A/N: I had no plans to add to this story but a reader suggested to me that it would be nice to add a scene where we actually see Kate with her daughter. Two days ago, out of nowhere, this idea popped into my head. So I put it on paper and decided to add it as a deleted scene of sorts. For anyone else who might enjoy it.

No proof readers this time, so all mistakes are mine.

Two (Deleted Scene)

Sunday is my day to write.

I mean, technically I can write every day. Since Allegra was born I've mostly been a stay-at-home Dad. So on paper it might look like I have lots of time to write. But anyone who's ever looked after a little human knows that the only free time you really have is when they're napping. And frankly, in those moments I'm usually ready for a nap too. The last thing I want to do sit down at my desk and work on my novel.

When Allegra naps the things I do think about doing include taking a shower, grabbing some food and picking toys up off the floor to increase my chances of having one toy-injury free day. (It hasn't happened yet, but I'm an optimist. I'm convinced the day will come when I don't trip over a plastic noisemaker from China in my own living room.).

Anyway, back to Sundays.

Beckett basically takes Allegra off my hands on Sundays. Sometimes for the whole day (on those rare days when I'm feeling particularly inspired) but definitely for the morning and usually for part of the afternoon as well. Barring any major catastrophe, Sunday is the one day she won't go in to the precinct. Beckett spends too much time there as it is. Twelve, fourteen hour days are the norm for her during the week and it's not unusual for her to go in on Saturdays too, in order to catch up on all the paperwork she never gets around to doing between her countless meetings and dealing with whatever chaos lands on her desk. Sometimes I think she misses being out in the field, but I have to admit, it gives me a certain peace of mind to know she spends the bulk of her time inside the precinct. That she's not chasing armed criminal in dark alleys anymore (I was decidedly more okay with it back when I was shadowing her, knowing I had her back out there, as macho and presumptuous that might sound).

Kate feels guilty sometimes, for not being around her daughter as much as she wants to be so she loves her Sunday mornings with Allegra. Almost as much as I love the break from having a crying, babbling, giggling toddler around me.

Kate does all sorts of things with her. She'll go for long walks in Central Park, stopping at the zoo afterwards, because Allegra loves the animals. Sometimes she'll take her to the local YMCA and they'll go to the pool. She brought her to Mom & Baby Yoga for a while too, until Allegra crawled out of the room they were in and straight into an adjacent room where she climbed over a woman's head. Apparently the woman was in some sort of deep meditation and Allegra almost gave her heart attack (I don't think Beckett ever went back to that yoga studio again). Sometimes her and Lanie take her out to brunch too, taking turns bouncing our troublemaker on their laps so she doesn't wreak havoc in whatever fancy restaurant Lanie's picked.

This morning Kate took her to a local playground. She'll probably pop into a cafe for a latte afterwards and come back home in the early afternoon, bringing back some lunch so we don't have to cook. (I love our lazy Sundays. It's my favourite day of the week.)

I haven't started writing yet today.

For the time being I'm enjoying doing absolutely nothing. Drinking a coffee by the pantry and marvelling at how perfectly the sunlight is pouring through the closed blinds in the kitchen. I know this is unusual for a writer, but I'm not someone who loves solitude. I do my best writing when there's life around me. While I appreciate not having a toddler tugging at my pants, I kind of wish someone else was in the loft, because I feed off the energy of others.

Much as she used to drive me crazy, I miss having my mother around. Every single day. What I wouldn't give to have her back just for a few hours.

I think of her as I make my way into the study with my mug of coffee. I used to not bother getting changed out of my pyjamas on Sundays, but when I did that I had the tendency to sink into the couch and play video games all morning. I didn't get a lot of writing done that way.

So nowadays I make sure to shower and get dressed. Makes it feel more like going to work. Even if my work is only a few steps from the kitchen.

Once I've turned on my desktop computer it doesn't take long for me to lose myself in my current Nikki Heat novel. Nikki and Jameson are tracking down that rarest of beasts, a female serial killer (They don't know it's the librarian yet, but the readers soon will).

