A/N: Thank you soooooo very much for all your feedback! As you will hopefully see, I attempted to explain the reasoning for some uncharacteristic actions in the last chapter!! I'm really thankful for your interest and extremely helpful feedback! Please let me know what you think so I can push ideas for the next chapter out of my head!! I'd like to squeeze a good many chapters in before this Friday! And now, for chapter 3:

"What are you talking about?" Natalie cried, taking a step back from Adrian. "Are you implying that what I said earlier was so that I could see your bellybutton?!"

"Hey, no need to explain yourself to me," he replied, holding his hands up, a knowing grin on his tired face. He was flirting with her but in a way she'd never imagined, by teasing that her feelings weren't real. Whether or not he actually believed that there were underlying motives when she told him she loved him wasn't important—he'd already informed her of his reasoning for believing it.

"That's not why I said it, Mr. Monk," she asserted, her voice lower than before. "I said it because I meant it."

"Sure, sure." He was unabashedly grinning now, looking down at her with a smile of perfect confidence.

Natalie was irritated by this exchange. Did he really think she was that shallow? Did he really think he could lie about something like that?

"So are you saying you told Trudy you loved her just so you could see her bellybutton—or whatever you wanted to see on her?"

He looked utterly stumped, and froze in place, the sheen of sweat on his brow. His smile of confidence had changed into a grimace of discomfort. She had touched a nerve there, and was glad to have done so.

"Of course not," he muttered, his shoulder twitching. "But that's different…."

"No it's not."

"It's not?"

"No," she replied, utterly exasperated. "Just go take your shower, Mr. Monk."

With a gentle push she began to walk him towards the bathroom, him not bothering to resist though she hadn't exactly promised him she would not enter the room if he should fall. He couldn't help but wonder why she was dropping the subject. Was she saying that her feelings for him were like his feelings for Trudy? That was utterly impossible. He was utterly taken with Trudy: she his every thought, the cause of every smile, the reason he wanted to wake up in the morning. She was his life. How could Natalie dare put herself on that level?! She was dating another man, for God's sake!

"Natalie, why are you telling me this…" he murmured irritably as a late response, as they strode down his hallway arm in arm.

"Why am I telling you how I feel!?" she cried, her voice pitched higher. "Because I can't let you go without you knowing the truth. I thought you'd figure it out on your own—and you didn't."

"What are you talking about? You're with Lieutenant Albright. How could I compete with that? He's normal… and not dying."

"Mr. Monk!" she cried, her voice shrill. "If you say the word again so help me!" She took a second to calm herself. "You know that I've only been with him since the captain's wedding. The only reason I even called him up in the first place was because you were in the wedding party and I needed a wedding date."

Now mere steps outside the bathroom, Monk came to a sudden halt. Natalie followed suit. He turned to his assistant.

"So if I hadn't been the captain's best man you wouldn't have called up Lieutenant Albright," he muttered, studying her expression.

"Right."

She crossed her arms, looking adamant.

"So it's my fault that you're with him," he said.

"No, but—"

"That's what you just said. If I hadn't been in the wedding party you would have gone with me."

"Yes, but—"

"And then you ended up in the wedding party anyway. It's fate, Natalie, that you're with him now. I can't compete with fate. Look at the cards it dealt me. In two or three days I'll be dead."

"Stop that, Mr. Monk," she scolded. "They'll figure out what the poison is and they'll treat you. You're going to be okay. I've been researching ricin and it says that if you can hold out for a couple of days, your chance of survival goes way up. You've got to keep strong and stop putting yourself down."

"You're not a very good liar, you know."

"It's true," she insisted, squeezing his elbow. "I read it from a couple of reliable sites on the internet."

"Thank you for trying to make me feel better, but it's no use," he said with a shrug. "Well, being as this shower will take a while, as you know, you should probably call your boyfriend," he added bitterly, leaning the heel of his hand against the bathroom door. "If I were him I'd be worried about you."

Now what was that supposed to mean?

As she opened her mouth to speak, Adrian moved past her to the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. It seemed her recent dalliance with Lieutenant Albright had stunted any deeper relationship with Adrian Monk from growing. The seeds had been planted, that she certainly knew. She thought back to several touching moments that stuck out in her mind….

There was the day she had left a very promising date to accompany Adrian to his college class reunion, allowing for all who saw them to assume they were a couple—and being surprisingly okay with that fact.

That time when he had been arrested for the murder of Frank Nunn, she had refused to believe him capable of such a thing. And in believing him to be killed by the captain's hand, it would have been easy for her to hold a lifelong grudge on the captain. She had put her life savings into Monk's memorial, had given him Mitch's prized Navy uniform to wear without a second thought. It came naturally for her to want to help him, to sympathize with him, to honor him. When she finally found him in that car wash, he accepted her flourish of kisses without pulling away.

