Exculpatory

Chapter five

"Soooo?" Elisabeth dragged out the word as she kept nudging her mother with her shoulder.

"What?" Kate questioned with a clueless tone, nudging her daughter back while looking over her daughter's homework.

"Come on mom! How'd it go?!" her daughter asked impatiently.

"How did what go?" Kate pretended to not know what she was talking about, reading the words her daughter had to know how to spell the next day at school.

"Moooom!"

"Okay, okay," Kate chuckled putting an arm around her daughter in order to pull her in and kissing her head. "It was actually pretty fine, he asked a bunch of questions and I told him all about how it is to be a detective."

Elisabeth looked up at her with a grin plastered on her small, adorable face. "Do you like him?"

Oh, so she was thinking in that direction! Kate felt a bit shocked, her daughter was sure sneaky!

"No, of course not. I mean, he's still my favorite writer but I'm only helping him with his research."

"But, it could be more," her daughter said in a dreamy tone to which Kate raised her eyebrows. "Becky's mom met a guy and Becky said he moved in with them and now she's calling him dad."

Kate felt her chest tighten at that. She knew it was hard on her daughter not to have a father, it had been a tough time for her learning that Kate didn't even knew who he was. Of course Kate hadn't told her daughter about the night, wasn't much to tell, but it definitely was PG-18. And stuff she would never let her daughter hear. The only one who had heard the whole story was her own mother, who probably told her father but point was she had never uttered the story for anyone else.

"Oh, no peanut, it's not..." Kate sighed, "Richard Castle is just doing research for his books, and I... I'm not ready to date." And she never would be.

"Why not?" her innocent voice made it that much harder to think of a good enough answer.

Why wouldn't she be ready? Well, for starters, she had scars. Scars deeper than she would want to ever share with anyone else. Second, she was happy the way it was. It was just her and her daughter and she couldn't ask for anything better, it was peaceful and wonderful, just the two of them. It meant she could lay all her attention on her little peanut. Plus, she had tried dating, when Elisabeth was younger, and it hadn't felt right or good. Sure, Lanie was onto her all the time, saying she needed to get out there again, but she truly didn't. So, there were many reasons. But she wasn't sure which would be good enough for her daughter to hear, wasn't sure any of the reasons even should be heard by the little girl.

"I don't know peanut, it's just the way it feels, okay?" she said in a careful voice, kissing her daughter's head again before she turned back to the homework. "Now, this is not really how you spell 'beautiful'."

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Richard Castle was enchanted. He couldn't stop writing once he got home after the interview. Word after word just poured out of him and into the laptop he'd thought wouldn't get another word out of him again. But now... now he couldn't stop. He was writing none stop, about her. Or, not about her her, but an altered version of her. A version his mind cooked up based on the words that had left her lips earlier that day, the stories she told about herself and her cases. She'd mostly been objective, never telling him anything too personal but he had noticed things, small things, that gave him a few clues. The way she reacted when he had asked her what made her want to become a cop told him something really did happen that changed her course of plan. She had mentioned her father had looked after her daughter, which made him wonder where her mother was. Because he definitely knew how his own mother was and somehow he doubted Kate's would just leave her alone when she needed her. In his version, her mother had passed and he wasn't sure how or when but he had already made out a plan for how to write this part into Nikki's story. Nikki Heat, that was the name his mind had given the new character based on her.