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Chapter One
Murder Board
(Castle)

His unconscious mind is stark. An empty murder board. The whiteness of it, lit by the lamps of late night, is swallowed time and again by the ebb and flow of darkness before he understands that there is something missing.

Kate.

Her silhouette, swaying as she writes. The squeak of the whiteboard marker as information is laid out, the snap of the magnet as another photograph is added, facts accumulating until they lead to a discovery.

He analyzes the facts at hand. There aren't many. Sometimes, there is pain, dull and sharp at the same time, but mostly there is just a humming quiet. So quiet that he can't think. This isn't his mind; what has happened to his mind? What happened to the cacophonous commotion of a thousand budding ideas pushing up through the soil, the real and imagined feelings that are his constant companions?

Then, just as the blank murder board emerges from another darkness, he's flooded with the cloying, sweet scent of maraschino cherries. It's not Kate, then. When she smelled of cherries it was light and delicate, radiating from the heat of her lips or the crown of her head.

A memory surfaces. Of them, rising and falling in the early light of morning, a phone call, an important victim, no time for a shower or even to finish what they'd started, him following her into her bathroom and into a cherry flavored cloud of dust. Pulling her nakedness up against his, growling "So that's why you smelled more intensely of cherries that day."

Memory Kate finishes spraying the cherry-scented dry shampoo on her roots and turns in his arms.

"You mean the comic book case? How close were you?" she asks, bringing her lips almost to his. "To kissing me?"

"Pretty damn close. What would you have done if I had?"

"Kissed you back. I would have always kissed you back."

Wait. Maybe that's just what her eyes were saying. She'd actually said something like "fought you off" or "we were at work, what was I supposed to do?"

Besides, she doesn't smell like cherries anymore. He's done a lot of growing up since meeting her, but she's grown up as well. He's always wondered how much of her wardrobe and makeup evolution was inspired by working with him. That choppy bob, the Bonnie Bell cherry chap-stick (for the record, he has no idea how one tube ended up in the drawer of his bedside table during that second year) and the off-the-rack blazers were cute, but she's in a whole other league now they're six years down the road. It's all Helmut Lang and romantic waves and the perfect, expensive balance of vanilla and musk now. But he still likes it best when the only thing she smells of is him.

So the overwhelming cherry scent - that's definitely not her. That's the first fact, then. It appears, letter by letter, on the whiteboard.

She's not here with me.

And then the second:

I miss her.

The pain returns and another curtain of darkness descends.