AN: I thought I could be through with this part of my Castle experience, but I found otherwise. Such is love. Patricia, thank you.

Richard Castle was not a man accustomed to professional failure. There'd been occasional missteps, certainly, stumbles along the path he'd forged to his position of acclaim in the world of mystery-writerdom, but he'd always managed to look back at the ground and laugh them off. That was until now.

Five weeks. His most recent contribution to the literary world had been in circulation for five weeks, and as he sat behind the screen of his laptop and scrolled through page after page of unabashed scorn for the words he'd poured his blood, sweat, and tears into, the ground now felt like it might swallow him whole.

"Richard, do we have any sunblock left out at the house?" he heard his mother's voice call from beyond his office walls. "Quelle nightmare it can be to try to cover up freckles."

He looked up just as she managed to squeeze across the threshold, sporting a green and orange kaftan and a sun hat the size of Rhode Island. "I'm pretty sure no one on the beach will need sunblock if you're out there wearing that hat, Mother, and I don't think freckles are what you need to be worried about at your auditions." He clicked away from the website currently taunting him and found a hint of a smile with the sight of his daughter's face behind the minimized page.

"Hey, kiddo," Martha replied with the point of a finger, "you keep that rain cloud of yours away from my vacation, huh? I know you're going through a thing right now, but don't you take it out on me. I don't deserve that."

Rick pushed back from his desk and came around to her, his aim to offer a hug of apology thwarted by the expanse of her hat's brim. "You're right. I'm sorry," he said, prying up its flopped edge to reveal her face. "And I'm glad we're taking two cars out there. No way we'd all fit into one with this thing along for the ride," he teased.

"Wait until you see our luggage," Martha dropped in offhandedly. She tapped him playfully on the cheek and they shared a smile. "You mustn't pay attention to any of that, Richard," she followed in a tone alive with maternal poise. "Remember all you've accomplished and all the joy you've inspired. Nothing will ever change that or take that away. You wrote a beautiful book, one you and me and many others believe in, no matter how many copies are or aren't sold. Let's go and celebrate that."

"Thank you, Mother," Rick said after her, her words, though sincere and appreciated, quieting his mind little.

"Oh, and your divorce," she added on her way back out. "I saw the signed papers out on the counter. That surely deserves a toast. Or five."

He returned to his desk and to his laptop once she'd gone, but succeeded in quashing the urge to recall the website that seemed to exist simply to ridicule him. Instead, he pulled up the weather report for the Hamptons, for their annual kick-off-the-summer week, beginning with the Memorial Day holiday. It'd been their tradition for nearly a decade, and its arrival was more than welcome, given the hell of the last month. Sun across the board, he found staring back at him, and he inhaled a tiny breath of gratitude.

xxxx

"Alexis!" Rick hollered through a yawn from the bottom of the stairs early the following morning, the morning of their exodus from the city. "Are you kidding with all of this?" he asked when she finally appeared on the landing. "Has this pile of bags actually grown since last night? How is that possible? You know how much I count on you to watch her."

"We are women, Richard," Martha jumped in approaching from the kitchen. In his morning fog, he didn't see her there preparing their coffee-one more thing to groan about, to be sure. "And as women, we enjoy having our things about us." She extended a mug in his direction, which he took from her most reluctantly.

"Sure, things I get, but everything? We're only going to be there for a week." He took a sip of the coffee without thought and instantly regretted it with a scowl. "And, um, to correct you, you're a woman. Alexis is a…" She came prancing down the stairs and he watched her the entire way, her expression one of daring curiosity.

"Alexis is a what, Dad? What am I?" She stood with folded arms at Martha's side, the pair a formidable estrogen duo, especially at that ungodly hour.

"Well, sweetie, you're an Alexis," Rick replied with an air of surety unbefitting his feeble answer. "And a daughter," he added with a second unconscious sip. "Honestly, can you take this away from me, please?" He pushed the mug back to a smirking Martha, who was firmly enjoying the hole her son was in the process of digging himself into.

