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She tried so hard to be normal. Grace Van Pelt was a daddy’s girl through and through. Everything she did, she did because she wanted to please him. As the only daughter, he worshipped the ground she walked on, ergo, she felt the desperate need to make sure that she deserved his faith in her. He expected her to excel in her career of choice (police work was definitely honorable in his view), take her religion seriously (she even volunteered at the soup kitchen in her local Presbyterian church) and have a steady family life. In her mind that meant right down to the white picket fence, two children and a dog.
The last stage was where she felt like she failed dismally. Every relationship she had, it felt like she was doomed, one way or another. She had a boyfriend through college, thought it was going steady and then he cheated on her. Grace wasn’t as heartbroken as she could have been; their relationship had always felt inherently wrong from the very beginning. They were never going to get married, so it didn’t matter too much. For a while, she decided that she would swear off relationships and focus on her career instead.
That was how she landed the job at the CBI.
That was how she met Teresa Lisbon and Wayne Rigsby.
Wayne was everything she was looking for in a husband. He was reliable, caring, protective, and just like her father, he worshipped the ground she walked on. This was the kind of man she knew that her father would have wanted her to settle down with.
But Wayne wasn’t the one who caught her eye.
She just couldn’t imagine herself settling down with him.
Whenever she was with him, her mind lingered elsewhere. On soft curvaceous bodies, fiery green eyes and sleek brown hair. The thought of Teresa Lisbon as a whole made her shiver with excitement, when it should have been Wayne who made her feel that way.
But it was wrong, so she repressed those feelings. She was a daddy’s girl, and a good one at that. Grace knew what he expected of her and it most certainly wasn’t that.
The relationship ended – she cut it short because she needed to stay close to Teresa and keep her job – and she tried to close the book on the whole ordeal.
So, she nearly married Craig O’Laughlin instead. He was second best, in comparison to Wayne at least, and there was something about him which she didn’t entirely trust. But she had blown it with Wayne, so she couldn’t go back to him either. But Craig was nice enough… until she discovered that he was actually a mole for Red John. Then, everything clicked into place. They had been using each other; him to get closer to the SCU’s Red John investigation and her to cover up her unnatural emotions.
When he shot Teresa, she thought she had lost them both.
And she lost a little piece of her soul along the way as well.
In the end, she just felt like giving up. Every time she tried to have a relationship with a man, it always felt wrong. Grace believed she knew why, but accepting what the alternative was genuinely scared her. It went against everything she had been taught by her religion, by her father. So, instead of focusing on trying to be the perfect daughter, she chose to aim for being the perfect cop. She didn’t need a relationship to be happy. Besides, she had everything she needed her. It was perfectly acceptable for her to decide to find love in other things; cats were a remarkable species and besides, the cliché always associated them with lonely old spinsters. If the boot fit, there was nothing wrong with that.
But it still didn’t rid her mind of thoughts of Teresa.
Grace sincerely believed that nothing ever would.