Chapter 1
It was a quiet morning in the big house that Kate Beckett and Richard Castle had bought for the birth of their first child, Jonah fifteen years earlier.
Since then, they had had two more kids: Evan, whom they had adopted thirteen years earlier, and Alexandra, whom they had adopted eleven years earlier.
As every week, Alexis arrived for Sunday lunch with her fiancé, a young doctor named Scott. The family sat down to enjoy Castle's famous lasagna. Even if they had never really lived together, the writer's four children had an extremely strong bond and the whole family cherished these moments together as a family.
After lunch, the children went out for shopping together in the neighborhood while Rick stayed home to work on the script for the first Nikki Heat film. Kate, for her part, went to spend the afternoon with her father as she did once or twice a month.
The children returned home in the late afternoon and an hour later Kate returned home. As soon as he saw her, Rick noticed that a dark veil had landed on his wife's face.
Kate didn't say a word and went to start cooking dinner. Her husband wanted to take her in his arms, but she pushed him away directly.
"What's going on, baby?" "You know exactly what's going on, Castle!"
"No, I don't know what's going on! Did things go wrong with your father?"
"Look, Rick, do you think I feel good when I walk with my father and see on the front page of Pure magazine that you cheated on me."
Kate handed her husband a people's newspaper called the "Pure" on which was written "Rick Castle, everything about his adventure with model Olivia Brandon in Vegas" with a selfie of him with a young woman.
"Kate, you don't seriously think I could have done something like that?!"
"Look, there's proof. Look at this picture, it's you!"
"Seriously, Kate! We all know that this article was written only to sell newspapers about fucking lies!"
"You know very well that a thousand words are not worth much in the face of proof. I checked, on the nights she said you were together, you were on a promotional tour in Vegas. Tell me if you really slept with that girl and at least we can see then what we need to do."
"Well, I'm going to do what I have to do. I'll get my things and spend a few days in the Hamptons. We can't go on like this if we can't even trust each other."