The coffee turns cold in my mug and an hour passes by without me noticing. This is the best part of writing, when it flows so freely and naturally that you lose all sense of the outside world. A kink in my neck brings me back to it and I stretch my arms. I see that I haven't touched my coffee.

I'm about to get up and pour myself a fresh cup when I hear screaming from the hallway followed by the sound of a door opening.

"Castle!" I hear Kate's voice as soon as the door opens. "I need some help."

Her words are nearly drowned out by our daughter's screaming.

Being around Allegra all the time means I know her cries all too well. Know the difference between her being hungry, hurt, tired or merely wanting attention.

Now she's hurt. (Mind you, you don't need to decipher her cries to figure this one out. Her bloody cheek is kind of a give-away).

Kate's holding Allegra with one arm while angrily shoving the stroller into the loft with the other.

"What happened?" I ask.

I hold out my arms to take our daughter from her, but Kate doesn't let go of Allegra. "Get the first aid kit."

I do as she tells me and when I get back into the living room, Kate's sitting on the couch with Allegra on her lap, trying in vain to get her to stop crying. Big, wet tears are pouring out of her blue eyes and dripping all over her face, including her bloody cheek.

I kneel down in front of both of them with the first aid kit, noticing now that my daughter's hands and knees are scraped too. Her cheek looks the worst, so I start on that first. Cleaning it with an antiseptic wipe and putting generous dabs of ointment on it. Of course that only makes her scream louder. Her piercing wails are the only audible sound in the loft now and she tries hard to squirm out of her mother's grasp. Every now and then her hands whack my face, even though Kate tries to get a hold of them. Tries to keep her little fingers away from her bleeding face.

Allegra might still be small but she's feisty. Holding on to her is no easy feat.

We might all be injured by the time we're done patching her up.

I somehow manage to finish fixing up her cheek, padding down a big square band-aid even as she keeps crying. I catch a glimpse at my wife, who looks as distraught as my daughter (minus the screaming and crying).

"Castle..."

"Yeah?"

I'm gonna tackle her knee next. Allegra's doing too much squirming for me to even attempt cleaning her elbow.

"Do you think we should take her to a hospital?"

"Hospital?" I question.

None of her cuts and scrapes look very deep to me. But Kate tends to panic when it comes to Allegra. She wouldn't think to see a doctor herself if some criminal knocks her out during a fist fight, but if Allegra has a fever for more than a couple of hours, she's ready to run straight to the ER.

In fairness, I was a panicky parent the first time around too. I'm a bit more relaxed with my second one. Besides, Allegra is way more of a handful than Alexis ever was. She gets into bumps and scrapes nearly every day since she started walking. If I took all of them seriously, I'd have to write an extra book a year just to pay for our medical bills.

"Why? What happened?"

"She...she fell off a slide. I wasn't looking...one moment she's playing in the sand near the slide, the next she's waving to me, standing halfway up the slide...I tried...I tried to get to her but this other, bigger kid came bolting down the slide and knocked her right off."

I have a hard time understanding (and hearing) Kate's explanation through Allegra's screaming.

"She was pretty high up when she fell...maybe she's more hurt than we think."

"Hey..." I ignore Kate for a moment and focus on my daughter. It's so hard to try and bandage her up when she's out of control like this. Nothing that Kate does seems to calm her down. "Come on, Potato, enough is enough."

I have this one trick that always calms her down. I raise my hand, spread out my fingers and cover Allegra's face with it. She doesn't respond at first and keeps crying. So I remove my hand and give her nose a poke with my index finger, watch as her blue eyes follow it. They look focused enough that I don't think she's really hurt her head. Then I put my hand back over her face, so that I can only see her eyes peeking through the spaces between my fingers. It muffles her cries at first and that seems to calm her down.

I repeat the whole process three times.

By the third time, she's no longer crying. Just sniffling. Pitiful little sounds, interspersed with the occasional hiccup. I lean in, squish my nose against hers and Allegra rewards me with what almost looks like a smile.

I know I'm terribly biased, but she's so freaking cute when she smiles. She might have my eyes and Kate's face (It's too early to tell, but I think she'll also have Kate's hair when she gets older) but her smile is all her own. And it's beautiful.

