Just when she thought that she had cleansed James from her life.

Sarah's chest trembled as her heart began to race. She could feel her whole body shaking, not from surprise, but from a different emotion: anger.

Noticing her agitated state, Adam said, "Please don't fret, I don't hold any ill feelings towards you. You did what had to be done."

"What had to be done? " Sarah shouted, unable to contain the rage boiling within her any longer. The edges of her vision blurred and a red tinge coated the room. This man had let his own son turn into a monster! "What was done wouldn't have had to have been done if you hadn't left him!"

Adam took a step back in surprise and Diane placed a firm hand on Sarah's shoulder. "Sarah," Diane calmly warned her.

Sarah immediately shook Diane's hand off and turned to face her. "You're not any better!" she yelled. She could feel her anger overflowing, a culmination of everything she had been through and everything she had lost. "You said that you could see every outcome. If that's true, then you knew everything! You knew that I didn't actually have cancer and that I wasn't dead. You knew that I was tortured and experimented on in the Lab. You knew that I was trapped in the Upside Down for eight years! And you just let it all happen!"

Diane and Adam shared an ashamed look as Sarah continued to melt down in front of them. Diane's lips parted to say something but Sarah fled the room before the words were able to leave her mouth.

Sarah raced down the hallways, wiping the free-flowing stream of tears from her eyes with the backs of her arms. After she had gotten far enough away from Diane and Adam, she attempted to open a portal, but her racking sobs made it too difficult to focus. She just wanted to get away, to go somewhere else and be completely alone. That's when her eyes settled on a painting of a bubbling waterfall breaking apart in a silver pond.

Sarah clambered onto the bench below the painting so that the upper half of her body was even with the scene. Her hand slowly reached out for the canvas, hesitant to touch the shimmering layer covering it. As her fingers breached the strange substance, a warmth spread through her body that welcomed her in.

Sarah's arm was halfway through when a familiar shout from around the corner alerted her to the incoming presence of her mother. She quickly pushed the rest of her body through, her feet kicking against the wall beneath the painting to hoist herself in. Sarah's foot disappeared just as Diane rounded the corner.

Sarah was met with a scene so beautiful that it gave her momentary pause. Crystal clear water fell forth from a jagged assortment of colorful rocks and disappeared into a contrastingly serene pond below. Flowers of every color and type sprouted up around the bank, dancing in the fresh air that flowed from the waterfall. Sarah pushed herself up from her hands and knees, which had been pressed into a soft patch of grass, and looked around to find a ring of wizened trees surrounding herself and the waterfall. It was one of the most beautiful places that she had ever seen.

Sarah had only made it a few steps towards the waterfall when she heard the presence of another being disturb the grass behind her. Sarah spun on her heel to find Diane and a deep frown replaced the look of awe that had settled on her face.

"How did you find me?" Sarah asked.

"I often escape to the paintings too," Diane answered with a somber smile. "This is one of my favorites."

"I don't want to talk to you," Sarah informed her. She crossed her arms and faced her back to Diane once she felt tears begin to grow in the corners of her eyes.

"I understand. But before I leave you be, I'd like to apologize."

Sarah didn't answer, but after a few moments of silence passed, she cautiously peered over her shoulder and caught her mother's form in her peripheral vision.

"There are no words that can make up for what you've been put through," Diane began. "You're right, I did know that everything would happen. More than anything, I wanted to stop it, but I had no choice."

"No choice?" Sarah sputtered, interrupting Diane as she turned back to face her. "That's bullshit!"

Diane waited for Sarah to calm down and to say what she needed to say before she began speaking again. "I had to decide whether to save you or to save everyone else. In that scenario, there is only once choice that is correct. It's a deep pain that I still live with today, but had I not let you go, the Upside Down would have consumed everything in its path. You were the only one who could stop it."

"This is a literal dimension of super-powered beings, and I was the only one who could stop it? Yeah, right," Sarah scoffed.

"James was instrumental to the destruction of the Upside Down. Had you not brought him there, had he not consumed the power of the Upside Down and made it vulnerable, it would still exist now. You were his weakness, which made you the only person that could destroy him and subsequently the Upside Down, which he was connected to."

Sarah contemplated Diane's words with furrowed brows and a deep frown. What her mother said made sense, but her anger prevented her from accepting this.

"There are a multitude of different worlds out there where any number of factors differ from our own," Diane continued. "There are worlds where I don't let you go, worlds where you actually do have cancer, worlds where you don't leave the Lab. But this is the only world where you get your happy ending."

"What about dad's happy ending?" Sarah shouted, dislodging the tears that had been collecting behind her eyes. This time, she didn't wipe them away. "You lied to him!"

Diane'e eyes filled with her own tears and she fought to hold them back. "I loved your father, I still love him, but he's not as strong as we are. Had I told him what was to happen, he would have interfered. He loves you so much."

"I didn't want any of this," Sarah choked out between sobs, finally breaking down. Her knees fell to the soft grass and her head tipped forward into her lap. "My friends and family probably think I'm dead."