"Get a grip, Dad. It's just a few bags for vacation. I'm not running away to Mexico." She pushed up onto her toes and kissed him on the cheek.

"Yes, darling, do get a grip, and a shower while you're at it, so we can get the heck of Dodge. Everyone's going to be on the road in a couple of hours and I loathe driving in traffic."

Rick looked at Martha sideways, after a firm squeeze of his eyes. "You never drive at all, Mother, let alone in traffic, which reminds me how thrilled I am to have you climbing behind the wheel of my very expensive and very new car. God, I need real coffee," he spoke under his breath as he shuffled away.

"Rain cloud, Richard, rain cloud," Martha poked. He raised his arm in acknowledgement but didn't turn back. "Our mission is clear, my dear," she said to Alexis, wrapping around her shoulders. "We need to make certain your father has some fun this week if it's the last thing we do."

"Yeah," Alexis agreed, but with an unspoken understanding of the mountain of a task they faced. "I need to go finish getting ready."

Martha released her and followed her back up the stairs. "Me, too. And I think I may have one more bag to grab."

"Gram," Alexis sighed.

xxxx

His favorite glass lay empty on its side on the table next to an uncapped bottle, the television in the corner still chattered from the night before, and scattered lights remained illuminated about the place without rhyme or reason. Such was the familiar scene that awaited Kate as she stepped out of her bedroom that morning, a scene she'd grown unfortunately accustomed to, a scene she hated.

She never saw him in those moments, her father always closed in behind his bedroom door, and despite the fact that she often stopped home during her break at lunchtime, she knew she wouldn't see his face again until later that night. That was Kate Beckett's life-by much her own choice though she knew-since the accident years ago, when she nearly lost the one person she had left, and he lost himself. Again.

She tidied up what she could in the little time available to her before she needed to be at the job she never imagined she'd have, and scribbled the same note she always left for him with an I love you and a smile. It was something her mother had always done, no matter how long she was to be gone, five minutes or five hours, and Kate did love him, however bogus the art that accompanied the words.

"Well, good morning, sunshine," Dot said in welcome as Kate stepped up to the counter at Smith's, the local diner. It was her regular stop on the way to the bookshop each day, their mediocre coffee ever her takeaway, along with its welcome dose of goodness, which often helped to fill her back up in the wake of earlier moments at home. "Today a medium or large kind of a day?"

Dot was every bit the years in her name, with her silver hair and her bowed shoulders, and she always treated Kate like family, like a granddaughter, for which Kate felt a tremendous amount of appreciation. There was never a day she could remember walking into the place without Dot's smile to greet her, and she'd missed that during her time away. She no longer took those warm feelings or those kindnesses for granted, not now, not with everything that'd been taken away from her.

"As big as you've got, this morning, Dot, thanks." She reached into the messenger bag hanging across her body-the one her mother had always carried-to grab her wallet, but she was waved off.

"It's on me today, sunshine. Just don't tell the rest of these vultures or they'll be all over me," she cautioned, though at a volume the other regulars perched along the counter couldn't possibly miss.

"I wouldn't dare," Kate said with a giggle, accepting the warm cup with a puckish glance at the men. "You going to be listening to the show tonight? Chapters ten and eleven. They're good ones."

"Eight o'clock like always. My ears'll be there," Dot assured her, and they always were.

She'd been doing it for a few years, once each week from the town's local radio station, reading classics aloud to the masses—or to those within its modest bandwidth, anyway—and she loved doing it. It didn't matter how many times she'd read or studied the stories before, sharing them with others brought her joy and provided her an escape when she needed it most.

Her intention had always been to teach them, as her mother had before, to enrich young minds with their themes and morals, but those plans had been hijacked by a universe that still hadn't revealed the reasons for its cruelty, but in all honesty, none Kate could conceive of could possibly ever soothe her, anyway.