Kate kisses the top of Allegra's head, relieved that our girl has finally stopped fighting us. "You're amazing," she tells me.

"We can't all be baby whisperers," I say with a satisfied grin and start working on patching up Allegra's knee.

"That trick never works when I do it," Kate says ruefully. "She's such a Daddy's girl."

I don't think it's so much that she's Daddy's girl. My fat, warm fingers are just more comforting than Kate's cool, skinny ones.

When I'm finally done, Kate lets Allegra go and our daughter waddles across the living room, towards her favourite toy. She ignores both of us now that we've put her back together.

"Look, she didn't topple over," I point out to my wife. "I think she'll be okay."

"It's my fault." Kate leans back into the couch and runs both her hands through her hair. I notice they're shaking a little. "It shouldn't have happened."

"What?" I get off my knees and scoot up into the couch next to her.

"I should've been paying attention to her. Instead, I was checking work e-mails on my phone."

I get it now. The guilt-laden looks I caught on her face since she walked through the door with our screaming daughter. "I'm sure you were the only parent in the playground who had her phone out," I joke.

Kate looks at me in disbelief. As if she'd consider the idea of me giving her an excuse.

"I swore to myself that one morning a week I wouldn't think about work. And I can't do it...I see these flagged e-mails from the Commissioner and of course I can't ignore them. Even though I know that letting Allegra out of my sight for ten seconds is asking for trouble."

"What'd the Commish want?"

"Petrelli got caught on video using excessive force this morning. Again." She sighs. "You know I'm not a saint, I've been guilty of it myself...but this guy, he's a menace and a loose cannon. Worse than Slaughter. He tackled a 14-year old kid walking down the street eating an ice-cream. Fourteen! I swear I'm getting that guy off the force, if it's the last thing I do as Captain. I have a good team at my precinct but it's the guys like him that get the attention and make us all look bad."

Getting a police officer fired is a lot harder than the media might lead you to believe. There's an awful lot of due process involved. Beckett's well aware of that and for someone who doesn't particularly enjoy bureaucracy, it drives her crazy sometimes.

Like right now.

"Still..." Her hazel eyes turn to mine, full of regret. "It shouldn't have mattered this morning. I should have known better than to check my phone when she's at the playground. I know how quickly she runs off. You'd think I learned my lesson at the yoga studio. I'm leaving the phone at home next time I take her out."

"If you do that, how am I gonna call and give you my lunch order?"

Kate pushes herself off the couch, so that she's sitting on the rim, arms extended along her sides with both hands pressed into it. "This isn't funny, Castle. She could have been hurt so much worse."

"But she's not," I counter. "She's fine." My gaze drifts over to where Allegra's playing on the floor of the living room. She's on her knees, oblivious to the band-aid on one of them, babbling on about something or other. She's a resilient kid.

Kate closes her eyes and sighs. "Almost two years later and I'm still lousy at this."

"What?" I have no idea what she's talking about.

She turns to me. "Motherhood. I'm awful at it."

I chuckle a little. Surely she's joking. "You're an amazing Mom."

"I'm not," she shoots back. Dead serious. "We both know it."

"Excuse me?"

"You look after her every single day, all day long and manage not to kill her. Me, I spend an hour with her once a week and bring her back bruised and bloodied."

"Did you forget about that bump on her head from when she ran into the heater last week? Pretty sure that happened under my watch."

"I can't even stop her from crying..."

I raise both my eyebrows as I look at my wife. She's the one who looks like she's close to tears now.

It's all so ridiculous and untrue, I don't even know what to say or what to do. There are plenty of times Allegra's gotten hurt while I look after her, plenty of times that it's Kate who gets her to stop crying, not me. But she seems to have forgotten all that right now.

So I settle for taking one of her hands into mine and run a thumb along the top of it, hoping my chubby fingers are as comforting to her as they are to our daughter. "Are you done beating yourself up?" I ask after a few moments.

"If you tell me I'm an amazing cop, I might buy it, Rick. But I'm not an amazing Mom. Not by a long stretch."