Diane kneeled beside Sarah and hesitantly placed a hand on her back. Even though she wanted to, Sarah was too exhausted to push Diane's hand away and in that moment, she needed the comfort. She focused on the warmth exuding from Diane's hand and spreading through her back as her cries fell into rhythm with her heartbeat.

Diane parted her lips several times before she finally found the right words to say. "I think it's time that I told you the story of how I met your father."

Sarah came through the portal in the alleyway beside the movie theatre. She wasn't exactly sure where Harrington Real Estate was, but downtown Hawkins wasn't that big. She joined the throng of people on the sidewalk as she raced down the street, her eyes tracing every sign for the right combination of letters. After a couple of blocks, she finally found it nestled between Melvald's General Store and a laundromat.

Sarah stood beneath the capital red letters mounted across the top of the brick building as she tried to work up the courage to go in. The large display window reflected her worried face back to her, but the sun shining down on it made it difficult to see inside. Her eyes glanced over to the glass door, where a hand-written sign that read, "open" in cursive script hung from the handle.

She willed her feet to move one step at a time until her hands were resting on the handle to the door. Taking a deep breath, Sarah pushed the door open, letting the cool air conditioning escape and freckle her skin with goosebumps. The tinkle of a tiny bell above the door announced her entrance.

Sarah blinked her eyes several times to adjust them to the fluorescent lighting. When the bright spots in her eyes finally dissipated, she found herself in a small waiting room. A desk with a telephone, a computer, and a lamp rested on the navy blue carpet with a red leather couch and a wooden coffee table sitting before it. A variety of magazines were scattered across the top of the table, next to a coffee pot and a stack of styrofoam cups. A quietness descended on the space, broken only by the soft hum of the AC unit. She was alone.

She wandered to the desk, where she found a pile of business cards propped up in a little plastic stand. She picked one up and studied the text written across the front, tracing her finger along the part that read, "Steve Harrington, Realtor". She had just made it to the "t" in "Harrington" when a door on the other side of the desk opened and a woman walked through.

"Oh, hello," the woman greeted Sarah in surprise once she saw her standing there. She immediately pressed a warm smile to her face as she stepped behind the desk. "How can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Steve Harrington," Sarah answered slowly as she studied the woman standing before her.

The woman had smooth, brown skin that glowed copper beneath the fluorescent lighting and big brown eyes. A cluster of curly, dark hair flowed to her shoulders and spilled out on either side of the bright yellow bandana tied in a bow around her head. The color of the bandana matched the silky blouse she was wearing, creating a golden aura that glowed around her. Astonished by her beauty, Sarah temporarily lost her train of thought.

"Of course! Do you have an appointment?" the woman asked. Her hand rested on the computer mouse as she began to click through files on the computer.

"No..." Sarah answered, suddenly feeling stupid and unprepared. "I'm just an old friend stopping by."

"Oh, how fun!" the woman said, her smile growing larger. "I always love meeting Steve's friends! I'm Quinn Mason, Steve's fiancée."

Quinn extended a hand towards Sarah and Sarah immediately became distracted by the large diamond on her ring finger. The glittering gem cast colorful spots across the room after it caught the light just right. Quinn's hand hung in the air awkwardly until she dropped it back to her side after she realized that Sarah wasn't going to shake it.

Sarah was stuck in a trance that she couldn't escape. Steve was engaged? She knew that this was a likely scenario given that ten years had gone by, but she had been blinded by her own hope that Steve and her would be able to pick up from where they had left off. She wanted to be happy for him, she tried to force herself to be, but in that moment it was too hard.

"I'll go grab Steve for you," Quinn continued, her smile faltering a little after the strange interaction. "What's your name?"

"N-no!" Sarah shouted unexpectedly, startling Quinn. "I mean, it's okay. I'm sure he's busy. Just forget I was ever here."

"Are you sure?" Quinn asked, but Sarah was already out the door and out of sight. The tinkle of the bell answered for her.

Sarah rushed down the sidewalk, her tunnel vision aimed at the cement beneath her feet. She knocked into a few people along the way, but she was too distracted by the swarming hive of thoughts in her mind to notice.

Steve had moved on.

Steve was in love with somebody else.

But most prominent of all:

She was still in love with Steve.

Sarah took a sharp left when she found an empty alleyway and sat down on the trash-strewn pavement to cry.

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"Was there somebody up here?" Steve asked Quinn, pushing open the door beside the desk to enter the waiting room from the back offices. His eyes were focused on a stack of paper in his hands, but he glanced up when Quinn began to speak.

"Oh, um, yeah," Quinn answered, looking up from her computer. "There was a woman in here. She was kind of strange, though. She said she was an old friend."

"An old friend, really?" Steve asked with a raised brow. "Who?"

"I don't know," Quinn answered with a shake of her head. "She didn't say her name. I offered to go get you and she just...left."

"Weird." Steve pondered who it could have been until he gave up and shrugged it off. He leaned down to kiss Quinn on her forehead. "It probably wasn't anybody important."

★ ☆ ★ ☆ ★