Archive of Our Own ^beta

That’s what’s on her mind as she whips around to find her recently liberated hostage holding a gun on her. Her back hits the ground hard and there goes another perfectly good blouse. There goes what little pride she's managed to hang on to these past few weeks, to the accompaniment of her partner’s sarcastic congratulations and the slow claps of the foreign agents she has failed to bring down. And that’s just another day in this brand new office. 

She doesn't know who her friends are in a very real sense. Hendricks, she guesses. He’s always there with a pep talk or an invitation and it seems neither empty nor backed by any kind of ulterior motive, professional or otherwise. But she doesn’t work a lot with Hendricks. 

McCord isn't not her friend. She's not even unfriendly, most of the time. Villante is at least as warm and cuddly as Captain Gates ever was but with the two of them—with pretty much everyone—she doesn’t feel great about her chances in the event any kind of metaphorical bus comes bearing down on the team.

So when he shows up—when he appears behind her outside the dismal little cube that's still part powder room, part . . . janitor’s closet or something—it’s an absolutely mercy that she wants him so badly. Otherwise he might catch her weeping for the joy of seeing an unwaveringly, unambiguously friendly face, for the joy of feeling like she might actually be safe, truly safe, for the space of a few hours. 

Of course he comes with his own set of dangers. He is walking temptation, or supine temptation, first thing in the morning, when she has to wrench herself from the warmth of his body beneath the rumpled covers. She has to hold tight to the counter to keep from running right back to that warmth when she realizes that he'd somehow found time to unbox, assemble, and set the timer on the fancy coffee maker he’d snuck into the “necessities" he’d bought and had shipped to the new place. 

He's dangerous because he’s nosy. And not just nosy—though of course he is that—he knows exactly which buttons to push, which strings to tug on to have her wanting him to be nosy. He pushes and tugs and she wants to believe they can solve the case right there at her kitchen table. 

He pushes and tugs and damn if she isn't at least as impressed to see him hopping off that golf cart as she is mortified by his failure to think on his feet. And when that danger meets the ever-present danger of McCord and the team and the whole damned job, she feel like she’s back in that alley and pretty much anyone around here might pull a gun on her just for the hell of it. 

And then their suspect is dead. Then she is crunching over an ocean of glass bus shelter cubes and he is up in the back of an ambulance and what she has to worry about is managing the situation—not seeing if he is hurt, if he shaken, if there is anyone else who might target him. Then she is watching him, forlorn, handcuffed to an interrogation room table, and she’s not even confronting the danger she thought she was. There's ATM footage, Villante says, and McCord nods along. Hendricks nods along, and it looks like she's the only one who didn’t know. It corroborates his story, but let him sweat. 

Let him pointlessly sweat, because they know everything he knows now, but his history—her fiancé’s history, and by extension, her own—means he has to spend a little longer in Time Out. Villante lets her spring him, eventually. It’s not a favor. It’s not a courtesy. It's a warning and a test. It's what feels like her tenth Hostage Alley of the day and bringing him a shitty little to-go cup of coffee feels like an immense act of defiance. 

He’s as contrite about things as he can be. His disappointment is as muted as he can make it, and these were the dangers she knew about. These were the difficult things they promised one another they’d work out together, but she never believed that two days could eat away so profoundly at his resilience, his fundamentally optimistic nature. 

And less than a day later, he is dying. She presses her fingers to the coarse strip of a government-issue bandage, and he is dying, and there isn't a person in this place who cares about that beyond the failure it represents—to question, to investigate, to follow through, to listen and think through whole damned story. 

She presses her fingers to a band-aid in the crook of his elbow. She feels the heightened throb of his pulse and wonders how on earth she never saw the danger coming. 

Everything about this is uncomfortably old school. Pralidoxime. Atropine. These are names he knows, not bleeding-edge drugs of the future that just might give him super powers. And the egg noodle–wide rubber band that the mute, nameless tech used to take his blood, Goldberg uses now to find a vein in the opposite arm—these are familiar, too. Even the single-use syringe, complete with fingernail tap to send the bubble plunger-ward, has a Marcus Welby, M.D. vibe he wishes he didn’t recognize. 

He emerges from the close confines of the interrogation room—not so different from the box he knows so well from the twelfth—into the humming, slick-surfaced nerve center that the various teams use, and feels a flare of rage, frustration, betrayal. These are exactly the halls of tomorrow he once spent more than a decade writing about. This is the rightful home of Derrick Storm and all the coolest toys, and they have, apparently, nothing to offer him. 

Her words come back to him. The elevator—God—just a few weeks ago. Before the whole world tilted on its axis: Because in my experience huge bureaucracies don’t act with that kind of efficiency. He resents the truth of it now. He hates the truth of it, but that’s the opposite of helpful. So he returns to what he knows. He tries not sneer at what’s clearly a going-nowhere promise from Villante about contacts and the Pentagon. He goes old school himself, returning to what he’s learned from her about tedium and tenacity and sheer effort: You could also check Bronson’s phone records.

And they have their lead. And it’s something. 

But she goes without him. She has to go without him, and he has to stay behind, even though he thinks they’re absolutely the two people here most capable of conducting a successful, old school interrogation, given that Villante—even Villante—hadn’t managed to pull the word Dreamworld out of him. 

Still, she goes without him. She comes back, and the only thing they have hinges on Dreamworld and he’s lost. He feels absolutely lost when Toccata and Fugue in D-minor startles him from the depths of his own pocket, and he wonders what kind of operation they're running here. 

He feels strongly that his mother, of all people, should not be capable of infiltrating—even by phone—a facility that deals in matters vital to national security. He feels strongly that Goldberg, if he is going to make house calls and carry an absolutely ancient leather doctor bag—the kind that has one of those gaping hinged mouths—should at least have the courtesy to have some kind of mid–twentieth century bed side manner. He feels strongly this should all be significantly less old school than it obviously is.

But old school is what they’re stuck with, and there’s a moment—a centering, peace-granting moment of grace—when he turns a corner. He believes in his heart of hearts that old school might save him. 

They’re gathered around one of the big tables. Waqas Rasheed has given them nothing, because he has nothing to give, beyond a narrative so strange it has to be believed. An old-school raid of the man's apartment has yielded nothing. 

He thinks back to his promise to Alexis that he’ll be home tomorrow morning. He retreats into details—into the logistics of how that will happen if he dies here in DC. He wonders, panic rising, what will become of the wishes he has spelled out, now that his body is riddled with a classified toxin. He wonders what has become of Bronson’s already, what they'll have told Jeanette Miller, if anything. He is on the verge of surrender—absolutely surrender to misery and anxiety—when Kate invokes the the power of story. 

No, Castle. Not nothing, she says with a determined little smile.

She spells it out, just like he usually does. Just like he might have the strength to do if he weren’t dying. She glances at him as if to ask if she's doing okay—if she’s gotten it right, and she has. She’s doing brilliantly, and she's right: It comes down to the story, the missile strike, Bronson, the man on the ground and the body. 

He thinks, with a pang, of Roy Montgomery. Of his hubris lecturing a man who had spent thirty years speaking for the dead on the universals of murder. All mysteries are the same. Motive, opportunity, cover-up, conscience.

He thinks, with hope in his still-beating heart, of how many times they have done it this way. He thinks of her, the story, and the two of them together. 

They’re kicking it old school, and it just might save him.  

She’s up in the middle of the night. It feels like a failure. She’s the one who’d wanted to go right to bed after McCord took her badge and gun. She's the one who, shell-shocked and small-voiced, had told him she didn’t want to talk. She didn't want to call anyone. She didn’t want him to call anyone, no, not even if he knew a guy. She’d just wanted to go to bed, and so they had. 

And she had . . . fallen asleep. Immediately—it was the strangest thing after months of lying awake for hours on end, hoping sleep would come. Even terribly worn out from the rigors of the job, pleasantly worn out from the rigors of making up for lost time on the handful of occasions they'd managed a night in the same city, she hasn’t fallen asleep straight away in months. 

And now she's screwed that up, too. She's awake in the middle of the night. And lying there in the next room, he knows she’s awake. Lying there and waiting it out,  trying to give her space, time, privacy, because that’s what he thinks she wants, she knows.

She's sitting in his desk chair, swiveling side to side. She’s staring into the middle distance. Her oil slick failures rest in thick pools all around her, but she's not exactly thinking of them. She's not exactly thinking of anything until she’s thinking of one thing and one thing only. 

Her fingers hook over the notched front of the small wooden drawer. She slides it open. She feels a sick trot of panic at the memory of Martha tearing open the same drawer looking for the passport that wasn't there. She's not looking for his passport—not really, though there's an instant when she thinks about his arms around her and his voice curling around her ear—Let me take you someplace, Kate. There’s an instant when she wants to wake him up and ask him to run away with her. 

But it really is only an instant. Her fingers find what she was looking for—the key with no ring. She extracts it. She holds it up and the light coming in through the window catches the sharp, fresh-cut teeth. She closes her fingers around it, holding tight enough that it bites into her palm. 

“We should call about the apartment first thing,” she says softly. She can practically hear his foot hovering above the floorboards, arrested in the middle of what he thinks is the stealthiest of footfalls. “It's not even the middle of the month yet. Rental market in DC is tight, they might be happy to let you break the lease.” 

He approaches slowly. She thinks at first that it’s her—that he's . . . managing her or something, but his head is bowed. He leans against the edge of the desk and catches the chair as it completes its arc away from the windows. 

“Kate, you don't need to be thinking about this." He reaches down and gently pries open her fingers. He winces at the deep indents of the teeth in the meat of her palm. He doesn't take the key from her, just traces the outline with the tip of his thumb. “You don't need—”

“I don't want to waste anything else,” she says quickly. Sharply. “Time, money. They’ll probably want the deposit, but—“

“I’m two months into the lease." He bites his tongue too late. It's the last thing in the world he wanted to say. She stares at him blankly. “But, Kate, it's not important. It's not a waste. None of this has been a waste.”

"Two months?" She stares at the key as though a jagged piece of metal might have answers. “How—? Why wouldn’t—?” 

She mentally rewinds to the one-hundred percent awkward presentation of the thing in the first place. No ribbons or confetti or fan fare. Not even an understated keyring that would turn out to be breathtakingly expensive. She takes in the utter weirdness of it. 

“Castle, why wouldn't you tell me?" 

"I missed you. So much. And the first time I had to cancel I just—” His fingers twitch as though he'd like to take the key from her, he’d like to hide the incriminating evidence. “I felt awful. So I looked and I found and I had, and then . . .” 

He trails off as though he might get away with not answering the question. He should know better. 

“And then?" She prompts. 

"And then I didn't know how you'd feel about it.” He scowls. "Kate, it's late. We don’t have to hash this—" 

There's something he's not saying. Something maybe she shouldn't pursue, but she's already screwed so much up, why not this? "You didn’t know how I’d feel about being able to see you more than once in a blue moon?" 

“I didn't know how you'd feel about . . . living together," he blurts. He waves vaguely toward the open bedroom door.

She follows the line of his gesture. Her small, partially disemboweled carry-on sits near the foot of the bed. It’s nearly all she has here—at his place, which is certainly kind of their place, but not officially. Never officially. She hangs her head. She thinks of her engagement ring, threaded on a chain with her mom's, sitting on the nightstand, and she almost laughs. Almost.

“We do things backwards." She hangs her head. “I would have felt great about it, and we do things backwards, and I’m . . .” She presses her fists to her eyelids. “I'm tired. Can we go to bed?" 

“To do things backwards?” He cracks an uncertain smile. So does she. “Backwards is my favorite position." 

"They're all your favorite position," she scoffs. 

She reaches forward to set the key back in the little wooden drawer. He slides it closed and reaches up for his hand in a mute plea for help getting to her feet. 

"You've got me there," he says, obliging. “You’ve got me everywhere.” 

She’s going to leave him. By 7:00 am, exactly one week since she’s come back to him, she is absolutely, definitely going to leave him. Because Pi, who is somehow the nexus between  fungus-riddled hippie and the dumbest dude-bro in the frat house, is parading through bedroom in a towel, extolling the virtues complimentary triple-blade razors. Because his mother has just tried to poison her with something almost entirely, but not quite unlike coffee. Because she is out of a job and her ex-boss wants to talk to him. 

"I'm not going to leave you, Castle.” 

She rolls her eyes as she pulls on her boots, but the hi-yahssound out, en masse, from the living room. The war cries of mother's students do battle with the high-pitched whir of the blender as Pi starts to work on his Second Breakfast smoothie, and he thinks she thinks she spoke too soon. 

He thinks she might only be tagging along to escape the loft. He keeps expecting her to peel off somewhere along the way—to head to her own place or to catch a train to parts unknown, because she is definitely going to leave him—until he sees the way her eyes light up as the uniform lifts the crime scene tape for them. She falls into her customary on-the-job-stride, and he's torn between relief and heartbreak. It's so weird. This has to be so weird for her. 

And maybe it is, but she digs in. They follow in the wake of Captain Gates until they reach the make-shift murder board, and she’s drinking it all in. She's taking in the armored ESU personnel lined up on either side of a nondescript office building. She's clocking the snipers patrolling the rooftops. She's listening intently to the Captain's download, and when the Captain, in the end, turns to him, she just . . . crumples as though she's only just remembered how the morning has gone, what world she's been waking up in for the last week. 

So heartbreak it is. 

