Tugging the strap of her duffle bag off her shoulder, she goes to set it down next to the bench at the top of the hill overlooking the coast and leaves it up to him to start. No matter who's really to blame, she was at the crux of why he left. It was because of her. She doesn't want to force him to tell her. She wants to be the person in his life that he not only feels comfortable telling those things to, but wants to tell those things to.

Rick starts around the opposite end of the bench that she set her bag down at and hesitates to sit down. For four days, he's used this spot to finally fulfill a wish he's had since childhood; to have a father. But she doesn't know that and the battle going on inside of him is too happy to see her and wants her to be as happy to see him to tell her that the spot she's sitting down in is his dad's spot. So, he swallows it for now and sits down, the same distance away he'd place himself from Jack.

"It's nice here." She finally decides to break the ice, something mild and soft to just let him know that it's alright to talk to her.

"When uh..." he starts, adjusting himself and leaning forward on his knees, "when Gina and I got married, I tried talking her into moving out of Manhattan."

She looks over to him, a soft clench in her throat at how he looks. His hair is shorter and looking a bit ruffled and spiked in the wind, his dark half-beard is reminiscent of when she first met him, he looks like he's gotten his share of the sun over the summer with his skin just a touch darker than it normally is. Yet, she can't help but feel something about him just feels raw... like he's not as emotionally prepared or fortified as he normally would be. More ragged and tired somehow.

"You wanted to move out of the city?" She prods, brushing her hair behind her ear that's flicking in her face with the wind.

He gives her a nod and looks down to the grass. "I bought the loft for Meredith and I when we got married, so I wanted me and Gina to have a place of our own, that was just ours. I tried coaxing her into moving out to the country but..." he trails off, shaking his head almost in defeat, "her job was too important to her to leave."

She smiles at his thoughtfulness, his wants for his marriage. Failed or not, he wanted them to work. "My parents always talked about moving out to the country after I had left the house."

He only responds with a breath outward, almost resembling a chuckle and a twinge of the corner of his lips only lasting a second before he's back to a sullen seriousness. "Alexis told you, didn't she?"

"All she told me was where to find you, Castle." She says, feeling the need to defend the teen. "I'm here on my own."

That draws his eyes and he looks over to her over his shoulder. What she knows and what she doesn't, what brought her here, and what she's been through. Seeing her here, feeling a newcomer to this new leaf he's turned over by leaving, he almost forgot to make the connection that she was that woman suffering on an operating table just two months ago, having to go through all that recovery. He's only realizing now just how easy it is to fall into the trap she offers of just being near him. He can only guess what kind of pain she had to go through and might still be going through... yet she's here to bring him home.

Kate can see a layer of armor shed itself in his eyes, shimmering with a slight vulnerability that he seems to quickly correct by turning back to the ocean. "She knows that if she needed you, you'd be on the next flight out." She continues, not wanting to lose the light of progress now.

All Rick can offer is a solemn nod as he looks back down to the ground. "How is she?" He asks, looking back over his shoulder to her, a sad pinch in his brow. "Really."

Kate shrugs, having only lived with the girl for one day. "She misses you." Rick nods again and looks back down to the ground, staring off into the abyss of his own guilt again. "And she's torn between wanting to see her dad happy and knowing that it would mean disobeying him to make him that way."

Rick stiffens his neck and gnashes his teeth a bit. "So that's it?" He almost accuses her, looking back over his shoulder at her coldly. "You appealed to her as a cop?"

"No, I appealed to her as a teenager who only had her dad and knows what it's like to admit that he's not invincible." She fires back, having kept it in her back pocket. And it disarms him just as she planned. Kate shakes her head, thinking back and putting herself back to those years in her early twenties when she didn't want to admit that her dad wasn't the biggest person in the world anymore, and was human just like everybody else. "I let her know it's okay to feel that way when your dad is all you have."

Alexis knows how he feels about her. But now that she's actually here, the old habit is proving hard to kill of burying it all and overcoming her judgment on him. He just keeps thinking back to that night, being honest with her and getting tossed out of her life for it. "What d-did..." he tries, but can't seem to get it.

Kate understands and decides to give him an out. She takes a soft breath and brushes her hair back again. "It's alright, Castle. Josh told me." She says and stuffs her hand back into the pocket of her jacket.

He looks over to her with a pinch in his brow.

When their eyes meet, she seems to be smirking a bit behind her hair whipping softly against the wind coming off the ocean. "He told me what he said after I broke up with him."

He can't stop the swell in his heart and the flutter in his stomach at the news. It seems to show as he sits up from leaning forward and puts a hand on his knee to push himself upright. "You broke up?" He asks, not able to contain the hopeful lift his voice has.

She lets her smiles warm herself as it sneaks onto her face and she gives him a nod, feeling like she just gave him good news and looking away from him afterward. "Yeah, a few days ago."

"Wh-uh..." he tries again, readjusting himself to scoot farther away from her and sit up straight. He hardens the tingle in his spine and gets ahold of his senses again as much as he can, wrangling in his conflicting desires that are driving his usually smooth vocabulary awry. "Can I ask why?"

