Sarah turned up the volume to her stero as Avril Lavigne's "My Happy Ending" blasted and consumed her mind and seemed to engulf the room. For the first time, her mind went back to the Labyrinth. How would things have been different, if she had accepted? Adam would've never came into her life. She would've never been raped, and her son, David, wouldn't exist. And she wouldn't be alone right now.

She looked at the bottom of the bottle of clear Cardigan rum and was amazed. The bottle was almost gone. She pushed herself up and struggled with her sense of balance. She pushed herself on the wall to keep herself on her feet and stumbled down the hallway. She flipped on the lightswitch when she went into the bathroom and took a long hard look into the mirror, and at once, wished she hadn't. Her oval face was sunken and her body was now a curvy-disaster area. She just decided a few years ago to stop trying.

Adam always said she looked 'Like a cross-dressing hooker trying to be Wynonna Judd." Looking deeper and deeper into the mirror, she could feel herself slipping. She suddenly felt again, like on many occassions - He was right.

Her mid-section remained a little big from the pregnancy, and the blouse she wore struggled to break free and run back to her closet. Her heart sank and she felt so unwanted. Her husband died honorably, protecting someone else's life, but, nobody else knew him like she did. All the bruises she had to cover with pancaked make up. All the cuts on her wrists she blamed the dog for, when she knew damn well there was no dog. She sometimes wished her son away and was shocked when no one showed up to do so. David was the only good thing she had going, and even then, sometimes she wished she could get a break. She let a teenage girl down the street baby-sit him for the night.

When Adam was alive, things started out well enough, but always turned to poison when she touched them. It just started with him coming home late. Followed by the screaming matches about how bad a mother she was and how pathetic a human being she was. Then it progressed to fights that ending with black eyes and bruises and broken doors. And finally, before she finally won with news of his death, the razor.

It started as a game he'd threaten her with. That "if she didn't cut her own wrists to save herself, he'd do it for her." And he did. But never deep enough that she could take a long needed break from life. Never a single vacation.

She needed a break long enough to sort things out.

Long enough to straighten her life out.

Long enough to find an escape.

She didn't have to wait long. Within a few minutes, she made a wish to be taken away. It didn't take long for the young woman babysitting down the street to come running up Sarah's driveway to tell her, her son was missing.