He turns to Gates, fully prepared to tell her that they are on their own. He is fully prepared to tuck Kate under his arm and whisk her off to someplace free of trust falls, sage bundles, and killer coffee. But there are hostages. There’s a desperate criminal who wants to talk only tp him, and what can he do? What can either of them do, other than the job, even if it's upside down and backwards? 

And it is upside down and backwards. He does a dumb thing right away. Which is . . . pretty right side up and forwards for him, but then she’s helping him suit up. She’s tugging the velcro on his vest tight and running anxious hands down the back. She doesn’t give the damned thing even one eye roll, and that is just utterly wrong. 

And then he has to play the game with Emma Riggs. The woman is odd, to be sure, but even though she wanted him and only him, she says Beckett's name in awed tones. She speaks with almost religious fervor about the two of them and all the cases they’ve solved together, and he has to catch himself before he pours out his tale of woe to the traumatized, unstable stranger with the gun. 

It gets no easier. They work together. They get to work together, and he can’t see how she's managing this. He can't see how she can sit behind a desk that, by rights, should be hers and not set fire to whatever will actually burn in the depths of Sully’s House of Soggy Horrors. He can’t see how it is that she hasn’t run screaming away from this and him and everything that reminds her of all that she's lost. 

But she doesn’t run. She forgets herself and orders Esposito around. Esposito snaps back and it’s all so routine—it's all so normal—that it's painful to watch how they all fall into their routines, to fall into his own routines and know how soon it will all be over. 

But he follows her lead. He fights the good fight alongside her, and they win the day, mostly. Emma will not go to prison for something she did not do, and wonder of wonders, she’ll have someone alongside her as she faces the consequences for the things she did do. 

It's more of a win than they sometimes get, and he hopes—he hopes—that will be at least some consolation to her. He hopes she doesn’t entirely regret tagging along, subjecting herself to this, staying. 

He's ruminating on it. He's telling himself that it's at least good that Ryan and Esposito have a chance to tell her that they miss her—that her absence is felt. He’s psyching himself up to be her shoulder to lean on when it comes time to leave, and suddenly the world is put to rights.

She produces her badge. Her gorgeous, wonderful, much-missed badge and he gets to kiss her, full-on, in the middle of the precinct. It’s coming up on 10:00 PM and there are no sage bundles or smoothies or triple blade razors. There are no pulled punches or inept round house kicks. It's coming up on 10:00 PM and no one has to leave. 

She has a strict, non-interference policy. Or she’s trying to develop one, anyway. It’s a challenge when it comes to Clan Castle. Go figure. 

She knows about the lease before he does. Alexis tells Martha. Martha alludes so heavily to it that she practically leaves a dent in every conversation, and still, it blindsides him. And she knows that before he tells her, too, thanks to a text from Martha that begins The worst has come to pass, and proceeds through melodramatic, ellipsis-filled narration, and she has to scroll forever to affirm that The worst will not involve her having to enlist Lanie’s help in hiding Pi’s body. 

But knowing isn’t exactly interfering, she supposes, and if Martha would certainly have been disappointed in her inability to feign surprise at the news, he was far too invested in his own melodramatic narration to notice. So she’s not interfering. She’s just . . . offering a little narration from her own past, and if that looks like interference—or even advice—to anyone, she’ll happily refer them to her strict non-interference policy. The one she’ll have, fully developed, any day now. 

It’s for the best. That’s her inner monologue all the way out to the Wickfield’s house, as he rehashes everything from the vicious belt buckle attack on his foot to the dread words old enough to sign the lease. Non-interference, she tells herself, is absolutely the best policy, because she’s not the stepmother. She probably won’t be the stepmother in the . . . stepmother-y sense, because Alexis, as she has pointed out, is a grown woman. 

As she’s pointed out. 

That’s where the delay in rolling out the strict non-interference policy breaks down. Because before she was the about-to-be-stepmother—but not a stepmother-y one—she would have interfered. Even when she was just the girlfriend, she’d dragged him away at Supernova Con before he could completely nuke his relationship with his kid using nothing more than a sport coat. And before she was even the girlfriend, she interfered all the time. She’d called him out and snatched his phone from his hand when the situation had called for it. She’d conferred and advised and shamed and poked fun at him when that’s what had needed doing. 

But it’s hard to strike the right balance now. It’s hard because of DC and then not DC, because she was unemployed and then she wasn’t. It’s certainly hard thanks to Pi’s Occupy Living Room agenda, and just hard thanks to Pi, in general, because he’s awful, but that’s not really the point. It’s hard because everything has been in flux, and yet there’s this certain future. 

She will be officially, formally part of Clan Castle. She will be the third wife, the daughter-in-law, the  stepmother, and she’ll no doubt wind up doing her share of melodramatic narration, because that kind of thing is definitely catching. All these things will come to pass, but she see the road that leads from here to there. 

It’s Beryl Wickfield, oddly enough, who gives her a glimpse of it. The bright, genuine smile that had leapt right out of the framed graduation photo in Shauna Taylor’s apartment understandably doesn’t make much of an appearance as she gently questions the two of them about Shauna’s life. 

Malcolm Wickfield is stoic—bordering on cold—in the face of his stepsister’s death. She doesn’t judge. She, of all people, knows a coping mechanism when she sees it, but it stands in stark contrast to his wife’s quiet, tearful passion when she speaks of Shauna’s love for her job. 

It’s a tenuous relationship—stepsister-in-law?—it’s one step up from stranger on the street, but this woman clearly knew Shauna, loved Shauna, invested in Shauna, and no doubt, interfered in her life from time to time. It’s a tenuous relationship, but so are they all if we let them be, she realizes.

She looks down at her phone, peppered with messages from Martha, who wants to be sure that Castle hasn’t “done anything dramatic.” She watches as he surreptitiously checks his phone, which isn’t peppered with messages from Alexis he’s clearly anticipating—the ones declaring that she has seen the light, will bow to his wisdom for the rest of time, never intends to move out. She watches his face fall, his jaw clench, his shoulders collapse in toward his sternum as the screen remains stubbornly blank, and he goes through the phases of parental grief all over again. 

She doesn’t snatch the phone from him, then or later. She doesn’t say much of anything on the ride back to the city. She doesn’t say much of anything at all until she has him alone in the workroom and he’s thrown gasoline on the fire of Alexis’s anger, just when it had died down enough that she was finally willing to pick up the phone. 

She doesn’t tell him that it’s not just the cheap shot about banana plantations he should have thought better of. She doesn’t interfere, but she makes a start on . . . engaging. She doesn’t get the words right. He’s a little defensive, then a little tone deaf. Duty calls, as it always does, and there’s been no monumental shift, no new understanding between them about how they get from here to there. 

There’s no sea change, but it’s a start. 

He deletes the text without sending it. One thumb cancels the speed dial of her number before before the other can hit call. The hand he has raised to hail a cab falls against his thigh. He turns and heads for the subway. He heads for the 1 train heading away from Tribeca, toward Washington Heights. 

It occurs to him only as he’s mounting the steps—only as his hand reaches for the wrought iron scroll work of heavy door’s handle—that it’s late. It’s a monastery chapel, not a church, and are churches even unlocked at all hours? He has no idea, but the door groans open when he tugs. So that’s one thing tonight that’s gone right. 

He slips inside. The place is well lit, as it was both times before. It’s empty, as it was both times before. Still, his instinct is to slide into a back pew. Or to turn around and leave. He does neither, though. He makes his way slowly up the center aisle toward the apse with his head tipped back, contemplating the world. Contemplating the ash heap. 

His phone dings with a text notification. The sound is deafening in the quiet of of the chapel. It ricochets all around him, and in his haste to avoid a reprise, he fumbles it from his pocket, directly on to the hard floor. It goes skating across the tile toward the transept with groaning face, the gaping maw. 

He retrieves it at last, relieved to find that he hasn’t managed to cap off his night by shattering the screen. There’s an instant when he hopes—believes—it’s from Alexis. An instant when he thinks the daughter he knows—the one who can’t bear to be mad at anyone, least of all him—will surely have resurfaced by now. But it’s not from Alexis, of course. 

How bad? 

He bridles at that. For another wasted instant, he bridles, because why the hell would she assume it had been bad at all? Recent history is an immediate pinprick to that, though, and he deflates accordingly. Why wouldn’t she assume it had been bad? 

Pretty bad. 

He leans heavily against the wall next to the bank of prayer candles. It’s probably disrespectful, but apparently that’s kind of his brand lately. He flicks off the ringer, at least. No sense in pushing his nonexistent luck. 

Come over? 

One, two, three is typing bubbles appear and disappear before the two words pop up. He’s not sure if she’s asking to come to him or asking him to come to her. He’s not sure she’d really be asking either one tonight if he weren’t such a pitiful case. 

Not home. 

He follows the terse message with an impromptu picture of their groaning friend. 

OMW, she responds immediately. No appearing and disappearing bubbles that time, and he feels stupid. He hadn’t meant to drag her to the literal other end of town. He hadn’t meant to drag himself there, and he tries to head her off at the pass.

No, it’s okay, he sends first, and when there’s no response, I’ll come to you. He heads for the rear of the chapel, but dithers at the door. Both messages show up as delivered, but not read, and knowing her, she’s already in the car. She might have already been downstairs at the loft, waiting for him to pull his head out of his ass and now she’s speeding her way here. In any case, she’s not responding. He knows better than to take off and risk missing her. 

He turns and heads back into the sanctuary. He does slide into the back pew this time. He spends some time staring at his hands, but the prayer candles have an irresistible allure. He inches his way back toward the left transept like he’s up to no good. He contemplates the velvet-covered kneeler, the slim taper resting in the sand at the base of the tiered rows, the slot in the brass donation box. 

He hears the groan of the doors heralding her arrival. It’s sooner than he would have thought possible, even with traffic thinned out this late at night. He listens to her slow, deliberate footsteps traveling up the aisle. He sighs as she draws up beside him and slips her arm through his. 

“I was going to light a candle for her in Paris,” he says quietly. He only understands the draw of the place—the allure of the prayer candles—as the words come. “The . . . man I was meeting set it up in a church. And I went to light a candle.” He remembers the heaviness of his body, the sick, wrung-out feeling deep inside him. He turns his face to smile down at her. He needs the escape from the memory. He needs her. “They were coin operated. Little white Christmas tree bulbs that would light up when you dropped in a coin.” She laughs against his shoulder. She gives his arm a tight squeeze. 

“Real ones here.” She nods toward the scatter of flickering flames. There’s one in the top row hissing and spitting, about to sputter out. “Want to light one before we go?” 

He ducks his chin, not quite laughing, but maybe close enough, at her not so subtle hint that they are going, and sooner, rather than later. He tilts his head to the side, as if he’s considering—as if he really might kneel, bow his head, pray for guidance. 

“Is it in the spirit of the prayer candle to light one in the hopes that Pi will asphyxiate on his didgeridoo?

Her eyes widen. “He does not have a didgeridoo!” 

“He absolutely has a didgeridoo. And bongos. And a djembe.” A yelp of laughter, louder than she’d like, escapes her. She tugs on his arm, and he goes willingly. “I didn’t see an oud or a sanxian, but you know he’s got one stashed away somewhere.”  

A cell phone is just an object. It’s a device that makes some things easier, some things harder. That’s been her attitude since they came into existence, as their sophistication has increased by leaps and bounds throughout her adult life. She’s never understood the love they inspire, the hate they provoke. She’s never understood the handwringing until now. 

The chime of his phone in the middle of the argument that’s not really an argument plucks at her nerves. It’s about Alexis, but it’s not from Alexis. That’s bad enough. But it’s about the Innocence Review case, and that’s worse. 

Esposito’s phone, Ryan’s phone, they’ve both been ringing off the hook of late, because Alexis has gone to them for help, and Kate has wished all along that she didn’t know that. Alexis clearly didn’t want her to know that, and she certainly didn’t want her dad to know that, and it’s a mess. It’s an absolute phone-facilitated mess. 

But then her phone rings, and it’s him. Alexis, with a nudge from the boys, has shown up asking for help. And he’s asking for permission, and she gives it happily. Happily. He’s going to help his daughter and she’s happy about that until her phone rings again and he is absolutely panicked. She hears the unmistakable sound of bars slamming shut in the distance. She hears the helplessness and terror in his voice and it’s contagious. 

She swallows her pride. Kind of. She strides right up to the boys at their desks and pretends like she’s in the loop. She says Innocence Review and Trace Lab like of course she’s been briefed on the whole situation and she’s just looking for an update. She gets one, and it’s bad. It’s unacceptable. 

So she doesn’t accept it. She gets in the car. She strides right in and does some more pretending. Like she’s on the team. Like there’s official interest in the case, not just some meddling college kids. But meddling college kids is the vibe at the Trace Lab, and they don’t seem impressed by her striding. 

So she phones a friend. Lanie is surprised. She’s annoyed. Kate would be sympathetic if she weren’t a little childishly relieved at having some company here out of the loop. But there’s no time for that. With a sweet smile on her face, she hands the phone—with a very annoyed Lanie on the other end—over to Mr. Meddling College Kids, who hands it over to Lanie’s friend, who outranks him. 

And then she waits. She and Lanie wait together and in the silence, she can’t muster up the courage to ask her friend what she thinks this is about—why Alexis would go to Ryan, to Esposito, and not to her. 

The news comes, and it’s something. It’s a happy phone call in, a happy phone call out, and Lanie can ask the questions that she can’t—Alexis, why on Earth wouldn’t you come to me directly? She doesn’t get an answer. There’s no time for that. But at least she got to ask the question. 

