A/N: Well, I simultaneously love and hate this chapter. It rambles quite a bit and no matter how I edit I just can't seem to get it right. That's why I hate it. I love it 'cause it has the potential to be "pot-stirring". My character suddenly had old-fashioned, yet radical ideas about love and marriage and other things. Please note: The views of the characters do not necessarily reflect the views of the writer and all that jazz. Basically, I'm asking: don't hate me for writing her that way, I thought it might be interesting, controversial even, with out being over the top. I guess I'll see if y'all do as well.

Also, a warning that it's a little less story and a little more...ideals. I was going to skip it, but I decided not to, just to get this conversation out of my head.

I don't own and etc.

4 days later

"You didn't!" Alexis cried, her mouth hanging open in disbelief.

"I did!" Aris confirmed. "I erased his phone number from my phone and made sure I wouldn't be able to text him or call him or contact him. I had decided that I deserved to be chased – so I didn't want to waste my time on a guy that was too lazy to come after me."

The girls all sat around the living room, coffee mugs in hand. It was Sunday afternoon, and Rick had a meeting with his publisher, so Alexis and Martha invited over Kate and Aris and the 4 women sat around, wiling the afternoon away with a puzzle on the coffee table and plenty of tea and cookies for all. Aris regaled her niece with the story of her engagement, and though Kate was fascinated by the woman's belief in love, dating and marriage, she tried to keep silent through most of the exchange.

"Well, obviously he finally contacted you...?" Alexis prodded her aunt to continue the story.

Aris laughed gleefully. "Yes, he texted me and we went back and forth for a few minutes and I genuinely didn't know who it was – I totally had to ask! Of course Cal was confused about why I didn't know who he was – and I bluntly told him why I'd written him off. The whole thing was amazing!"

"Then he started asking you out?"

"Yep," Aris said contentedly. "All of a sudden, he came on strong. And 4 months later, we were married."

"No way!" Beckett gasped, not remembering to stay out of the conversation. "Four months later? That is unheard of!"

Aris laughed at her shock. "Yeah, but when you know, you know, right?"

"I guess," Kate replied doubtfully. "But four months? How can you know at that point?"

The conversation turned serious, and everyone watched Aris carefully. "How can you know after 1 year, or two years, or 15 or 20? Let's face it: love isn't an event, it's a process. And that's true of any kind of love – parent/child, friends, husband/wife, boyfriend/girlfriend – it's always a verb, not a noun. I have this theory that love is a choice, and we have to choose every single day who we will love."

"You choose who you love?" Alexis asked skeptically.

"Yeah," Aris confirmed. "Sometimes that choice is easy – like your dad and grandma loving you, Alexis. They wake up in the morning and remember how special you are and it's easy to love you. Sometimes that choice is hard. If you were to suddenly start drinking and doing drugs and stealing things and beating people up –" Aris stopped for a moment to let the humor of such a situation overtake everyone, "anyway, if you did all those things, it might be hard for your grandma and your dad to love you, but they would still choose it everyday.

"Sometimes it's just hard because the person you are choosing to love has changed over the months or years, and you may feel you don't know them anymore, you may not want to know them or put the effort in to know them again. Loving someone you don't know is difficult. But if you've chosen to love them, your love will grow as you get to know them again."

"But what about love at first sight? Do you believe in that?" Martha challenged.

"I do," Aris confirmed. "But what I think I believe it is is someone seeing the person they choose to love for the rest of forever. That the attraction and connection is so intense that they know they won't ever have trouble making that choice."

A light came on in Alexis' eyes. "So that's why you married Uncle Cal so quickly? You just decided to choose to love him?"

"Sort of, yeah. I knew that we got along, and that we could talk for hours about everything and nothing. I knew that he was intelligent and good and kind. I knew he was loyal and generous. All these things I knew before we even started dating. And when we started dating, our relationship turned into a brilliant love affair. We were swept into the passion and excitement of it all. So even though it was fast, we figured, hey – we know marriage isn't a cake walk for anyone, so let's decide to slug it out together. And we have ever since. We've loved and laughed and argued and made up and been silly and been petty and everything in between, but we've done it together. Everyday, I choose to love him, and he me, and we make that commitment. Like I said earlier, love is an action, not an event."

"That's so amazing Aunt Aris," Alexis breathed. "It's like...you knew what was coming, like you could see the future."

"I could," Aris smiled. "And so can you. I'd seen so many failed relationships since I was little that I knew that a good relationship would take hard work for it to last. That meant that I knew what my choices would need to be if I wanted to keep my relationship with my husband strong and alive."

