NAME: Rebekah Dunne
GENDER & PRONOUNS: Cis Woman / She/Her
AGE & DATE OF BIRTH: 45 years old / March 8th
HOMETOWN: Westerly, RI
TIME IN WESTERLY: Returned 7 years ago
RESIDENCE: Misquamicut
OCCUPATION: Unemployed
AND THEY SAID, THERE GOES —— the last great american dynasty.
There’s something off about that girl, people would say after meeting her, often as politely as they could. She’s peculiar. Rebekah would argue (more to herself than aloud to anyone) that she simply never had much to contribute. From a young age, Rebekah felt disconnected from herself — like she’d been watching her life go by as an outside party, waiting for the day she stepped into her own. It had nothing to do with her upbringing, she’s been born into a perfectly normal family that some might even call mundane. Two happily married parents, a baby brother that came along when she was nearing ten years old. They encouraged Rebekah to go out and make friends and get involved, but the young girl was happy to keep to herself — less out of introversion and more because she simply didn’t feel like she had anything of value to add.
Low self-esteem is lethal for young girls, some would say. Rebekah would eventually come to realize that statement is true. Her teenage years were spent feeling awkward, gangly and out of touch with the other kids and when she finally graduated high school, she didn’t feel as though she had anything to show for it. She began waiting tables at Captain’s to make some money, but really she was just passing the time waiting for an opportunity to give her life meaning. Meaning, as it turned out, seemed to find her when a man named John sat at one of her tables. He didn’t stop coming back after their first meeting, and the attention he gave her was enough to reel Rebekah in immediately. She learned quickly that John had joined the military a few years prior, and twenty year old Rebekah was infatuated by his tales of travel and war. He seemed important to her, and it was easy for her to fall under his spell and attach herself to his side. It didn’t matter that things were moving quickly — she was simply glad to finally feel like her life had a purpose.
John had clearly been looking for a wife, not a girlfriend, and after only a year together Rebekah had found herself desperate to keep him happy, so she gladly married him when he asked. The military’s benefits for married couples were great, and Rebekah liked being a wife even though her husband wasn’t around all that often to see it. The two of them moved from base to base throughout the years, and though she tried desperately to please her husband, it seemed that Rebekah could never quite live up to John’s standards. His mental and eventually physical abuse began to take a toll on her, and over time Rebekah realized she had become a shell of the person she once was.
It took sixteen long years for her to finally leave John and move back to Rhode Island, where her family thankfully welcomed her with open arms. The changes in her were clear for anyone to see, though, especially to the family that had once known her as a bright and happy — albeit still quiet — young girl. If at all possible, Rebekah had withdrawn into herself even more so than when she was a child, keeping her distance from everyone around her whenever she possibly could. For a few years it was difficult to get her to speak at all, and when she did it simply came out as broken sentences.
Her saving grace came in the form of William J. Dunne, heir to the Standard Oil fortune and the oldest eligible bachelor in the state of Rhode Island. Rebekah met him by a fluke, and somehow the two hit it off instantly — it seemed he understood her in a way no one else did, and their friendship quickly solidified into something deeper. It wasn’t what she would ever consider to be love, and the two of them were never physical — but he was simply an older man in need of companionship and she had more than enough of it to give. Eventually, Bill’s presence helped pull her out of her own funk if only slightly, and the two of them became inseparable only a few weeks after meeting and married within the year.
Their wedding was ridiculous, and anyone who attended would say the same. Subsequently, the life they led after getting married was equally as absurd. They threw extravagant parties that Rebekah rarely participated in, only planned, and the extravagance of it all never ceased to amaze her. As quickly as it began, though, their whirlwind honeymoon phase came to an end. On Bill’s 64th birthday, only a little more than two years since he and Rebekah had tied the knot, he passed away from a heart attack. Rebekah was distraught, though she couldn’t quite pinpoint why. She had no feelings for Bill beyond friendship and they both knew his time was coming to an end — his heart issues long preceded their arrangement. But he was a friend and he gave her a sense of stability when her life felt as though it’d been falling apart, and for that she could never thank him enough.
Rebekah quickly found herself saddled with a new problem after Bill’s death — she’d inherited a generous sum of his estate that hadn’t gone to his adult children, including the infamous Holiday House where they resided together in Watch Hill. It took Rebekah six months of haunting around the place to realize she couldn’t possibly live there alone, and she soon sold it to the township for a pretty penny that would keep her set for life even without her share of Bill’s inheritance. Still, Rebekah has never felt the need to live anything but modestly outside of her relationship with Bill. She moved back into the small home on the shoreline that gave her salvation when she left her first husband, a quiet little saltbox house that she thinks is just the right size. It’s been a little over a year since Bill passed and Rebekah still doesn’t feel like she’s gotten back to herself — but part of her wonders if she even has a sense of normalcy to return to at all.
Portrayed by ANGELINA JOLIE, written by KATE.
