They won't stop. Like a wound seeping blood, just when her reflection in the mirror seems to coagulate into hard-won control, a gleam gathers and another droplet of liquid grief escapes the corner of an earthy-hued eye. It cannot be helped. The detective has grown almost numb to them. When it happens again presently, she dismisses the matter as a lost cause. One doesn't shake their fists at the clouds with any expectation of commanding the cessation of a downpour.

The rain stops when its good and ready to.

Otherwise, Beckett has cleaned up as well as can be expected given the tools at hand in a public restroom. The light layer of her makeup, smudged or otherwise, has been washed away. Somehow she managed to lose her dinner without ending up wearing any of it. Minus some redness in and around her eyes, it would be easy to mistake her for the woman who left the beach house a couple hours ago in better shape and spirits.

The mental comparison summons an image of the author waiting for her there. It's so clear a picture that a kaleidoscope of butterflies takes flight and spirals in her still sensitive belly. I know why you stayed. Most of me is glad you did. But I need you now. That only leads to a renewed clamp of her hands on the porcelain edges of the sink. Kate glances down at the whiteness of her knuckles, the veins in her wrists, and the taut muscles in either forearm. A few calming breaths later she's able to let go. She steps back from the sink and exits the restroom.

John is waiting in the wide hallway, arms crossed, standing at a lean with his back against the wall.

The security guard on duty in the building is also hovering nearby. Calvin Something. He was lured out by seemingly genuine concern and helped John clean up the mess in the office suite. Kate assisted too, some, but ultimately deferred with mute gratitude when they suggested she tend to herself instead.

"Feeling better?" the guy asks. He emerged for what may have been good reasons, but he might as well be wearing a neon sign declaring having lingered for the wrong ones, namely a decreased proximity to her. To his credit, the lack of wandering eyes suggests it isn't so inappropriate a motive as lust. No, he merely wants to be heroic. Some guys can't seem to help themselves in these situations, as if its hardwired into their DNA to puff up and steel themselves in the face of a woman's tears, like there's saving that needs to be done. Any other night Kate might be sympathetic to the male condition.

Not this one. It isn't me who needs saving.

"I think we've got it from here, Cal," John issues, stepping pointedly between him and Kate as he offers the former a handshake. His height and breadth completely obscure the other from view. "Thanks."

"Sure, Sarge. It's no problem." Still he lingers, leaning a bit to look past John's right shoulder and offer a wan smile to Beckett. She stares back impassively. "Just, uh, lemme know if you guys need anything else."

"We'll do that," the Sergeant replies evenly. After the other man turns and reluctantly leaves John faces her with a thin snarl of dislike in the swift process of coming and going from his lips.

The woman empathizes with the sentiment, but her disapproval goes well beyond one too-eager custodian of the Assessor's Office. It encompasses the man still before her too. She's hiding that well, must be, because John views her with more openness in his posture than he's borne thus far. It's subtle enough that he probably isn't aware of revealing it. The sight pisses her off to behold. You think—what? That we've bonded over this case tonight? You couldn't be more fucking wrong. Kate tamps her emotions down. Again. In the grip of a deceptive calm, she says, "I need a little more time in there. Alone," she adds, expecting that stipulation to herald the beginning of a pitched battle of wills.

John frowns immediately, shifting the set of the wide belt around his waist in discomfort. He surprises her by nodding in the middle of the critical assessment of his gaze on hers. He doesn't even bother repeating the previous warnings about the case files and its contents staying in that room where they belong. Kate is already appropriately intimidated on that front, as any sane person would be. She has no intention of testing Montauk's hospitality anymore than is absolutely necessary.

They walk down the hallway together without another word. The soft squeak of the Sergeant's polished boots upon the floor is the only sound between the two of them. Kate can sense her fellow's willingness, perhaps even eagerness to talk. Part of her laments not being able to indulge him. The people of this town have carried this case for a long time. They will continue to long after her and Rick return to the city. For the detective, John is the face ascribed to all of that teeming uncertainty. Natural instinct demands bearing witness to fellow victims of loss. It doesn't feel right to force that aside.

I'm sorry. I really am, but I can't help you.

Truthfully, Beckett probably could. But she won't. That unwillingness is not sired by maliciousness. It's triage medicine. She's chosen who needs her more. Tonight her only intended patient is Richard Castle.

John opens the door with his key and Kate presses it wide.

The officer's heavy right hand lifts to her left forearm before she can step inside. Bemusement touches the corners of his bristle-encompassed mouth. Somewhere within the depths of those dark brown eyes is slowly budding suspicion that she's found something he has not. Beckett places one of her hands over his before he can process the situation enough to become convinced. Gently, but firmly, she pries him loose without even blinking. The door closes between them with his face still frozen in the formation of questions he hasn't quite put into words within his own mind.

