In The Event Of-A post-Montreal Caskett one-shot
Title: In The Event Of
WC: ~3000
Rating: T
Summary: "He doesn't even register that he's been wondering about something as innocuous as a damned phone until he finds the other-her old one in the drawer of the night stand on her side of the bed."
A/N: I'm marking this as a complete one-shot, though I have a couple of ideas for a few more chapters. It's in no way my solution to "what happened to Castle," but rather how do they deal with what they know as of early season 7.
She has a new phone.
It's nothing in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't make the top one hundred most important things he's missed, even if he did feel the need to tweet about it. The fact that the phone exists at all, not hers specifically.
Except it is about hers. Hers, specifically. Because she has a new one. The latest, and that's so not her. It's him. He's the one who has to get his hands on one the very first day. Except the first day came and went without him.
He has one, too. His old one got crushed. That's what they tell him. What they've shown him, and logically, he understands that it happened.
So he has the latest now. The same as hers, and he's not even really aware it's a thing. He doesn't even register that he's been wondering about something as innocuous as a damned phone until he finds the other-her old one in the drawer of the night stand on her side of the bed.
He's looking for something else. Lotion, because the skin of his hands is still ragged from exposure. She has that shea butter stuff that's better than his, and it smells good. It smells like her, and he misses her every second. He misses her when she even leaves the room, so . . .
So.
But he finds the phone and forgets everything else. The screen is shattered. He cuts himself. A wicked little shard snags in his fingerprint as he tries to turn it on.
He sits on the edge of the bed, bleeding. That's how she finds him. Calling out ahead from the living room, because she was waiting by the door they were going to do something. A spur-of-the-moment outing, because he's never even heard of anything that's out in theaters and it's something that feels like normal.
He has no idea how long he's been sitting there, but his name dies away as her fingers curl around the doorframe. It dies away, and she doesn't say it again, even though she stands there a long while, wondering what to do. Wondering again how it is that they do this.
"I threw it," she says as she comes to rest beside him on the bed. "The day the FBI pulled up stakes, I think."
He doesn't say anything. She doesn't either. Not for a while, and the blood fills in whorls and grooves. It drips down the white side of the case.
"It broke," she says finally. Obviously, and his body crashes into hers, or maybe it's the other way around and-thank God-they're holding each other. Thank God, however wrong everything else goes, they still fit like this.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Kate."
He says it over and over, and she tells him she knows. She says that it's ok and they're here now.
It's all she ever says. It feels like all either one of them ever says.
I'm sorry. It's ok. We're here now.
He wants to make it work again. The phone. He's sort of obsessed.
"It's not important." She holds up the new one. A demonstration, but he's obsessed.
He smooths clear packing tape across the screen. It's nothing close to the glossy, unbroken expanse it ought to be. It rises and falls and a hundred jagged little things lie in wait, straining just beneath the thin plastic.
"I know, but . . . "
"But . . ." She smiles. She comes around the desk and slides her hands over his shoulders.
He leans back into her. Abandons the shattered phone and crosses his arms to close his fingers around her wrists. He pulls her forward to kiss her temple as she leans into him and it glides by.
"You don't . . . mind?"
She looks at him curiously. Rocks her cheek to the outside of his shoulder to consider him, sideways and half upside down.
"Mind?"
"It's your . . . I'm not trying to snoop."
He feels stupid. Awkward and wide of some boundary neither of them knew was there. She buries her face against his neck, though. She steps right over it and falls right into him.
"I don't mind."
He works at it in spare moments. Thorough the night once, but never again. Not after that. The inky silhouette of her in the doorway. The sight of her stark, staring fear. The impact of knees and elbows as they fumbled to hold each other fast.
You were gone. I woke up. I thought you were gone. That you never came back.
So now, he works at it when he can.
It's a matter of patience. That and straight pins that skitter free of thick, clumsy fingers that still don't feel quite like his.
The on button is smashed, but he can feel just where the contact is. It takes him forever to get the pin in place. He does, though. He taps it just so with his thumbnail and feels it give.
The screen flashes, and for one second-for two- he's surprised to feel tears pricking at the corner of his eyes. Stunning relief, like this means something. Like the damned phone actually matters.
The faint outline of a battery appears. A tiny sliver of red at the far left of it, and below it, the prongs of a plug. A lightning bolt for one second more, and then it all goes black again.
"Something?" She peers around the corner.
