She found her truth in a hail storm of metal and gunpowder. Her lesson in the soft crack of a rifle shot. Her heart in his blood covering her hands.
She's sitting in an uncomfortable chair, in a makeshift hospital, alone with her thoughts and a bottle of water that she is beginning to wish would become wine. Reddington is in surgery, as the doctors work to fix the mistakes that she made. What could she have been thinking, meeting him on an open street? Could she have been any more thoughtless?
Those thoughts about it being her fault make her inpatient, she gets up and starts to pace. One thing, which she should have learned long before now, is that it's not always about her. She's begun to see a pattern emerge when these things happen. When something happens because of her or more specifically because of her presence in Red's life, or because of the nature of her job in its current state, she begins to spin the events into being about her, either because of who she is (which she can't remember) or something she did or didn't do. Whatever happens, whoever suffers, somehow, it's all about Liz.
She doesn't want to be that person anymore. She has learned more about herself, written in the blood of people she loves, than she ever imagined knowing. One moment, she was willing to walk away from Raymond Reddington, and now she cannot imagine never being able to see that face again. He kept secrets, he kept so many secrets; from her and likely from himself. She knew why he kept his life compartmentalized, portable; like so many boxes in a basement just waiting for moving day. Those secrets had begun to hurt, to burn where they touched her heart. Though she may understand why they were kept, it didn't make them any less apt to scar once the truth would out.
She'd only meant to ask about the passports. Tom had told her that Red had supplied them. Lizzie could connect the dots easily enough. The sociopath she had married had turned on his employer, very much like he had turned on her, it didn't really surprise her. To have it said plainly though, by Red, that yes he had hired Tom in the first place, knowing that she had spent her whole life dangling from strings that Red had held in his hands. That had burned like acid in her soul.
She knew he cared for her. Cared about her. She could admit to caring about him easily enough, but now she was seeing the lie of her own making in full close-up. She didn't "care" about Raymond Reddington. She loved him. He made her angry and sad and insane, but he also made her think, gave her agency in the life that he had mostly designed himself. Neither of them was perfect, but they were of the same cloth.
So here she was in the bitter light of early morning, praying that the manipulative man she loved was going to make it through this. Because if he didn't, she wasn't sure she wanted to either.
"All I have, all I need,
He's the air I would kill to breathe..."
"Breathe Again" Sara Bareilles