She hesitates for an instant afterward, blinking at the otherwise vacant office without actually seeing it. The reality of those cabinets and boxes standing across the room slowly hardens her resolve and layers it with an icy coating.

You've all had your chance to see. Decades, in fact. Time's up.

The files are well-organized. It only takes another hour to find what she's looking for. Kate reads the reports and studies the images carefully, drilling them into memory, because they can't come with her. The truly heinous nature of it all is far more likely to make forgetting the difficult part. She only cries two more times during the process, but it's quieter and briefer in both cases. Neither elicits embarrassment or shame. The day she ceases being affected she'll be ashamed.

Everything is replaced as it was found. No backwards glance is given before she leaves, only a brief pause to rest her back against the door for a moment on the other side. Her companion is waiting right where she left him, curious and perhaps a mite bit put-out. Without meeting his gaze she strides down the hallway to get the hell out of this place.

"Headed out then?" Calvin asks, rising as they pass. She doesn't stop. "Uh, okay. Well, take care."

John offers a grim, "Thanks. G'night, Cal."

Night has fallen outside. Trees and hedgerows skirting the building emit their restless susurration as the pair advance to John's truck. Coolness is ushered along by intermittent gusts, a welcome difference from the artificial chill inside. Even in the more populated downtown, East Hampton it is already growing quiet. Traffic is light and many of the businesses and residences lining the roadsides are dark. Local restaurants and bars will cater to the evening crowd for some time yet.

"So, when exactly was I cut out of the loop?"

Beckett glances up at the question, but the other's focus remains on the road. His tone isn't petulant or even unkind exactly. Actually, he sounds more disappointed than anything. They agreed to play it straight with one another earlier, so she doesn't lie to him. "There is no loop, John. Never was. Just a line, and it runs between me and Castle."

"That's interesting," he replies at length, glancing out the driver's side window. "What you said earlier—I thought you understood that this case goes beyond any one of us. We all share the pain here."

"That's the damn truth," she grits, seething with accusation, unable to help herself.

It earns a pair of minimally arched eyebrows and a small, puzzled frown. "What the hell does that mean?"

Beckett turns, fixing him with her gaze and withdrawing slowly and completely behind the mask. "It means...I'm tired. My head is swimming in a sea of blood and guts and I'm an emotional wreck. It sucks, and it sucks to admit, but there you have it. I'm not up for hashing out anything else right now."

Sergeant Autry doesn't relinquish the tapered frown at his mouth, but there isn't any wiggle room in the statement for continuing the discussion. They drive on into the unlit wilderness beyond the lights of the hamlet with only silence between them.

The reduced speed as they get closer to the beach house is noticeable. Beckett doesn't comment on the delay tactic, which is, after all, specifically intended to loosen her lips. His options are admittedly limited, but as a renowned interrogator she's a bit disappointed with the fumbling attempt at coercion. Who do you think you're playing with here? Progress is inevitable. Soon enough Kate sees the dark ship of the sprawling home on the right with its beacons of lamplight aglow upon a sea of black. It was beautiful last night too. Haunting. It didn't convey loneliness until now.

Castle is standing under the central arch of the front veranda, almost exactly where they left him a few hours ago. The sight of him in the wash of the F-150's headlights elicits...too much to sort through. No more tears though. Beckett is opening the passenger door even before the truck comes to a complete stop in the driveway.

"Kate," John tries one more time. He's not a bad man. "Detective!"

Beckett closes the door behind her, aware from the tingling in her cheeks that the blood has drained from them to leave her with a pallor of similarly mixed and gnawing emotion. Castle steps out from under the porch, lifts a hand in a gesture of greeting or parting to the Sergeant. The truck leaves with a tearing of the tires into the loose gravel in as clear an expression of frustration as any. She turns at the waist, watching the taillights glare red at the top of the drive before swishing left with a bark of rubber against the road. They dwindle fast.

All too quickly it's just her and her shadow. She turns slowly, facing him with her fingers curled at her sides.

"You didn't tell him," Castle says. It isn't a question.

"Tell him what?" she fires back, her voice tight.

He doesn't wilt under the force of her glare. On the contrary, the author diminishes the distance between them almost to nothing. The step she takes back from him is purely involuntary. Old habit, obsolete defenses. It couldn't have been timed any worse from the way his expression flashes an instant of alarm, and then shuts down immediately and completely. Any other time that might not strike her as a big deal. Tonight, too many or too significant a misstep could easily be their last.