The truth quickly starts to stampede its way up her throat, but her better judgment, or worse, catches it before she can form the words. She wants to be honest with him as much as she can, but she knows full well that she's not at that point yet. Spilling her guts to his mother is one thing, a weakness on her part wanting her own back and settling for someone else who will lend an ear, but the man himself is a hurdle she's just not ready for yet.

"Castle, I may not remember getting shot." She says, looking over to him again. "But I remember my recovery... and I've learned something from it."

In waiting for her to continue, he looks into her eyes and quickly starts to lose his senses. He can lose himself so quickly in her.

"I've learned that my life is too short and too fragile to keep lying to myself." Her words seem to snake themselves around his heart, constricting his breath away as he stares at her with a furrow in his brow. She nods once before looking back down to her lap with her hair shifting with the wind to blow behind her. "And once I learned that, I knew I didn't belong with Josh, so I broke up with him."

He feels lost, tugged in two directions; one in wanting to give anything just for his own shot at being with her and the other in not wanting to know what he'll end up doing when she does the same thing to him.

But Kate, she can only seem to picture Castle talking to Josh, reading on Josh's expression somehow that he was going to propose. And since Castle seems unwilling to lead the conversation as opposed to the usual battle for dominance that goes on between them, she looks back over to him. "He was going to propose, you know?"

Rick doesn't look back over to her, deciding it best to bite back even the potential of that heartbreak by himself. "Yeah, I know."

"Please don't tell me that's why you left, Castle." She edges on pleading. When he only meets her with silence and a furrowed brow staring off into nowhere, she pushes him again. "How'd you even know? What did he say to you, Castle?"

Rick blinks rapidly a few times, reliving the conversation with the doctor in his mind and looks back down to the grass between his hiking boots. "I'm a writer." He explains, lifting his brow. "I know how to form dialogue that lets the reader know there's something between the lines. He talked about... letting you put it all behind you so you could move on, but I could tell he didn't mean from the shooting. He wouldn't have blamed me for all of it otherwise."

Kate nods to herself, looking out to the ocean with the cold, salty air blowing in her eyes. "He meant you."

"All I said was..." he starts after her, "not to ask you while you were on painkillers. I don't know what kind of guy Josh is, but I didn't want him asking you something that important when you were on enough pain medication to put down a horse. I told him he wouldn't be able to forgive himself if you gave him anything but an honest answer."

She feels honestly thankful, but still frustrated that, if nothing else, all it did was enable Josh to drag their already doomed relationship on. But she can't pass off all the blame onto Josh. She knows she's responsible for getting together with him in the first place. All she had to do was just be honest with herself from the start, and Josh might not have ever happened. "Do you honestly think I would have said yes?"

That gains Rick's eyes again, looking back over his shoulder to her to gauge her expression. It seems to be the same calm, soft smile playing at the edges of her lips that she sat down with. "It wasn't my decision to make."

"That's not what I asked you, Castle. I asked you if you thought I would have said yes if he actually asked me to marry him." She pushes for her answer.

He hesitates to move to give her an answer as long as he can, delaying his response because he knows to answer her will force him to divulge the kind of man he feels she should be with... and he doesn't have the guts to tell her the only person he can picture her with and not have his heart fold in on itself is him. But he sees her shake her head despite herself and scoff a bit under her breath.

"I mean, I told you before what a marriage is to me." She says, recalling their brief broach on the topic. "I'm a one-and-done kind of girl, Castle. When I take my marriage vows to the guy I want to be my husband, I'll be making a promise that I won't leave him, no matter what, to spend the rest of my life with him, and to work out whatever problems we face together because I love him. Now, tell me, Castle. Did you really see me saying yes to Josh?"

Rick loses track of his thoughts while she speaks. He could only wish Gina, or God forbid Meredith, take the vows they took as seriously as the ones she hasn't even written yet. He could only really hope, as pointless as it was, that he wasn't lying to Jim when he said she wouldn't say yes to the wrong guy when they spoke on the phone. Rick gives her a stern nod and looks back down to the ground before throwing himself back against the bench. "I know you well enough to know you wouldn't say yes to the wrong guy."

Kate can feel her eyes crinkle as she fights her smile. "Well..." she starts, shifting her tone to seem less serious, "it wasn't Josh. So don't worry, you can insult him all you like, Castle. You won't hurt my feelings."

Her quip seems to lift his spirits a bit as his eyes crinkle with the same humor. "Believe me, I'm not going to waste any of my well-crafted insults on a guy I don't have to worry about anymore."

"You had some good ones?" She asks, a sly smirk sneaking onto her face.

"What do you think got me started on writing?" He rhetorically asks and folds his hands together on his lap.

They share a brief, under the breath, laugh and eventually fall into silence with each other. Kate can still feel her smile play at the edges of her lips, and taking a peek over to him, she can see his too, slow to leave his face as opposed to the stern brood he sat down next to her with. She doesn't pay Josh another thought, letting what sour memories she has of him wash away. She feels no closer to bringing him home, her mission she set out for in the first place. But with his soft and all too familiar smirk playing at his lips, she feels she got something back that she can only temporarily settle for.

Her partner.

A/N: Sorry for the delay. Hope this makes up for it. :)