"Thank you again for dinner, Alexis. And break a leg. You'll be great."
Alexis reached over and hugged her before she jogged out the door with Martha. Kate hadn't really expected the tight squeeze, but strangely it momentarily steadied her nerves about her looming admission. With the click of the door closing, she was alone with the man she was about to hurt. She did not want to do this. She had to do this. She intentionally hadn't worn anything from the new top drawer in order to stack the deck in favor of having the serious conversation. She needed courage. She needed-
"Here you go. Thank you for bringing this, by the way."
Castle passed her a glass of the California Cabernet she had deemed very respectable, despite its moderate price tag. Her hands had better not even think about shaking. He motioned her over toward the couch.
"So, movie? Knicks game? Or shall I read to you from the draft of the next Nikki Heat?"
She sat and drew up a knee to turn in his direction.
"As tempting as that last one sounds, actually, there's something I want to say. Something I've been meaning to tell you for a while now." His look darkened slightly.
"Why do I think this isn't going to be the rest of our conversation about each other's numbers?"
She managed a smile and a huff of a laugh.
"No, though somehow I'm not surprised you're still fixating on that one. Actually, I wanted to tell you about Dr. Burke, my therapist."
"But I thought you already told me about your physical therapist? Aren't you done with all of that now?"
"Different kind of therapy, Castle. Dr. Burke is a psychiatrist. One of the precinct's contract psychiatrists, to be exact. He's the one I had to see last summer in order to pass my psych evaluation and come back to work."
Relief seemed to wash over his face. At least she had his approval on the concept.
"I sort of never stopped seeing him."
"He's helping you with your PTSD."
"That's part of it. But that wasn't originally the reason I went back to him after I passed my eval. A long time ago, I told you that I didn't think I could be the kind of person I wanted to be, or start a real relationship, until I solved my mom's case."
"I remember."
"Well, it turns out I was wrong."
His eyes widened and he looked like he was trying to find something to say. Before he could, she continued.
"Dr. Burke has been helping me figure out that it wasn't really about the case. It was about me, and never getting over losing my mom, and refusing to give up this one last connection to her. It was about not letting myself have a real life because it would be a life without her in it. And it was about pushing people away now to avoid having to deal with losing them later."
"Kate, why are you telling me all this now?" He put his wine on the coffee table and she did the same, then took a breath and looked at him through her lashes.
"Because you're the one I've been pushing away." She couldn't read his face. He was looking so intently into hers that maybe he was having the same problem. When he did speak, it was in a hesitant, quiet voice she hadn't often heard.
"But you're here with me now." Well, there it was; time to own up to it.
"I don't want to push anymore." His brows rose hopefully.
"But there's something else, Rick. Something I've been keeping from you." Here goes nothing, or everything.
"On top of the disappearing act last summer, I lied to you." Again, he looked almost relieved.
"You remember the shooting." He said it calmly, like he had practiced it. And without much of a pause, he continued.
"Kate, I never really thought you forgot. That's why I was so angry with you when you finally showed up and acted like everything was back to normal. I didn't say anything, because I thought maybe there was some tiny chance that I was wrong.
"But I knew for sure the first time you dropped on the sidewalk during the sniper case. You remembered all of it, the flash of the sight, the bullet, bleeding in my arms. You didn't want to deal with it. I knew you'd eventually tell me, when you were ready to accept it."
His last words hung in the air. She was pushing tears back, blinking through the shock that he'd known all along. Only Rick Castle would manage to see her confession as a good sign.
"I'm so sorry, Rick. I'm sorry that I couldn't deal with it. I heard you though, and it helped me. It was so selfish of me, keeping all the comfort of those words for myself."
He reached across the cushion and took her hand, twined their fingers together.
"I was really mad, Kate, past tense. Lately, I've just tried to be hopeful."
"I don't know how this is going to go, Rick. I'm not sure about very much at all, lately. I'm not sure I even know how to be in a relationship, to really work at it and put everything I have in it. But that's what I want to do. That's what I asked Dr. Burke to help me do—to have enough of a feeling for myself that I can share it all with you."
She squeezed his fingers. But looking up from their hands she saw that a new cloud had settled over his features.
"Honesty seems to be the order of the day. I need to show you something." He pulled her up off the couch and tugged her into his office. He grabbed the remote for his smartboard from under the pile of papers on his desk and turned back to her. He looked terrified.
"You know how it felt just now, trying to tell me something that you thought would hurt, that might ruin everything before we even have anything to ruin?"
She narrowed her eyes at him and nodded slightly. She didn't think she was going to like whatever this was.
