Claire Hughes is a 33 year-old single woman who is very disappointed in the way that her life has turned out. Her father gives her the journal of her late aunt who experienced the same pressures that life throws at a young woman. He expects her to learn a valuable lesson from her aunt's difficult life and marriage. As she spends time reading about the emotional abuse her aunt Rita endured, she begins to dismiss it as something that could never happen to her. Claire simply cannot fathom why any woman would allow herself to fall into such a trap. However, she goes on to experience far worse than her aunt Rita had. Claire is convinced that she is hopelessly single until she meets a man named Todd Russell. He is everything that she could ever want in a man, or so she thought. The signs of Todd's violent tendencies were made clear before they married. That mattered little to Claire. She believed that she had met "the one" and was not about to let him slip away. This was the beginning of her disaster. Will she leave an abusive marriage before it is too late?