Chapter 2 The Beginning of A Great Friendship

After they got off work, Sophia and Samantha went straight home to start planning for their trip. Sophia was raised by her grandparents. Her grandfather died when she was five years old. Her grandmother died when Sophia was almost twenty-six years old. After her grandma died, Sophia inherited the house. Although she was seeing someone at the time, she lived in the house by herself for a year after the grandmother's passing. After the year, she got a golden retriever puppy to keep her company; later, Samantha moved into the house as her roommate two years after she got the puppy.

Before Samantha moved into the house, she had just started to work at Bloom Marketing Corporation as an intern for about three months. Sophia was her supervisor and trainer. Around that time, they got to know each other and became good friends. Samantha was the only coworker that Sophia was able to build a great friendship with. Before Samantha, Sophia could never hang out with her coworkers for more than a month. Because of Sophia 's beauty and youthful genes, they would end up getting jealous of Sophia. Some did not like the fact that Sophia was older than them, but she looked younger or about the same age as them. Others who were the same age as Sophia, did not like the fact that she looked younger and more beautiful than them when they were all the same age. They would even ask Sophia to tell them about her secret to look naturally youthful than her age, but Sophia would always deny using any type of treatment on her face or skin. However, to them it felt like Sophia just did not want to give them her secret. They had a hard time believing that it was all genetic. So, after all these situations with her coworkers, Sophia decided to keep her distance from them.

But when she met Samantha who was very extroverted, and very easy to work with, Sophia ended up befriending her before she knew it. Partly, it was because of Samantha's perseverance of wanting to hang out with her. Samantha would admire and praise her, instead of resenting Sophia for her look and genes. Samantha was also beautiful in her own right. Since Samantha was living at her college dorm at the time and was about to graduate, she would have had to either move back to her parents' house which was like a five hours drive to the company or rent a place to stay. At the time Sophia was going through a painful break up from her longtime boyfriend and needed someone to lean on for emotional support, so she asked Samantha to move in with her as her roommate. She immediately offered Samantha a deal that she could not refuse. She would only have to make a monthly payment of four hundred dollars. The price would not only cover a place for her to stay, but also all the utilities bills. Sophia's house was a two-story house with four bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms. After her grandma passed away, she was able to get a decent amount of money from her grandmother's life insurance. With this money, she paid off the remaining balance that was due on the house and she also was able to renovate it. After the renovation, the house had two bedrooms with their respective full bathroom each, one bathroom for the other two bedrooms and the half bathroom downstairs for guests. So, not only Sophia had a full bathroom in her room, but Samantha was able to also have a full bathroom in her bedroom.

The house was quite of a decent size. So, even after Sophia added the other bathroom during the renovation, it did not really affect the overall space in the house. Sophia was not really in need of money since she had inherited a substantial amount of money from the insurance. She just needed another female companion inside the house. The house felt too lonely for her. So, having Samantha move into the house was good for her. Since she was not married yet, she could not let anyone she was dating move into the house with her. That was one of the conditions that her grandmother had written in her will before she died, for Sophia to inherit the house.

From the moment that the two women had started living together, they became inseparable. They did almost everything together. Even after Samantha started to make good money at the company, Sophia never raised the rent's price. Although Samantha did offer to pay her more for the rent several times, Sophia always declined. Sophia never had siblings, or any siblings that she knew of. As far as she knew, she was an only child. Her mother was very young when she had her. Her mom never took the responsibility of being a mother. Before she was pregnant, her mother always liked to party and hang out with the bad crowd. After she gave birth, Sophia's mom gave Sophia up to Sophia's grandparents and then just took off. She never reached out to see how her parents and Sophia were doing. The grandparents and Sophia never heard from her ever again. Even at her grandparents' funeral, Sophia's mom never showed up to their funerals. Sophia was hoping to meet her mother at her grandmother's funeral.

Her grandmother's name was Betty Anderson. Betty was the mother of Sophia's mom after all. It had been twenty-six years since she left the house. If she was still alive, she would have at least checked to see how her parents and daughter were doing, right? Her mother would have been forty-two years old by then. She thought that maybe if her mother had heard about her grandma's passing from somewhere, she would have shown up at the funeral. She was willing to forgive her mother. She was willing to start over with her mother. They would have reconnected, and she would have finally had answers to all those unanswered questions that had been tormenting her for all those years. In the end, it was all just wishful thinking. However, despite growing up without her biological parents, and having her grandfather died when she was just five years old; Sophia had a loving grandmother who had raised her to be a reliable and strong woman. She never really lacked anything growing up, Except for the lack of parental love from her biological parents. Betty made sure of that. Betty had two full time jobs up until Sophia graduated from college. She did not let Sophia work while in school, except for internships during college. She wanted her to focus solely on her school.