"No," Kate blurts, snatching at the sleeves of his t-shirt when he begins a mirroring step back. "No. Don't do that. I'm sorry." He smiles just slightly in reply, the same way he's done who knows how many times before, precisely the way he did before their moment in the precinct and this resulting weekend. He's gone from her as easy as that, might as well be standing a mile away. It's shocking how fragile his willingness to trust is. The wrong word spoken at misplaced volume is capable of shattering it. "Look at me, Castle. I'm here, right? I came back."

"Why?"

It takes several seconds to find her breath again after the cold, blunt edge of the word strikes her. "You don't need to do that. How did we get here—right here where we're standing now? It wasn't by hiding."

With their positions reversed in the driveway he's visible in the lamplight. The tone of the question he offers in reply is deceptive, almost pleasant, but in the mildness of the late-spring night a piercing glimpse of departed winter skies stares back at her, "Is that what you qualify this evening as for my part? Hiding?"

"No," Beckett answers hastily, wincing, "of course not. I'm only asking you to bear with me. This is all still very new. Even on my better days I get this stuff hopelessly tangled along the way to communicating it properly."

A blessed note of reconsideration lightly drapes the words. "This 'stuff'?"

"Yeah. Y'know, heart stuff." He doesn't smile, which implies the seriousness of the message survived a clumsy wording.

The other circles her where she stands, front to back to front again until he's paused at her left and looking away. It began slightly unnerving for the imposition of his looming height, but by the end it's clear that a long luxuriation of closeness is the intent, not intimidation.

Why he didn't simply reach out and touch her she will never know, and the painful question to follow it will always be: why didn't I?

"I don't believe I...did what they think I did, Kate."

"Oh, babe," she sighs miserably, "I know you didn't."

He nods once with the end of the gesture finding his gaze on the ground between them. That knowledge would be news to John most likely, who seemed to think her upset aimed at the implication of her partner having killed Laura. It was deeply upsetting, but not because she considered it likely. It's absurd. What killed her, drove her to a sudden disgust so great as to dislodge her dinner, was how John spoke of it: full of doubt and fear. It's bad enough Rick went through what he did as young as he was, but to survive all of that and then fall under such a sick cloud of suspicion after the fact?

"Why doesn't everyone else though? I can't wrap my head around it." Kate faces him more squarely. "And you—you've allowed them to go on suspecting your part in it all these years. Do you appreciate how that looks from the outside? To me?"

Castle doesn't shy from her ire, which is ultimately on his behalf. By contrast, his expression is at ease. It's difficult to discern whether he's still closed off or simply taming the emotions attached to the matter.

"Rick, you have to talk to me. I wanna understand if I can."

Finally, there's an infinitesimal lift at the corners of his mouth, not a smile but an inclusive blip of feeling. Even so diminutive an appearance of it bolsters her. "You don't assume you'll be able to," he observes. His eyebrows lift together in a whisper of aggrieved irony. "I wish I'd given your past the same manner of respect. I do now, of course, but my first instinct was..." His voice trails off, the rest not needing to be said.

Beckett smiles minimally with a small shake of her head. The apology for that prior intrusion was all she ever needed.

"They know the truth," Castle declares quietly, back on topic. "Part of them does. The war that has raged here since then is waged between acceptance of that belief and...not. There have been literal casualties on both sides."

Beckett's lips straighten and soon dip into a small frown. "I'm not so sure they do know. You qualify John Autry as your advocate on the matter, but...God, Castle. His face when he talked about it. He thinks you did it."

"Yeah, he wants it to have been me too." Even a gentle volume of his baritone climbs atop every other sound of the evening around them to be easily distinguished. "It is what they prefer to have happened. Did you read the interviews?"

It takes a moment to swim through her confusion at his appalling reply to find her sunken lines of thought. "Uh, yeah. John took me through the case, but I went back in afterward to check those and other parts for myself." Kate shifts her weight from one hip to the other. "False confessions aren't rare, and survivor's guilt is a massive contributor. I figured that'd be what happened in your case, and I'm sure it was a major contributor, but it wasn't solely to blame. They asked the wrong things, and the way they asked them was all wrong too. There were more statements from them summarizing what they imagined taking place than actual questions. It goes beyond any ordinary example of sloppy police work, Castle."

"To be fair," he interjects mildly, "this happened a long time ago."

"The procedure for handling children as witnesses was different," Beckett acknowledges. "More apt to say it hadn't even been written yet actually. That occurred to me as well. Back then, we didn't know how to ask questions without also suggesting the answers we expected to hear. Even in a big city with more experienced investigators on the case that task might have been bungled. It still doesn't excuse what happened here." She crosses her arms in mute stubbornness, her jaw shifting with underlying anger. "They had their own agenda when they questioned you. I can imagine there being a bias in and of itself considering the crimes, but I don't understand how they could get it so twisted around. You have to want it to be true to make that mistake. Why the hell would they prefer it was? That doesn't make any goddamn sense."