He must have said something. He must have shouted out loud, and he could kick himself now. She looks so hopeful.
"Nothing." The phone slips from his fingers and clatters on to the desk. "It's nothing."
"It doesn't matter," she says when her body meets his, halfway across the room.
"I know." He mumbles it into her hair. "You're right. It doesn't matter."
It's a lie, though he doesn't want it to be. He doesn't know what's wrong with him. He doesn't know why he's fixated on it, but he is. It does.
It matters.
He lifts tweezers from the morgue. They catch his eye. Some tool he must have seen a hundred times before, and he's supposed to be listening to whatever Lanie is running them through. But he can't think of anything else once he sees them. The way they taper to fine, needle-like points gives him an idea. He pockets them.
Lanie knows. Kate knows. He's pretty sure, anyway. He's pretty sure it's what motivates the hundredth look they've exchanged over his head, but neither of them says anything.
Kate doesn't say anything when he begs off. She doesn't call him on whatever excuse he starts to mumble before the words trail into nothing.
She skips her fingers over his cheek. She slides them through his hair. It's shorter over the ears than she likes, even now. Even though days are moving into weeks, it's shorter than she likes. It's one more thing that makes him want to go. It's one more thing that makes the damned phone matter.
She smiles like she knows, and he supposes she does. Not this. Not why it matters. Neither of them knows that. It's just that she knows what this is about. Tweezers and begging off. He wants to make it work again. She knows that.
She smiles. "See you at home?"
"At home," he echoes.
It's satisfying. Rooting around the end where it should plug in. Grasping with the tweezers and bringing pressure to bear. Twisting things back into alignment. There's a stupid sense of accomplishment every time he tries to fit the plug again, again, again, and he's a little closer.
He's a little closer, and then it's done. Metal slots into metal and stays. He tugs and the connection holds. It's firm, and he's almost too afraid to try it in the outlet.
He sits there with the cord in his hand, snaking through his fingers. He stares and wonders again why it matters. This, of all things. It does, though. It just does.
He flips the legs of the connector open and slides the prongs into the outlet at the base of the desk lamp with infinite care.
Nothing.
His fingers land on the broken landscape beneath the tape and he can't believe it. Nothing.
His forehead drops to the desk. It's gone, all at once. The strange sense of purpose is just gone, and he feels the rest of it pushing in. Anger. Despair. Grief. Absolute loss, and he doesn't know if he'll ever get up from the chair again.
But the wood of the desk vibrates. A long burrrrrrrrrrrrr just beyond his fingertips. The face of the phone lights up. A solid flash refracted and refracted. The battery icon reemerges. The red sliver. It's there a few seconds, and the surface goes dark again, but that's normal.
He brushes at the connector and it's warm to the touch. He hesitates. His finger hovers over the home button and touches down at last. It lights up again. The battery icon.
It's charging.
He doesn't get up. He doesn't pace or pour himself a drink. He sits, watching.
It's deader than dead. Of course it is. It's amazing that it powered on at all with his straight-pin trick.
He sits with his palms on either side of it. A barricade, like it might try to run, wounded as it is.
He almost jumps out of his skin when it buzzes again. It's the phone actually starting up this time, and he thinks the white-on-black image might spin infinitely. A strange kaleidoscope across the broken glass that makes him hold his breath until he realizes he's dizzy.
He closes his his eyes and pulls in air. He misses it. The moment when it comes to life. Sark numbers telling him that it's later than he thought. The words Slide to Unlock rippling , he thinks, though it could be him. It could be his eyes blurring as he stares down at the wallpaper.
It's a beach house. A searing blue sky over a thatched roof. The warm-looking wood of a slatted deck leading to the hot tub jutting out over the ocean itself.
He laughs. Drags his shaking finger carefully along the bottom and waits for the number pad to pop up. He taps out the code, telling himself it won't work. That surely she wouldn't have left it like that.
This is his doing. The wallpaper. Their honeymoon house in the Maldives. Their wedding date for the lock code.
He tells himself she would have changed it. She must have. But he taps it in anyway.
She hasn't changed it.
He doesn't hear the door. He doesn't hear her call out or approach. It turns out he hasn't heard his phone or the landline for a while now, and she's frantic.
Her voice is sharp. She strips off her coat and throws down her keys. Everything in her hands clatters to the floor with force as she makes her way through the office.