There’s waiting, then. There’s more waiting, and it’s terrible. She’s worried about them. She’s worried for them, stirring up shit in a small town where the cops have a vested interest in the man they liked for the murder getting his just desserts. She’s frantic about that and puzzled when Ryan’s phone rings again and suddenly he’s on to the lead they got via the ex-boyfriend. Ryan is on it, and it’s petty, but she’s hurt. 

So she goes to Lanie with her tail between her legs, not striding, and Lanie calls her out for the lame excuse she’s prepared. Seems like you could have done that over the phone. And she wants to shout that no she couldn’t have. She wants to yell that sometimes the damned phone won’t do, but it’s not Lanie she wants to say that to. So she asks—Do you find it odd . . . 

She lays out her anxieties, and Lanie doesn’t have an answer. And that’s . . . comforting. It’s reassuring that there isn’t one—that she’s not screwing up something obvious. 

She makes her peace with the phone, then. It’s just an object when the Trace Lab agrees to release the box of evidence to her, and just an object as the four of them walk through what’s there, what fits, what doesn’t. It’s a tool that lets her and Ryan and Esposito light six simultaneous fires under people at the bank—landline and cell phone for each of them. It’s the bearer of glad tidings—that they won in the end, that her family to be, her family already in progress, is on its way home. 

It’s just an object, neither good or bad. She knows that. She believes that. 

The two of them come straight to precinct. Her phone clatters to the surface of her desk.She’s been clinging to it without realizing, apparently. He throws his arms around her. He whispers thank you, thank you into the hollow of her neck. 

Alexis looms, solemn-faced, over his shoulder. She asks if they can talk, looking as serious as the girl of fifteen that Kate remembers. The door closes behind them. It is simply the two of them. And In the quiet of the work room, she begins, I didn’t want to do this over the phone.

He’s been unequivocally a jerk about Linus the Lion. He has a host of It’s just that . . . defenses at the ready. It’s just that she caught him off guard. It’s just that he was mostly asleep. It’s just that he’s had Linus since In a Hail of Bullets finally made money, and shit—that one slips out into the real world. It adds to his overall jerk score. 

He’s not sure what it’s about or why he can’t seem to let it go. He’s not sure how the It’s just that slips out, because he knows that he’s been a jerk. Before he was even caffeinated he knew, so why can’t he shut up about it? Why is he compelled to keep deploying cut-rate metaphors and quoting from Alice Clark, who quite honestly could use an editor? And what is even up with the silly game with the elephants? 

He wants to write it off to recent—unpleasant—changes to his household. He still has the after-image of a bare-chested Pi sleeping on his couch burned in to the back of his eyelids. And now that he and Alexis are back on better footing, it’s a full-time job holding his tongue about dumpster chairs and the aforementioned fruitarian. So he’d like to write his turn to the jerk side off to all of that. 

But it doesn’t ring true. Nothing really does. He digs all the way back to Gina and the havoc she wrought on his living space, twice over, both coming and going. He thinks about Meredith infestations, ancient and more recent, and he wonders if Pi knows anything about a sage smudging or some other cleansing ritual. 

But it’s not really any of those things. He’s just been a jerk—reflexively at first, maybe. In a pre-caffeine, half-asleep daze, perhaps. But everything since then has been a jerk pile-on, from disingenuous accusations to clunky metaphors, it’s been an inexplicable pile-on. 

It doesn’t need to be explicable, though.That’s his belated epiphany. Very belated when he thinks back to the first time she took him back, when he thinks back to his daughter’s innocent, unhappy face—Why do boys do that? Why do they always have to justify everything? Why can't they just say they're sorry? 

It’s as good a question now as it was then, but actions, he knows, speak louder than words. So down comes Linus. It’s a blow—the blank-gaping space on the wall, the elephant on the opposite side of the doorway looking at nothing, Linus himself tilted far back enough that he’s roaring up at the ceiling. It’s a blow for one long moment, and then it’s an opportunity. 

It’s a space waiting to be filled with something that signifies her place here, the history they already share and the future they’re building. It’s a possibility and a daunting one. He thinks about her place, about sneaking in and making a there-to-here move with some of her artwork. But that seems . . . wrong. It seems invasive, and more than that, not the point he’s trying to make. 

He thinks about leaving it for her—a blank canvas for her to work on, but he worries it will look like he’s sulking. He worries that the memory of what a jerk he’s been will seep into the empty space. 

It’s Steve Warner who drops the answer into his lap. It’s the story he tells about wanting to give his wife something meaningful—to make her something. It’s sort of awkward, considering the wife in question turns out to be a murderer, but the sentiment stays with him. It calls up the memory of her snatching up a pink spiral shell before he could reach it. She’d danced away backward, holding it aloft and knowing he’d give chase. 

The sense memory is overwhelming when he digs the shells out from one of the boxes behind his desk. The salt smell and the rough textures, the breathtaking geometry and the roar of the ocean in his ear when he holds the pink spiral shell up to it. It takes him back to such precise, happy moments, and it propels him forward. 

He has to make agonizing choices. He has to leave behind half a dozen lilac, indigo, spun-sugar pink butterfly shells and an enormous round freckled thing that simply won’t work. He has a yes, every single one is essential argument with the person he’s paying a small fortune to do a rush shadowbox and frame, but it’s worth it.

It’s done by the time she comes home the night they’ve finished the case, and he’s suddenly nervous when he tells her to close her eyes and leads her by the arm. He’s suddenly sure she won’t remember, won’t recognize, won’t have the same sentimental attachment to them. He’s convinced for a long, miserable moment that to her it’ll look small or stupid or sullen after all. 

But she remembers, she recognizes, she gets misty-eyed and he can’t believe she can’t believe he kept them. She spends the night on his side of the bed, and he’s relieved they’re past it. He’s relieved, but as she gazes across the room to the cluster of shells that’s exactly right, as her eyes flutter closed, he still whispers—I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was a jerk.  

She’s thinking of having new business cards made: Detective Kate Beckett, NYPD—Emotional Cans Kicked Down the Road. She really is thinking about it, but for the moment, she’ll hold on to the one Kelly Nieman slapped down on the interrogation room table in front of her right before she disappeared for good. Yeah, she’ll keep this as a memento. And as a warning.

She has, for three years, thought about Jerry Tyson as someone else’s problem, emotionally speaking—as Ryan’s problem, as Castle’s, when it comes to what might have been that first night in that dismal hotel room. Professionally, she’s wanted him as bad as any cop. Worse, when she thinks of Roy Montgomery going to his grave with 3XK hanging over him, along with everything else. But emotionally . . .

Even with what went down last year, she hasn’t owned the emotional part. Even knowing how deeply that repugnant waste of skin had invaded their lives, how close he had come to taking Castle from her, from Alexis, from Martha, and how deftly he had crafted exactly the situation to exploit their mutual vulnerabilities and take them both down—even with all that, she simply has not emotionally engaged with any of it. 

Until now. 

They have all lived through the night. They have put away the man who murdered Pam Hodges, Daniel Santos, and others they’re only just now able to count, to name. To say they had “caught” him would be overselling it, but they will put him away. In that light, they’ve emerged victorious. But it’s pretty pathetic light. 

They are wounded now, all of them. Ryan has never stopped carrying that weight. Castle has not, in three long years. And it’s no lighter now for the fact that Esposito and Lanie have been so directly touched by it. It’s no lighter because she, herself, is grappling with it at last. 

It’s the music. It’s the unnerving chromatic movement of a song she has known all her life, and the fact that it is nothing more than music that has brought her down is enraging. She wants it to be enraging, but truth be told, it’s simply devastating. 

She’s choked with paralyzing tears when the title phrase surfaces in the back of her mind at the most unexpected moments. When she’s running to the enraged beat of post-punk divas, when she’s whistling nonsense as she stands at the kitchen sink, scrubbing her few dishes, when she is exhausted and she just needs her mind to switch the hell off, the sway of strings and the lilt of Vera Lynn’s voice surfaces, and she is reduced to something worse than useless. 

Images of Lanie rise up. She hears the quaver in her best friend’s voice and recalls the way her fingers trembled as she tugged her scrubs down to reveal the tattoo. She hears the sound of Esposito’s fist slamming into a locker provides a percussive counterpoint, and even these things—even the terrible sights and sounds of people she loves suffering are little more than diversion tactics her mind throws up to avoid any kind of personalization of this. 

Because she is suffering, too. She is traumatized and she has been since last year at least. She is sick to the point of her vision going black when she thinks about how he hunted down Tessa Horton, sick when she wonders if he waited—if he actually waited—until she and Castle were together to make his move. 

Her whole body shakes uncontrollably as she remembers Castle emptying the clip of her back-up piece into Tyson, because she fell for his slumped-behind-the-wheel feint like a damned rookie. And she’s half out of her mind as she swings between wild conviction that he’s dead and washed out to sea and equal certainty that he’s alive and coming for everyone she loves. She’s all the way out of her mind when she realizes it doesn’t matter if he’s alive or dead, because Kelly Nieman is certainly still drawing breath somewhere, and that’s on her.

“It’s not on you.” His voice—his touch—is soft enough that he somehow it doesn’t startle her, though she’s sitting in darkness, drowning in her own thoughts. “It’s not, Kate.” 

“I hear it now,” she says. There’s a bleak smile on her face, though she doubts he can see it. “How unconvincing that sounds.”

“Not unconvincing. Hard to hear.” He settles on the couch next to her, ducking beneath the blanket she’s huddled under. “Blame is a kind of control. If I could have done something—if you could have done something—then someone could have. The alternative . . . the idea that there was nothing we could have done differently is terrifying.” 

“I’m sorry.” It comes out a threadbare whisper. She hides her face in her hands. “We never talked about it. I shut you down after the bridge, and it’s—“

“It’s awful.” He tugs at her wrists and brings her face to rest against his chest. “For you, too. I know it’s been awful.”

“And now it’s what?” She pulls back, swiping at her scalding-hot cheeks, furious with herself for falling apart on him. “Awful together?”

“Yeah.” His answer comes swiftly. It’s earnest and not at all calculated. “I think—for a while.” He claims her hands again. “But Kate, it’s so much better than awful alone.”  

Jim Beckett sits on a baby bottle ninety seconds after he arrives. It’s wedged between the couch cushions, mostly hidden by the hideous blanket that is, for some reason, still tossed over the back. It has just enough formula left in the floppy plastic insert to soak his soon-to-be-father-in-law’s right butt cheek when the whole thing collapses with a resounding pop. 

It is two minutes into Thanksgiving and he is thinking about his soon-to-be-father-in-law’s butt cheeks, because they come in pairs. Sudden, urgent issues related to one immediately raise the specter of the other. He is thinking about the butt cheek, but he is not called upon to address the issue. He is, in fact, banished to the kitchen, with Pi as his basting assistant while the women confer. 

Jim is whisked off up the stairs by his mother, and that can’t be good. Jim returns wearing linen drawstring pants. The subtle shimmer of earth-toned stripes clashes absolutely with Jim’s French blue button down, his sober tie, and the tweedy plaid of his sport coat. The pants belong to Pi—they were, for some reason, hanging in Alexis’s closet—so of course they would clash with any clothing native to the not–PI world. 

It is eight minutes into Thanksgiving and his soon-to-be-father-in-law is wearing the hideous pants of his please-God-never-son-in-law. That’s where his soon-to-be-father-in-law’s butt  cheeks, plural, have taken up residence. So that’s how things are going for him. 

The weird thing is—well, one of the weird things—that things are going . . . well. 

Jim is joking about the pants as he thanks Pi for the loan. Pi is telling a long, disjointed story about this being the pants’ second rescue mission. Alexis sits with the two of them, providing Pi-to-human translation services.  It’s an oddly functional ice breaker when it comes to releasing Pi into Jim’s very staid world, where the rivers do not run with linen drawstring pants. 

With the three of them settled and out of the way, he and Kate—with his mother supervising—get the meal on the table. He catches Kate’s eye, bracing for exasperation at best, but there’s nothing worse than an amused twinkle there. 

“It’s fine, Castle,” she murmurs as she bumps him out of the way with her hip and executes a a deft turn to excavate serving spoons the drawer he’d been blocking. “Pants are fine. My dad’s fine.” A peal of laughter from the odd trio awaiting their call to the dinner table draws her eye. She puffs out an amused, bemused, slightly confused laugh, and he gets it. He so gets it. “Apparently everything’s fine.” 

She’s not wrong. They gather around the table, extended to its maximum capacity with all its leaves dropped in, and everything continues to be . . . better than fine, sartorial mishaps not withstanding. 

“I just can’t understand those plastic things, though,” Jim shakes his head as he helps himself to another spoon of mashed potatoes. “With Katie it was glass bottles and that countertop contraption. Martha,” he turns to her. “You must remember.” 

“Do I!” his mother exclaims. “Oh, that sterilizer. Horrible. Loud. Always breaking. By the time Alexis came along, all the conveniences! Richard could hardly have screwed it up if he tried!” 

He opens his mouth to protest. But she’s already off and running with tall tales. He looks to Kate for sympathy—for an ally—but she’s a strange combination of rapt and . . . something else. She keeps shooting furtive looks across the table at her dad, at his mother. He doesn’t quite know what to make of it. 

“You should have seen me on the subway.” His mother is still talking when he tunes back in, of course. “Richard on one hip and one of those giant hobo bags on the other and those glass bottles shaking and rattling the whole way!” 

