"You can't hang that painting there," Kate Beckett told him firmly, standing beside him in the livingroom, aghast he was considering hanging a huge painting of their wedding day out in the open.
Castle held the painting up, arms extended, visualizing how it would look on the wall. "This is the perfect spot."
"No, oh my God, Castle, no." She moaned, her head in her hands. "Wherever you learned your interior design skills I suggest you go back and demand a refund."
He lowered the painting and frowned. "Okay, maybe it's not the greatest spot ever."
She raised her hands to the ceiling and muttered, "Thank you."
She followed him into his study as he placed the painting carefully out of the way while he wrestled with where to hang it.
"Just, trust me. There's a better place for it."
"But where?" he asked.
"The bedroom," she told him without a hint of a waver in her voice.
"The bedroom?" He hefted up the painting and carried it carefully to where Linus once adorned the wall, so long ago now.
She stood beside him, silent, watching as he removed the seashells from off the wall, smiled as the memories crashed over him, and placed the small frame on the bed. He lugged the painting up, and secured it to the wall.
They both stood back and admired it in silence.
The painting he had commissioned from a photo, the one she had tried to talk him out of, but had failed. But now she kind of liked that she hadn't been able to convince him otherwise, because seeing it now made her heart swell. It wasn't gaudy, or garish. It was skillfully painted, and now it hung privately in their bedroom, where only they could see it.
Where only he could see it.
"I miss you, Kate," he rasped out, stumbling backwards to sit on the bed, his eyes never leaving the painting. "You weren't supposed to leave me."
"And I never will," she promised, her words unheard, her ghost unseen.