Imagine being tortured for six years then coming home to your husband's new wife and a murder charge.
This is what happens to Absentia's disgraced FBI agent, Emily Byrne. Only a year after her disappearance, her husband remarries a young blonde, named Alice, who raises Emily's child with him. It becomes pretty clear that Flynn hasn't been told much about his mother or what happened to her.
Upon Emily's return, this new wife claims she feels "unsafe" having Emily around her son, who, let me remind you, is Emily's son. Realistically, Alice is probably more concerned that her husband, FBI agent Nick Durant, will cheat on her with Emily now that she has returned. (To be fair, She wasn't wrong).
Then, bodies start dropping. Lots of them. One was the man who was convicted of Emily's murder when she was declared dead in absentia. Definition: the legal presumption that a missing person is dead. Hence, the name of the show. Then the head of Emily's former FBI is murdered. Emily is of course assumed to be the evil mastermind behind all of this and so, she is forced to run.
This is when we really see the woman that Emily Byrne is. With minimal help from her father and brother, Emily manages to stay two steps ahead of the FBI agent investing her case. Who, by the way, happens to be the ex-husband that slept with her just days prior. Backing him up, of course is the entire Boston PD and the FBI.
And this one woman manages to outrun them.
As if six years of torture and an FBI manhunt wasn't enough, things get even worse. Her son and his stepmother are kidnapped. Naturally, the FBI jumps to the conclusion that Emily is the one who took them and the search intensifies.
When Emily gets word of Flynn and Alice's disappearance, she is camping out in the homeless camps, where she has been listening to the cassette tape which will solve the case. Therefore, we know she didn't do it.
Emily immediately begins searching for Flynn and Alice, while Nick continues chasing after Emily. Eventually, she leads Nick to Flynn and his captor and unsurprisingly, he continues to blame her while their son is being tortured right in front of them.
They can literally see Flynn, but Nick is too busy pointing his gun at Emily to pull his head out of his ass and see what's happening right in front of him.
In the end, our antiheroine saves Alice, Flynn, and Nick, along with herself and how ever many other people could have been killed in the future. Nick offers her a half-assed apology after all of the hell he put her through, which she graciously accepts because she clearly still has feelings for him.
But, she makes yet another sacrifice and tells him to work things out with Alice.
The entire time, Emily has to combat mental and physical exhaustion, along with the fact that the father of her own child has absolutely zero faith in her. The man immediately believes that she kidnapped their child, when the memory of Flynn is what kept Emily going this entire time.
This same man had the nerve to sleep with Emily while he was in the process of trying to arrest her for murder. Emily is blamed for absolutely everything that happens to her throughout the ten episodes, including her own disappearance. She has a very limited memory of the last six years and often has painful flashbacks of being tortured that she can't quite make sense of.
Yet, she fights through it.
She fights to protect her son and the people she loves. She fights to clear her name so that her son doesn't grow up hearing his mother's name slandered for a crime she never committed. She fights to bring the killer to justice. And she fights by herself.
Emily Byrne is slightly crazy. She does some questionable things as she investigates her disappearance. She breaks in to cars, apartments, and the mental hospital. She shoots several people, including Nick. She becomes obsessed with investigating her disappearance and takes things way too far.
But, in the end she is the heroine of her own story.
