He could have invited himself to Beckett's apartment that evening, citing the need to go over everything that made up their current case once more. It would have been the logical thing to do. Sit together, share ideas, using their backgrounds to predict the killer's next move like they'd done so many times.
But Castle didn't have it in him.
Too many things had affected the way he felt about her lately, too many unanswered questions, unreturned acts of affection, too much of the depressing nothingness that seemed to sum up her feelings for him lately.
Did she really want him around any longer? Did she need him as much as she needed him a few short years ago, when their paths first crossed? Had their lives taken on two different directions, slowly but surely driving them apart?
Lanie's and Esposito's breakup had been the beginning of a tidal wave of change in the group of people that summed up his new work family. And maybe that part had begun to clear some of the fog that had clouded his mind since the day Beckett was shot. As the weeks and months after his heart wrenching confession of love came and went without any reciprocation, his hope for a positive outcome diminished one lonely night after another.
Had he seen something different in her years ago, something that wasn't there? Or were his thoughts and feelings too self-centered? Did he miss something that made her not want to be with him? What was it that made her ignore his obvious advances, his clear-as day confessions, his caring demeanor? Was it not enough? How much else was there to do?
Or was their relationship doomed from the beginning? Were they just too different? Their yin and yang too abstract to match? Was life telling him in no uncertain terms that Kate Beckett would never love him, no matter what big of a fool he made out of himself?
Because that's exactly what it felt like right now.
He was a fool, fighting for the love of a woman who had dismissed his advances from day one. A successful, best-selling author who could have any woman he wanted- except for the one he really did want.
His deep brooding was interrupted when the book he'd been studying shifted off to the side, nearly toppling over his coffee.
Catching it in time before the thick swill could spill over onto his mahogany desk, Castle drew in a deep breath, trying to fight off the demons that had such a stronghold on his emotional awareness lately.
The case.
He had to focus on the case. Even if his private life was a mess right now, he owed it to the victims to find the killer. The sooner, the better.
Swallowing the bitterness that came with his thoughts about Beckett, he pushed her aside as he did with the book he'd been reading, not finding much in the way of psychology that would help him that evening.
Instead, he decided to start from the beginning, treat the case as though they'd just discovered Raquelle's body.
But this time, instead of treating this as a serial killing, his first research would take him someplace completely different.
