Sarah couldn't understand that her mama had gone. How do you explain to the child with the wide clear eyes gazing at you in absolute innocence that mama didn't care enough to stay?

You can't, and so that is why Robert Williams told his daughter nothing.


Sarah grew up in blissful ignorance to all. She lived in, and accepted little but her fantasies – they seemed far more real to her than reality.

For Sarah's reality was an adult world, of standing in the doorway robed in her floral nightie, sucking her thumb, clinging tight to her precious teddy Lancelot as Daddy and the business men sat bartering around the dinner table, speaking in what was nothing more than utter nonsense to little Sarah. They would laugh at her, make ignorantly demeaning remarks, such as 'that's a cute kid you've got yourself there Robby' before her father went to her, lifting her up to take her back to bed, calling her his little angel, his princess, as he settled her to sleep.

Robert was left devastated by his wife's departure. He'd never truly believed she'd leave, he'd never wanted it to go so far. How he'd regretted that blow, how he cringed at the memory of the look of utter horror, disbelief on his sweethearts face before she ran up the stairs in preparation for her final flight.

He never really accepted that he'd been left as a divorcee, he refused to speak of Linda to anyone, not even his parents, it took many years to discover that she had ever left. He didn't know what had become of her, some days went by with him desperately craving to know what had happened to the one he had loved so dearly, but he always restrained himself from ringing the numbers he knew could tell all – he had no wish to dreg up ghosts of the past.

For Sarah, this involved being told nothing of her mother. She remembered her, of course she remembered the mother who had loved her enough to sit with her for hours and laboriously read each word of the hundred-page play for her little daughter. But as the years passed, the memories began to fade, her loving words grew silent and Sarah, having no mother to know, invented her own.

Sarah gave herself a lovely, beautiful mother. She had skin as fair as snow, hair as dark as ebony, and lips a deep ruby red. To Sarah, her mother had been a Queen, and Sarah the Princess, the true and legitimate heir to the throne of a far off mystical land. A wonderful fantastic land, inhabited wholly by dragons, dashing knights, weeping ladies in their turret hats and of course – ample quantities of gossamer winged faeries.

But as a baby, Sarah told her little pen rapidly scratching the words of her own personal fairy-tale to paper, she had been stolen, stolen away by a wicked, desperately jealous King, who wished for the the beautiful Queen for himself. And he had fed her mother a potion, and she fell into a deep false love with him. The baby had been left all alone, spirited away to the earth, a land of unhappiness, monotony and despair – for no one knew her.

For Sarah, the fairy tale finished with the baby growing into a beautiful girl, possessed of a radiance that even outshone that of her mother, and reclaiming her throne, breaking the spell put unto her own mother, and finding her very own prince charming, who had lifted her off her feet, sat her on his beautiful ivory stallion, and led her off into the far distant sunset.

Sarah had been deeply satisfied with this creation at the tender age of eight, had written it out in her neatest script, filling an entire notebook with her story. She drew her own little illustrations as well, put great time and care into her mama's face, the rainbow wings of the faeries, the wide, happy smile on her own face at the finale.

She had proudly presented it to her father, and the look on his face upon opening the first page was unfathomable. He'd been devastated at the sight of it, as for him, it encapsulated his child's loneliness, her masked despair.

She'd been hurled into a fury when he kept the book from her, when he told her with as much patience, as much love that he could summon, that he would take care of it, he would treasure it, but she could not see it again, he patted her head, told her to go and watch the television, like a good girl.

He read through the tale in bed that night, tears running silently as he saw the Linda he knew so well captured by the hand of her child. What hurt him more is that he couldn't see not a mention of him, the man who tried so very hard to be everything to his daughter, and was little more than nothing in her child's eyes.

He didn't understand that Sarah meant no such things with the invention of her story, it had merely been an escape for her at first, just a diversion from her boring daddy, for it wasn't that she didn't love him that she failed to include him, it was merely that he held little interest for her beyond the hopelessly mundane source of love that most knew so well. All that changed for Sarah when her creation was taken from her, her story began to displace the reality, she soon began to live by it – the careful, careful rules her fairy tale world laid out for her.