"Yeah, you are."

"How can you...?"

"You stayed," I cut her off. "That's amazing to me."

Kate gives me a puzzled look. She doesn't quite get what I mean by that.

I've never told her how afraid I was that she might not. Stay, that is.

As cocky and self-assured as I can appear to the rest of the world, the truth is, having your first wife leave you to raise your daughter alone can do a number on you. You don't even realize it or acknowledge it but there's an insecurity of sorts that worms its way into your system and settles there. Worst of all it lingers, no matter how much you want to flush it out. Or pretend it doesn't exist.

I know first hand that raising a brand-new baby is the most challenging and unglamorous job in the world. It comes with the kind of sleep deprivation usually reserved for inmates at Guantanamo. And, honestly, no matter what the baby bloggers say, the first six months don't bring a whole lot of rewards either.

Meredith began leaving us only four weeks after she gave birth, when Alexis got colicky and cried all the time. At first she just left for a few hours to get out the house. Then a few hours would turn into a few days. I didn't even blame her at the time. There were plenty of moments when I wanted to leave too. There's only so much endless crying you can stand before you're afraid of losing your sanity.

But I stayed. Mostly because someone had to and partly because I already loved that little girl so much it outweighed everything else. By the time Alexis started teething, Meredith was seeing someone else and only stopped by about once a month.

This time around I often lose sleep not because Allegra's keeping me up at night, but because I wonder what Kate's breaking point will be.

Although we stopped using birth control not long after we got married, kids and domestic bliss was never something that we yearned for. I mean we did, we wanted to have a baby, but not in the way that some couples do, like Kevin and Jenny for instance. For them not having children would have been unfathomable. For us it wasn't. Had Beckett not gotten pregnant naturally, we weren't about to consider in-vitro and all sorts of other efforts. We'd have been perfectly fine without kids.

Of course that knowledge only added to my fear.

Like Meredith, Kate's a beautiful woman (What can I say? We all have a weakness. Beautiful women are mine). She's smart and ambitious. A workaholic and a bit of a thrill-seeker who could be with anyone she chooses, including billionaire geniuses like Eric Vaughn. How long would it be before Kate Beckett decided that dirty diapers, a tired husband and a screaming baby wasn't her thing?

It's a stupid, baseless fear. Just as silly as Kate's fear of not being a good mother. I know that. Beckett hasn't done a thing to suggest that she doesn't want this or that she'd ever leave us. It seems grossly unfair to her to even harbour these thoughts. It's why I can't bear to tell her.

But that doesn't mean they've gone away.

Nearly two happy years as a family later, the fear is still there. The thought that one day she'll decide she's had enough, walk out the door and not come back. It paralyses me sometimes, often out of nowhere, and usually at around three in the morning, when I watch her sleeping next to me, blissfully unaware of my morbid thoughts. It's like a panic attack that I have no control over. Thankfully, it doesn't last. I usually come to my senses by morning.

"What do you mean?" Kate asks me softly.

"I, uh..." I'm not sure how I want to say this. I'm not ready to admit this out loud. But at the same time I need her to know how ridiculous she's being. That I'm not being facetious or patronizing when I tell her she's an amazing Mom.

Because she is.

"You get up and pace around the loft with her in your arms all night when she's teething, even when you have to work the next day..." I start.

"Castle..."

"You run to the drug store at night when she's got a fever. You take her off my hands on Sundays so I can write. You slipped the mall Santa fifty bucks when Allegra puked all over his beard last Christmas. " There's something else that springs to my mind. Something that makes me smile. "Remember when I had that super important meeting at Black Pawn two months ago and our sitter cancelled at the last minute? You just grabbed the Snugly and took her to work with you. Took a cardboard box from the evidence room, moved it next to your desk, tossed a blanket inside and put our daughter in it."

I'll never forget the sight of Allegra sleeping in an evidence box when I went to the precinct to pick her up that afternoon after my meeting. I think Beckett might've made NYPD history that day.

"I'm still not used to it sometimes," I confess. "Not having to do all this by myself. Having someone around to do it with me. Someone who...loves it."

