Chapter Fourteen: I need one more night.

The trip from the Hampton's police precinct to their upscale West Hampton's estate doesn't take more than fifteen minutes. It feels more like fifty - to both of them.

Castle's silent and withdrawn, his face turned away and his eyes stubbornly flitting from the passing ocean views to his lap and back again. He steadfastly doesn't glance in her direction, but at least he's not feigning sleep on her now, as she's pretty damn certain that he was while she drove them up here.

He's trying for unconcerned, unbothered, she thinks. But he's failing dismally and coming across as guarded and calculatedly cold instead. Her mouth tastes bitter with it, the fact that he's play-acting and still so unable to be himself around her.

But then she makes the turn onto their mile long driveway and Kate's thoughts are instantly pulled away from her husband's current state of mind and sent spiraling instead. She swallows heavily as she steers the cruiser closer to the house, forcing the sudden rampant nerves and nausea back down into her stomach. As their destination finally comes into view she realizes with unwavering certainty that she wasn't actually ready to come here.

Not ready in the slightest and its terrifying that that she didn't even know that until this very moment.

Her foot eases up on the gas pedal without her noticing and the car begins to slow far before it reaches the parking circle in front of the sprawling ocean-side mansion. The cop doesn't notice anything, all she can see are flashes. Vivid images scurrying across the landscape of her mind from the last time that she was here. The last time they were here together. Jackson barely a month old and strapped securely into his car seat beside her. Castle driving and bemoaning the lack of her presence in the front of the silver Mercedes while she focused instead on playing with the tiny perfect fingers of their son. Jack was all wide-eyed and staring at her, too young yet to smile but the concentration written somehow on his face gave the distinct impression he was trying to.

Kate sees it all again. She feels it all, again.

All of that perfect happiness.

Breathless and uncontainable. Everything that she'd never dared to dream that she could have and it was hers - theirs. A life she could never have imagined. A love unlike anything else she'd ever known - and a baby. A gorgeous, perfect miniature of the incredible man who fathered him – it was everything . . . Everything.

All gone now.

All of it long gone, and suddenly all the world is unraveling again as it did a year before, and the cruiser is starting to swerve even as it rolls to a stop still a hundred meters from their destination. She's not aware of any of it – nothing beyond the overwhelming cascade of feelings and images of how perfect life was the last time that she was here.

She wants to die.

In this moment, she just wants to crawl inside these beautiful memories for a moment, breathe them in, hoard it all to her heart for one final second and then just stop. Just stop living. Stop feeling, stop fighting, stop hurting. Just stop.

"KATE!"

The call of her name is sharp, loud. And she comes back out of it as Castle makes a grab for the steering wheel, keeping the cruiser from rolling onto the grass verge as it comes to rest.

She turns wide frightened eyes on him and Castle stares back. Confusion and fear dancing across his face as he wonders what's she's playing at? What's wrong with her?

"Kate?" he says again, softly this time. A thousand questions asked in his inflection only, he offers up nothing more.

Eyes filling she fights to be honest with him. Fights to share this with him instead of giving into the blind panic that's overtaking her and letting the loss – the terrible loss – steal her away. It's their loss, their loss, and she knows if she gives into this instinctual impulse ever again all hope of him coming back to her will be gone.

"The last time . . . " She gets out.

Castle frowns, repeats it back to her as a prompt, "The last time?"

"The last time we were here – together." Her voice breaks, the image of tiny fingers inside hers carried in the heartbreak.

Her husband's eyes light with a sudden understanding and then dim with the burden.

"Yeah," he manages to croak out. "We were a family."

Kate nods and reaches blindly for him, desperate for the feeling of his reality, and their connection. She grabs onto his fingers and her eyes close as she ghosts her thumb across the back of his hand. Lets her focus be on the warmth and the real, solid feel of him. He's her reason to remain; he was and still is her only reason to remain. He is why she's fought to come back from this terrible darkness that's engulfed her over this last year. It hasn't been easy for her, though she doesn't know how to make him understand this, not without it all sounding like excuses for behavior that shames her heart in its terrible selfishness now.