They had been locked in a bank vault together. He had placed Trudy's bracelet across her wrist, had placed his head in her lap and fallen asleep. Though they were running out of air fast, it was quite the time to bond. She had enjoyed comforting him, had enjoyed the weight of his body on hers, had felt a kind of peace at watching him sleep ever so quietly in her lap.

Then there was his birthday only two months ago. He had told her what he perceived to be a deep dark secret, one that he hadn't even shared with his therapist. She had surprised him completely with a party and he was utterly delighted; had spent over $100 to hire and transport Cowboy Hank out of the old age home for an afternoon just to rewrite history for Adrian, to show him that the partiers were there for him and not the entertainer. She'd never seen such joy in his face at the sight of all his friends and coworkers, though she had seen how he stared at the side of her face as she spoke her final words upon emerging from the dumpster, had seen how he had blinked in complete shock, almost falling over, as she made the revelation. As they sat at their table later, he'd lifted cake to her mouth on his fork, no less. Only a couple of minutes passed before he used that same fork, that unwashed fork, to feed himself some cake. She remembered thinking at the time: had he forgotten what he had done? The answer was a resounding no! Adrian Monk did not forget!

After getting his badge back, he'd told her he'd miss her. He hadn't asked her to give back her key to his apartment, hadn't even told her to lock up after he'd left for work that morning. She'd almost moved across the threshold to give him a kiss, only stopping after she'd considered possible negative reactions from him. She'd never felt more like a wife than she did that morning, making him his meal for work. It gave her feelings of warmth and comfort that she thought she had lost for good when Mitch died. Of course, later on when Adrian had decided to quit the force on his own volition, it was he who moved to hug her—and he did so fully and unabashedly—she'd never admit to him the tingles she felt at that moment.

The seeds were there, germinating into little white stalks in the darkness, their cotyledons emerging as a perfect pair of tiny leaves. The presence of Steve Albright, especially at present, served as an herbicide to halt the progress that had been made between her and Adrian, the slow emergence of feelings that would have at one point been next to impossible to even consider. The herbicide had done its duty, had poisoned the plant, and now Monk was suffering a very real poisoning. The irony of the situation was thick enough to slice.

Could it be that Monk's recent barrage of bitter remarks was because he was hurt? Could it be that he believed her confession of love to be a joke because of her choice to date Albright? She had told him she loved him, but really, what reason was there for him to believe her words when she was currently with another man? Really though, it explained a lot. He at first had been in a kind of denial, yet he then allowed bitterness to seep in. Though she claimed to love him, she had not chosen him.

"Just tell me what you want me to do!" she suddenly cried against the door, feeling overcome with emotion. Instead of an answer, she heard the shower being turned on at the same time her tears began flowing again.

Adrian Monk sighed as he turned the lock on his bathroom door, hearing the resounding click as the deadbolt slid into the wall. The deadbolt had been installed at his request and was a rather good investment. There'd be no unexpected visitors while he was in an indecent state. If he should fall, there'd be no way for Natalie to get through that door and help him. Ah, but what was the use anyway? He'd be dead soon enough. For one instant he considered silently unlocking the door but his nudity phobia quickly overruled that thought.

As he turned the shower on, he could've sworn he heard a quick, choked intake of breath, like a sob.

Nah, he reassured himself. With another sigh, he undid the belt of his robe and checked the water temperature. Perfect.

Shutting his eyes tightly, he slipped out of his robe and then the remainder of his clothes and stepped into the shower, leaning on the wall for support. With one sense completely unavailable to him, he could now hear the faint steps of Natalie's footfalls outside the door fading as she walked down the hallway.

Thankfully the multicolored pills had taken away the dots, but the fact still remained that he had a throbbing headache and worse, that he was nauseated. The big N. The big N that would eventually lead to the bigger V. Oh, God. To even think about it made the nausea that much worse.

Would Natalie run from the house when it started to happen? He wished he could run away when the time came. Even if Trudy had done it, he would have run, but she rarely got sick and he couldn't remember the last time he'd been sick in such a way. He made a mental note to move vomiting up to the number two spot—scratch that, the number one spot on his phobia list. And death would be the new number two. The rest would fall in place after that.

How was he going to get Natalie out of the house when it happened? Even if she was crazy enough to want to stay, he did not want her seeing such things.

I can't let her go through that, he mused. The only thing worse than watching it is doing it.

He felt around blindly in front of him for the soap and a clean washcloth he'd put out the day before. The water beating down on his chest was extremely hot and yet he ignored the pain as he lathered up and began washing his face, wiping the sweat and tears and whatever else off his skin.

Within a minute or so the intense heat became too much. He opened his eyes, albeit briefly, focusing them on the showerhead, which he promptly aimed away from him. His mind focused on the task at hand, he adjusted the temperature of the water.

This may be the last time I take a shower. I'm not going to make it to Christmas. Will they bury me next to Trudy? Now that I think about it, I should have bought her a bigger tombstone with my name on it. Why didn't I, anyway? Should she and I have separate tombstones or one tombstone? I should tell Natalie, so she can handle that issue if I'm not able to get to it.