He took the slim notebook to the loft that night, reaching blindly for a place to secret it, to wipe it from his memory. He groped about in the darkness, before finding a box, a tattered flimsy thing, and throwing the tale into it, he retreated. If he had dared flick the light switch he would of seen the scrawl on that box, he would of seen the name 'Linda.'


Sarah was thirteen when everything changed, when her world fell down.

She learned so much about herself in that year, her family, her whole world. All the lies, the deceit were exposed to her, and she couldn't bear it, it was all too much revelation compressed into a mere sequence of days that drove her to the station. The one way ticket to Manhattan held with a desperate tightness in her quivering hand.

On Sarah's thirteenth birthday, Sarah's father took her out for a meal to a local pizza parlour. He'd asked her is she had friends to invite to a party, had eagerly suggested venues, days, times, but she'd looked up at him blank and cold. He didn't need to be told his daughter was virtually friendless, and the ones who dared refer to Sarah Williams as friend were often neglected and despised by Sarah in the secrecy of her room. Her room where she could talk with her real and true friends, her teddies, her books – her endlessly monotonous padlocked diary. The friends who had not the slightest potential to hurt her.

It would have been a perfect day for Sarah, her and her daddy, his attention focused on her alone – no business associates to interrupt and steal his affection, not on her birthday. That is, had it not been for one devastating component – Karen. Robert had brought his friend as he referred to her euphemistically along to the celebrations, and Sarah set out from the very beginning to hold her in absolute, utter contempt.

Karen tried to get along with her partner's daughter, she wasn't a monster, was certainly not the wicked fairy-tale Stepmother Sarah painted her as so eagerly. She desperately tried to draw Sarah from her self-immersion as she picked miserably at her food, spoke to her of the things she had been interested in at thirteen – boys, pop music, even school (though that is generally what adults perceive to be of interest to adolescents), none of which held the remotest appeal for Sarah. Each attempt at companionship did nothing by strengthen Sarah's resolve to make this blonde haired mannequin's life a misery.

Sarah told her father, coldly, from beneath her covers as he tucked her in on the night of her coming of age, of her opinions of Karen. Told him with absolutely clarity and steadfast solidarity. He'd scolded her for being so wicked, told her that he liked Karen very much, he found her interesting, she made him very happy, and, he told her, he hoped he'd make her happy too. He meant so much more than his masked words could express – but Sarah was no fool, she guessed his true feelings well enough.

Sarah said nothing. She didn't need to, both knew that a new mother could never possibly be a source of happiness for Sarah, not when Sarah would always remember that smiling, laughing face, wiping her tears, setting her to bed with the tenderest and most loving of kisses.

It took only a matter of months for one thing to follow another, a brief, intense romance, an engagement, and finally - a marriage. The tantrums, the tears that Sarah had bombarded the new couple with are near impossible to encompass in words, but the childish mix of pain, fear resentment was so very powerful – it truly scared the couple who stood before her hand in hand to tell her of their forthcoming joy.

Sarah refused to come to the wedding. How Robert had tried to coax her with the promise of a beautiful bridesmaid's dress, the beautiful gauzy creations of which she had always so admired with her little nose pressed tightly to the windows of Bridal Boutiques. But nothing, nothing in the world could of drawn her from her room at the moment in time. It had been a most subdued, simple affair their wedding, it all had the feel on intense melancholy about it, for all present could see Robert William's face agonising for his daughter sat back home locked in her room.

Sarah was delivered new purpose on the day of the wedding, no one had truly thought she would persist in her stubborn resistance to the concept of her father's happiness, and there had no one to prepare for a sitter, no relatives willing to sit for the strange, brooding child.