First came the death of her mother at the hand of a cancer swift and savage, leaving her with a father who tried mightily to hold together the weave of their family for her sake, but who sought his own form of help from bottles that didn't know the meaning of the word. He'd managed to find his way out of that darkness over time, once, much to the credit of his daughter, but when the second wave hit, when the only intact world he knew then was blown apart, he tumbled back down the dark hole and hadn't yet climbed back out.

Kate was nineteen, away at school in the Midwest, when she received the call from her aunt that her father, a long-time officer with the NYPD, had been injured in a shooting on the job. They weren't life-threatening wounds, thankfully, but they were career-ending, and physically debilitating, and she left Northwestern without blinking an eye to see him through the aftermath. Seven years later, there she was, still.

"Well, there might be a quiz when I come in tomorrow morning, so tell that man of yours to keep the volume on the game down so you can pay good attention," Kate said playfully, Dot's husband, the proprietor of the place, within earshot. Gus looked up and tossed her a look and she smiled. "Thanks again for this, Dot," she said, raising the large cup. "Hope you enjoy tonight."

"I'm sure I will, sunshine. Always do. And you be sure to laugh today, you hear?" She prescribed it every morning, and Kate always tried to honor it.

Just down the block from the diner was where she now spent her days, watching over Whitman's Bookshop for its aged owners who'd owned it famously for nearly sixty years. No, it certainly wasn't the job she ever imagined she'd have, but, despite that, there was a respect and a love there for it, and it kept her close to all the pages and words she always hoped to fill her days with. She clung to that, reminded herself of it over and over again, because she knew if she didn't cling to something, she'd probably float away.

xxxx

Rick arrived in Southampton before Martha and Alexis, not surprisingly, though they did have a bit of a head start out of the city. He parked the Ferrari in the garage and stepped inside the house after too long away, its familiar scent of linen and salt comforting in an instant. Walking from room to room, he slid up windows and pushed open doors to the sunlight, and he could already sense a shift inside of him, slight though it was, as a result of being in a place he so revered, a place that had only ever brought him pleasure and peace of mind. Maybe, he thought as he stood looking out towards the ocean. Just maybe.

He'd just finished bringing inside the few things he was able to cram into the car when his phone chirped in his pocket. Assuming it was his mother or Alexis calling to break the news of some horror story involving them and the new Benz, he reached for it immediately, but it wasn't either-thankfully, sure. Instead, it was Paula, his literary agent, for the third time in as many days.

Paula was a piranha in a power suit, the quintessence of a forties dame who possessed the delicate touch of a mallet, and Rick adored her on both a professional and a personal level. She was born and raised in the borough, her accent and her attitude more Queens than even Queens, and when she had someone's back, they knew it, and her loyalty never wavered.

She most certainly had Rick's back, and she'd always worked her ass off for him, and though he believed that, he'd let two of her calls pass, already, the messages left behind but two words each: "It's me" and "Number two." Their brevity didn't concern him, though; she was always able to convey a lot with a little, and sharp was her customary way. He always imagined she'd make a fine editor, actually, if she wasn't so drawn to the brokering of it all, to the sounds of the dollars and cents. What had him in avoidance mode wasn't Paula at all, but rather the state of his own mind.

His book-his thirteenth book-the one out of all of them he was truly proud of, was five weeks out in the world, and the world wanted nothing to do with it. It seemed the surprise demise of one's fan-beloved righter of wrongs, one's time-and-again hero of a corrupt world, wasn't the lowest a successful mystery writer could go. No. Penning a novel that attempted to convey actual substance and depth and that didn't once involve a cliché phrase like There's no time for backup! was the apparent ultimate offense, and his heart-and, yes, his ego-was paying dearly for its failing.