"You can't see what your husband's choices will be though," Kate pointed out. "We can't ever know what someone else will do, right?"

"Of course not," Aris agreed. "I remind you that this is my relationship theory. I'm hardly pulling it off. I've made plenty of mistakes in my life – hurt and been hurt. I married Cal with one failed marriage in my belt already."

"Really?" Kate exclaimed. "You were married before?"

"Yep, I was young and in love. We'd dated for 2 years and then got married. After we'd been in a state of wedded bliss for about a month, I realized my husband had a secret life – he had a gambling addiction; I'd totally missed seeing it the whole time we were together. By two months, he'd cleaned out my bank account and hawked most of my possessions, including a wedding gift my father gave us that was worth quite a bit of money. By three months Gio wanted to press charges, but I just wanted to walk away and start fresh, y'know?"

"That's understandable, my dear," Martha sympathized. "I know exactly what you mean. Sometimes, it's better to just forgive and forget – and put yourself in a position where they can't hurt you again."

"Exactly," Aris said. "It goes back to my choices theory. Sometimes the choice to love is hard because the person you love is hurting you. Badly. I mean, no one's going to escape this life with out getting their feelings hurt at least a little. And we'll all hurt others too. But when the person who loves you is hurting you – you have to make the choice to love yourself and get away from them. Sometimes that means you have to choose not to love them...which can be hard because our choices may have become habits...and habits are hard to break."

"But isn't everyone different? Aren't you taking the romance out of it all?" Kate asked. "Or maybe even dooming us all to failed relationships?"

"Not at all, not any of that," Aris replied emphatically. "First of all, we're not all as different as we want to believe. As much as all lovers like to think that theirs is the first and only love like it in history, it's just not true. But that same fact, as depressing as it is, actually equips us with the tools to have happy, healthy relationships. I did plenty of studying on relationships at college, and I knew that, while I couldn't control the outcome of a relationship I entered, I had control of some of the variables, and that could help me get closer to a happy ending."

Kate couldn't stop herself. "What do you mean?" she asked.

Aris sighed and looked toward the ceiling, obviously trying to collect her thoughts.

"Well, I knew that a solid relationship needed to be built of two people who were free to be honest in that relationship – not that they didn't have pasts, or baggage, but that they were in a place at that time that they could be honest about. So I never dated a married man, or snuck around with a friend's boyfriend, or dated someone I knew had a drug or alcohol problem."

"That makes sense," Alexis pointed out.

Martha huffed aloud. "And yet women go after married men all the time, knowingly...I just don't understand."

"What other variables did you control?" Kate asked again.

"I knew that a healthy relationship needed a solid foundation of trust and communication. So I made the choice to not ever cheat on anyone I dated, and to not tolerate such behavior in the slightest degree in someone I dated. If a person can't be faithful to a simple promise of 'we're in a committed relationship', then I shouldn't expect fidelity in marriage. I kicked 4 boyfriends to the curb for that routine on the first violation. Two of them cried."

"You're brutal Aris," Martha said with a chuckle.

"I was!" Aris agreed, with a self-deprecating tone. Martha and Alexis laughed at Aris' dramatics, but Kate felt her heart pump even harder. She didn't look too closely at why the conversation was affecting her like it was, she just pressed Aris for more details.

"What else?" she asked, striving to keep her voice nonchalant. "Any other tricks of the trade?"

Aris smiled at Kate knowingly and thought for a moment before she continued. "I also learned that I couldn't take my previous failures as a death sentence. Just because I hadn't succeeded in keeping a relationship alive didn't mean I couldn't grow and learn from it. As long you are learning and progressing with each discontinued romance, the old adage "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again' is wise advice. And I had to remember to apply that to whoever I was with in the relationship as well. They deserved the chance to learn and grow just as I did."

"I suppose that's true," Alexis agreed. "If we all got relationships right on our first try, we'd all be married to our elementary school sweethearts and I am so glad I failed with Jeffrey Kelley!" Everyone laughed at that, and the mood lightened. Martha stood up and walked over to her son's sister.

"Aris Miron, I am delighted I get to spend time with you," she said, leaning down to give the woman a hug. "However I'm going to excuse myself. Chet is coming in a few hours and I need to go get ready."

"But you look gorgeous already," Beckett said with a smile.

Martha patted her hair and beamed at the compliment. "Yes well, I must freshen up," she said airily. "And at my age, that's no easy task."