The question remained: why had he not bought a tombstone big enough for both their names? Was he, in the days following her death, so out of it that he hadn't been thinking clearly while buying the tombstone, or had he purposely left the possibility open that he wouldn't be buried next to her?

He groaned, feeling wave after wave of pain attacking his stomach. Though his eyes were closed he felt the room spinning around him. Before he could allow the baseline level of nausea to creep up to even more noticeable levels, he decided to sit down and calm himself.

The shower poured down on his head as he sat with eyes tightly shut on the bottom of the bathtub, the steam in the air making it more difficult than usual to breathe.

It was then that he heard an odd metallic ringing in his ears, overpowering the sound of the water falling upon his head and the floor of the tub. It became so intense that he covered his ears, lifting his head to look up at the shower head and nothing more. What he saw there shocked him.

It was a bright white apparition of Trudy floating in front of the shower head—well, more like standing there. She was clad all in a blindingly white dress and the water flow apparently didn't bother her at all. His eyes stung from hot stray droplets of water as he gaped up at the figure above him. Instinctively he closed his legs, covering himself with a washcloth.

"Hello, Adrian."

"Hello… Trudy," he muttered back, his nausea all but completely forgotten.

"It won't be much longer," the ghost told him.

"I know," he muttered, voice barely audible, though a smile was not to be seen on his face.

"I can tell you don't want to go," she added.

"That's not true," he cried, voice breaking.

"Oh, Adrian; I can see when you're not telling me the whole truth. As I've said before, you're the world's greatest detective, and the world's worst liar."

"You know me better than I know me," he remarked with a weak smile, his face now deathly pale. "I'm afraid to die. I didn't think I would feel this way, Trudy. I thought being with you in the end would make it easier to stomach, but it's not helping…."

"That's because you are needed here. You have to fight for your life. She needs you, Adrian—and you need her too."

"Who needs me?"

Trudy only laughed gently.

"You may not have to sleep in the middle of the bed after all…. This is what I want for you—to be happy. Be happy, Adrian…."

The figure began to fade away, the soft voice of Trudy becoming drowned out by the shower water.

As the water continued to fall on his face, Adrian Monk could feel the sting of hot tears welling up in his eyes. Who was she, anyway?

"Mr. Monk?"

A loud knocking startled him for an instant and he flinched, staring at the shower curtain in the direction of the bathroom door.

"What? Natalie?" He grasped the edges of the tub with both hands, afraid she would burst through the door if he didn't reply quickly enough.

"Are you okay in there?" She had heard him talking indistinctly, but didn't dare mention that. If he wanted to explain himself he would.

"I'm fine."

"Almost done? You've been in there almost an hour."

He stood haltingly in the tub, careful not to slip. With his eyes focused towards the door and not downwards, he turned off the shower. Though he was suddenly aware of the fact that he hadn't shampooed his hair, he decided that it didn't matter. He'd wasted enough time already.

In ten minutes Adrian Monk left the bathroom and walked down the hallway to the kitchen, now wearing a different robe but with no pajama pants. The juice Natalie was drinking where she had been seated on his kitchen counter almost went down the wrong pipe at the sight of this sudden reduction in modesty in the form of his hairy yet slender legs.

"Feel cleaner?" she asked him, intrigued by this development.

"Yes."

"Feel better?" She jumped down from the counter and began to approach him, holding the cup of juice at her side as she sauntered towards him.

He nodded resolutely.

"It's actually interesting. I saw Trudy…."

"Yes?"

Natalie was smirking now, her blue eyes sparkling mischievously at him as she took a drink from the cup. He almost forgot to breathe for a moment at the sight of her approaching him and swallowed loudly, suddenly very aware of his instinctive physical response to her. It wasn't as if he hadn't reacted to her presence before in such a way, but he'd never thought to acknowledge when it happened. The way she moved towards him just now, her hips moving side to side, eyes glittering, it was as if she knew. Trudy had meant her; he was sure of it. She was the only woman in his life now. And she had just revealed some rather heavy sentiments to him even though she wasn't really at liberty to divulge them. It all made sense now. Trudy said that she needed him and he needed her-- but he already knew that.

"Natalie…."

"Yes?" The smile was gone from her lips, though the glimmer in her eyes remained. He swallowed again, realizing he could hear his heart pounding in his ears.

"Even though I don't have much time," he said, fumbling awkwardly with the belt of his fresh robe as he looked at her, his eyes earnest, "there's something I'd like to say."

A/N: Ahh! So, what did you think? Are they in character? It's extremely important for me to stay on that line of believability (not sure if that's a real word)!! I hope you liked this installment! Please review! Each of your reviews was soo very helpful and wonderful for moving along this last chapter quickly, just as they will be in getting me to type another part of the story out for this next chapter! Thank you all again!!