Behavior that calls to that same broken heart this very moment. Offering a way out where there is just blissful denial and everything is comfortably numb.

But no, no Kate. Silly Kate.

She can't let it beat her, not after all her work, has to let this all out now so that maybe Castle can begin to see how hard she has been fighting.

"You . . . For you," she gasps. The words are a struggle. Air is a struggle and then suddenly she's free of the seat-belt and conscious of him almost lifting her across the divide between the seats, and into the haven of his lap.

"Breathe, Kate," he murmurs against the top of her head and she realizes that she's burrowing against him. Cramming her head into the space beneath his chin so that her ear can seek out the strong rhythmic thumping of his heart within his broad chest. It races beneath her ear, picking up speed as she listens.

Her husband's arms wrap awkwardly around her and he seems unsure where to put his hands. That and his racing heart tell her just how difficult this is for him, but then he cradles her close even though she can tell he doesn't really want to.

"Just breathe," he whispers again, his low voice calm and infinitely comforting. "Deep and slow, Kate - you can do it."

Air rushes back into her lungs as if solely on his command, and she clings on hard to him, her fingers scrambling for purchase in his shirt as she fists the material between the digits desperately.

She lets the tears come.

Oh God, Kate.

It feels, actually Castle doesn't know what this feeling is that he currently feels as he holds his wife close in the narrow confines of the passenger seat of her vehicle. So much of her is in contact with so much of him, and this breakdown of hers is . . . unexpected.

The blind panic in her eyes, the memories that she was clearly reliving. He knows exactly what scene has swept over her. And it's unexpected only in that he's been thinking she'll flee because of the bad memories yet to rain down on them. Not the good ones.

Oh, God – not the good.

Everything, every moment that they shared here, all of it's just . . .

So very happy they were, and so much in love.

Heart in his throat, a storm of emotions swamps him and he doesn't realize it but he cradles her just as tightly now as Kate's holding onto him. There is no awkward awareness of it in the way he just reacts on instinct. His body seeking her closeness and his mind unable to counteract it - too occupied.

Its all clear as Kate sobs against his shirt, tiny murmurs of his name falling over and over from her lips, and the writer looks through the windscreen to the looming shape of the home beyond that they both love. The sprawling house is such a familiar sight, one he's always taken for granted because it's so long been a part of him. Maybe that's why he views it differently in this moment than she. For him there are so many more years of memories, so many more moments that his mind can associate with here.

But for Kate, her memories of this place are so much more compact, compartmentalized. Every one of them linked to him specifically. To how perfectly happy they had been within its walls, gifted after so many trials and tribulations with such a wonderful, full, extraordinary life.

Gifted with Jack, who was surely created in the huge bed that dominates the master suite – or maybe the soft rug that they love that lies before the fire? He doesn't know and it doesn't matter. They had it all and her reaction to it, how she's reaching for him – it's so very different from how she so resolutely pushed him away.

There are no walls around her grief here. No barriers to the hopeless darkness of her loss – their loss – she isn't hiding or being stoic or any of the things she's previously done when caught in the throes of all the pain of this.

Instead she's physically seeking him, she's open and her eyes as she gasped for breath told him something Castle doesn't know how to believe is true, even though he saw it clearly written there.

Even though he heard it in her gasp of 'For you'.

He's the only reason Kate's still living in the aftermath of Jack's death. The only reason she could even begin to try and make it through. He tugs her tighter still against him, grappling with this flash of understanding. Wonders if he can somehow absorb this? Reconcile it with how she's made him feel this past year as he struggled himself to hold his life together. He doesn't know, he can't answer it yet. He fears strongly that this is just a behavioral aberration from her, as the anniversary clock is ticking down.

But he holds her.

Holds her with feeling. Holds her as her husband would even if it is. He can't help it, because how does he deny now that he's the sole reason she lives.