She drives for as long as she can, stopping only to sleep (not long) and to eat (not much).
Once she reaches Minnesota, she drives around to places that once held meaning for her but are now nothing more than vague impressions from a dream that had once been her life.
She visits the park she had frequented as a child, sits on the swing-set she used to spend hours on while gleefully telling her father to push her even higher.
So long ago.
(A lifetime.)
She passes by the restaurant Owen had proposed to her. She waits for that elated feeling she'd experienced when he had knelt down on one knee and asked her to be his wife.
Nothing.
Finally, she finds herself near the front of her old house, the one she was going to marry Owen in, the one in which she'd grown up.
She stares from a distance at a life she can no longer live.
Her mother and father sit side-by-side on the swinging chair on the front porch, watching their grandchildren run around in the front yard after their puppy. Her sister's husband has his arm draped on her shoulders, while they smile and laugh cheerily as the apples of their eye run wildly on the lawn.
The perfect life.
What she had – at one point – wanted, but can no longer remember why.
Was it the white picket fence? (Trapped.)
The constant, reassuring presence of family? (Suffocating.)
Or the pretty, blond children she would inevitably bear to rear and mold to want the same? (Overwhelming.)
And it's just as it was before, her chest tightens and her eyes glaze over and she can't fucking breathe.
She doesn't belong here, she's not the same.
She didn't want it then and she doesn't want it now.
It's taken a brutal violation of her body, multiple murders and the gentle yet unwavering support of a man just as broken as her to realize what it was she did want, what she had much too easily left behind in Miami.
And with an absolutely painful clarity, it dawns on her that she'd let slip through her fingers the only person in the world who understood her, accepted her not in spite of her demons but because of it.
Then she'd ran.
Ran because she knew they'd lose themselves to each other.
He in her darkness. She in his.
She knew that killing them would never have been wholly successful without him. She could have tried and she might have even been able to dispatch of one, maybe two, but never Jordan.
Dexter had jeopardized everything to help her, had put at stake his very life to ensure her vengeance was exacted. He'd made a space for her in a life he couldn't share with anyone, not even his wife.
So she turns the ignition on and heads back to the city that had destroyed her, hardened her, to the man who had saved her, and though she'd repaid him by turning her back on him (them), she knows she needs him too damn much not to go back.
On her way to Miami, she eats and sleeps even less than she had when she'd traveled to Minnesota.
And it takes her less than a moment to discover why.
She's coming home.
TBC