Jim jumps in with tales of his own—even Martha Rodgers has to breathe some time. There’s a long, involved story about a toy syringe from a pretend play doctor kit and an isolated nipple and neck ring from a three-day-old bottle sitting on top of an important set of contracts, in full view of a room filled with men in high-powered suits. 

“I did the only thing I could do,” Jim holds them all in suspense. “Pulled out my wallet and showed them every single picture I had of Katie.” 

The table erupts in laughter. Kate laughs along, but there’s that . . . furtiveness again, and he wonders what it means. 

He has to wait to find out. There’s the long meal and the protracted desert. There are the arguments about who will and who won’t clean up, and whether it’s worth finding a container for just that little bit of this, that little bit of that. There’s the packing up of leftovers for Alexis and Pi to take back to their place, and Jim’s demurrals—his insistence that they’ll just go to waste, because he’s headed up to his cabin. 

There is, at last, Jim’s restoration to his own pants. Kate has worked her emergency-home-dry-cleaning witchery on them, and something more familiar settles over her and her dad as they say their goodnights. 

She retreats to the kitchen when he’s gone. She leaves him and his mother to have their own goodnight scrum with Pi and Alexis. His mother makes her way upstairs, blowing kisses to Kate, and Kate waves back.

She’s distracted, though. Her attention is on something he can’t see until he’s pressed up against her with his arms winding around her waist. It’s the remains of Cosmo/Benny’s poor, crushed bottle. In the flurry of activity that had followed the pop, he’d shoved the offending thing out of the way, but it’s caught her attention now. 

“What’s up?” he asks quietly, his chin tucked into the hollow of her shoulder. 

“Nothing.” She smiles and tries to dismiss it with a shake of her head. “I just . . . it sounds dumb, but I didn’t know all that about my dad. It felt—I don’t know if it did feel or if it’s just how I remember it now, but I’ve always thought of it being my mom with my stuff in her briefcase. I remember spinning around on her chair in her office.” She fiddles with the impossibly disrupted arc of the bottle, trying to fit it back together. “But hearing how he remembers it—that’s just . . . different.” 

“Different.” He presses a kiss to her collar bone. “I know. I like to . . . give my mother grief about the chaos when she was raising me, but then I think about her on that subway with a bag full of glass bottles, rushing to a rehearsal.” He laughs at himself—at the stupid thing on the tip of his tongue. “It’s like I forget she was there, too.” 

“Right.” She turns in his arms, looking eager. “That’s it. He was there, too, and I just . . . forgot.”

“But you remember now.” He kisses her. “You both remember.”   

She does not have, has never had, will never have the same attachment to her phone as he does. It is a tool, the complexity of which, has grown in leaps and bounds in recent years. It makes her job easier in some ways, harder in others. It makes her life easier in some ways, and harder in others. She has, since she has known him, been perplexed by his enthusiasm for the latest model, his determination to ferret out every cool new thing—no matter how screamingly pointless it is—he can do with the latest features. 

She has never understood having strong feelings about a damned phone, until now. Now, in these few minutes that have unfolded endlessly like some sadistic origami eternity, she has developed incredibly strong feelings about many different phones. 

Milo Pavlik’s is punctuation for the roar inside her head. Its sharp, staccato ping haunts her, and there is a moment in their race across the city, when she almost turns the car around so she can go back and slap it out of the grotesque little freak's hand, so she can grind its screen beneath her heel. 

Her own takes on a terrible aspect as she shoves it into Castle’s hand, rapping out instructions as she navigates toward the bridge, pushing the car, pushing Manhattan traffic, pushing her own reflexes to the limit. 

“Get the communications room. Give them the address of the warehouse. Confirm that FDNY is on the scene, and tell them you want to be put through directly to the IC.” 

“IC?” Her head whips toward him, away from the road in front of her, but before her glare can find its mark, she can see he’s already horrified by his own chatty, ill-timed curiosity. “Sorry,” he says, dialing. 

“Incident commander,” she tells the windshield almost soundlessly. 

He holds the damned phone up for her as she calls out disjointed details. Two detectives. Homicide. FDNY Lieutenant. Unmarked. She rattles off their car’s plate. Their badge numbers, and hoping against hope, their radio call signs. 

She is a distraction—a nuisance. The IC does more handholding than he should. It’s the courtesy of the Bravest extended to the Finest in a moment when he can ill afford it. She knows that. She knows it and makes a sharp gesture to end the call. 

He does. She sees him, out of the corner of her eye, swallowing hard as his finger comes down on the screen. She sees him take up his own phone and dial frantically as the distance between her car and the warehouse closes, all too slowly. She sees him take up her phone and repeat the panicked sequence of gestures. When their eyes meet for the briefest of moments, he cracks a gruesome smile and rasps out, “I thought maybe they’d answer for you.” 

But they don’t answer. Neither one of them answers.  Each phone rings, an end-to-end brrrrrr, followed by a fatal-sounding click, and then their voices emerge—their voices. Her mind throws up a veil, a stark black wall between her and the idea that she will never again hear their actual voices. And he dials frantically—his phone, her phone, his phone. 

And they have arrived. She has slammed the car into park. They have flung open the doors and launched themselves out of the car and this is so much worse than she imagined. It’s so much worse than anything her mind could have conjured up and held on to—the heat and the stench, and the light of the flames is too much to look at straight on. 

The IC—Miller—has considerably less patience for her here in the flesh. She is considerably more useless, telling him things he already knows, as though that can change anything—as though the phone was the problem and he’ll see now. He’ll have to see. But he doesn’t. Or he does, and—worse—it doesn’t matter.

And then the phone rings—that damned troublesome thing. It rings and drags her through the next razor wire moments. 

It could be them. 

(It isn’t them.) 

It’s Jenny. Beautiful, smiling, round-bellied Jenny, because he must have swiped her phone and messed with her contacts, adding photos again. It’s Jenny at the baby shower she had no desire to go to, but did. Jenny with the adorable outfit “from them” spread out over that round belly. 

It’s Jenny and they are, the two of them, suspended in a moment, not knowing what the next will bring. Not knowing at all. 

It’s Jenny. 

Why would she be calling you?

Maybe she’s heard from them. Maybe she knows if they’re safe. 

They are suspended in a moment. 

But she hasn’t heard from them. They are not safe. 

He finds that he wants to face her. He’s not sorry he left the precinct on the definite note he did—Screw it. September.—but now, after wine and window-gazing with his mother, he finds he’s sorry he that he left without facing her. 

She has been kind in the aftermath. It is, of course, her defining feature—courage, yes. Strength, intelligence, fearsome drive and tenacity—yes, yes, yes. But kindness where she can give it, kindness to those she loves, kindness to strangers whose pain she knows, whose struggles and mistakes she regrets. And right now, having left without facing her, he feels like he qualifies across the board—he feels like a stranger. And he feels unworthy. 

They lie to one another too easily. They have lied to one another too easily—about their feelings, about memory, conspiracy, opportunity. They have lied to one another in times of crisis, cutting one another neatly out of the equation when they should have been leaning on one another, and he had hoped—he had so fervently hoped—that was behind them. But he has recently, profoundly, and so fucking readily lied to her and he needs to own up. He wants to own up.

He wants her well-deserved wrath and the brutal honesty she’s only revealed in icy, restrained flashes so far. He is not your father. He made the choice a long time ago. He wants her cynical take on the hug, on the body drop, on the trap he baited with their lives—the life of his son and the woman he loves. He wants to hear from her lips the undeniable fact that his father is a lawless murderer. 

He wants to hang his head as she rails about the mess this will have landed her in with the few people at the AG’s office who’ll still take her calls. He wants her to say out loud that they—the two of them—will have to lie to Ryan and Esposito every single day until Tony Blaine and the murder of Ted Rollins get swallowed in the terrible day to day. 

With his mother upstairs, alone with her thoughts, and an untouched glass of wine at his elbow, he just wants her, And like the undersized answer to a prayer, her key sounds in the lock. 

“I wasn’t sure you’d come here tonight,” he rises as he admits it, realizes it. He wasn’t sure she’d come home. 

The disbelieving look she gives him is a reflex. It’s a mask that she lets fall almost at once. “I wasn’t sure if I shouldn’t stay—” She cuts herself off. She drops her keys into her pocket and shrugs off her coat. It’s a statement, a definitive note. “I didn’t know if you and Martha needed . . . time.”

“Time. Wine. Window.” He hangs his head, and this is not what he expected, though he should have. He is a stranger tonight. “Mother is very zen about it.” 

“And you?” She approaches him cautiously. She touches his sleeve and he sees there’s blood there, rubber-glove smear that skips from elbow to wrist where his cuff was rolled up. It’s evidence. He is walking evidence in more ways than one, and still she dips her head to catch his eye, to favor him with a half smile. “Are you zen about it?” 

“Not so much.” He takes tentative hold of her hand. He feels the familiar lines of her palm meeting his, and it’s so much more than he deserves right now. “I’m sorry I left you at the precinct. I’m sorry I left you with the clean up.” “Nothing to clean up.” She lets out a humorless laugh. Her grip tightens, then relaxes. “Gates got a call from . . .” She lifts their joined hands and makes a vague gesture out the window. “Someone. She got a call, and now this federal agency needs this and that federal agency needs that, and long story short, Tony Blaine is not our problem.” 

“I’m—” He’s the one to cut himself off this time. He short circuits the meaningless script that gets them nowhere. “Sorry’s not enough.” 

“Castle.” She looks at him for a weary moment, then tugs him toward the couch. She sinks down, pulling him with her. “You left me with a murder board to take down, okay?” She works her way into the crook of his arm and swings her feet up. “Nothing new, That’s all.” 

He wants to let her matter-of-fact approach settle him—for her sake even more than his own. He doesn’t want to make more work for her tonight, emotional, professional, or otherwise, but the image of her methodically stripping the board is arresting. Something about it is arresting. 

“I look like him.” He sees the sketches in her hands—the same hands that have drawn his arms around her body and come to rest in a knot with his where he can feel her kind, courageous heart beating. “When you recognized him at the office. It wasn’t just the sketches. It was because—”

“I don’t see it.” She tips her head way back to study him. He gives up one hand with a reluctant grumble so she can shift his chin this way and that. She frowns. She sniffs and gives a mighty, that’s-the-end-of-that shrug. “I definitely don’t see it.” 

She really is prepared to torture him over the Page 6 thing. She is prepared to torment, to dine out, to sincerely enjoy watching him squirm for the foreseeable future. Operation Torment and Enjoy begins with quiet careful gestures while he’s at the door dealing with Pi. Quiet, careful gestures to tear the few inches of column from the rest of the paper. It’s mostly for the look of it,  so he’ll know that she has—so that he is aware that she's kept a trophy and has a weapon she’s eager to wield. 

But the fun loses some of its shine right away. The creeps with the disingenuous Gone Too Soon signs strike her as no better than the paparazzi shoving lenses and microphones in her face, then seamlessly downshifting to do exactly what she’s been rarin’ to do—torment him. 

Oh, hey, Richard Castle, is it true . . .  

She feels a little knock-knock from her inner Jiminy Cricket, but she’s already telling herself it’s different—it’s different—and then even that gets lost in the way he sidesteps it. 

This isn’t about me today. 

She’s not exactly touring real estate on the high ground right then. Her ear latches on to the absence of a denial, and it’s not like she’s worried. She’s not worried in the slightest, but she has a sudden case of the Kristina Coterras. She’s the one who doesn’t want her life splashing unexpectedly across a printed page, a tv screen, a BuzzFeed listicle, and he’s honoring her wishes. And she’s annoyed by that, She knows it’s unreasonable, and that annoys her even more. 

And she says something. She tells herself she is absolutely not going to say anything. She fingers the torn out Page 6 item that she has shoved into her coat pocket and she sets to work on a plan for torture at a more convenient time. But instead, something comes out of her mouth, and it’s petty. It’s a whine and she’s aware that he’s being the reasonable one. He’s being the decent one, because it isn’t about him today, and she is not, in the slightest, enjoying this turvy topsy world in which Richard Castle is the grown up. 

The realities of Mandy Sutton’s life do nothing to endear that world to her. She’s more troubled by Jesse Jones and his cool assessment of how to land a pretty little rich girl than she should be. She’s troubled by Marilyn Sutton who is decidedly more manager than mother when her daughter turns up hungover, rather than dead. 

And she’s troubled when she does the math and realizes that he’d have been about Mandy’s age—a little younger—when this world came calling for him. And here he is, being the grown up—being the person who sees how badly she’s reeling from a new and genuinely terrifying invasion of her life. 

She tosses her trophy after Aunt Theresa—Aunt Theresa, who literally prints out emailed joke chains and mails them to people. Aunt Theresa who somehow knows how to post to Facebook. That just absolutely tears it. She wads up the little square of news paper and stuffs it way down among the wet paper towels in the ladies room garbage, and she takes a moment to settle herself.

Her dad was teasing. She studies her own face in the mirror and affirms to herself that whatever reservations he might have had about Castle, he’s set them aside long since, and he was teasing. Esposito was teasing, and Ryan was, and it’s all just part of the  world of fun she was on board with mere hours ago. 

But it’s not fun. 

She wants her privacy, and she has a right to it. But clinging to it as she has turns out to be the same as leaving him out there alone to deal with ghost of a man he simply isn’t anymore. And he’s not Mandy Sutton, and it’s a little funny every time he overestimates his own fame—his own notoriety—and gets knocked down a peg, because Lord knows his ego can use a pinprick or two. But he could also use a partner. He could use someone willing to make herself known, at the bare minimum. 