And this had delivered Sarah the perfect opportunity, she knew so little of her mother, her father didn't even keep any photos of her for her little girl to remember her by. Sarah only had the vaguest memories of a beautiful, smiling, laughing face lavishing her with attention, kisses and hugs, the like of which she had never known again. And so Sarah set out that day to find out the truth, with nothing more than a name – Linda.

Sarah trouped down to the bus stop, and despite the bus driver's look of shock that she could even pay the fare into town, she made it. She made a bee line straight to the library, a place her grandmother had taken her to visit many times, where she had withdrawn many fairy tale volumes, and brightly painted storybooks, but this time it was different, for once she asked not for a fantasy, but for the truth, the truth of her mother.

She went to the lady at the desk, and asked her if she search a name in the newspaper listings, the librarian gave her a contemptuous look from beneath her glasses, surprised that nothing more than a girl should wish to delve into such musty recesses of information.

She sighed, clearly displaying her feeling that her efforts were not worth the time for a child, but keyed in the letters into her primitive cataloguing system, as if to infuriate Sarah, she asked for the spelling, with Sarah rattled off without a moment's hesitation.

After a series of slow, dragging minutes, which only acted to make Sarah increasingly short-tempered and snappish, the search was complete. The gaunt skeletal woman gave her the reference numbers of the relevant papers of a slip of paper, and directed her towards the records room. Making sure to inform her in a tone of subtle menace that if she so much as tore the sports page of one of the ancient, decrepit news journals, she would have to pay a sum incomprehensible to one so young, she was sent on her way.

The first thing that struck Sarah when she went through the heavy insulated door to the library's record room was age. The sense of a room that was rarely entered. It had been left to do little more than collect dust and be consistently replenished with newly printed papers with no purpose remaining but to rot to dust.

Sarah was swift in her task, for she had waited so terribly long for this, to discover her mother as she truly was, to gain some substantial information of her beyond those misty, desperately vague memories. She gathered together all the papers making mention of her mama that the librarian had given her references for, carefully noted the years, they ranged from 1966 to 1978, the year her mother disappeared from the records forever.

The thrill she felt, at sifting through the pages of the earliest newspaper, a small-scale local affair, was indescribable. It was an article on a play held by the local high school, The Taming of the Shrew. What made it so very special was that it had a photo, a bitty faded image of her mother, smiling broadly, garbed in a pseudo Elizabethan gown, looking every bit the Queen Sarah had always envisaged her to be.

She felt like crying, at finally, finally seeing her true mother's face, the face of the women the usurper Karen would try to ape in her newly gained role, but now Sarah knew of her true mother, she knew all the more that she needed not this Karen, she didn't even need her traitorous, neglectful father – for she had her mother back.

Sarah remained in the room for hours, eyes carefully fixated to the page, taking in every slight detail her memory could take, she was like a starved man, so eagerly consuming all the trivial fractures of knowledge that had been so cruelly withheld from her. She watched the years go by, saw her mother's beauty do nothing but flower into something more brilliant than what she had ever envisaged in her childish tales.

It scared her in a way to see just how similar her mother was to her, in near all ways, her hair, her eyes, the shape of her nose the resemblance was almost shocking, but it did nothing to please her that she was evoking her, her oh so beautiful, talented, successful mother. All was fitting her fairy tale so neatly, it only grounded the fantasy for her.

She was able to piece together her own story of her mother from the scattered articles, growing in size and prominence, moving from local newspapers to national ones as the years passed by. Her mother had started so low she found, school plays, cheap, tacky advertisements, tiny bit parts with a smattering of lines, but she had moved to such great heights – national theatres, galas, stood by the side of one of the most powerful, influential men in theatre. She read the articles of how they played their roles together, side by side, inseparable they said, so very much in love they could not bear to be parted – her mother and Jeremy King.

Sarah had easily seen why her mother had been so very transfixed and taken with the striking figure of Jeremy. He had always been cut so very clearly within her mind, the villain, the bad, bad man who snatched her mother from her. But looking, looking at their smiles, reading the article The On-stage Kiss, she could begin to understand, the man was intoxicating, even to one as young as Sarah she could tell he was unbelievably handsome, so utterly compelling, he oozed charisma.

