cold is the night. 2/?
heavy is the head that gets no sleep,
"He asked me if I wanted to get divorced."
Burke's not a chatty man, and that's perhaps why he works so well for her - he picks his words carefully, finds the right moment for them, but mostly, he lets her work it out herself. Even now, his only reaction is to incline his head slightly, tilting his chin up at her.
"I don't- I told him I loved him, I tried to make it clear that it wasn't about us, but..." She trails off, because what else is there to say, really?
"You need the words, Kate," he all Burke offers, but his voice is coaxing. This is a dance they know well; she's been in his office on and off for four years, and regularly for the last couple of months.
"I do." She needs the Kate, I love you to cling to, she always has, she needs his books to pore over, the notes he jots down for her in the loft, the words he whispers in her ear as they go to sleep. She needs the words... But maybe he doesn't? "He needs the actions?" she tries, cringing even as it turns into a question at the end. "Leaving him–" Oh, god, it hurts to say the words aloud, it hurts, it hurts. "Leaving him doesn't exactly scream I still want to be in this with you."
He hums. "Do you?"
"Of course!" she cries, and they've been over this, around and around and around. "I just don't want him to die!"
"Which he will. If you pursue this case, you believe that you'll put him in danger."
She's damn frustrated that they're routing back to this again, because it's all her sessions ever degenerate into – this fine point. An important point, and maybe the trick to getting herself back into the loft and back into the place where she can ease her husband's worry with a thumb smoothing over his eyebrow. But it feels like rehashing the same thing, and it all hurts.
"Yes," she finally grits out.
"But pursuing the case is the most important thing?"
"No," she cries, and that's new. Burke's never this direct. "No, it's not the most important thing."
She looks to Burke for help, because she can't find the words to follow that, but he's back to being silenced, to looking at her across the room with kind, encouraging eyes. Perfect. She takes a deep breath, dives in. "I don't... have a handle on this. I can feel this obsession lurking inside, and if I pursue it, then it puts my family – my husband – at risk."
"And if you don't?"
"It's not that simple." This is a point they've crossed before. It doesn't make it any easier to say. "It's like an addiction," she finally manages, in a robotic voice mastered from years and years of hearing it and repeating it and accepting it. "And I don't trust myself not to fall into the bottle again."
Burke offers her an encouraging hum, jotting something down in his notebook. She wonders if he, too, has aged in the last several months, if he's also burdened by this decision of hers like everyone else in her life seems to be. "I don't suppose there's an Obsessive Anonymous, is there?" she tacks on wryly, but of course Burke just looks at her again, no indulgent twist his mouth like Castle would have, no fondness for her gallows humour.
"What do you want, Kate?"
It's not the first time Burke has asked her that, but it's the first time she hears it instead in Castle's voice, remembers the night she showed up at his loft, and she wants him here, wants him asking it, wants to say you, you, you. It grows a lump in her throat and she swallows around it, refusing to cry in this office again. "I want to get my head around this." Mostly honest. "I want to go home." Better.
"You say that Rick asked you if you wanted to get a divorce." She nods. "What if home isn't there when you're ready for it?"
His voice is so quiet, so beseeching, that it strikes Kate that Burke is trying to break the news to her. As though it's news to be broken. But she's thought about this, of course she has. This isn't four years ago, and Kate is not going in blind, and she can see the forest for the trees now, she knows the possible consequences. Long before she stood in the loft and said I'm sorry. I love you so much, she stood in the hallway outside their home and considered every possible option, thought long and hard about the very real possibility that her husband might not be there when she finally figures this thing out.
Thirteen years. She tries hard not to think about that one.
But her answer is easy: "I'm his partner. It's my job to have his back." And then, even though it runs through her painfully, "If he hates me, if he leaves me, if he's gone when I get back... At least he's alive to do it." At least she won't drag him down with her.
we carry our lives around in our memories.