She exits the ladies room, trophy-less, but not without weapons. She thinks of going to him right away and telling him that she’s ready—that he can go ahead and make an announcement to . . . wherever semi-famous people make these kinds of announcements. But there’s another Jiminy Cricket knock-knock she simply has to accept: She can’t abide the idea of Black Pawn handling it. She can’t abide Gina with her spinach teeth or Paula who is always thinking of Ibiza having anything at all to do with this. 

She watches him, head bent over his laptop as he scowls his way through Pi’s recommendation, and she knows what she has to do. She goes to her own computer. She opens a fresh document. She stares at the blinking cursor and laughs to herself about the fact that he’s doing exactly the same thing just a couple dozen feet away. 

But her job is easier, certainly. It’s simple, it’s formulaic, it’s a brief and breezy statement of truth: Novelist Richard Castle and New York Police Detective Katherine Beckett, both native New Yorkers, are pleased to announce their engagement.

He loves Kate Beckett from her spectacular cheekbones to her devastating legs, from her elegant wrists to her mysteriously always freezing toes. He loves her in all her girlie-but-not-girlie glory. And though he once called her a liar for it—though he would probably still call her a liar for it, just to see what hijinks might ensue—he has come to believe she’s never torn a picture of a wedding gown out of a magazine. 

He’s wondering about the why of that lately. It’s not that the why of anything especially matters to him—not in terms of loving her, anyway. He’s professionally interested in the why of everything. There’s no procrastination like wondering-about-the-why-of-everything procrastination and all that. 

But when it comes to loving her, it’s been a long, hard road to accepting, celebrating, working to meet the challenges of who she gloriously is, and he’s glad to be well beyond wondering if this or that or the other thing about her is trauma or healing or a defense mechanism so she won’t have to hurt again. He’s outrageously glad to have the luxury of simply loving her, even when—especially when—things aren’t all that simple. 

But he really is wondering about wedding gowns and bridal magazines lately, and he’s not quite sure why. It seems simple enough when he comes upon her and his mother and an end-to-end spread where the kitchen counter should be. They’re dreadful. Their manipulations are transparent and there’s a deadly sameness.  She’s right about the gauzy, love-struck looks, and should girls of fourteen or fifteen really be getting married? He certainly can’t see the appeal, so why should she, simply by virtue of being a woman? 

But then it gets interesting, It seems like more than the fact that bridal magazines suck is at work here. Certainly the juicy Modern Fashion revelation sparks his curiosity. Did Matilda King simply tear up her enthusiasm for such feminine rites of passage by the roots? Did Beckett turn the woman down because ehe’d shown her the sordid underbelly of the Wedding–Industrial Complex at such a tender age? 

It doesn’t seem especially likely, and he wonders idly why it matters anyway. Kate Beckett is not interested in bridal magazines and that is simply one facet of her magnificent essence. Except Esposito being a snot about fashion and masculinity suggests another hypothesis: What if she has to insist that she isn’t interested in such feminine folly because to admit otherwise would mean exposing her underbelly? 

That idea makes him kind of sad. Sadder than death-of-her-girlish-dreams by way of Matilda King and the Marital Mafia, for some reason he can’t put his finger on. It might be the he first fell in love with her as a cop. Even though he pegged her story from the first—the why behind this smart, beautiful woman with the world at her feet choosing such thankless profession—he has loved for a long time the way she bends the job to her will and owns it. So maybe he doesn’t want to think of the job taking anything from her that she isn’t willing to give. 

But it’s all more or less idle wondering until the phone call. He’s on the not-quite-solo-mission at the venue, and she’s on the job. She answers the phone, and his vague wonderings are all but silent. He’s even, somewhere in the back of his mind, enjoying the gender reversal here. And he’s excited. He’s so excited that having been faced with a long-term delay, things are suddenly moving quickly, and it feels like a sign from the universe. 

And then she says no. Worse than that, she hems, she haws, she beats around the bush. And she ultimately says no. 

And he . . . falters. He doesn’t doubt, but he falters, and those damned bridal magazines loom large. Her deer-in-headlights look as his mother prattled on, the eye roll on lovestruck brides—even her hiding behind him for the briefest of moments before facing Matilda King—it all starts to make him worry that it’s not just the trappings of a wedding she’s not enthusiastic about, it’s the very idea of a wedding—he very idea of their wedding—that underwhelms her. 

It’s a rocky moment, but it’s not a long-lasting one. She loves him. They are fallible, but solid—he’s sure of that. He’s sure of her, but worried, too, because something is not right. 

The no about the venue is what it is. He’d pass up a hundred dates in a hundred perfect venues if she had the slightest objection to any of them. He’s not worried about the no, he’s worried about her. And one of the down sides of being in love with a cop is there are precious few opportunities for him to convey that—to look her in the eye and tell her that whatever is behind the no, it’s fine. It will be just fine. 

It’s funny how it turns out. It’s a little bit funny. She is knotted up when she comes home. She tells him they have to talk, and a kind of calm settles over him. He says something about bad news, and he’s sorry that she’s knotted up. He doesn’t want her to be unhappy for an instant, but he’s calm, too. There’s not a second that he’s worried about them. 

She tells him the whole of it, or maybe the whole of it as she understands it.  But who knows better than he that everyone makes their own autobiographical myths? She’s never torn a photo of a wedding magazine because it’s the kind of thing a girl—a young woman—does with her mom. She misses her mom and that’s why she’s never done it, and he’s sorry and he’s glad to know and he loves her. He loves this about her. 

She likes Lucas Troy from the first. Even though he lies to her, even though he is guilty of the cardinal sin of even trying to lie to her, she likes him for his forthright commentary on their victim. She likes him for his loyalty to his friend, even though that’s precisely what leads him into his foolish lie. And most of all, for some reason, she likes him for the strange fact that he’s spending his lunch hour painting enchanted lanterns for a dance that will undoubtedly be populated, in large part, by people like their victim. She likes that for some inexplicable reason. 

She doesn’t have a lot of time to devote to Lucas Troy, though. She has charlatans to interrogate. She has Castle’s nonstop flow of supernatural tales to debunk. And once they finally find Jordan Gibbs, she has high school interpersonal dynamics to sort through. 

It’s not the best time she’s ever had. 

Madison Beaumont, according to Jordan, began acting out of pattern when school restarted after the winter break. It’s not exactly a highpoint of her career as a master interrogator that the information comes at the expense of causing real and obvious distress to the already distressed girl, but the information is useful. The timing of the change is inside the window Riley, Madison’s ex, ball-parked at a couple months ago. With typical victims—with common criminals—the change in behavior, the corroboration of it by multiple witnesses, would give the case forward momentum. 

But Jordan Gibbs is odd and harassment of Jordan Gibbses by Bitch Cliques led by Madison Beaumonts probably predates humanity’s descent from the trees. And even the Madison Beaumonts of the world are not immune to the dastardly effects of wild hormone swings and a self-image as fragile as a soap bubble. The secrecy, even with the boyfriend, the shiny new target for her Bitch Clique energies—acting out of pattern might mean everything or it might mean nothing. 

They luck out, if that’s the word for it,  and it means something. It means that Madison Beaumont was more than just a victim of hormones. Her sudden need to pick on the weird girl seems to have been related to her foray into extremely high-end robbery. It should make her feel better, but finding herself at the intersection of Heathers and Charade is not really an improvement over putting a misfit seventeen-year-old’s feet to the fire. The whole case just has her feeling not right in her own skin. 

He soothes some of that feeling away. Being home with him, sharing a glass of wine and guilty-pleasure dinner of a massive loaf of garlic bread and homeopathic amounts of real food soothes some of it away. Telling her story does, too. She’s not sure that she’s ever said out loud to anyone that she has regrets about it, and now that she has said it, she’s not sure it’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

It feels close, though. They clink glasses and toast the things they did and the things they didn’t miss. She sips her wine and sets it aside. She deprives him of his, and they dance in the kitchen to the song they don’t have until the timer dings for the garlic bread. They eat, side by side, and regret feels close to the truth. And she feels like herself again, mostly. Mostly. 

The morning brings with it a lead that’s firmly in her wheelhouse—a gangster who certainly would not have looked kindly on any thief, let alone the seventeen-year-old daughter of his defense attorney. A cocky rich kid, unsatisfied with all she already had at her feet, playing with that kind of fire—it’s a tragic, undeserved ending, of course, but it’s legible to her, at least. Until it isn’t. Until it’s not that at all, and it looks like it very well might be Lucas Troy. 

She’s unhappy about it. Even as she puts the pieces together out loud, voicing her own thought process about how clever it was to throw suspicion on to Jordan, to play up his hate for the eminently hatable Madison Beaumont, she’s unhappy to a completely inappropriate degree to have Lucas Troy in the suspect slot. 

It doesn’t help when he confesses all the things she doesn’t need him to confess—that he hides how smart he is, how niche his interests and talents are, that he wasn’t trying to frame Jordan, he was trying to protect her. The bleak, terrified look on his face when he admits that Madison was able to blackmail him because he’s a scholarship kid, because the Jordan Gibbses and the Lucas Troys of the world can’t hide forever from the world’s Madison Beaumonts—none of that helps at all, when what she needs is his confession to a murder she really, really wishes he hadn’t committed. 

She’s glad when it turns out he didn’t. She’s glad to an inappropriate degree, given the fact that she closes the case by slapping the cuffs on yet another pair of seventeen-year-olds, one of whom saw no way other than murder to get out from under Madison’s thumb. But inappropriate or not, she’s glad. 

She’s gladder still when she spies the two black sheep—Jordan and Troy—swaying more than a little awkwardly to the song she and Castle have just decided is theirs. She’s happy to share it, though. With her cheek resting on his shoulder, she takes in the spectacle of the gym transformed. She spies Lucas’s cerulean blue lanterns with the light of the disco ball sparking off them. She inches closer to the truth about her own feelings about dances and poetry slams, the things she missed and the things she didn’t. 

Regret isn’t quite the right word for what she feels. She looks at those lanterns and at Lucas, and she likes the way he’s insisted on being here. She likes that he and Jordan—she in her kicky Wednesday Addams dress and he in his baby blue shirt with a non-zero number of ruffles—have insisted on making a place for themselves here. She likes the cerulean blue lanterns—a concrete form of that insistence. 

She nestles closer to Castle. She loses herself in the music, in the dance. She doesn’t regret her poetry slam, but she regrets—a little at least—the either/or-ness of it. Here and now, she likes those lanterns. She wishes Rebel Bex had at least thought of that.  

He thinks he’s hallucinating the morning of the elf coffee. He has been tossing and turning barely dipping beneath the surface of sleep all night. He’s been hearing phantom noises and now there are phantom smells and there is definitely a phantom Beckett, because the real Beckett does not invoke fairy tale creature explanations, even when she’s half asleep. 

He certainly thinks he’s hallucinating his daughter. She’s been the central focus of his tossing and turning all night. Kate had dropped off somewhere in the middle of his litany of requests for police resources. 

A patrol car . . . 

No.

Just at night? 

No. 

A SWAT team?

Why would I let you have a SWAT team if I wouldn’t let you have a patrol car? 

I thought I might be wearing you down. 

No. 

He realizes now that he never quite managed sleep at all last night. He hadn’t hallucinated the sound of the front door or her quiet tread on the stairs, soft footsteps making their way along the hall upstairs, falling silent on the threshold of her room. It hadn’t just been wishful thinking. 

What’s here in the cold light of day though is not exactly what he would have wished for. He’s glad to see her face in any state, but she looks dreadful enough that he has to bite his tongue if he doesn’t want to be immediately exterminated by simultaneous glare from the two most important women in his life. 

But she does look dreadful, and it’s more than just the fact that dark circles are always particularly stark against her fair skin. She looks . . .  burdened, and that’s more than the oversized bag that’s bound to be missing three or four or five things she’d probably love to have to get her day started, but they’re all at her apartment—her dismal, lonely apartment. 

The thought eats at him—not just the notion of her rambling around that place by herself, without benefit of so much as an overzealous meter maid looking to moonlight (No . . . and nobody calls them meter maids anymore), though that’s certainly bad enough. He can’t stand the idea that the loft is a way station for her, and it’s missing things she wants—things he can’t get for her, because she’s been gone for months and he doesn’t know what they are.

He’s kept her room as is. He’s lashed out at his mother for trying to gather up and stow away things she left sitting around the upstairs bathroom—hair ties and mostly empty bottles of lotion, an awkwardly squeezed out tube of bubblegum toothpaste that she still uses every once in a while. That she used to use every once in a while, maybe. He doesn’t know, because that’s the way it is when someone leaves. 

He’s still on the mopey, self-indulgent train of thought when suddenly she’s going, suddenly with a kiss and a long-suffering I am not having this conversation again look, she is gone. And he is left not quite alone with the elf coffee. He slumps on to the stool and reaches for it. He takes a sip grimacing almost before it hits his tongue. 

“Why would you do that?” Kate scolds, but not really. “You know she takes it black now.” She comes up behind him and whisks the cup out of reach. 

“She didn’t used to,” he mutters. “Four sugars and a little bit. Until Pi was all ‘There’s no such thing as ethical sugar’.” 

“Yes. But Pi’s gone now.” She sets a fresh mug in front of him. Elf coffee that a human might drink. “Hurray! Remember?” 

“Hurray, except now she’s there—”

“By herself in that sketchy, dismal place—” She steals a sip of his coffee for herself. She has his rant down, beat for beat, just as he has hers. 

“—which is neither that sketchy, nor that dismal.” He shoots her an apologetic look. “I know. I’m sorry.” 

