Disclaimer- I don't own Castle, Andrew Marlowe does. Please don't sue me for writing this story! Just having fun playing in the Castle Sandbox! Errors corrected, but I do not have a beta reader, so there's probably typos and dropped words (my apologies). I am not getting into the fandom and making friends for a reason; all my experiences with fandom in the past have brought me friends and some great charity work, but at the same time, incredibly gross and unappealing drama (like having my account hacked. Nice job, right?). I actually had my life threatened by someone once (are you kidding me? It's only fanfiction!). I am never going to fall into that trap again. It's not worth it at all. But the nice people who've reviewed the prequel to this story, I do appreciate you! Thank you!

I spent a lot of my time on the fire escape to escape all the roaches and rats that seemed to infest my place. It got to the point that I didn't keep food in the kitchen cabinets, although I loved cooking. One night, my upstairs neighbor came down and started spluttering in her language, which I had figured out was Estonian, and shoved something in my direction.

It was small and furry, and I realized it was a kitten.

"You want me to take this?" I asked.

She said a few more things in Estonian and shoved the poor kitten in my direction as well. I accepted it and she shook a finger at me as she told me something, and then climbed back up the fire escape.

"I can't... I can't afford a cat!" I cried.

She looked at me through the grating and said something else, then climbed back into the window.

The little kitten meolwed at me and looked at me with watery blue eyes.

"So I guess it's just you and me," I said. "Maybe she's giving you to me so you can help out with the rats and roaches?"

I lifted the kitten to see if it was a boy or a girl, and realized I couldn't tell. This kitten needed to go to the vet because it looked sick when I checked it's gums. They were white, a sure sign of anemia. It was lethargic and seemed weak. I called my dad.

"Hey, Alexis," he said.

"You know my crazy Estonian upstairs neighbor? She just came down and gave me a kitten."

"What? Why? Did you ask her for one?"

"No! But think about it- a cat could help out with the rat problem in my place."

"Is it a boy or a girl cat?"

"It's... I don't know. It's so small."

Dad sighed. "Bring it over."

I took the subway to Dad's house with the kitten in my hand that night. The fleas bit me a few times on the subway, which hurt. As always, I was attacked by Noel, Jace, and Jo-jo the moment I walked in the door, they wanted to see the kitten, Jace completely ignoring my glittery pink high heels today.

"He's so little!" Noel cried. "Let me hold him!"

"I don't know if it's a boy or a girl cat, yet," I said.

"Where's he going to go to potty?" Jace asked.

"A litter box."

"What he eat?" Jo-jo asked in toddler-speak.

"Mice, hopefully. But when he doesn't eat that, it'll be cat food."

"I wanna hold it!" Noel shouted.

"It's got fleas," I warned.

"Let's see," Mom said, entering the room. She took the cat from me and held it up. "It's a girl cat."

"Awww!" Jace and Noel groaned in disappointment.

Jo-jo squealed and danced. "I hold it!" she cried, reaching up. "Me next!"

"No, Jo-jo," Mom said. "She's got fleas. She needs a bath."

"That's cruel!" I cried. "Cats hate water!"

"You can train them to like baths. And she's too little for flea treatments," she said. "I don't think she has her milk teeth. Noel, can you go get several towels and bring them to the kitchen for me?"

"Okay!" Noel cried, running off.

"Oh lord. We're going to bathe a cat," I muttered.

"My mom loved Persians, we had to bathe them," Mom said. "They liked it because they got baths every week or so to keep their fur clean and were used to it. I had Mom's last Persian until I was twenty-six. Her name was Princess Isadora, and I called her Izzy."

"What happened to her?" Jace asked.

"She's in kitty heaven," Mom said.

In the kitchen, she got out dish soap and started to run some water. The kitten looked scared to death, but Mom showed me how to wash it off. She resisted and we had to scrub it with soap and fleas would be repelled. The water underneath turned brackish and about a million fleas were drowned off the poor baby. When the bath was over, Dad showed us that he had filmed it on his phone with Johanna screaming and bouncing in the background in excitement, threatening to put this video on his blog. I took towel and wrapped my kitten up in it and held her close to me. She was a skinny kitten under all her fur, and she shivered. We had to use several towels to get her dried off, and she was a lighter shade of grey than we thought.