"Well," Castle begins softly, "that's definitely one of the stranger details of the aftermath. It was easier for people to imagine me killing Laura. Like it was...better for her somehow. No one wanted to imagine her suffering the way the other women did, or even watching them suffer while knowing her turn was coming. When you consider why they believe what they do, the lack of feasibility sharpens into a terrible kind of clarity. How do we fault them for that? I've never been able to. At first, I guess I was repeating what they wanted to hear, yes. But over time..."

"You started to believe it too."

"I started being afraid it was true," Castle hedges, but then shakes his head. "Same result."

"That is so fucked up," Beckett murmurs with a hand rising to lay at her brow. "It makes me physically ill." Her partner says nothing. The man's expression is thankfully open to her by now, but the glimpses of grief visible there seem to be on her behalf, which is only more upsetting. "Stop feeling bad for me," she chides, "it's your horror story, not mine."

He almost smiles, but not quite.

"Obviously you grew up and realized the truth. So, again, why is this town still mired in what you might have done?"

"Not to quibble unnecessarily, but it isn't the town in general. Not anymore. Most of the current adult generation doesn't even know the story. Remember, this was something people were glad to bury deep and quiet. The issue of scale isn't especially relevant," he explains to her crinkled brow. "I just don't want you thinking I can't go anywhere around here without getting a long string of morose looks. In point of fact, I'm largely anonymous. There wouldn't have been any room for me to come back here if that weren't the case."

Beckett exhales a puff of very dim humor. "Two days ago, I wouldn't have accepted that idea—intentional anonymity. Not with your ego." Unbelievably, a deep hum of a chuckle tours the column of her companion's throat. The sound of it is a quietly happy reminder that, as Rick said, he's more than the sum of his history in Montauk.

Castle's voice rips her out of her thoughts and steers them back on course. "I'm not sure whether I lost the memory of what happened to Laura while we were still in the cave, or if it became muddled in the aftermath, but it is gone. I can't say definitively that I didn't hurt her. I know better in my heart, but the actual proof is just as buried as those poor women."

True. She'd temporarily misplaced that detail between there and here. He doesn't know either way for certain. There are no easy answers to his case. How alike we are—both of us haunted by our respective scenarios of what-if.

"Well, what the hell do you people talk about when the subject comes up?"

An arching eyebrow greets her question. "You think we talk about it?" It's as she'd guessed previously then. He's learned to live around this piece of history, but not by acceptance or some other form of resolution.

"Not even with John?"

"John has more reason than most to let the past stay buried. As lead investigator, not even his father, Frank, could stop what happened. We were close, you know? That man was as much of a father as any I'd had up to then. He, uh, carried a lot of guilt for not being able to stop the idea people came to have of what happened, of my role in it. I didn't realize that at the time. Mother moved us out of here and we didn't come back for seven years. There was never a chance to grow into that knowledge either. Eight months after the murders, Frank disappeared into the woods and never came out. He found a quiet spot out there and annihilated himself with his service weapon."

"Holy shit."

"He wasn't alone. Anita, Laura and Genie's mother? She threw herself into the sea from the bluffs of False Point. There were a few other suicides at the time. I told you before that no one who worked the case emerged from it unscathed. Some people who waded into it just...didn't quite come out again. It hit harder for people who were already having difficulties in their own lives. The cave itself was, I don't know, the last straw I suppose. Irrefutable proof, for them, that life and the world don't make much sense. Sometimes evil overcomes good. Sometimes the imbalance of that victory is so profoundly one-sided it's hard to believe good could ever hope to win."

"They applied that dismal logic to you too: if good didn't win, innocence must not have either."

Castle gives her another fleet, humorless curve of his lips in reply.

"Go on," she encourages quietly.

He nods and does so. "Three of the victims came from prominent families in the area."

"John mentioned that too."

"It makes an impact when the pillars of a community crumble. There's a psychological event called emotional contagion. It refers to situations where a group will unconsciously emulate one another's emotions to such a degree that they feel them as well. I think, even after the shock and grief wore off for most people, they were still influenced by the families' of the lost. It's a small town. There was nowhere to go to escape it back then. Like a virus, it spread. It endured."

"Unreal," Beckett murmurs with another shake of her head.

"Very real," Castle replies evenly, "and downright mundane. It's simple human nature." He faces her more squarely with either hand slipped into the pockets of his slacks. "There's a, ah, curious sense of responsibility attached to it all now."

