“Mamaaaaaa!” The 5 year old girl jumped up in the bed and buried her mother’s face in sweet little kisses. An audible groan came from the 11 year old boy on the small cot at the foot of the bed. Opening her eyes to the sunlight peeking through the curtains, she sat up stretching her arms wide, back arched and ended with wrapping her arms tight around her little girl. She smiled big for the first time in a long time.

“What are we doing today mama?” Her daughter asked her as she wriggled out of her arms and bounced on the bed.

“Yeah mom, what are we going to do now?”

The stark difference in the way her son asked the question made the smile fade from her lips. But only for a moment. She smiled at both of them again and replied, “I’m not sure yet. But who cares right now? We just woke up in paradise!” She leaps off the bed and throws back the thin curtains of the window in their studio apartment overlooking the beach. Running away to a beach town in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico with her children was the last thing she ever saw herself having to do in life, but here they were.

Elsewhere, far from paradise in an empty house that reeked of stale beer and whiskey, a very disoriented man woke up on the couch with the most painful hammering in his head. It was about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, how the hell did he manage to pass out for this long? He rubbed his face with his rough, calloused hands and flashes of the night before started coming back to him.

“I’m leaving you Cal. I can’t do this anymore. I’m taking the kids. There’s a note on the dining table, since you probably won’t remember any of this when you wake up tomorrow.” His wife had threatened him again. He chuckled as he made his way to the kitchen. They were always empty threats.

“You know I’ll fucking kill you before you ever try to do that!” He heard himself say to her in his hazy memory. Crap, I probably hit her again. He couldn’t remember but he started planning his apology anyway. Where was she anyway? Probably took the kids out. Let her cool off for a bit. He stopped short when he got to the dining table. On it lay a piece of paper with a handle of whiskey placed on top of it. “You’re free to drink yourself to death now, Cal. The kids and I are gone. You’ll never hurt us again.” Melodramatic bitch. She really did it this time. He was gonna report her missing and his children kidnapped. Then he would have her locked up, if he could stand not killing her first. She can’t get far, he thought as he unscrewed the top off the whiskey bottle and took a nice, long swig.

She watched her kids run in and out of the water laughing and splashing in the waves. For the first time in 12 years she felt relaxed. She pictured his glum, cocky face as he read her note as he drank from the bottle of whiskey she left him with not even a second thought about what he was drinking. Only about what he was going to do to her if he ever found her. But he would never find her. No doubt by the end of the evening he would consume the whole bottle. If he lived until the end of the evening.

Pentobarbital. Her best friend was a nurse and could have lost her job for nabbing the dangerously large dose.

“I would risk losing my job if it meant saving you from getting murdered by your own husband,” she said with tears in her eyes knowing full well that when it was done she’d have to take the kids and flee. “You’re saving my life, Sav, more than you know. I’m going to miss you.”

Up to 75% percent of abused women are killed after they get out. After reading it once she repeated it in her head over and over again. As she poured the lethal dose into the bottle of whiskey she said it again. As she drove her kids cross country she continued to say it in her head. Getting out wasn’t enough, not for her. She was not going to become a statistic, nor were her kids. She got up from the sandy beach and ran into the ocean with her children. They were free.