“I know you are.” She nudges under his arm. “And I know you’re a dad and you can’t help but worry.” 

He loves her for that. He loves her for all of this, actually—that she stays awake for a big chunk of his litany nearly every night, and denies him his fantasy police resources. He loves her for hammering it in to his brain as best she can that they’re not necessary. He loves her for the light touch she takes with him, most of the time, and for knowing when he needs a not so light touch to yank him back from the brink of something stupid and unreasonable. He loves that for right now, she knows he’s a dad, and she’s willing to save him from himself. SHe’s willing to save him from left-behind Elf coffee. 

“Hey,” he says when it seems like they’ve been standing there, sipping from the same mug for what feels like days and nights and days. “Don’t we have an early murder?” 

“We do.” She peels herself reluctantly from his side. “We should get going.” 

“Can we tune the scanner to . . .” He swivels, but he’s talking to her back as she strides toward the bedroom. 

“No,” she calls over her shoulder. 

“Okay.” He slides over the stool to follow. “But that’s only because you’ve got beat on her—”

“No.” The denial isn’t quite, drowned out by the shower starting. “No beat cops, you creep.”

She feels like an idiot—an absolute idiot—talking nonstop into her own coat collar. She’s on her knees with her hands bound behind her back, headed for God only knows where, and what seems to be foremost on her mind is what a fool she must look like. 

It’s a defense mechanism. Her sharply analytic mind knows that. Embarrassment, self-consciousness, they keep the fear from rising up and overwhelming her. Panic serves no purpose, so she keeps talking, right through a sudden memory of him, of Ryan and Esposito fitted him with a button cam in the back of a van in the worst part of Chinatown. She has the sudden memory of her own seething irritation as he talked incessantly down his own shirtfront. He looked like a complete fool, she recalls with a snort of laughter that she hopes is blowing out someone’s ear drums on the other end. 

The van rolls to a stop and so does her monologue. Information comes together, snap, crackle pop, and her brain must have been working on it all through the drive—all through her constant nattering. Oh, she thinks, so that’s how it works for him. She spares a microsecond for a strangled laugh before she sets to work on the collar button with her teeth. She does not feel like an idiot as the thread gives way at last and disc, mic and all, clatters to her feet. 

The bag goes over her head, and once again, he’s her model for what an idiot she must look like. Standing there silent and zip-tied in Tracy McGrath’s foyer—yeah, he looked like an idiot, so this is not her most dignified day ever. 

She feels a pang of longing for him as the elevator man roughly extracts her from the back of the van and leads her . . .  somewhere. She should be listening. She should be registering what the ground feels like beneath her feet, what the ambient sounds and scents are. But she feels a pang, then a strange shift in the very center of her body—longing and then not. Longing, then . . . presence. 

It’s unnerving at first. She is ushered through a door, and she should be asking herself what kind. The elevator man cuts her hands free. He jerks the bag from her head and she should be wondering why. She registers in an offhand sort of way that the space she is in is a house—a mansion that feels curiously empty.  But she’s knocked off balance by how near he feels. She knows—logically, analytically—that he’s far from here. He’s home, decanting something amazing, because she figured she’d be home for dinner, but he’s here with her, absolutely. 

He catches the first wrong beat with the man next to her. She lets her nerves bubble up. Elena would, she thinks. She remembers Fowler’s instructions—you’re intimidated by these guys— and she plays the part. 

Wrong, he says, and it’s him. It’s his voice sounding out from the absolute center of her. He’s surprised you’re nervous. This is wrong. And it is wrong. The elevator man tells her to drop the act, and she does. And there’s the second beat with Jones—the man who is really in charge here, who is offering Elena drink and laughing as though they are equals. 

You are. He’s not. 

Harden, he means. The elevator man’s name is Harden, and he’s an underling. Jones is the one who slips folded notes with salary offers into the hands of people who are most definitely not low-level couriers. Elena is valuable. She is on Lazarus’s wish list, and that’s her leverage. 

“I’m going to need to meet Lazarus,” she hears herself say. She thinks of him running, one-shoed, after Harrison Tisdale, of him trading himself to Emma Riggs for the release of a nine-year-old girl and her mother. She hears him—she feels him—gasp. “It’s a matter of trust.” She throws a decidedly down her nose look Harden’s way, an ex post facto sale of her earlier nervousness as all part of the act. 

And she lives to see the next act. She lives to lunge for Jones’s desk phone and rip open every drawer of his miserably empty desk. She lives to get the faintest sign of life out into the world, and he’s with her. 

Keep breathing. Keep breathing, Kate. 

He is not a fan of the pause she takes when she’s locked in the bedroom, left to wonder about the parade of women, bags on their head, being led into some part of the house. He is not a fan of the blood or the goodbye. 

Kate, you don’t have time for this. And I know. I know. 

But she ignores him. She carries on. She pours her heart and soul on to the page and tucks it away in the most secret place she can find. And then she waits. 

The world tries to rock beneath her feet when next she sees Jones. It tries to, but her mind has been working on the Elena problem. He’s been working on the Elena problem. She is the odd sock as Nikki would say—a compromised courier who lived long enough to get leveraged by Fowler. She is the assassin, and now she is. Now she has an assignment. 

He’s an underling, he reminds her when Harden gets twitchy enough to worry her. Push back. 

So she does. She buys herself time to think, room to work, an opportunity to make her own opportunity. She does that, too. She orders Evan Potter on the floor, because she needs him scared enough to listen—to serve his purpose after she sets the scene. 

She doesn’t need the voice in absolute center of her to tell her that Harden will check—that she’s wounded his pride and he wants whatever petty victory he can get. She doesn’t need him to tell her that Evan Potter is her button mic now, and whatever she can get Harden to say within earshot is a little more information that just might save her life. 

She doesn’t need it, but he is there, every moment. He is present for the spark of hope that sputters to life within her when Harden buys it—when there is no black bag over her head on the way back to the mansion. He is with her when Vulcan Simmons steps into the strange slash of light that makes its way into his basement lair and hope dies absolutely. 

He is with her when her blood mixes with the icy water and she can’t struggle any more. He is with her when it seems as if her lungs have surrendered, and through every step with rope cutting into her ankles, her wrists, as Harden marches her out to some shallow grave in the woods. 

He is there, at the absolute center of her, as she watches Harden’s blood fall in thick drops from Elena’s blade. He is there, telling her to breathe—keep breathing—as she claws her way back up that fucking hill and makes her way to the road. He’s there when a car finally slows and she makes her way, with her empty hands spread wide, to the passenger-side window and begs for a phone. 

And then he is actually there—in the flesh and at the center of her. He is at her side and pressing coffee into her battered hands, and every time he speaks, it reverberates within her—the questions he asks so she won’t have to, the anger fizzing barely beneath the surface, his stupid, stupid, stupid attempt at a joke. 

Do you see what happens when I leave you alone? 

Babe, I wasn’t alone. 

They have kicked around the idea of siblings before. They have wondered and fantasized and mostly counted themselves secretly lucky that they’re both only children. 

Can you imagine my mother trying to Edmund and Edgar us just to see what would happen? He’d asked her with his cheek pressed against her sweat-slicked ribs in the middle of some early-on night after round three or four or fourteen. 

Wait, are you the bastard or the other one? she’d wondered back, lazily stroking his hair. Also, history or Shakespeare?

And he’d had to seize her body immediately and roll it right beneath his own, because it was simply too hot that she knew in the middle of some early-on night that those were the options. 

But they’ve kicked around the topic of sibling in less . . . distracting scenarios, too. After movies and looking up from books, they’ve talked about it. Running through cases from the murderous Harrison Tisdales and David Nicolaideses—Nicolaidei?—of the world to the devoted Wendalls and Wendys, the heartbroken Skyes and Rosies and Paisleys, they’ve considered the pros and cons. They’ve kicked it around. 

She’s always quiet about it, and mostly grave. She’s mostly serious when she says something for her own part.

I had my mom all to myself while I had her. Is that terrible? she’swondered aloud. Is that selfish? And he’s told her it isn’t. He’s asked gingerly if her parents wanted more kids. He’s jokingly surmised that they must have decided not to push their luck when they saw they’d hit on perfection the first time out. She’s elbowed him and flicked his ear and kissed him hard and murmured that she doesn’t know—that the question had never crossed her teenaged mind, that she can’t ask her dad. She can’t ask him. 

The subject of siblings is well-trodden ground between them. He thinks it is, anyway, until they cross paths with Saya Ozu, until they know that Jade Yamata really died in a way that hits far too close to home. It hits too especially close to home lately. 

It’s this sibling angle that preoccupies him as the case winds down at Saito’s. He stakes out a comfortable corner of a leather couch and watches from a distance as Beckett runs interference for Saya with the personnel from the local precinct. He watches Saya as she stands, stiff-spined at nearly military attention and still looks ten seconds from breaking. He tries to imagine what it would be like to lose a sister, a brother, a person who has only ever been imaginary for him. 

It’s still siblings he has on his mind when Kate surprises him at the precinct. She produces Jade’s dagger—the one Saya took from him, the one they took from Saya—and he’s . . . surprised. It seems to him an awful thing, a replica of the very thing that took Jade’s parents, Saya’s parents, their brother from them—to have such a thing commissioned seems to him such an awful thing. 

But he watches the moment pass between the two women, one whose pain he knows intimately, and one whose pain he considered with almost idle curiosity just moments ago, and he sees it’s the same. In some profound, essential way, it’s exactly the same. 

A terrible jolt of memory rattles his bones as he studies the reverence in Kate’s gesture as she sets the red cloth bundle across Saya’s palms. He sees, superimposed, the resin model of the knife that killed her mother passing from Clark Murray’s hands in to hers, and he is seized with what can only be a tin can echo of the pain the two women before him live with, day in and day out. A mother or a sister or one, then the other—he hasn’t known and can’t know that loss. 

The thought saddens him. It frustrates him and makes him want to do something—to spring into action or shoulder the load. It makes terribly aware how little he can, in reality, do to ease the pain. 

“That was a good thing you did for Saya,” he says when they’re almost home. Quiet has compounded quiet since they left the precinct. She has been guiding her unmarked through the route she could follow in her sleep. He has been watching familiar stretches of New York glide by, but he’s moved to tell her, at least, how he admires her. “A kind thing.”

“Was it?” She asks, almost absently. “I don’t . . .” She shakes her head and flicks on her turn signal. She coasts into a loading zone spot and switches off the ignition. Her head falls back against the headrest. “It was the right thing. And at least the bastard will be in jail. But she has to live with him in the world. I don’t know if it was kind.” 

“Sorry.” It’s a rasping whisper. He reaches for her hand and finds it in search of his. He lifts her palm to his lips. “It’s hard. Kate, I know it has to be so hard.”

“It’s worse.” She squeezes his fingers. It’s at once an apology and a desperate gesture of grief. “Since Vulcan Simmons. Since that . . . fucking announcement. I can’t do anything, and it’s worse.” 

“Maybe it’s time.” He’s surprised to find his voice. He’s surprised by the way it fills car and sounds certain. “You said—you’ve said since we’ve known it was Bracken—that we’d get him the right way.” He feels the weight of Jade’s dagger in his own hands. He pictures the bland, deceptively beige replica of Dick Coonan’s knife languishing in an evidence box somewhere. He understands their awful necessity. “Maybe it’s time we get started.” 

“Maybe,” she echoes. Her head rocks toward him along the headrest, like she’s too tired to lift it. The thought of this—the prospect of taking up this burden again—weighs on her. It wearies her, but he’ll help her shoulder it. “Maybe it’s time.” 

Their joint list-making endeavor devolves into chaos more or less immediately. He sneakily produces his original four-hundred-person behemoth. She, just as sneakily, produces hers and things devolve. 

“We should make a game of it,” he says with a bolt upright spine and a cartoon light bulb metaphorically above his head. “For every name you’re willing to cross off, I’m willing . . .” He trails off, still rocking the cartoon vibe as he waggles his eyebrows suggestively. 

“Strip Guest List?” She gives him a deadpan look, even though it’s not the worst idea she’s ever heard. But that’s really only because making up a wedding guest list is the worst idea she’s ever heard. “This is your solution?” 

“Well, I suppose it starts with strip.” He looks down at his t-shirt. “Should have worn a button down. But since I didn’t, you’re in luck.” He toys with the hem dragging it up an inch or two to reveal the drawstring waist of his pajama pants. “Because Strip Guest List is headed straight for Sexual Favor Guest List in a hurry.” 

“I’m not the one with three hundred names to get rid of.” She falls back into the crook of the couch and disrupts his striptease-tease with her toes. 

“Oh, so you’re willing to make it worth my while to . . .  pare this down.” 

He runs his hand down the first page of the alarmingly thick stack. He’s going for something sultry, but it’s more like slightly demented Vanna White. And apparently slightly demented Vanna White works for her, because things devolve into absolute chaos at that point. 

They wrestle the lists back and forth until they’re both much the worse for wear. They laugh and tussle and make out on the couch until Alexis comes in from the library. She stops to gape at the two of them sprawled there like a pair of deer in headlights, if deer were in the habit of getting caught rounding second base by their full-grown, soon-to-be stepdaughters. 

“Hey. Alexis,” he croaks, but she holds up her hand. She closes her eyes tight and gives her head a brisk shake as though she’s hoping the image might fall right out of her ear, and then she’s gone. 