The three younger women scoffed at her and Martha floated away on the wake of their flattery. Once she was gone, Aris collapsed against the couch.

"Oy," she groaned, "I feel like I've just talked so much, stood on my soap box a little too long. I think I should be embarrassed."

"No, not at all," Kate assured her. "You have a remarkable gift for storytelling and you've some sound advice."

"And, I need to know all about you," Alexis pointed out. "We've got a whole lifetime to catch up on."

"Your lifetime too, though," Aris said. "So maybe you need to start spilling all your stories and secrets for me and Kate." Alexis turned red and clammed up.

"Uh oh," Beckett teased, "I think we've found a gold mine of secrets...tell us what you're keeping locked inside you. It's about boys, I know it is!"

"I'm not telling my stories," Alexis giggled quietly.

Kate didn't let up. "No fair, your aunt told hers!"

"So you tell us yours!" Alexis shot back instinctively. A second later she realized what a good idea that was, and she latched on. "Yes, Kate, you tell us about your romances."

Beckett saw Aris' eyes light up. "A gal as gorgeous as you, detective, I'm sure has men lined up around the block."

Now it was Kate's turn to blush. "I really don't have much of a dating life," she hedged.

"Oh, we do not believe that!" Aris protested. "Come on Katie," she teased with the nickname and a sing-song voice. "Let's hear about all your boyfriends."

"I don't have any...Rissi" Kate jeered back, mimicking the teaasing tone and creating her own nickname for her new friend. "I'm just too busy with work. I have nothing like the fairy-tale your life is, Aris."

"Hardly!" Aris laughed. "I just have – like you said – a knack for story-telling. I'm a plain Jane who's been lucky to find a guy to love...I guess that's all a girl needs."

"I wholeheartedly agree," Kate whispered. "I'm a 'one-and-done' kind of girl myself."

"'One-and-done?" Alexis asked.

"When I get married, I want that to be the last relationship I enter into," Kate clarified. "I want to stay married for forever."

Aris smiled, but Alexis frowned. "But, remember? It doesn't always work out like that Kate," she said quietly. "I mean, look at Dad."

Beckett refrained from a snide: "Yes, my point exactly," and settled with a "What do you mean?"

Alexis sighed. "You know how my dad is, Kate," she said, a weight apparent on her shoulders. "He just doesn't know how to go half-way. So when he falls in love, he falls in love and he's been burned twice now. And, though I don't remember the first time very clearly, I do remember Gina, and my dad did honestly try with her. She just couldn't seem to bend or compromise. Then, my mom – well...if how she's performed as a mother is any indication of how she was as a wife...you have your proof right there."

Aris leaned over and squeezed her niece's hand. "I'm sorry you've both been hurt like that."

"Actually," Alexis said thoughtfully, "I have this feeling that all these relationships are just preparing my dad for something – or someone – really amazing. Like, he's gotten something from every heart break that he needed in his life, and each step is leading him somewhere special."

Kate's heart almost stopped in her chest. She allowed herself – for a moment to recall the feeling she had as she walked to tell Castle she loved him...like being reborn, like coming home. Before emotion overcame her, she shifted her train of thought. "He got you from Meredith, that was something good." Beckett indicated with a smile. Alexis beamed back at her.

"And he got Gina as his publicist," the girl continued the thought. "And she's better at that job anyway. So I'm kind of glad it didn't work out with Gina. And oh boy am I glad it didn't work out this past summer!"

"What didn't work out?" Aris asked, very interested. "Did your dad try to get back together with Gina?"

"I don't know exactly what happened, 'cause I wasn't here – I was at camp. But Kate was here. Kate, tell us what happened? Dad won't talk about it and here I am, five months later, and I don't know a thing."

Detective Beckett's mouth went dry. "I uh, ummm...well, he just came to the precinct and said he was going to the Hampton's for the summer and was taking Gina back with him. It wasn't my place to ask him anything, so I didn't."

"But I thought that maybe the two of you would – "

"I guess I can understand that," Aris interrupted Alexis' protest with a little too much enthusiasm. "Sometimes inter-office drama is just too much to keep up on."

Kate nodded stiffly, not looking anyone in the eye. She didn't want to say anything else for fear of hurting Alexis' feelings, so she gratefully let Aris steer the conversation to something else entirely. Even though a part of her wanted to know just where Alexis thought her father's heart breaks were leading him, and quieter part of her wanted to be at the end of that road.

"Yep," Kate finally acknowledged her friend's rescue attempt. "You hit the nail on the head Rissi – the inter-office drama was just...weighing me down."