He hears her now, but the words don't mean anything. He just can't make sense of anything. He holds one hand out to her. The other curves protectively around the phone where it rests on the desk, still tethered to the outlet. He looks from the shattered planes of her face there up to the real thing. The real, beautiful, mercifully whole thing.
"Kate."
Her name is hardly anything. Not even loud enough to hear over the words still rushing out of her, but it stops the torrent. She's silent. Seeing him now. Falling into him. Hissing as her hip bangs hard against the arm of the desk chair, but she can't get close fast enough.
He lets go of the phone at last. He wraps both arms around her.
"Beautiful." It's all he can say for a while. "Beautiful, Kate. You looked so beautiful."
They drink a lot. Alexis and his mother are out, and he's glad of it. It's for them. This is. One bottle, then another as they spread out on the floor with the laptop and a cable.
The phone keeps dying. The case gets burning hot and something judders and thunks as it clicks off, but he keeps at it. There's something really wrong with the battery, but he keeps coaxing it patiently back to life.
She isn't talking much. He isn't either. He's focused on the task at hand. Obsessed, even though it's just a handful of pictures.
Two red heads and hers in the center. She and Lanie puckering up for the camera. And the first one. Her alone with the sun streaming in the window to gild her hair.
It's a handful of pictures, but he wants them. He wants them.
"The earrings . . ." He leans into her. His nose brushes the rim of her ear. He's a little drunk, and she is, too. They're both trying a little too hard to make it an adventure.
"Martha," she says, and it's a good memory for a second or two. The last good memory. He can tell.
"I remember." It spills out of him. Childish excitement, because he does remember. "One of those old-fashioned boxes with a heavy hinge. I pinched my finger in it a dozen times."
She laughs at that and the goodness of it skips back in. "They're beautiful. It was . . . I didn't expect it."
He swallows past the lump in his throat and tries again. The phone keeps dying before the sync can start.
"Tory . . .?" She says it hesitantly after a while, but the question dies away almost before she forms it.
It's already been so terrible. They've all been trying to move past suspicion and doubt and a locker full of damning evidence. She doesn't want to ask another favor and he doesn't want her to. This is for them, and he's glad she knows as well as he does. He wants the pictures badly, and if it comes to that . . .
"A text."
It seems brilliant when he says it, but he frowns. He worries it's the wine, but she's nodding. She's hanging on his shoulder.
"Yeah. Yeah." Her brow is furrowed in concentration. "They . . . it's quick, right? Packets . . ."
He's laughing at her. He's laughing at them, but she's slapping him hard. He knows what she means. He fuzzily knows that it's something about a short, quick burst of data that cell towers hand over when they can. Or something. He'd know if there had been less wine, but there's been a lot of wine.
"Sorry. Sorry." He stifles a last laugh and tries the phone again.
He doesn't let himself look at the picture. Not really. He attaches it and works quickly. Gingerly, though he can still feel a sharp prick at the pad of his thumb. He hits send and fumbles his own phone out of his pocket.
"Castle."
It's an awed whisper through a fierce smile. It comes with her fingernails biting into the skin of his arm. It's what tells him he's not imagining it. The flare of his screen. Sunlight gilding her hair.
He cries in earnest then. Not just tears slipping from the corner of his eye or a lump in his throat. Choking sobs as his fingers travel over the screen.
She takes the phone from his hand. She shoves everything out of the way and brings them as close as she can. She cries with him until they're both exhausted with it. Until long silence comes, and he's the one to break it.
"I have to know."
She tenses before he's finished and he hangs on. He kisses her swollen eyelids and her tearstained cheek.
"Not . . . what, maybe." He smooths her hair back from her face, grateful when she looks up at him, wanting to understand. Wanting to hear him out. "I don't know . . . It's so hard for me to believe that I'd . . ."
"You must've had a reason," she says for the tenth time. The hundredth.
"I must have." He concedes it, finally. Jenkins. Whoever he is . . . given what he knows, there must have been a reason. "So maybe not what. Maybe I don't need to know what happened. But, how . . .?"
"The dumpster." She nods. "It was just a few hours . . ."
"And the videos. The key." He buries his face against her shoulder. "I don't understand . . ."
"The timeline," she finishes for him. "Maybe . . . we could put that together. Maybe."
He breathes her in. He's relieved. He's so relieved that she's with him. That her mind meets his on this, and there's a sharp, new kind of pain that comes with it. Realization that they haven't until now. That they haven't been meeting on any point, however hard they're trying.
