Kate moves at last. Her limbs are heavy, and each step toward Esposito's desk is like walking through quicksand.

"Shot?" she asks, and her voice comes out shakily. "What do you mean, shot?"

"Shot, Kate," comes Esposito's reply, his voice filled with a raw grief. "A couple of hours ago. A bullet in his left shoulder. He was walking back to his place, we think, after he left here."

"Long walk," Ryan comments, and Esposito shrugs.

"Is he…" She trails off. Doesn't want to hear the next words. Not if she's going to hear that her… what? Her shadow? Her friend? Her writer, her mind settles on. She doesn't want to hear that her writer is dead. But if he wasn't far from here, and she hasn't had a homicide call? She dares to hope, holding her breath.

"He's alive." Esposito's voice breaks though the rush of blood pounding in her head and she breathes again. "He's in surgery. That's all I know. That's all they said. Martha and Alexis are on their way to the hospital now."

Kate slumps against Esposito's desk; she can't hold herself up anymore. She buries her face in her hands, giving herself to the count of ten to regain her composure. One. Two. Three… She'd decided when she'd seen him this morning that she was going to make peace with him. Four. Five. Six. Is this how their entire relationship ends? On seven she stands up straight, dropping her arms to her side, on eight, she opens her eyes. Nine. Ten. She takes a deep breath. It can't end this way.

"What do we know?"

Ryan sighs. "We don't know anything, but we have a few theories," he starts. "So, we know Castle had started looking into your mom's case."

Kate sighs heavily. "Yeah. Not with my blessing. Wait- what? What does this have to do with my mom's case? I thought this was just some random "wrong place, wrong time" kind of thing?"

Ryan shakes his head. "Maybe. But I don't think so. Did Castle tell you what he found when he started looking?"

"Yeah. Other cases. Like my mom's." It's taking all she has to remain standing, and she sinks against Esposito's desk again, giving up on the idea of remaining upright while she listens to this.

"Uh-huh. So it seems like an awfully big coincidence that his house gets broken into and then he gets shot, all in the forty-eight hours since Karpowski gave him access to those other three files, right?

"She didn't!" Kate's horrified.

"She did," Ryan nods. "That's why he was here this morning. He brought the files back, because he figured out that's what the intruders were looking for yesterday."

"Yeah," Esposito agrees. "He had a bad feeling. He thought that if he came by, he could return the files, pretend it never happened. And he didn't want to tell you- he was still hoping he'd be able to patch things up eventually."

Ryan smiles, a wry curve of his lips that is belied by the sadness in his eyes. "He realized he'd gone too far. He realized there were good reasons you weren't looking into the case anymore, and he was really worried. You know his whole family stayed in a hotel last night? Little Castle was freaked."

Kate bites her lip, pushing down the concern she's feeling. A cop. She's a cop, and that's how she has to act right now. "And Karpowski? How does she figure into this?"

"I don't think she knew," Esposito clarifies. "I think he cornered her when he was here the other day, and she didn't quite realize the implications of what she was doing, thought she was just helping him out. She didn't have any idea whose files they were, or what they had to do with your mom."

"Okay." Kate huffs out a sigh. "That's fine. But if all she did was give him access to the files, what exactly happened to get Castle shot?"


"I was buying a swimsuit,'' Alexis tells her dully.

Kate can only nod. "It's okay," she says at last, thinking that the girl needs a response, feeling awfully inadequate as she stands beside Castle's mom and daughter, seeking information that neither can provide.

"Oh, darling." Martha entwines Alexis into an embrace and Kate watches the girl melt into her grandmother's arms. She's taken aback when a second later Martha reaches an arm out and brings her into the fold. It's an awkward position, but Kate finds she doesn't mind at all, and she hugs them both in return, patting Alexis on the shoulder steadily.

She turns her head when she sees the boys out of the corner of her eye. "What have we got?" she asks abruptly, tearing herself away from the red-heads.

"Not much," Esposito tells her, and Ryan shuffles uncomfortably before meeting her eyes.

"We have some theories though, and you're not going to like them."

"Tell me," is all she says and Ryan looks at Martha reluctantly. The older woman nods at them and guides Alexis out of earshot.

"Come on," she says to the teenager. "Let's get an update on your father."

Once they've made their way down the hall and turned toward the nurses' station, Kate turns to the guys. "Tell me," she says again, and Ryan nods.

"You're not going to like it," he remarks, an unsettling look on his face.