She looks at him, runs her hands along her sleeves for warmth. "What do you mean?"

"What I did or didn't do is no longer particularly...hrm. Relevant, let's say."

"Seems pretty goddamn relevant to me, Castle."

"Is it though? Do you think my role in what happened matters to the few people left who carry the result of Llewellyn Matthews' madness? I'm one little detail attached to the end, a sorry note of punctuation on a grander, more painful story. And in that respect my perceived part in this is the only fact, however right or wrong it may be, which gives these people any comfort. The idea that Laura might have...gone...while looking into the eyes of someone she knew, loved. Ones that loved her back," he adds, so softly she has to strain to catch the syllables. The author clears his throat and forges onward, "Is it wrong to feel a responsibility to the victims who didn't make it out of there? And to express that by allowing their families to have what little solace is available under the circumstances by believing the events they constructed of it?"

"Ugh, god." She lifts a hand to the side of her head, cradling it. "That is so not okay. It's sick."

"It's—

"Complicated?" she snaps in interruption.

"That too, but I was going to say: a matter of simple survival. It's not a lie exactly, just an unspoken treaty of possibility."

"There were no hesitation marks. On Laura," she adds, wincing and studying him critically. There's no more distress apparent for getting into the gritty details, so she continues. "The depth of the wounds suggests an adult's strength. It takes...sorry, really, but it isn't easy to, uh, cut through all of that muscle and tendon, let alone with a rock."

"They cited—

"Hysteria strength," Beckett finishes again with a roll of her eyes. "That's an urban legend."

Castle arches an eyebrow as he regards her. "I once saw a woman who was maybe a hundred and thirty pounds stop a six-hundred motorcycle from tipping over onto her two-year-old boy when the kickstand failed. She had a full grocery bag in one arm and grabbed the rear fender with the other. She yanked it over onto its other side from at least a forty-five degree tilt in the opposite direction. It might have crushed her boy if it had fallen."

"Okay, well, scientifically speaking, the evidence of the phenomenon is anecdotal at best. I'm not saying you're lying, Castle, just that no court of law would entertain that explanation if it was used against you."

"The only thing these people have convicted me of within their own minds is the mere possibility of having enough mercy to spare a little girl from tortures that you and I can only imagine." By the end of the statement his voice has changed subtly. There's no lift of volume or growl in the tone. Just a well hidden quake of potently, destructive emotion.

Damn. What the hell do you say to that?

"But you didn't," Beckett attempts. "And you were right not to. Victims of violent crimes survive, Castle. It takes time, and yeah, in some cases survival doesn't even seem like the word for what some people become. But time passes and the horror slowly dims." She sniffs quietly and mentally curses a runny nose for the need to pause.

Castle doesn't even blink an interruption.

"There's always a chance for things to get better." Kate meets his attention again and holds it solidly. "You never know what...or who...might come barging into your life unexpectedly, flipping on the lights in all of those dark corners of yourself, ripping open the curtains to let the sunlight back in. Sometimes the reminder that it's okay to live your own life in the wake of disaster can show up in packages you'd never have expected." Kate pauses by necessity, and her companion's expression is so raw and humbled with understanding that she has to turn slightly to one side and away. "Everyone deserves time to see what chance brings. It's not mercy to rob someone of those possibilities."

Silence eases into the wake of her explanation. It is not uncomfortable, merely heavy with the weight of Castle's lengthy consideration. Finally, he says, "I don't think I took that from her, no. I'll never be one-hundred-percent about it though."

"I'm sure enough for both of us. If you could see what I see, you would be too, you sweet, foolish man."


A/N: So, a quick note here, because of the questions which the last chapter raised by its end. This is one of those times I wasn't specifically aiming for a cliff-hanger situation, or to confirm Castle's guilt. Whether he did or didn't commit the deed is intended to be more of a question mark for each of you to answer, as Kate found hers.

Sadly, scenarios of fear-riddled people imposing guilt unto situations like this, as John did previously, is no more fictional than it is incomprehensible. History is rife with examples of our little ones being intentionally and unwittingly coaxed into admissions that later prove invalid, likewise the opposite. We get afraid and lose our way. One of the reasons for the delay of this chapter was from researching a veritable cornucopia of sorrowful, real-life examples.

Additionally, it's fascinating to me the way the human mind functions, how it protects and in some cases condemns itself by burying some memories and outright manufacturing others. If our identity is the sum of our experiences, who do we become when those experiences are rendered suspect? I think how we live around the uncertainty matters just as much as the answers themselves. Anyway, musings aside, I hope this chapter was clearer than previous ones!