Prologue

'Life is hard' is what people often say;

Everyone has a story behind it too, either of how they bravely faced it, or of how they just gave up and let the course of time do the trick.

However Lucas Gray, belonged to a third category, he got used to his hard life.

The blue-eyed boy, like any other teenager, was full of passion and dreams too in the past, but he gave it all up because of his parents, who at the end of the day, never once cared about it.

His mom and dad never really loved him, nor did they ever love each other, they got divorced when he was just twelve years old and his mom left his custody with his dad, to start a new life of her own, without any regrets.

His father, Benjamin Gray owned an art gallery, he was professionally, a successful contractor, with an eye for astounding art pieces and his love for painting and creativity passed on to his son, but it was funny how the old man didn't even know about it.

They had their unnecessarily spacious three storey apartment, in the humble dwellings of East London, right above their furnished gallery, called ‘Adroit.’

Every single day Lucas went to his arts college and came back home to find empty liquor bottles strewn all over the apartment, with his drunk father, passed out on the couch.

It became an irreplaceable routine and all this while, their neglected art gallery kept rotting away, closed for years; but young Lucas had always dreamt of renewing it and holding a showcase of his own paintings, that recieved great praise from all his teachers.

Nonetheless, he never got a chance to fulfil that too, since his father decided to remarry and handed over Adroit to his second wife, Evangeline, a very young woman who more or less married his father for money.

Lucas tried to convince Benjamin innumerable times to keep Adroit, but his stubborn father never reconsidered, the old man only kept telling him, that he had already given him the apartment and he should not be greedy for the art gallery too, shattering his dream all over again.

In the one year that followed after the remarriage of his father, Benjamin grew more alcoholic, as his relationship with Evangeline crumbled bit by bit and Lucas somehow graduated from college among all these problems, all while keeping multiple part time jobs to handle fundamental living expenses.

Feeling hopeful of his achievement, only when the raven-haired boy finally thought he could have a better future, Benjamin Gray passed away all of a sudden, leaving him totally by himself.

It actually didn't make much difference physically, since he never knew if his father was ever home or not, but emotionally, he did feel the loneliness creeping in on him, the encompassing dread of being all alone in the whole wide world.

Two years passed by and Lucas still miraculously managed to push through, with the help of his college senior, the one friend that he had made in his entire life, Austin Lee.

It almost seemed as if his life was slowly rippling back to normalcy, until that particular summer night, when Evangeline rang the doorbell to his apartment, and Lucas opened the door to find the ungrateful woman standing with a sleeping little boy in her arms, wearing an enraged expression.

“My life has turned into a living hell because of this child, I cannot handle the responsibility of your father’s mistake anymore!” Evangeline shrieked and thrusted the sleeping boy towards a shocked and clueless Lucas, who hastily held the child so that he doesn’t fall.

“Your useless father just gave me that poorly maintained gallery, all my money is gone because of him and then this pathetic child, you take care of it now, I don’t want to keep any relations with you and your father anymore, you’ve ruined my life enough!” The woman spoke and left after throwing the birth certificate and some more papers at Lucas’s feet, who stood frozen at the doorstep, still supporting the baby with a tight grasp, even though his own knees were about to give away.

He was only nineteen, had just recently got himself an admission in a decent university and now he was supposed to raise a child, with zero knowledge about how to do it.

Life was hard and Lucas Gray had no choice, but to get used to it.