"I think she's too young to be separated from her mother," Mom noted.

"Yeah," I sighed, seeing how white her gums were. "I think it's also anemia. That's why she's not very playful."

"Richard, can you go pick up some kitten food and cat litter?"

"Yeah. I'll be back in a minute."

Dad stepped out while we fed the kitten canned tuna. The kids were too hyper about the kitten to actually go to bed while we cleaned the sink. Johanna was squealing at the kitten, scaring her. Before I knew it, the kitten had crapped on the floor before Dad got back. He asked me if I wanted to spend the night and take the cat to the vet in the morning, which I took him up on.

Getting the kids to bed was a challenge. Around midnight, I got to sleep on the couch, and in the morning, the kitten was playing with my siblings. Mom left for work and dropped the boys off at school, and Dad, Jo-jo and I got into his car and took the cat to the vet.

"Definitely a girl," the vet noted. "I do see signs of anemia, but the bath really got rid of a lot of the fleas, although I don't normally recommend them for flea removal. I think this little girl is feeling much better already." He looked at her teeth. "She's definitely older than eight weeks, but she's a tiny little thing. Less than a pound."

"This lady upstairs just gave her to me," I said.

"She was definitely the runt of the litter," he said. "She's going to have a beautiful medium-length coat. And sweetheart, if you can't feed it, don't breed it. We need to talk about making sure she gets fixed, because she's definitely not a purebred anything. And cats can get pregnant during another pregnancy, they're not a very hearty breed, so they tend to over-reproduce if they're not spayed."

"How will I know when she's old enough to spay?"

"When she reaches five pounds, bring her back and we can fix her. In the meantime, I'm going to vaccinate her. She's not going to like this."

The poor kitten screeched when she got her vaccines, but I came out, and Dad was trying to entertain Johanna, who had to pet all the kittens that came in.

"She's going to be fine, but I want to get her fixed," I said. "The vet told me she'd be ready when she got to five pounds."

"How old is she?"

"Older than eight weeks."

"She is?"

"Yeah, she's tiny!"

"Can I hold?" Jo-jo asked.

"Yes, you may, but don't squeeze, Jo."

Dad drove me back to my apartment and we took the kitten upstairs to get her set up. Johanna wanted to go out on the fire escape, but we didn't want to let her go alone. Dad insisted that I needed a strong screen over the window so the kitten didn't get out and fall to her death.

"So, what are we going to name her?" Dad asked.

I thought about it. I wondered if I could put her in a little flower pot or basket and lower her down the alley like they did in Rear Window. Dad and I loved that movie when I was thirteen and I saw it the first time. Nah, that was dangerous. "Grace Kelly."

Dad grinned. "I like it."

"Me too. Well, I got work to catch up on. Thanks for taking us to the vet this morning, Dad."

"Not a problem. Love you, honey. Say good-bye to Grace Kelly, Jo."

"We leave?" Jo-jo asked. "No!" She started crying. She definitely needed a nap.

"Take care. Give Alexis a kiss."

Jo-jo leaned over and gave me a tearful kiss and then kissed the kitten.

I got back to work once they were gone, playing Grace Kelly by Mika on my computer for the cat. She chased roaches and I felt content.

I continued the query game on my manuscript, until one morning after Thanksgiving, while reviewing Publishers Marketplace from Liz Elsburg and saw something that made me sick.

Columbia MFA Benjamin Haversham of Brooklyn, New York and his agent, Brett Jackson, have sold his first manuscript for $100,000 advance to Random House for a three-book deal.

"Asshole!" I shouted, grabbing Baby Grace. I dialed Mom to bitch about him actually selling something before me. After about twenty minutes of bitching, Mom finally spoke.

"It's just luck. Do you know your Dad queried over twenty agents before he got taken on as a client?"

"Twenty?" I sputtered. "I queried over seventy with my first manuscript, and I've already queried fifteen with this one! Ben's such an alcoholic asshole, and he's selling books already?"

