Grayson wasn't positive they were the places he wanted to raise, and not raise, his daughter, and the opportunity to become chief of medicine in a Los Angeles hospital appealed to him. After all, he was a born and raised California boy, and the cliche of going home again? It wasn't lost on him. Always one for impulsiveness, his marriage was proof of that, Grayson went for it, accepted the position and the move was in the works. Simone? She was apprehensive of it, had only ever truly known three cities in her life, Manhattan, Saint-Etienne and Paris, but she trusted her husband, and went along willingly. The move was a positive on all their lives, and Stella did well there, despite a few rough years in the beginning. The new kid with the silly accent in kindergarten? There was bound to be more than a few taunts and teases, and she took them quietly, took everything quietly until she met a talkative girl by the name of Jamie. It had taken awhile, but eventually the incessant chatter, about absolutely everything, had quite the positive effect on Stella. From then on, she was a precocious youth, often asked pondering questions with philosophical meanings, was always hard at work on her studies, and her father couldn't have been more pleased. Though.. the pendulum on his praise did swing the other way when she brought home a grade that was less than stellar, less than what he thought she was capable of. Sports, soccer specifically, became her outlet, running that field and kicking that ball with all the aggression that built up every time he criticized something that was under an A. An A- was never good enough, he expected so much more out of her, and her educational life became a series of AP and Honors courses, each one more challenging than the next.

You know how some people almost always wind up disappointing their parents? Stella is one of them. Something had occurred to her somewhere in the midst of her Sophomore year. She didnt have to be the perfect child, she didnt have to become this all star doctor following in her fathers footsteps no matter how hard he kept pushing for it, introducing her at parties as his daughter the future doctor. Instead, she chose to go in the other direction, exploring faith and sexuality and finding that for her, both were fluid, that she could experience so much more than the little niche that everyone else had been trying to carve for her. She was her father's greatest disappointment in so many ways, and continues to be, even from thousands of miles away in New York.