His captured smile induced a blush, as if she could imagine him giving her such smiles, pressing onto her the kind of love she could never truly imagine. She imagined the happiness they had far, far away from the drudgery that was the life of Sarah Williams. It made her ache for the thought of such a future.

She became so absorbed in the epic nature of her mother's life, the cinematic qualities of it all that she nearly missed the reference to her agent, Rosemary Walker, there was a phone number there as well. Sarah was ecstatic to find it, she knew she had at last found a tangible link to her mother, some way to break through the so horribly cruel restrictions placed on her all her life.

She had to be sent from the library forcibly in the end, for the sun was dipping beneath the landscape, the sky darkening – it was time to close. She asked as she was near frog marched out if she could have a copy of the articles, anything to take back and keep, the librarian said nothing, just left her outside the door as it began to rain, turning the sign from open to closed.

Sarah had been left alone outside there for a while, just stood in blissful ignorance yet revelation in the rain, she had spun herself around, hugging her arms tight to herself in her joy, just letting the rain fall onto her wild and free, uncaring for her chilled skin. Passers by thought her mad, but part of her, part of her boundless joy inspired something within them, made passers by give curious slight smiles to the girl who cared for nothing in the world.


Months passed. Sarah had been found, after tearful phone calls from the honeymooning couple who had rang the police frantic for the missing girl. She'd been found after hours, sat cowering in the bus shelter, quaking desperately from the cold, it had been late in the night when she'd been found, the rain drumming persistently to the floor.

She'd suffered significant exposure, was restricted to bed for days, and she enjoyed it in a strange bizarre twisted sense, to have all the attention stocked up for the new bride directed at her. Her father near neglecting Karen in his desperation to show Sarah that he loved her, to show her just how much he cared.

Karen tried at first in the marriage, tried very hard to be nice, tried taking Sarah to the cinema, to the town, she attempted to bond with her, all to not the slightest avail. Sarah near ignored her, or directed frantic tearful tantrums at her stepmother's door. Karen tried so hard, it all made Sarah's total rejection of her worse than it ever had been before.

So after the first two months, Karen could not resists answering back sharply to a shocked Sarah, the girl who near without exception had always got her very own way all her life. Karen proceeded to intensify her backlash, refusing to let Sarah have her beloved dog, Merlin, in the house, saying, among other things, that 'I have an allergy' and 'he's so messy.'

What began as petty insults escalated into a full blown, passionately borne war, with Sarah and Karen having their weekly eruption when Sarah was left at home near every weekend as Karen dragged her vaguely bemused father out to various fashionable hot spots about the town.

What began as a passionate dislike evolved into something far worse – because it was so genuinely meant – wretched hate. After a while, she began ignoring her step-mother, avoiding her at all available opportunities or refusing to speak to her when she was asked anything. Karen's repertoire consistently consisting of questions relating to boyfriends, school and friends, and more importantly why she seemed not to have the remotest interest in any of them.

Her obsession with her mother did nothing but deepen, for Sarah had refused to tell any where she had went that raining bitter night, despite the pleading, the coaxing, the threats from her father, and so nothing was down to dissuade her from constant dwelling on the subject. She would remove the paper with the name and the number clumsily scrawled on repeatedly, each night, considering whether she really wished to find out what had truly happened to her mother, to discover whether she had found her happiness.

She had just fought a particularly brutal war of tongues with Karen before she and her awkward, mumbling, useless father who did nothing but stand by, useless to quell the open warfare, when she chose to take action. Karen had gone too far that night, had called her spoilt, had called her selfish – when she knew nothing, had no idea of just how much she cared for that one unspoken other in her life – her true mother.

She'd seized the phone, and dialled the number before she considered or doubted to change her course, her heat raced as the end of the line sounded rhythmically in it's monotony, her head considering all that could happen, would she answer? Would a stranger respond to her call? Or would there just be no answer at all?

