"Who is Kate Beckett," he asked.
The question hung in the air like a lead balloon. The room was quiet, just the slight sound of a ticking clock.
Kate Beckett stared at the man across from her. The therapist she had been seeing on an off for a month, since she returned to the job. He had cleared her, she had passed her psyche evaluation to return to work, but she came back to him just days after donning her detectives badge again.
In her second day back, she had frozen. The suspect had pulled a gun on her and she couldn't move. Her hands shook, her breathing was labored and all she could think about was the sniper's bullet that had burrowed in her chest at Captain Montgomery's funeral.
Kate had a chance to redeem herself. Or what she saw as a chance, the next day. The real murder suspect pulled a shotgun on her, in the same dingy warehouse. Except this time Richard Castle was standing behind her. She kept hearing him tell her she had this, she could do it. And she finally talked the man down and he dropped his weapon.
But Castle couldn't be her crutch. He couldn't be behind her every minute of every day telling her she could do this job,that she wouldn't feel the bullet pierce her chest each time she faced a perp with a gun.
So, she had made the decision to go back to the shrink. To talk to him about what she was going through, to tell him the truth.
When she had first started going to see him, as a mandate for her release back to active duty, she had lied to him. She had told the psychiatrist that she didn't remember anything about the shooting. Didn't remember being shot, didn't remember the moments after.
But that was a lie. And when she started going back to see him, after returning to duty, she told him the truth. She had remembered everything, the shooting, the feel of the bullet and what Richard Castle had said to her.
After being shot, Kate had felt Rick Castle's weight upon her as he tackled her to the ground. She could feel his hands on her chest, trying to stop the bleeding, the crimson life force flowing from her body like a flood, soaking into her pristine white gloves and on his hands.
As she was fading into unconsciousness, she heard his declaration. Richard Castle, playboy best-selling novelist who had followed her around for almost three years, annoyed her, embarrassed her and claimed she was his muse, loved her.
And that scared the hell out of her. So, when he came into her hospital room and told him she didn't remember anything, she did it to avoid the feelings bubbling up inside her. But they were there. It was why she broke up with Josh and why she avoided Castle during her recovery. She loved him too, but just didn't know how to tell him, how to be with him and how to move forward.
So, it threw Kate Beckett when the psychiatrist asked her who she was. Of course she knew who she was.
"Kate Beckett, NYPD Detective," she said with a hint of pride.
"That is what you do," he said as he scribbled something in his notebook. "Who is Kate Beckett?"
The simple question rattled the often stoic Kate Beckett. Richard Castle's words came back to haunt her. He had said pretty much the same thing in her apartment all those months ago, when he begged her to stop looking into her mother's murder, just two days before she was shot. Castle had told her she had crawled into her mother's murder and hadn't come out.
Had she really lost herself? Once Katherine Beckett was a typical young woman from an affluent family and she loved her life. She was enjoying college life at NYU and she had decided to be a theatre major. One incident, one shot in a dark alley robbed her of not only her mother but of herself.
It hit her harder then she thought it would. Johanna Beckett wasn't the only one murdered 12 years ago, the carefree young girl named Katie Beckett also died, replaced by a hardened and bitter young woman who put all her rage and grief from her mother's murder into her job at the NYPD.
Who is Kate Beckett? His words kept ringing in her ears. And she guessed it was a question she needed to answer along with who she wanted to be. And when she could discover that, then she could find out who she could be with Richard Castle.