"Thank you."

He stood silhouetted by moonlight, leaning against the doorframe between the office and their bedroom, the closed laptop tucked against his hip.

"What for?"

She thumbed off the iPad and sat up to stretch out the kinks in her lower back, folding herself to sit cross-legged on the bed.

"For letting me read it."

"Well, you showed me yours."

Her teasing attempt at innuendo garnered a small curve of his lips that did not reach his eyes. Castle finally stepped forward, though, bringing his features from the shadows into the yellow glow of lamplight, revealing suspiciously red-rimmed eyes.

"I thought we needed to start this off right."

This was not how she had pictured their wedding night, each of them pajama-clad, cloistered in separate rooms with the other's Word document, their hearts in tatters. But he had been right to insist once they got home - it was time.

It had been sweet, actually, the way he had told her he hadn't bought her a wedding present; he had written her one instead. His broad palm was warm when he pressed the thumb drive into hers. Kate owed him that same openness, that chance for a clean slate. She had booted up the laptop under her login, opened her own journal to that first four-sentence entry. She had contemplated curling up with him in his office, but almost instantly changed her mind as she had watched him sit in front of his screen, eyes scanning the first lines. She had escaped to the next room instead, loaded his file on the iPad, and stretched out on the bed.

At first, her eyes had wandered from his words on the screen to the door separating the bedroom from the office. She had been writing to him for all those months, but somehow the reality of her writer-husband actually reading her words had her insides tied in knots. But then she found herself pulled under that all too familiar spell - before she had ever known him as a partner, a best friend, a lover, she had known his words.

The Nikki Heat novels read like a thinly-veiled love letter to her, but this journal was the first thing he had ever written for her eyes only. His entries began to captivate her attention, and soon she found herself reading some two and three times, devouring the details of his narrative, savouring each word.

They were simultaneously the most beautiful and most painful he had ever written.

By the time he appeared in the doorway, she had completely forgotten he had been reading her own words. Making his way across the room, he paused at the side of the bed until she turned to hang her legs over the edge and patted the comforter beside her in invitation. Setting the laptop next to the iPad, he sank to the mattress.

Her fingers, numb with adrenaline and cold, tangled together between her knees, lacing, gripping, pressing the new band and the familiar one until they pinched. She only hoped she could hide the tremor in her voice as well as she concealed the one in her hands.

"Mine won't be winning any Pulitzers, I know. I've never been any good at writing in a journal. As a kid, I always gave up after the first week."

Her eyes stayed down as her stomach churned.

Those three months of written words laid her heart bare.

He took in a breath, long and slow and deep, let it out, and sat forward to mirror her pose, elbows on knees. He didn't turn to face her, instead letting the words span the distance.

"Kate, what you wrote? Everything you were thinking, feeling, details about your day, about being pregnant? Those words are the most amazing gift anyone has ever given me. It's almost like I have some part of those three months back."

His warm hand covered both of hers, thick fingers insinuating between the narrow knobs of her knuckles. The strength, the gentleness of his hold took her back to that afternoon.

They had made it. In the slanted light filtering in through the vaulted dome, they stood, hands clasped, on the landing of the floating stairway in the Rotunda of City Hall. The Mayor had closed the public space just long enough for their little group to gather and listen as Katherine Houghton Beckett and Richard Edgar Alexander Rodgers Castle exchanged vows and became legally responsible for one another's misbehavior.

Her cream shift was far from couture, and certainly not her mother's gown, but it was simple, classic, clung and draped in all the right places to forgive her growing waistline. Castle looked handsome in her favorite charcoal suit, and the deep blue button-down matched her earrings and brought out his eyes.

When the Mayor pronounced them, it was Gates who piped up with a resounding reprise, "Well, kiss the man!" Castle's dramatic dip bringing on cheers from the rest of the group. They paused to kiss barefoot in the fountain as they crossed the park on their way to the Woolworth building for dinner in the newly-renovated top floor penthouse.

When she had asked how he arranged to reserve the space, unofficially known as the "Castle in the Sky," not yet up for sale, but a steal at a cool 100 million, he had predictably answered, "I know a guy."

They had panoramic views of New York and a technicolor sunset as they swayed and spun through their first dance.

The evening had been perfect.

Uncomplicated: the two of them and their family. She had been the one to point out the two familiar, broad-shouldered, dark-suited gentlemen keeping watch from one level above them in the Rotunda, but Rick had already spotted the spies. So much for secret agents being inconspicuous. Unfortunately they had slipped away by the time the ceremony was complete.

At Kate's request, they had skipped garters and bouquets in favor of a moonlit champagne toast on the terrace - she was allowed a sip or two - and then headed back to the loft, empty thanks to some last-minute spa reservations with an overnight at the Four Seasons for Martha and Alexis.

Seeking lips had found flushed, heated skin in the spacious, but firm, back seat of the town car on their ride home. When Castle tugged her toward their bedroom, his gift of words was the last thing she had expected.

His fingers squeezed hers briefly, bringing her back to the present. Their day had left her heart so full, so exposed, and then to read about all he had gone through to get back to her, to get to this moment, she found maybe it wasn't so hard to speak after all.

"I'm really proud of you."

That prompted a pair of raised eyebrows from him.

"Why?"

Shifting her body to face him, she unfastened their hands, only to take up both of his.

"You were brave. You were resourceful. You never gave up."

His lips pressed together almost making a smile.

"You never gave up, either."

"You told me not to."

That smile did reach his eyes.

"I'm proud of you, too."

Now it was her turn to raise a brow.

"It's my job to solve mysteries."

"And that's one of the things I love about you, but that's not what I meant. I'm proud of you for letting people in when you were hurting. And for letting me in tonight, letting me read all those awful words."

"I wrote them to you, Rick. Sometimes the worst of words make the best of beginnings."