Kate catches up with Martha and Alexis after the boys fill her in. She's stony faced, horrified by what she's learned, but she pushes it aside. She needs to stay strong for Castle's family.

Martha is wringing her hands and Beckett is surprised to find Alexis is providing comfort to her grandmother instead of the other way around. "We both knew, Gram," Alexis is telling Martha, but the older redhead just shakes her head.

"No, sweetheart. I should have stopped him. Said something. Told someone." She looks up guiltily as Kate approaches.

"Told someone what, Martha?" Kate asks, and the older woman sighs.

"Oh, Katherine," Martha proclaims, and Beckett is as thrown by the use of her full first name as she is by anything else. "I knew," she confesses. "After the break-in yesterday- well, this has to be related, doesn't it?"

Kate nods.

"I knew Richard was investigating your mother's case on his own, and I didn't stop him," Martha continues. "I even encouraged him to tell you what Dr. Murray found out. I said he couldn't keep it from you, even if you didn't speak to him again. Oh, darling. He was so upset when he realized how much he was going to hurt you, but I told him it didn't matter."

Kate bites down on her lip. She'd assumed the worst when Castle started looking into her mom's case. He could be so childish, so self-centered, but she's starting to realize that he really hadn't intended to hurt her, he just hadn't known.

"I told him he had to tell you- that you needed to know, even if you hated him," Martha continues, and Kate closes her eyes, briefly. She wants to turn the clock back in time and start everything again.

"It doesn't matter now," she says, patting Martha on the arm awkwardly, and pressing her lips together before continuing; she's afraid to ask, afraid of what the answer might be. "Did you find out how Castle is doing?"

"He's okay," Alexis tells her, tears running down her face, as though she's all of a sudden done being brave. The dam has burst, and she sobs it out, her voice breaking as she tells Kate. "He's though the surgery. He's going to wake up."


Kate wakes to a gut wrenching sound. A wail. It just doesn't seem to be stopping, and it takes Kate a moment to realize the sound is her own cry, a strangled gasp that has her sitting up, gasping for air. The sobs come more freely now that she recognizes that she's crying; heavy tears have rolled their way down her cheeks, and dampened her pillow.

Shot. Castle's been shot.

And it's her fault.

It's her mom's case, and it goes deeper than she'd ever realized; has more significance than she'd known. It's much more far reaching, and the consequences of one woman killed in an alley are apparently more serious than she'd ever guessed.

She'd always assumed the crime was meaningless to everyone but her father and herself. The case had never been solved, but she'd put that down to lazy police work, inadequate man power at best.

The entire week has been disquieting. Castle always has a wild theory, and her conservative approached at realism doesn't seem that relevant now. She and the boys have pieced a lot together, but crucial information is still conspicuously absent and she'd left the precinct reluctantly after running through everything with the boys more than once this evening. She's still amazed at the jumble of coincidence that seems to be connecting everything.

She's worked beside Roselyn Karpowski for three years; their teams have crossed paths a hundred times. They share the same floor, the same break room. They use the same interrogation rooms, and they collaborate from time to time. But over the years they've never become close, and Kate hadn't known- never had any reason to know- that Raglan had been a family friend, drinking buddies with Karpowski's dad, a mentor of sorts to the younger detective.

And Karpowski had never had any reason to know that Raglan had been the lead detective on Kate's mom's case. In fact, if she even knew the reason Beckett had become a detective, she hadn't ever let on, which was just the way Beckett preferred it.

It had been a coincidence, plain and simple; Karpowski had had dinner with her parents the night she gave Castle the file and Raglan had been there; he'd stopped by to borrow something, and Karpowski had found herself filling him in on the writer's presence in the precinct; just idle chit chat.

Raglan is unaccounted for. Either a victim himself, or off the grid; Kate can't really hazard a guess at which. She's none the wiser to what he was covering up, but she's certain at last that something has been hidden.

She'd spent half a decade of trying to solve the case, before spending a year in therapy. And yet she'd missed something huge. Somehow Castle had found answers in just a matter of months.

Kate finds herself crying out again, clawing at the sheets that are suffocating her now; she pushes them away, gasping as she reaches to flip the lamp on beside her bed, bathing the room in light, but still the demons aren't relegated to the shadows.

Castle had found something. A link.

And now he's been shot.


A/N: Many thanks for reading... and reviewing if you're so inclined. :) And thanks to Kylie and Trish for the betaing! x