"They took me," he says, not even knowing that he needs to say it until it's out. Not even knowing that he needs her to hear it until then.
"They took you." She repeats it immediately. With conviction. She tips his chin up so he can see she believes it. She believes it. "That's where it starts."
WC: ~3000
Rating: T
Summary: "He doesn't even register that he's been wondering about something as innocuous as a damned phone until he finds the other-her old one in the drawer of the night stand on her side of the bed."
A/N: I'm marking this as a complete one-shot, though I have a couple of ideas for a few more chapters. It's in no way my solution to "what happened to Castle," but rather how do they deal with what they know as of early season 7.
She has a new phone.
It's nothing in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't make the top one hundred most important things he's missed, even if he did feel the need to tweet about it. The fact that the phone exists at all, not hers specifically.
Except it is about hers. Hers, specifically. Because she has a new one. The latest, and that's so not her. It's him. He's the one who has to get his hands on one the very first day. Except the first day came and went without him.
He has one, too. His old one got crushed. That's what they tell him. What they've shown him, and logically, he understands that it happened.
So he has the latest now. The same as hers, and he's not even really aware it's a thing. He doesn't even register that he's been wondering about something as innocuous as a damned phone until he finds the other-her old one in the drawer of the night stand on her side of the bed.
He's looking for something else. Lotion, because the skin of his hands is still ragged from exposure. She has that shea butter stuff that's better than his, and it smells good. It smells like her, and he misses her every second. He misses her when she even leaves the room, so . . .
So.
But he finds the phone and forgets everything else. The screen is shattered. He cuts himself. A wicked little shard snags in his fingerprint as he tries to turn it on.
He sits on the edge of the bed, bleeding. That's how she finds him. Calling out ahead from the living room, because she was waiting by the door they were going to do something. A spur-of-the-moment outing, because he's never even heard of anything that's out in theaters and it's something that feels like normal.
He has no idea how long he's been sitting there, but his name dies away as her fingers curl around the doorframe. It dies away, and she doesn't say it again, even though she stands there a long while, wondering what to do. Wondering again how it is that they do this.
"I threw it," she says as she comes to rest beside him on the bed. "The day the FBI pulled up stakes, I think."
He doesn't say anything. She doesn't either. Not for a while, and the blood fills in whorls and grooves. It drips down the white side of the case.
"It broke," she says finally. Obviously, and his body crashes into hers, or maybe it's the other way around and-thank God-they're holding each other. Thank God, however wrong everything else goes, they still fit like this.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Kate."
He says it over and over, and she tells him she knows. She says that it's ok and they're here now.
It's all she ever says. It feels like all either one of them ever says.
I'm sorry. It's ok. We're here now.
He wants to make it work again. The phone. He's sort of obsessed.
"It's not important." She holds up the new one. A demonstration, but he's obsessed.
He smooths clear packing tape across the screen. It's nothing close to the glossy, unbroken expanse it ought to be. It rises and falls and a hundred jagged little things lie in wait, straining just beneath the thin plastic.
"I know, but . . . "
"But . . ." She smiles. She comes around the desk and slides her hands over his shoulders.
He leans back into her. Abandons the shattered phone and crosses his arms to close his fingers around her wrists. He pulls her forward to kiss her temple as she leans into him and it glides by.
"You don't . . . mind?"
She looks at him curiously. Rocks her cheek to the outside of his shoulder to consider him, sideways and half upside down.
"Mind?"
"It's your . . . I'm not trying to snoop."
He feels stupid. Awkward and wide of some boundary neither of them knew was there. She buries her face against his neck, though. She steps right over it and falls right into him.
"I don't mind."
He works at it in spare moments. Thorough the night once, but never again. Not after that. The inky silhouette of her in the doorway. The sight of her stark, staring fear. The impact of knees and elbows as they fumbled to hold each other fast.
You were gone. I woke up. I thought you were gone. That you never came back.
So now, he works at it when he can.
It's a matter of patience. That and straight pins that skitter free of thick, clumsy fingers that still don't feel quite like his.
The on button is smashed, but he can feel just where the contact is. It takes him forever to get the pin in place. He does, though. He taps it just so with his thumbnail and feels it give.
The screen flashes, and for one second-for two- he's surprised to feel tears pricking at the corner of his eyes. Stunning relief, like this means something. Like the damned phone actually matters.
The faint outline of a battery appears. A tiny sliver of red at the far left of it, and below it, the prongs of a plug. A lightning bolt for one second more, and then it all goes black again.
