"To open your heart to someone means exposing thescarsof the past."
The pain isn't really there. It is phantom pain, like when someone loses a limb and the person swears they can still feel the ache.
Once, her ritual was to reach into the wooden box to pull out the necklace with her mother's ring and her father's watch. No matter the time of day, prior to leaving her apartment, those two symbols of her life always left with her.
Now she has something else she carries – scars of her life. For so long her scars weren't visible. She carried the pain of losing a mother tragically, at such a young age. She carried the burden of trying to solve the murder of her mother, forever carrying the fear that whomever she truly loved would be violently ripped from her.
After the death of her mother, she lived with the fear that her father would leave her too. And when he fell to drinking, as a way of coping with the pain, she did lose him too for a while. But he found his way back to her, and has since been a constant in her life, until him.
The scars inside her soul are healing, just as the ones that now mar her body. A bullet penetrating your chest, and tearing through your body, can have a violent affect, and not just on the body itself.
She sees a physical therapist to help her heal her wounds on the outside, she sees a psychiatrist to help her with the battle on the inside.
A few weeks ago, she realized the healing on the inside was forming a scar just like the one on her chest and side. Kate Beckett was ready to expose her scars, in more than one way, and was ready to do it with one man, the only man she could truly do it with – Richard Castle.