"It might be that you just haven't found the right agent, yet," she reminded me. "It could be a lot of reasons."

I pouted for a moment. Yes, what she was telling me was true. I was being childish.

"It's hard to see your exes succeed, isn't it?"

"Yeah," I admitted.

"Well, I think the worst thing you could do right now is to compare yourself to him. He's got an MFA and he's published short stories, and you're different. You've gotten a paper published and a few medical articles at Columbia University, and that's very, very, different from him. He didn't have to do that at Vanderbilt to get his undergrad degree. And you're a junior agent at a literary agency. Keep in mind that the fast path to unhappiness is comparing yourself to others. Even alcoholic assholes that lied to you."

"Allllright."

"Now go tell your father. If he doesn't know by now, he'll be pissed that you didn't tell him first and I don't want to take that bad mood when I get home. I love you."

"Love you too. Bye."

I called Dad and told him that Ben had a book deal. He asked me to come over with Grace Kelly and spend the night, since Jo-jo was mad about not getting to play with the kitten lately. He was pissed, too, and pulled up his subscription to Publisher's Marketplace to see the announcement.

Once I was done with my jr. agent work and had worked a four-hour shift at the coffee shop, I packed up Grace Kelly and my laptop and took the subway to Manhattan. When I arrived, Jo-jo and Jace ran up to me and asked where Grace Kelly was without even saying hi.

"Hello to you, too," I said, handing over the cat carrying case that she traveled in. They ran to Dad's office to play with her. The kids insisted I bring the cat each night I baby-sat, but tonight Mom and Dad were staying home to console me.

"We're in here," Dad called. In the kitchen, Mom and Dad were making dinner for the family.

"Hi," I said, kissing each of them hello. "How can I help?"

"We need the salad washed and started," Mom said.

I washed my hands and started on the lettuce. "So, tell me, are you feeling better?" Mom asked.

"Yeah, a little bit," I said. "I was so pissed off when I read that in Publisher's Marketplace."

"It's just his time," Dad reminded me. "Yours is coming, just keep at it and don't compare yourself to him."

"You only submitted twenty query letters before you got representation," I whined.

"It's tougher these days. There's more information on querying and the self-publishing industry has grown a lot since I first published," Dad said. "Your former rejections could be because the agents had all signed on to represent something that was similar. Dark Fairies are a genre in YA that's already overdone, like vampires, mermaids, and dystopian."

I sighed. My newest novel was about a zombie-hunting New York Society-reject teen. I wanted my father to know about it, but I had promised not to let him read it, and since he and Mom couldn't keep secrets from each other, she couldn't read it, either.

"I love everything you write," Mom said.

"My mother liking it doesn't mean it's publishable," I whined.

"Don't worry, I won't give him a blurb or review for his book, alright?" Dad assured me. "Gina's already hinted that his publisher wants to send me an ARC for a blurb. She said that rumor was that he had written something in my genre."

"Yeah, I read an early draft of it. He doesn't get women, honestly. His main character is an unbeatable awesome version of himself, I thought that was the weakest part of his script, the heroine was so whiney and a victim and-"

"I think the hardest part of writing is not developing sour grapes," Dad reminded me. "People and critics have said that Derrick Storm and Jamison Rook were Gary Stus of me."

Mom turned away from him and I saw her smirk. She knew I saw it.

"Don't compare the most difficult and unfair moments of your life to someone else's highlight reel, okay?" Dad asked.

"Hey, what did you do with my husband?" Mom joked.

"Hey, now!"

"You hate Ben!" I cried.

"Of course he does, Ben was taking his place in your life and it broke his heart," Mom piped up.

"I knew he'd break your heart, he did it twice!" Dad cried.

"Because you threatened him!" I cried.

"I was-" Dad cried, but put down the knife he was slicing the peppers with. "But seriously, Alexis. Don't let it spill over into your writing.

"You gotta keep a cap on it or it'll show," Mom said.

I sighed. All the years I told Dad not to get mad at the writers (like Alex Connolly) that Mom was dating before they married started to make sense. But I had never realized how upsetting it was to be jealous of a fellow writer and how hard it was to talk yourself out of it.