"Something?" She peers around the corner.
He must have said something. He must have shouted out loud, and he could kick himself now. She looks so hopeful.
"Nothing." The phone slips from his fingers and clatters on to the desk. "It's nothing."
"It doesn't matter," she says when her body meets his, halfway across the room.
"I know." He mumbles it into her hair. "You're right. It doesn't matter."
It's a lie, though he doesn't want it to be. He doesn't know what's wrong with him. He doesn't know why he's fixated on it, but he is. It does.
It matters.
He lifts tweezers from the morgue. They catch his eye. Some tool he must have seen a hundred times before, and he's supposed to be listening to whatever Lanie is running them through. But he can't think of anything else once he sees them. The way they taper to fine, needle-like points gives him an idea. He pockets them.
Lanie knows. Kate knows. He's pretty sure, anyway. He's pretty sure it's what motivates the hundredth look they've exchanged over his head, but neither of them says anything.
Kate doesn't say anything when he begs off. She doesn't call him on whatever excuse he starts to mumble before the words trail into nothing.
She skips her fingers over his cheek. She slides them through his hair. It's shorter over the ears than she likes, even now. Even though days are moving into weeks, it's shorter than she likes. It's one more thing that makes him want to go. It's one more thing that makes the damned phone matter.
She smiles like she knows, and he supposes she does. Not this. Not why it matters. Neither of them knows that. It's just that she knows what this is about. Tweezers and begging off. He wants to make it work again. She knows that.
She smiles. "See you at home?"
"At home," he echoes.
It's satisfying. Rooting around the end where it should plug in. Grasping with the tweezers and bringing pressure to bear. Twisting things back into alignment. There's a stupid sense of accomplishment every time he tries to fit the plug again, again, again, and he's a little closer.
He's a little closer, and then it's done. Metal slots into metal and stays. He tugs and the connection holds. It's firm, and he's almost too afraid to try it in the outlet.
He sits there with the cord in his hand, snaking through his fingers. He stares and wonders again why it matters. This, of all things. It does, though. It just does.
He flips the legs of the connector open and slides the prongs into the outlet at the base of the desk lamp with infinite care.
Nothing.
His fingers land on the broken landscape beneath the tape and he can't believe it. Nothing.
His forehead drops to the desk. It's gone, all at once. The strange sense of purpose is just gone, and he feels the rest of it pushing in. Anger. Despair. Grief. Absolute loss, and he doesn't know if he'll ever get up from the chair again.
But the wood of the desk vibrates. A long burrrrrrrrrrrrr just beyond his fingertips. The face of the phone lights up. A solid flash refracted and refracted. The battery icon reemerges. The red sliver. It's there a few seconds, and the surface goes dark again, but that's normal.
He brushes at the connector and it's warm to the touch. He hesitates. His finger hovers over the home button and touches down at last. It lights up again. The battery icon.
It's charging.
He doesn't get up. He doesn't pace or pour himself a drink. He sits, watching.
It's deader than dead. Of course it is. It's amazing that it powered on at all with his straight-pin trick.
He sits with his palms on either side of it. A barricade, like it might try to run, wounded as it is.
He almost jumps out of his skin when it buzzes again. It's the phone actually starting up this time, and he thinks the white-on-black image might spin infinitely. A strange kaleidoscope across the broken glass that makes him hold his breath until he realizes he's dizzy.
He closes his his eyes and pulls in air. He misses it. The moment when it comes to life. Sark numbers telling him that it's later than he thought. The words Slide to Unlock rippling , he thinks, though it could be him. It could be his eyes blurring as he stares down at the wallpaper.
It's a beach house. A searing blue sky over a thatched roof. The warm-looking wood of a slatted deck leading to the hot tub jutting out over the ocean itself.
He laughs. Drags his shaking finger carefully along the bottom and waits for the number pad to pop up. He taps out the code, telling himself it won't work. That surely she wouldn't have left it like that.
This is his doing. The wallpaper. Their honeymoon house in the Maldives. Their wedding date for the lock code.
He tells himself she would have changed it. She must have. But he taps it in anyway.
She hasn't changed it.
He doesn't hear the door. He doesn't hear her call out or approach. It turns out he hasn't heard his phone or the landline for a while now, and she's frantic.
Her voice is sharp. She strips off her coat and throws down her keys. Everything in her hands clatters to the floor with force as she makes her way through the office.