They scamper, in an embarrassing state of undress, for the bedroom. She’s still clutching her list and the joint effort. He’s still clutching his and a fistful of ballpoint pens, fountain pens, sharpies, and—for some reason—scented markers in an array of pastels. He comes for her and she welcomes it. She ends up with names scrawled across the small of her back, along her thigh, stuttering over her ribs. He ends up with them curling down his arm, in the angle of his shoulder blade, on his kneecaps, because he makes her laugh at the most inopportune moments and she kind of hates him. 

They wind up in the shower, scrubbing each other clean, watching dark water swirling down the drain. They wind up leaning against each other, propping each other up until even the loft’s endless supply of hot water whispers Uncle. They lean against each other a little bit longer, because Strip or Sexual Favor or Chaos Guest List is exhausting. Fun, but exhausting. 

When the hot water is nothing but a memory, he leads her out of the shower stall. He towels her body dry—inefficiently, wickedly, anarchically, and when she bats at his hands and tells him she kind of hates him, he tells her he’s checking for names she might have snuck in when he wasn’t looking. She’d tell him that doesn’t make any sense. She’d tell him the names across the small of her back, along her thigh, stuttering over her ribs were his, but she’s tired now. She’s mumbling and grumbling, so he dances her from the bathroom to the bed. 

The lists are still there. The duvet and the blanket, the top sheet and the pillows are all gone, but the lists are still there, so he sweeps them aside with a grand gesture. He seeks out her pillow and restores it to its proper place. He sweeps her off her feet and sets her in the bed. He sets about restoring order to the bed itself, and if there is a tactile sensation more soothing than having someone you love snap a sheet high in the air and lay it with infinite care over your body, she doesn’t know what it is. 

He crawls in next to her. He fits the curve of his body to the curve of hers and he is out like a cartoon light the moment his head hits the pillow. She, surprisingly, is not. She’s weary. She’s absolutely weary, but the number one hundred keeps her just in the land of the conscious. 

How does she have a hundred people to invite to their wedding? She thinks of her days before him, the long stretch of her days after him. She thinks about her mother’s ring, her fathers watch, her badge and gun and her simple, lonely rituals. 

She thinks about they way he’s grown her world—because he asks for her stories and she remembers who she was—who she has been in the course of her life—and she recalls people who fell by the wayside. And she reaches out. Sometimes she does. And he asks after people he’s met once, who he’s never met, but they sent her a birthday card, so she sends one back. She adds their name to his massive Christmas Card List, and little by little she has this world of connections—old ones, new ones, and ones remade. 

She might have gotten there without him. She might have built herself and her world and her lists of birthday and Christmas and Halloween cards she has to send out. But with contentment settling on her a like fine linen sheet, she is grateful she didn’t have to. 

She is grateful. 

“It’s official.” He backs out of the last of the scattered closets in her apartment and plants his fists on his hips. “We have to go shopping.” 

“Nope.” She doesn’t look up from the magazine that she’s idly flipping through as she lounges on the couch with her feet up, her shoes and socks defiantly off. 

“I’ve gone through everything.” He gestures expansively toward the hall closet where, for some reason, she keeps a lot of her sweaters. “Everything here and in the wardrobe and unless there is yet another Narnia closet somewhere around here, nothing you own is going to sell it to Harold.” 

“Correct.” There’s some zing on that—there’s some interest—but she is still not looking up from the magazine. “Nothing is going to ‘sell it’ to Harold, because this is insane.” 

“Okay.” He crosses from the hallway to sit. She slams a pillow on to the chaise longue end of the couch to block him. She stretches her feet to their maximum extension. He frustrates her by plopping himself down on to the coffee table ottoman, deep into her personal space. “Agree to disagree about the ‘insanity’ or lack thereof, but we’re committed now.” 

“Yes” She finally slaps the magazine closed and lobs it in his general direction. “We’re committed to bringing a man who practically goes into a fugue state whenever he realizes what year it is and traumatizing him by showing him a rubber model of his dead best friend!” 

He wants to point out that it’s the most Sign From The Universe-y Sign From The Universe ever that they even have said rubber model, but it’s possible this will not enhance his argument. It’s possible he might not live to find out if he tries to carry the point, so he gamely makes a bid for her hand instead. 

“It’s a risk,” he says, persisting when she tries to tug away. “But what’s the worst case scenario? Harold can’t tell us anything and we know just as much tomorrow as we know right now.” 

“That’s not the worst case scenario.” She kicks sullenly at his thigh, but she relents on the hand front. “The worst case scenario is I have to go shopping.” 

Shopping really is kind of a worst case scenario In her mind. It’s weird, given how well-dressed she is, how earnestly devoted she is to shoes and coats alone, but she really does hate shopping. 

“This isn’t shopping shopping, though,” he argues as he puts his back to the door of the fifth or sixth shop they’ve hit. “Think of it as playing dress up.” 

He waits for her to say that she hates playing dress up, too, but the bell dings above the door when he pushes it open, and she’s silent. Silent-er than she was even when they started out, which is not the usual way of things. Kate Beckett does not exactly shy away from voicing her displeasure, except right now, she seems to be.

Odder still, she’s the one who’s drawing out their excursion. Although he could happily spend days strolling the East Village and popping in and out of these vintage stores, sensitive to her already short fuse when it comes to his genius plan, compounded by her horror of shopping, he’s made every effort to keep the jaunt as brief as possible. On their first stop, he’d picked a wide-collared shirt, a sport coat with a louder plaid than he’d usually be caught dead in, and—why not?—a thick gold chain. 

Unsurprisingly, she’d done little more than flick half-heartedly through circle racks, so he’d then turned his attention to pulling out possibilities, tentatively at first, then by the armful when it became clear that she was going to wave off practically everything. 

By the time they arrive here—at their fifth or sixth stop—he’s gotten her to try on a homeopathic number of things and hardly even gotten her to take a genuine look at any more than that. She puts space between them as soon as he’s inside the shop and he stops to gather himself for another round of Yes, every one of your turtlenecks, other than the magenta one, makes you look like a supermodel-slash-superspy. We are going for rookie detective from the seventies. 

He takes a deep breath and heads for the opposite side of the tiny shop. When he’s close enough, he’s surprised to see her with a fold of shimmering, poppy-colored fabric in her hand. He’s surprised to find her reaching up to unhook the hanger from the closet rod and spin, holding the dress—the decidedly ruffled disco dress—up to her body in search of a mirror. 

She spies one and rushes toward it with small, quick steps that are totally unlike her usual, confident, long-legged stride. He follows, at a distance, fascinated by the look on her face. It’s something close to awe, and it looks for all the world like she’s tearing up. Except Kate Beckett does not tear up at random in public. 

“Kate?” he says carefully as he draws up over her left shoulder in the mirror.

“My mom had one just like this,” she says like she was expecting him. “Almost like this. More red, I think. Hard to tell in a picture. But the ruffles and the way it wraps to cut high in the front—” She gestures at features he barely understands. “It was just like this.” 

He feels like a cad as realization tumbles around his ears. She’s a child of the eighties—a decade behind him, just as her parents are a decade behind his mother. Whereas Martha Rodgers’ flares and beads and diaphanous Stevie Nicks-wear are a fuzzy, slightly embarrassing childhood memory, for her, there would be photos of her parents as sweethearts, as newlyweds, as expectant parents. And in every one, her mother would be decked out in the kinds of things he’s had her pawing through for going on two hours now. 

“Kate, I’m—” He moves to put his hands on her shoulders, but she’s spinning toward him. 

“I want this,” she says firmly. She flicks a hand at the rest of the store. “Find me something to wear to the morgue. I don’t care. But I want this.” 

“You do?” He blinks, startled to realize that he’s read her mood wrong this whole time. “You want this.” He shakes himself. He snaps to and takes the dress from her with a courtly bow. “Then this, Detective Cupcake, you shall have.” 

Time has been flowing in an odd way for her lately. Or she’s more aware of time lately. Or something. It’s a sensation, not a preoccupation. It’s odd. 

Sometimes it’s little moments that make themselves known like tick marks on a hand-drawn timeline. She’s buttoning the cuffs of her work blouse and realizing a whole night has passed with him hunched over the Scrabble board trying to figure out where he—the reigning champion—could have gone wrong. 

And that stays with her—that moment of realization that she slept in his bed without him, only it’s not his bed, it’s theirs. The whole domestic scene stays with her—fruit on the counter, coffee in mugs, and she and Martha and Alexis ganging up on him. 

The two of them are poured out like a clear, steady stream of water from a pitcher—from home to the crime scene and he’s still being ridiculous about the stupid game.  She has the sudden notion that she could dip into any moment in the time stream of her life and there he’d be, being ridiculous about something. It makes her smile. There’s absolute continuity and pleasant, special occasion interruptions—a moment with Lanie to bend their heads together and share a girly squeal over dresses and dress fittings. 

She feels . . .  anchored to it all. She feels like it’s a snapshot she could plant on the sticky page of an old-fashioned photo album, and smooth the crinkly plastic over it. She could fix it there and point to it later to say This is where my life started. This is what my life was when it really started. 

With the case, with Logan Moore, it presents itself as sudden shock at how young everyone involved is. She has a vague sense that Logan, at twenty-one, is too young to have a driver’s license, to fly from coast to coast unaccompanied. She has a much stronger sense that Ross DeKoning is too young to already be such a douche, that everyone at his party ought to be dropping their red solo cups and scattering like cockroaches when the light flicks on, because she’s a grown-up, damn it, and surely everyone here is too young to drink. 

Damn it. She’s a grown-up, and that makes her smile, too, even though Rebel Bex is dying a little inside. 

And then the case snaps time like a rubber-band. Logan was in search of—hunted down—pieces of the past: A positively ancient camera, three-thousand dollars from a man he had every reason to hate, the teenage transgressions of a fellow competitor. 

Time converges—or it seems to—on a date six years in the past. Six years strikes her, at first, as being forever ago, but the garbled date stamped on the few frames of tape Tory has managed to salvage is another timeline tick mark. April 27, 2008. It’s less than a year before she met him, and she almost laughs out loud at the very idea, because how can that be? 

How can it be that they’ve known each other since Olden Times. She can see her own handwriting—March 9, 2009—on the interview notes she wrote up longhand and filed with the Tisdale case. She feels the weight of a flip phone in her hand and can’t remember—for the life of her she can’t remember—if she would have been able to take pictures with it, or if that was still in the future for everyone but fancy, technology-obsessed people like him back then. 

She watches Ryan clip a picture of Jay Dixon to the murder board. It looks like a school picture from—what?—seventh grade? She sobers, thinking about the driver’s license he never got to have and the red solo cups he’d never drink from at the party of some impossibly douchey rich kid. She thinks how strange it is that they—the police—must be practically the only ones who still use pictures printed on glossy paper, the kind you could stick to the page of an old-fashioned photo album, and smooth the crinkly plastic over them. You could, if only the idea weren’t so awful. 

She is a little preoccupied with time, then. She’s more than a little sad, more than a little unnerved at the way Logan Moore, a young man barely old enough to drink, died trying to right an ancient wrong—trying to come clean, speak out, get justice. It’s a tick mark on the hand-drawn timeline, Logan’s and her own, that she’d rather not think about.

She’d like—selfishly, she thinks—to rewind two days to that early morning moment buttoning her cuffs and fist-bumping Alexis and ganging up on hm around the kitchen counter. She has an opportunity there. He wants a rematch and there’s a moment when she pictures beating  his pants off, leaving him with five tiles and a stubborn sense of despair for company all night long. 

But she snaps the rubber band of time much further back, instead. She sweeps the Scrabble board clean with one emphatic gesture. She channels her soon-to-be mother-in-law. She produces a familiar pack of cards from the kitchen drawer, and she embraces Martha’s philosophy from Olden Times: Well, frankly, I prefer strip because even when you lose, you win.

It begins as a phantom itch. Actually, it begins as a pointed gesture. Donovan concedes, with no small amount of glare-mediated pressure from Gates, that the tape lends credence to their claims that Beckett is not a murderer, that someone has been setting her up all along. He relents and jerks his head at one of his lackeys in a gesture that seems to cause him physical pain. The pain seems only to intensify as said lackey finally tuns the key to release her cuffs, his cuffs, the cuffs that are still on Ryan and Esposito, because Donovan and his IA boys are fans of security theater. 

He makes a show of chafing the feeling back into his hands. He fixes Donovan with something that’s less a glare than it is a promise that this moment would be playing out very differently if he didn’t have infinitely more important things on his mind. 

He goes to her. He thumbs her long sleeves upward and examines the reddened skin at her wrists. Her desperate lunge for the elephants, combined with frantic fumbling amid the very real possibility of being gunned down, means she’s worse off than he is. It’s more than red. There are angry-looking welts that are starting to go blue–purple already. It’s not exactly a crisis, but it is a path into the moment, a path he desperately needs, when every other concern is so monumental, his mind is at constant risk of shutting down entirely. 

“You okay?” He murmurs, trying to find her eyes—trying to let her feel the press of his fingers against against the hammering pulse at the base of each thumb. 

“Okay.” She seems to snap back into herself. She gives him a sharp nod, and he watches it happen—he watches her assemble herself from the minute pieces the last forty-eight hours—the last fifteen years—have shattered her into. “Yeah, I’m okay.” 

“Guess you’re used to rough stuff with the cuffs,” he says low enough that there’s no possibility  of anyone in the cramped work room hearing but her. He’s not actually sure she has heard as the moment draws out and she’s staring at a point somewhere just southwest of his Adam’s apple. 

But then she murmurs back. She lifts her chin and cocks an eyebrow. “Not usually on the receiving end, am I?”  