For a moment, Kate doesn't say anything but I can tell by the way she's looking at me that she knows what I mean now. I hope it's enough for her to never doubt herself as a mother again.

Her hand slips out of mine and she cups my face with both of her hands, before leaning in to kiss me. I love it when she pulls me into her space and kisses me like that. It's gentle and tender, but it's also possessive and proprietary. It's her way of letting me know I'm hers. Hers alone.

"You know..." she sighs when we're done and we've both pulled away. "I've gotten to like Meredith over the years but I'll never in my wildest dreams understand how she could walk away from all this. From you...and your daughter." For a second, I get lost in her eyes and her words. "I'd fight for it. Because I can't imagine ever giving this up. This beautiful life with you. You know, that, right?"

"Yeah..." The word gets caught in my throat like a giant lump. "I know." I do know this, in spite of my foolish fear.

But I think there's a part of me that needed to hear her say it.

"Good," she nods.

Allegra's decided she's done playing with the toy elephant and she's next to us again, tugging at Kate's jeans. Tired of being ignored. Our daughter looks pretty funny all covered in band-aids.

"Come here, Potato," Kate reaches for her, her strong arms pulling Allegra up onto her lap. "I can't believe you've got me calling her that too. We're going to stop calling her that when she gets older, aren't we?"

"Yes," I say solemnly. "We'll stop calling her Potato when she gets older." (Unless of course she still looks like one when she's older. Then all bets are off).

Okay, so she doesn't really look like a potato.

I came up with the nickname because Allegra has this funny habit of falling asleep face-down on the floor. She simultaneously pulls her legs in underneath her body and sticks her butt into the air just before falling asleep. One time I caught her wrapping herself in a light brown blanket when she did it. It looked like there was a giant potato lying in the middle of our living room.

Now she's lying face down on her mother's stomach. Bet it won't be long before she's asleep there.

For some reason the image makes me think of Alexis when she was that age. When Meredith would come over and spend some time with her. I'd constantly nudge Alexis towards her mother no matter how often she came crawling back to me.

Because no matter how upset I may have been with Meredith, I always wanted her to have a relationship with our daughter. I knew Alexis might not need it when she was a toddler, but at some point she would. And that meant they needed to have a connection to begin with.

So they did have one, but it was never like this. Even at two-years old, Alexis would never have done this. She'd never seek out her mother and fall asleep on her, the way Allegra does, like it's the most natural thing in the world. She instinctively knows that she's safe and secure there. I don't have to nudge Allegra towards her mother, she gravitates towards Kate all on her own.

Part of me feels sad, that Alexis never had this.

It doesn't take long for Allegra to fall asleep. Our potato looks more like a sack of potatoes now, with her face squished into Kate's chest and her limbs hanging off to the sides.

I get up and offer to lift up our daughter and put her into her bed. Because that won't be comfortable for Kate for long. Allegra's getting heavier. She's not a baby anymore.

"No...it's okay," Beckett protests, stroking our sleeping daughter's back. "Leave her here. She's comfy."

"Okay." I'll make the offer again a bit later. When I know Kate won't turn me down.

Then I spot the cup of coffee I never got around to refilling and get up and grab it. Make my way into the kitchen to brew a fresh batch for both of us.

By the time it's done and I come back out into living room with two steaming mugs of coffee, they're both fast asleep. Done in by their playground stress. One on top of the other. It's seriously adorable.

I set down Kate's cup of coffee with a smirk. Maybe she'll wake up before it gets cold. Maybe she won't. Doesn't matter. She never gets enough sleep, so I kind of hope she doesn't.

I head back into my study, sit down at my desk and resume my writing where I left off.

Before long, I escape back into Nikki and Rook's world and find ways to add even more twists to the labyrinthine mazes I've already carved out for this story.

Occasionally I turn away from the screen and glance towards the living room where Kate and Allegra are still zonked out on the couch. They'll wake up soon and Allegra will probably distract us too much for me to keep writing. We'll need to cook lunch after all. But I don't care. The three women in my life, they're my whole world.

And I like that for the time being, at least two of them are back under the same roof as me.