There was a tiny park overlapping the Minnesota state line where she would go sometimes when she wanted to be Alex. It was deserted most of the year, even in the earliest parts of spring when although the sun's rays were starting to reach the earth and warm it again, the temperatures still held in the forties and bit the cheeks of small children on their way to school in the bitter mornings. On this March day, the sky seemed impossibly grey to Alex Cabot as she rubbed her gloved hands together in an attempt to avoid frostbite. She watched as the cars zoomed by on the rural interstate road just a few yards ahead of her, and closed her eyes each time a large vehicle or a tractor-trailer whipped just a bit more of the frigid wind onto her face. Each driver was going somewhere and nowhere simultaneously.
This, exactly this, was all that was left to Alex Cabot's life. When she got up from that bench in the state line park, she would be Emily again. Emily was a middle management insurance agent who was content with remaining rooted to the spot she was in for some indefinite amount of time, presumably her entire life. Her coworkers were round pegs in round holes, people that Alex would have looked at, smirked at, and waved off on their way. But Emily was no square peg, either. She was a paper doll just like her neighbors. Alex watched Emily from some faraway vantage point every hour of every day like a silent movie, wondering when the plot would get exciting.
Emily had never been to New York. She'd lived in Wisconsin all her life, her big life move being from Polk County to Milwaukee and back to Polk again. By that point her parents were dead, buried somewhere in Massachusetts, where incidentally, Alex's parents were alive and well. Or at least alive. There's only so well one can be when one outlives one's child.
When she was on that bench, Alex could remember things. Alex could remember having coworkers that weren't so damned vanilla. She could remember having a job that meant something and interacting with people that meant something. She could remember sharing a bed with someone who loved her for who she was instead of for the sake of convenience and a warm body next to them. And she could remember, though she didn't want to, a diner in small town West Virginia where the TV sets were tuned into the six o'clock news, playing a story about the "New York Attorney Shot and Killed by Latin American Drug Lords", where not a single face in the diner looked up at the screen except for the casted woman in the corner booth with two men in suits that stared at her reflection in the television, realizing in that moment that not only was she running, she was hiding without even trying, because no one in the Midwest was looking. She wouldn't even have to dye her hair or dress differently to avoid being recognized.
For about ten minutes each day, she could still be found on a bench near the Wisconsin and Minnesota state line. For the other twenty-three hours and fifty minutes, as far as everyone but the US Federal Witness Protection Program, Olivia Benson, and Elliot Stabler knew, Alexandra Cabot lay still in a casket in New York City.
After the obligatory ten minutes had passed, Alex blew out a deep breath and stood. Emily was going to be late to work.