She leads the way out of the room, then. Everyone follows—Gates, Donovan, lackeys and all. She strides to her rightful place by the Vulcan Simmons murder board. He stands aside, proud and as in awe of her ever, as she and Gates, plus a few strategic phone calls that communicate the need to act swiftly and without further enlarging the circle of those in the know, hammer out the what next details, leaving Donovan largely mute and fuming. 

That’s when the itch starts up. It’s not real, he knows. For one thing, there’s nothing there, not even the tiny bit of redness he’d made a show of at first. For another, it jumps from wrist to wrist, and when he actually has something to do—which is not often, as things start to happen at lightning speed—it disappears for long stretches of time. 

It’s worst on the flight. She sits beside him, spine straight, eyes front, and absolutely silent. He sits beside her, trying his damnedest to be still, to be silent, to be at the ready for whatever she needs, and Dear God, it’s both his wrists now, itching like absolute mad. 

“Castle what?” She finally says, her head snapping toward him. 

“Nothing.” He takes the opportunity to swipe her hand and press a surreptitious kiss to her fingertips. “Sorry.” 

She scowls a little, but holds tight to his hand for the last little bit of the flight. The phantom itch skulks off to wherever phantom itches skulk. Holding tight to her hand is an all-encompassing Something To Do. 

It rears its head again—both wrists, and now there is something to see, as he can’t keep from clawing at his own skin—as he’s separated from her in the unmarked DC Police convoy that rolls Code-2 until the Capitol Police pick up their escort. It keeps him company on the steps as he waits for her. 

And then it stops, suddenly and utterly, as he catches his first glimpse of her in the crush of people  suddenly seething out between the columns. There’s a man behind her with a massive television camera lofted over his head, pointed directly down at Bracken, in handcuffs. In her handcuffs.

There’s an itch at the back of his mind now. There’s something nagging, but it will have to wait. Bracken is going, Bracken is gone, and her face is serious as she comes toward him. It is composed, sorrowful. There will be triumph later, he hopes, but even though this moment contains multitudes, there is no room for that right now. 

The itch at the back of his mind keeps its own counsel all the way back to New York. She holds his hand tight and holding hers right back is his sole occupation until they have to part, once again. 

Back at the precinct, the itch speaks. It makes itself known, and he stands like a fool, twisting at the waist, trying to arrive at a plausible course of action. It finds him in the form of Esposito. 

“You put him in the car,” he says, tugging urgently at the man’s sleeve. “Bracken—he was in—they were Beckett’s cuffs?” 

With the sentence fragments and rising inflection, he’s hardly making sense, even to himself. He hardly understands what the stupid itch is asking, but Esposito seems to follow. He produces a perfect pair of cuffs from the depths of his suit jacket. 

“Got ‘em.” There’s a world of feeling in the two simple words, in the solemnity with which he hands them over. “Figure’d she’d want them.” 

It’s what he figures, too. It’s what the itch has been about—both of them—but once he has them, he’s not sure what to do with them. He thinks about his bell jars and shadow boxes at home—all his framed, mounted, proudly displayed mementos. He thinks about that. He thinks about slipping out and throwing obscene amounts of money at someone to create something worthy of being hung with pride. 

But she’s unexpectedly finished. It’s unexpectedly time to hold her hand tight and take her home. It’s time to follow her lead on whatever comes next—however she wants it to go. 

And she seems to want normalcy. She wants a glass of wine and she wants to put her feet up before she can face even getting undressed. She wants to download the strangest little details and to settle into the crook of his arm. 

She wants to get ready for bed, like usual, not too long after. He watches her slip off her blazer and twitch it straight on the hanger. He sees her reach up to fetch the lock box for her service weapon off the closet shelf. He sees her go through the familiar motions, and he knows exactly what to do. 

“Here,” he says gently as he produces the cuffs from the inside pocket of his jacket. “You’ll probably need these.” 

It’s damned ineloquent for a writer, but really, what could he say that could compete with the look on her face as she turns and sees the silver bracelets dangling from his finger. 

“Need them.” She sounds lost for a moment. Heartbreakingly lost, but it passes. It gives way to satisfaction, determination, triumph. She takes hold of one loop and swings the other up to double it in an expert gesture. “Yeah. Work to do.” 

He offers her vast sums of money to help him sign copies of Wild Storm. He repeatedly offers, and she can’t help doing the math on how many books he could have signed in the time it takes him to make each elaborate, indecent proposal. 

“We are talking obscene amounts of money, Beckett.” He follows her around the loft, hands clasped before him in supplication. “Truly obscene.” 

“What do I want money for?” she asks as she swats at him and dances away. “Haven’t you heard? I’ve got a white whale on the line?” 

“You haven’t quite landed him yet,” he grumbles, but his eyes sparkle with anticipation. “What if he dies of  . . .  of toxic Sharpie inhalation or something before you can say ‘I do’?” 

“My heart . . . and my well-rested hands will go on.” Her words are steely enough, but she   produces a silver spray paint pen from somewhere up her sleeve and offers it to him.

“Oh, so you think I can be bought with prestidigitation and gimmicky pens?” He gives her a haughty, wounded look, but he’s too much of a kid not to love the new toy. He races back to the desk and reapplies himself to the last of his pre-wedding tasks. The tactic gets him through five, ten, fifteen more books before he’s after her for help again. 

She doesn’t help. She will not help. She tells him even his groupies deserve the Real McCoy, and she shames him when he brags about Tom Sawyering Alexis into mastering the swoop of the R, the sharp, arcing C and the comparative scribble of the other letters when both expediency and style matter. 

“I’ll have you know, her efforts did not go unrewarded,” he informs her with a wounded sniff. “She got some choice swag back in the good old days.” 

“Choice swag for child labor. Is that how you sleep at night?” She tosses a glitter gel pen at him, mostly to see if the trick will work twice, but a little bit as a diversion, too. It doesn’t work on either front. 

“You’re going somewhere?” He practically bats the pen out of midair and on to the desk. He sets down the book in his hand—half signed, no doubt— and trots after her. “Where are you going? Take me with you, please.” 

“I’m going to my dad’s.” She moves to lift her hair free of her jacket collar, but he beats her. He shakes it out and sets her lapels to rights. He gives her his most devastating puppy dog eyes, but she stands firm. “You’re not invited.” 

“He’s going to talk you out of it.” His hold on the front of her coat tightens. “You want him to talk you out of it. You’ve come to your senses. That’s why you’re willing to let me die—literally die—of paper cuts.”

“You know I wasn’t gonna let my dad talk me out of it.” She uncurls his fingers one by one. “But all this drama about signing a few books? I might hear him out?” “A few?” He stands, aghast, as she makes her break for the door. “Five hundred is not ‘a few’ I seem to recall someone freaking out about five hundred of something not so long ago.” 

“Oh, hey! There’s an idea.” She takes a theatrical pause halfway out the door. She tosses a wicked over her shoulder. “Signed copies for every wedding guest!” 

“You’re mean!” His voice carries through the door. It carries most of the way to the elevator. “You are a mean woman, Kate Beckett.” 

“Katie, hi!” Her dad’s smile is bright enough when he opens the door. The hug he wraps her up in is warm enough, but he seems almost surprised to see her. 

“Hi, Dad!” She returns the hug. She pulls back and stands on his doorstep, more than a little confused when he makes no move to invite her in. “We did say three, right? Three today?” 

She fumbles her phone out of her pocket as if to check her calendar. She panics a little, worried that with so much going on, she’s managed to jumble dates and times, whens and wheres, But her gesture breaks whatever spell he has been momentarily—and uncharacteristically—under. 

“Three. Yes, of course, sweetheart.” He steps back and gestures her inside. He takes his time closing the door behind her, as though he’s reluctant to leave the foyer.  “I’ve got . . . well I’m sure I’ve got what you need pulled out and dusted off.” 

His voice is a little too hearty as he leads her down the hall and into the dining room. His place is as tidy and spare as ever, save for the banker’s box that takes up a substantial chunk of the table. 

She can see the files inside, set neatly on their spines with the labeled manila tabs staggered and easily thumbed through. She can see from the way two or three sit not quite flush with the others that he has been thumbing through them in search of the certified copy of her birth certificate that she’s come to get. 

“It’s here. Vital documents. This is where right where it’ll be,” he says sounding . . . flustered. If he were anyone but her dad—her matter-of-fact, brass tacks, tell-it-like-it-is dad—she’d say he sounds embarrassed. “I just got a little sidetracked.”

His chin drops. She follows his gaze to a folder half hidden behind the lid propped against the side of the box. It lies open, and she sees now that it’s sitting exactly in front of a chair pushed back from the table, out of sync with the others, perfectly aligned. 

Her fingers trail along the polished, beveled edge of the table as she steps around to the place he’s only just risen from. She knows what she’ll see before she plants a palm and leans over the folder. It’s a long moment, though, before she can calm herself enough to settle her gaze. She knows what it is that’s sidetracked her dad, what has him looking closer to sentimental than she’s seen him in years. 

“Affidavit, License, and Certificate of Marriage,” she reads aloud softly. 

Her eyes scan down the page slowly. She takes her time with it, savoring the familiar slant of her mother’s neatly printed capitals. She grins at the playful swoop of her Ts and the precise, intent action that comes alive in every stroke. She lingers over the address, the date, the dry details. She lets the anticipation build a moment longer, then feels the smile spreading through her whole body as her gaze falls at last on the playful, absolutely distinct elegance of her mother’s signature. 

“I know you’re busy.” Her dad steps close beside her. His arm comes around her shoulder and he laughs, shamefacedly, as he gives in to the temptation to reach out and rest his fingertips on the generous loop of the J. “I meant to have that birth certificate all ready for you to go. And then there she was.” 

“Here she is,” she corrects him as her fingers join his on the page. “Hi, Mom.”  

He is not signing books when she makes it back to the loft. He has an army of Sharpies arrayed before him, varying in color, in tip size and style, in click-y versus non-click-y status. He has the spray paint pen and the the glitter gel pen. He may actually have all the pens in the loft arrayed before him, but he is not signing books. 

“How many did you get done?” She lets her arms fall over his shoulders. Her palms rest flat on the desk, trapping him in the swivel chair. She reaches for the nearest book to check. She’s quick, but he’s quicker—this time, at least—and he very nearly catches her finger as he slams the cover. “None? Really?” 

“Not none,” he insists, but the guilty look on his face strongly suggests that the number is a few doors down from none. “All of these are garbage.” He gestures defensively to his pen army. “They smell bad and they squeak and they make my hand hurt and have I mentioned the paper cuts?” 

“Paper cuts. Death.” She laughs against the crook of his neck. “The issue has been raised.” 

“i’ll do them tomorrow,” he says with an air of finality. He pushes off with his feet, and in a move that certainly should not work, he breaks her hold, spins the chair, and scoops her into his lap. “Plenty of time tomorrow,” he mutters, working on her blouse buttons in such a determined way that he nearly has her on board. 

“Tomorrow,” she murmurs, and the word has walked right up to the door of his diabolical plan to distract her. It’s walked right up, but it hasn’t quite slipped in yet. She manages to grab his wrists. “No! Tomorrow we have City Hall. We have the license tomorrow.” 

“License,” he scoffs as he shakes off her hold. “That’ll take, like, half an hour.” 

“What if I could . . . inspire you to get these signed?” She’s pouring it on thick, giving him her most seductive tone.  

“Inspiration. Yeah, that was . . . “ He pauses dramatically as he pops the button that reveals a glimpse of her bra. “. . . the plan.” 

“Good!” She’s on her feet and racing for the bedroom closet. She retrieves the small, wedge-shaped box that’s fancier than her fanciest evening bag. She’s back in the office, holding it out to him before he’s had time to so much as sputter a protest. “Voila. Inspiration. Open it.” 

She’s unsure for half a second. It’s her wedding present to him—the man who has everything—and for half a second it feels like cheating to give it to him now instead of after they’ve crossed all their Ts with playful swoops and dotted their is with precision. But she sees her mother’s signature in her mind’s eye. She sees her father’s next to it, and it doesn’t feel like cheating. 

He hesitates, not knowing what this gesture means, but sensing its import to her. He takes the box in one hand and tugs her close with the other. The fancy box doesn’t so much open as it unfurls, revealing its treasure nestled in actual snow white satin. 

“Is this—”  he gasps as his fingers scramble to take it up. “A Pineider Mystery Filler!” 

She should probably be offended that her half-open blouse is all but forgotten as he rifles through his secret stash of ink bottles to find one worthy of the inaugural fill of the fancy, clear-barreled fountain pen with its watch-work mechanism. She should scold him for the dramatic sweep of his arms that sends the rest of the unworthy pen army to ground. 

Instead, she perches on his knee. She listens to him rattle off the pen’s vital statistics, including the A-listers who use it and those in the mystery writer brotherhood who’d kill to have one. She oohs andahs along with him as the magnet in the cap causes it to snap satisfyingly to. 

She helps, finally. With one of his arms wrapped firmly around her waist, he needs her to, so she sets each book in exactly the right place and braces it for him while he swoops through R and scrawls his way toward the emphatic arc of the C. She helps him work his way through five, ten, fifty books, and the sight of his signature loses none of its charm. 

But she plucks the pen out of his hand when they make it fo fifty books. She caps it with a satisfying magnet snick. She reminds him of her half-open blouse. And after they’re both spent, after he’s fallen asleep, she lies awake, fingers pressed to the butterflies in her stomach, and she pictures his signature, right next to hers.