CHAPTER FOUR ——— living someone else's life (season 5, episode 17: SOLITARY MAN)
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RYNE BECKETT
Ryne's house is a ten minute drive away from Quantico. Small, isolated but still in a prominent neighbourhood, a place where nobody would expect a person who had faked their own death to end up. It was the perfect place because essentially, Ryne Beckett was living someone else is life. Ryne knew that never again would she live her own life — in that, the one before the crash and the lake, she was Katherine Berkeley, with a degree in biochemistry, aiming for a doctorate. Katherine Berkeley, working her way to the top with big plans and even bigger dreams. It was possible that Ryne Beckett had dreams just as big as the old version of herself, but most of those dreams were never going to come true. No longer were they career goals but small things — a hug from her father, a night spent watching nineties sitcoms with her best friend, meeting her goddaughter, a kiss from somebody who loved her, a hug from somebody who cared.
The feeling of comfort, of anything but loneliness.
None of that was possible anymore, not for Ryne. She had inadvertently made a choice a long time ago, and the consequences of her actions had begun to come to light years later when she stood in a lowly New York apartment a year ago, completely alone, nobody to speak to and no one to tell her it would be okay. Returning to DC, she though that maybe she'd feel better having Callahan and Lindsay around her, but all Ryne felt was empty. All the time. Like a piece of shrapnel had come and torn a piece of her heart out from the original flood, and it had never been built back into place properly — there was a gap, a hole, something unfixable.
She feels the same metaphorical hole in her heart pulsate with pain as she glances at the latest pictures of the victims for their newest case, eyes empty and body sprawled on the ground. It was as if their life hadn't mattered the way the unsub had disposed of them, boiled down to nothing but a list of names that had one end in common.
