Disclaimer: The characters Chris, John, Ellen, Kim, and Tam are the property of Boublil and Schoenberg. The only character that's mine is Haley.

Prologue

Manhattan, New York
Late spring, 1993

Haley Wilson made her way to the nice, yet modest, brownstone. She considered it her home away from home when she and her parents came to New York for her father's work. She glanced around to make sure passerby weren't looking and then crouched down to look for the spare key she knew her Uncle Chris kept under the doormat. It didn't take long for her to get to it, but the door opened before she even had to use it.

Kimberly Scott looked down at the girl she considered to be her surrogate niece. Like her Tam, Haley was also a Bui-Doi child, but she really didn't look the part. In fact, she looked practically Caucasian with her brown hair and hazel eyes. John had found the girl as part of his work, but when he learned her biological father had been killed during the Fall of Saigon, he and his wife, Ellen, adopted her and raised her as their own. Kim smiled and held her hand out to help Haley to her feet.

Haley grinned. "How did you know it was me?" she asked with a chuckle.

Kim smirked. "Your father phoned here and let us know you were coming," she replied. "You just missed your uncle. He's meeting your father for a business lunch."

It didn't take long before Haley was sitting at her kitchen and Kim was serving up some left over take-out from a Vietnamese restaurant that she and Chris liked to frequent. Tam was on an overnight track meet for his school, so with Haley here visiting it wouldn't go to waste.

"Is your mom here this time?" Kim asked.

"Naw, she's been kinda sick off and on," Haley replied. "To be honest, Aunt Kim, I'm getting kinda worried about her. Dad's been on her to see her doctor for a while now, but you know how she is."

"Yes, I know," Kim agreed. "Thankfully, your uncle would never let me get away with such nonsense."

Haley laughed. It was common knowledge that retired Marine sergeant Christopher Scott was still very much in love with his Vietnamese wife and very protective of her. In fact, when she'd had a breast cancer scare two years before, Chris had made sure she'd gotten to their family doctor the moment the lump had been found. Thankfully, the tumor found in her breast had been benign, but the doctors had told Chris that had it been malignant, his insistence on Kim coming to see them when she had would've saved her life.

Haley smiled as she thought of the love and commitment her surrogate uncle and aunt shared for each other. She'd heard the stories about how Chris had fallen in love with Kim when he'd seen her in "Dreamland", a seedy club in Saigon.

"What are you thinking about?" Kim asked, startling the teenage girl back into the present.

"About how you and Uncle Chris fell in love back then," she replied. "What I don't get, however, was how he was able to get you out of there. I mean from what I remember from my history class last year was that things were so insane back then and that they weren't letting any more Vietnamese into the embassy."

Kim flashed a sad smile. "Yes, that's true," she agreed. "It's only because he insisted on taking me with him when he had to report back to the embassy. I only had the clothes on my back, my shrine, and my wedding dress in a small bag, but it didn't matter…"

TBC... Hope you like the intro and how I've woven Haley into Chris and Kim's lives.