"Now it's my turn. All those months ago, I told you not to chase your mom's case. I told you to put it aside for a while, and we'd solve it together. I had a very specific reason for asking you to leave it alone. A man called me right after you came back to the 12th. He had received documents, evidence about the conspiracy to kill your mom and then kill you. Montgomery was an old friend of his, and apparently his last act before he called us to the hangar was to put those documents in the mail. This man told me that if you kept digging, you would be killed. No hesitation, no question. The only way to keep you alive was to get you off the case, and leave it to this man to keep the conspirators in check with his evidence."
She was stunned. She was numb. He'd kept the case open all this time. He had more information and he had kept it to himself. Fingers of the old obsession were creeping up and squeezing her heart. She felt the tingle of anger and dread and sadness spreading through her veins. It had been so long since she'd allowed herself to feel any of this. She had worked so hard to put it all away. Now he had brought it back; déjà vu. This had all happened before. She gripped the hand he was still holding tighter, and she tuned back in to what he was saying, focused on his voice over the hum in her ears.
"But I didn't give up, Kate. I did some digging. I tried to make the connection to this shadow man and Washington, DC-that's where the phone call came from. I didn't get anywhere. Everything was a dead end or a roadblock. Then I heard from him again, when the mayor was accused last month. And this time I met with him. He said there were ties to your case, and you had to back off. They haven't forgotten about you, Kate."
He clicked on the smartboard and let go of her hand to tap the file marked with her photo. The web of information appeared, including a dark, grainy photo of the shadow man from the parking garage. Her eyes darted to all the images, taking in the layout and the new points since she had last seen the leads in front of her, assimilating the data. She closed her eyes and pressed against them with her fingers.
"If you want it, everything I've found, all the digging and the information is here. I'm going to let you tell me what to do. I've been protecting you, trying to let you have that real life you were talking about, and I hope you can understand that, but it would be dishonest of me to keep this from you now."
She studied the grainy photo.
"It has to be someone high up. Higher up that I ever thought: Congress, Supreme Court, something like that. Castle, this is important. I need to make sure you understand me."
She turned to him, put a hand on his chest, felt his heart beating through his ribcage, and looked into his eyes.
"You cannot chase this anymore without me. If they would kill me, they would probably kill you for doing this." He reached up and took her hand in his. She took another breath to get up the courage.
"If I'm going to have a life with you, we have to do this together or not at all." She hoped that sounded resolute."
"Can you really step away from it?"
"I did when you asked me to."
"OK then, I'm asking again. Keep out of it unless I'm in it with you. Turn-about is fair play, Kate. I love you, and if you're giving me a say in it, then I say we stay out."
Her mouth fell open when it registered, but he just plowed on like he said it to her every day.
"Whoever this is won't go away—I've seen that for myself. We'll get dragged back into it again, but then we'll have more to go on. And we can do it with the boys and Gates backing us up."
He clicked off the board and put down the remote, then grabbed her other hand in his and pulled her into his chest. She laid her cheek against his shoulder as he wrapped his arms around her.
"I can feel myself wanting to find these answers and take down this person, these people. But I learned something in the past six months. More than finding justice for my mom with an arrest warrant, I want to find it by living a life she would have been proud of."
"She would have been so proud of you. You have to know that. And even if I don't have any real claim, I'm proud of you, too."
"She would have told me to quit being an idiot and tell you how I feel about you." She pulled back slightly and quirked a begrudging smile.
He laughed aloud and the sparkle came back to his eyes.
"I like your mom a lot."
"Oh, she would have loved you."
"Think so?"
"She would have loved anyone that took care of me the way you do, the way you try to. And she would have made you sign her copies of all your books."
"Your mom read my books?"
"Castle, she's the reason I started reading your books. She didn't just read them, she was a fan."
"That does it, now I love your mom."
"I met someone the other day who reminded me of her. I want to introduce you."
"Who is she?"
"Her name is Dora; she owns a ladies clothing store over near my apartment."
"'Dora's Ladies Boutique' Dora?"
"Uh, yeah, how do you know that store?"
"Oh, the Times did a big piece on her a few years ago in the fashion section. I remember it made me feel good when I read it—a real heart-warming success story. I think her husband and little girl died in a car crash in Texas, and so she came up here with almost nothing to start over. She built that lingerie business of hers all by herself—she's a bit of a legend in Manhattan fashion circles. I think a couple of First Ladies have even shopped there when they were in town. But back up a second here, how do you know her exactly?"
"I went to her store."