Her heart near stopped when a weary woman's voice spoke the name she had read over and over.

"Hello, this is Rosemary Walker, how can I help you?" Sarah paused for a moment, shocked, taken a back by her directness, considering what on earth she would say, something she had never really anticipated as being necessary. The voice asked again, digging for an answer, "hello? Is anyone there?"

"Umm, yeah. I don't think you'll know me, but I'm sure I know you. I need to find out something, it's real important." She paused didn't know whether she could bring herself to take the final step and speak her mother's name.

"Yes dear? What do you want?" The woman was clinging to the phone, happy for any kind of true human contact beyond the ever-persistent debt collectors.

"I want to know, if you know, if you know Linda Williams. If you know where she is, I – I'm her daughter, and I need to know, it's so important." Sarah began crying, overcome with the effort it had all taken, she gripped the phone desperately, nails scraping the plastic as she could barely contain the tension of the wait Rosemary was putting her through.

After what seemed like hours, a voice, wavering, as if overcoming desperate shock spoke to her, as if carefully composed and orchestrated, "I can't tell you that dear, it's really best you don't know, can't you ask your father?"

"No, no I can't ever do that. Please, please, you must tell me, you have no idea how it feels, it's awful, please, please, if you can't tell me where she is, can't you at least tell me someone who can?"

Her voice was nearing anger, as if she would like to shout, scream down the line until she got her answers – but she knew how powerless she was, knew her answers were totally reliant on a stranger's judgement.

Another lengthy pause, Sarah heard her breath magnified by the silence, then a voice, the final time she would hear it, telling her the name and the number of an apartment, in the infamous rich district of Manhattan. Sarah felt close to whopping with joy at the thought of how close she was now, as she scribbled down the reference on the back of the scrap of paper Rosemary's number was carefully recorded. Only a train ride away with the new station, was her main thought, the voice one the other side of the line near forgotten.

Rosemary told her one last thing before the line went dead, "look honey, there are some things you shouldn't know. If you're dad wouldn't tell you where Linda is, there was a reason. Maybe, maybe it would be best if you didn't go, you live too far away, you're, you're still just a little girl!" Sarah put the phone back dead on the receiver. She would listen to no such nonsense, she was going to see her mother again soon, and no cruel dismissive words would deter her from her course.


It was two months later, after Sarah had carefully researched just how to reach her appointed destination, that she left, kit bag slung across her shoulder, warm coat in hand, purse full of months of carefully hoarded pocket money.

Her father and Karen had approached her door, knocking tenaciously as she recited to herself the words from the beloved play her mother had thought to leave her as companion. She told them sharply to leave her alone at first. If there was anything that angered her, it was being disturbed during one of her recitals.

She opened the door at their insistence, and there both were, bold as anything, as if they were proud, hand in hand as they had been before, when they had told her of their engagement. Her father told her as Karen looked on nervously, told her of how she would soon have a little brother or sister,told her of how happy the thought had made him, desperately emphasised how it would do nothing to compromise his love for her.

She looked him in the eyes, as she did to all when testing the depth of their sincerity, and she read her own meaning in to them. Told herself it was all thinly veiled lies, of how Karen had taken her father from him in near all ways, and how a new baby would just widen the chasm that had emerged between them – if not break the relationship between them completely. She chose to hate the child then, months before it's birth, as she slammed the door heavy in their faces.

Sarah left the next evening, a Saturday, when her father was taking Karen out for a lavish meal to compromise for Sarah's brutal rejection.

For you see, in her own eyes, she had absolutely nothing left to loose.


Wow, I remember thinking a 2000 word chapter was long once – and this clocks in at close to 5000! This was going to be the last chapter but it just got so ridiculously long, I had to split it, so keep you're eyes peeled for another chapter after this!

Thank you very much for reviewing everyone, it's great to hear what you think, and it would be lovely if you could do the same for this chapter, especially as I'm exploring an area I haven't really touched upon before. I hope you all enjoy it!

Many thanks as always to my Beta, Ergott!