Rick understood how the game worked; he'd been playing it for a long time, and the give-readers-what-they-want of it all was the playbook he'd always followed. It was the reason he was able to arrive at his house in the Hamptons, from his penthouse loft in Manhattan, in a Ferrari, and for any number of the other luxuries he and those he loved now enjoyed in life. But there came a day, one he recalled with great clarity, when a decision was made, one that inspired an absolute shift, and once that happened, he knew he was never going back.

Paula's third call went to voicemail with the others and his phone beeped in alert of her newest message. It still wasn't the time, and he apologized aloud to the room only he occupied. What she had to say, he didn't know, but he wasn't yet resilient enough for the disappointment, certainly not from someone of such value to him and not in that place of sanctuary, so he would continue to wait and so would she have to. But with his phone already in hand, he dialed Alexis' number. Surely they should've arrived already.

"We're here, Dad," she said without a reciprocal greeting, sounding every bit as exasperated as he imagined he would if he'd had to spend all that time in the car alone with his mother. "We've had to stop at all three wine shops. I swear, if we get pulled over by the cops, they're going to ask to see her liquor license."

Rick chuckled, and the recently foreign sensation wasn't lost on him. "Honestly, is there anyone on the planet more predictable than Martha Rodgers? I should've called ahead and told them to lock their doors. Sorry, sweetie. Ice cream cones on me tonight."

"More like all week," Alexis quipped with an unintended rattle of glass. "I have to go, Dad. There are speed bumps." The line went silent and she was gone, and until they pulled up in front of the house, the only thought Rick had was about how impossible it seemed that anything more could possibly have fit inside the car.

"In one piece and as good as new, kiddo," Martha said smugly as she tossed Rick the keys.

"Thank you, Mother," he replied as she sauntered past and into the house. "Should I call a mechanic to come check it out, just in case?" Alexis was standing close enough to hear his purposefully lowered voice, though Martha was already long gone.

"Couldn't hurt. With all the extra bottle weight, I think I might've heard the sound of metal scraping when she drove over those speed bumps," she teased.

"Another Memorial Day week together, you and me," Rick said pulling her in. "This is exactly what I need right now."

"Me too, Dad, and thanks for letting me skip school, today. Last trip before I leave for camp for the summer."

He heard far too much excitement in her voice. "Gee, thanks for reminding me." There was no excitement in his.

xxxx

Kate spent most of the morning wrapping up an inventory of the bookshop with the help of Merle and Margaret Whitman's grandson, Ryan. He attended community college nearby, and owed his tuition to their generosity, so he came in from time to time when Kate needed another body and his class schedule allowed. But that was, of course, not the only reason he so generously offered his free time.

Kate Beckett was, by any and all accounts, a stunning beauty of a woman, though she'd never acknowledge such a label as fact. She attracted much attention because of it, but it brought her no reprieve from the valleys of life, no whiff of power that she ever embraced. She tried her best to live simply, though simple wasn't anything close to her life, and that, to her, after all that'd happened in her brief years, seemed an admirable goal.

"Need anything else before I take off, Kate?" Ryan asked almost hoping for the affirmative.

She glanced around the modest shop, tidy and free of patrons, and came back to him. "I'm good, Ryan. Go ahead. Thanks again for helping out."

He looked at her as he always did before he took his leave, as though snapping a mental photograph to hold him over until the next time he saw her, and she felt a warm blush. He was just a kid, yes, but his focus never failed to remind her. It'd been a long time since she'd looked at a man in that way, since her eyes had feasted longingly on someone, and that was a thrill she missed.

"No problem," he said taking his leave. "Hey, by the way, when are you going to let me take you out, Kate?" It was almost like a bit they did, now, a running joke, but one where only one of them was actually kidding.

"When I'm not almost old enough to be your mother," she shot back with a smirk for the umpteenth time, an exaggeration, yes, but one always made for humorous effect.

The bell on the front door settled as he disappeared and she took a peek at her watch. It was another Friday, and her twice-a-month standing appointment with Dr. Burke was to begin in twenty minutes.