The day Elora Easton's father died, she was playing.

She was outside, enjoying the sun and the perfect surf with her friends. She wasn't at her house, where her dad was taking pills upon pills to numb the pain of her mother, Elizabeth's, infidelity.

She was just ten years old, she didn't understand. All she knew was that her mummy had a lot of male 'friends' around the house. She had a bad feeling about each of these friends, but she never acted upon it. She was just a kid.

Yet she didn't feel like just a kid when she walked into the bathroom and saw her father's motionless body slumped in the corner. She didn't feel like just a kid when she screamed as loud as she could, screaming for her mother.

Her father, David Easton, had always been her hero. He'd always loved her more than her mother, he'd always cherished her. He'd always celebrated her, made her feel special.

(Just like her mother had never done).

"You're an angel, Ellie, never let anybody tell you otherwise," he always used to say. She'd lost count of the number of times he'd said it.

But she believed him, because it was him saying it.

And now he was gone.

She didn't feel like just a kid as she watched her father's get buried, as she watched her mother's crocodile tears fall as she inherited everything.

(Because he trusted her. He trusted her, even though she'd never done anything to make him).

From then on, her 'friends' came round every night. Sometimes more than one came every day.

As Elora grew up, the blindness began to falter. She began to see her mother's true colours, she began to see that she'd been cheating on her father for years, and yet he'd stayed with her. Elora didn't understand how on earth he could do that.

Because living with her mother was terrible. The men she brought home were rude, and mean, and some even looked at Elora the same way they looked at Elizabeth.

Elle learned to hate them, and she learned to hate her mother, too.

She hated her for never celebrating her, for never being there. She hated her for bringing men home and sleeping with them and never spending any time with her. She hated her for her bitchy attitude and her indifference.

She and her mother looked the same, with their fiery red hair and sunkissed skin and blue eyes, but the resemblance stopped there.

Because most of all, Elora hated her for taking away her father. The one person who'd loved her, the one.

She soon learned there were other people who loved her, however. Other people who knew how special she was, who knew who she was.

(Because her mother didn't).

But it was different with Kiara Carrera, her first proper friend. She was... she was kind, and nice, and she made Elora laugh. All it took was the redheaded girl shoving a boy in their class for making fun of the brunette's interest in turtles.

And then Kie introduced her to her three friends, John B, JJ and Pope. Elora was best friends with all of them immediately, and soon enough, the five of them were out every second they could be.

They really were Elora's best friends. They gave her an excuse to be out the house, to be away from her mother. Their relationship was frosty at the moment, with a lot of shouting involved, each one of them trying to not be the first to break.

So you'd imagine that Elora would be happy that one day, when she was seventeen, coming back home from a day with her friends to find her mother not there, and two police officers standing, arms crossed, outside her front door.

You'd think she'd be relieved when she asked what was going on, and one of them replied.

"Elora, your mother has been missing for twenty four hours."

But she wasn't.

And that was just the first of her problems.