He hears her now, but the words don't mean anything. He just can't make sense of anything. He holds one hand out to her. The other curves protectively around the phone where it rests on the desk, still tethered to the outlet. He looks from the shattered planes of her face there up to the real thing. The real, beautiful, mercifully whole thing.
"Kate."
Her name is hardly anything. Not even loud enough to hear over the words still rushing out of her, but it stops the torrent. She's silent. Seeing him now. Falling into him. Hissing as her hip bangs hard against the arm of the desk chair, but she can't get close fast enough.
He lets go of the phone at last. He wraps both arms around her.
"Beautiful." It's all he can say for a while. "Beautiful, Kate. You looked so beautiful."
They drink a lot. Alexis and his mother are out, and he's glad of it. It's for them. This is. One bottle, then another as they spread out on the floor with the laptop and a cable.
The phone keeps dying. The case gets burning hot and something judders and thunks as it clicks off, but he keeps at it. There's something really wrong with the battery, but he keeps coaxing it patiently back to life.
She isn't talking much. He isn't either. He's focused on the task at hand. Obsessed, even though it's just a handful of pictures.
Two red heads and hers in the center. She and Lanie puckering up for the camera. And the first one. Her alone with the sun streaming in the window to gild her hair.
It's a handful of pictures, but he wants them. He wants them.
"The earrings . . ." He leans into her. His nose brushes the rim of her ear. He's a little drunk, and she is, too. They're both trying a little too hard to make it an adventure.
"Martha," she says, and it's a good memory for a second or two. The last good memory. He can tell.
"I remember." It spills out of him. Childish excitement, because he does remember. "One of those old-fashioned boxes with a heavy hinge. I pinched my finger in it a dozen times."
She laughs at that and the goodness of it skips back in. "They're beautiful. It was . . . I didn't expect it."
He swallows past the lump in his throat and tries again. The phone keeps dying before the sync can start.
"Tory . . .?" She says it hesitantly after a while, but the question dies away almost before she forms it.
It's already been so terrible. They've all been trying to move past suspicion and doubt and a locker full of damning evidence. She doesn't want to ask another favor and he doesn't want her to. This is for them, and he's glad she knows as well as he does. He wants the pictures badly, and if it comes to that . . .
"A text."
It seems brilliant when he says it, but he frowns. He worries it's the wine, but she's nodding. She's hanging on his shoulder.
"Yeah. Yeah." Her brow is furrowed in concentration. "They . . . it's quick, right? Packets . . ."
He's laughing at her. He's laughing at them, but she's slapping him hard. He knows what she means. He fuzzily knows that it's something about a short, quick burst of data that cell towers hand over when they can. Or something. He'd know if there had been less wine, but there's been a lot of wine.
"Sorry. Sorry." He stifles a last laugh and tries the phone again.
He doesn't let himself look at the picture. Not really. He attaches it and works quickly. Gingerly, though he can still feel a sharp prick at the pad of his thumb. He hits send and fumbles his own phone out of his pocket.
"Castle."
It's an awed whisper through a fierce smile. It comes with her fingernails biting into the skin of his arm. It's what tells him he's not imagining it. The flare of his screen. Sunlight gilding her hair.
He cries in earnest then. Not just tears slipping from the corner of his eye or a lump in his throat. Choking sobs as his fingers travel over the screen.
She takes the phone from his hand. She shoves everything out of the way and brings them as close as she can. She cries with him until they're both exhausted with it. Until long silence comes, and he's the one to break it.
"I have to know."
She tenses before he's finished and he hangs on. He kisses her swollen eyelids and her tearstained cheek.
"Not . . . what, maybe." He smooths her hair back from her face, grateful when she looks up at him, wanting to understand. Wanting to hear him out. "I don't know . . . It's so hard for me to believe that I'd . . ."
"You must've had a reason," she says for the tenth time. The hundredth.
"I must have." He concedes it, finally. Jenkins. Whoever he is . . . given what he knows, there must have been a reason. "So maybe not what. Maybe I don't need to know what happened. But, how . . .?"
"The dumpster." She nods. "It was just a few hours . . ."
"And the videos. The key." He buries his face against her shoulder. "I don't understand . . ."
"The timeline," she finishes for him. "Maybe . . . we could put that together. Maybe."
He breathes her in. He's relieved. He's so relieved that she's with him. That her mind meets his on this, and there's a sharp, new kind of pain that comes with it. Realization that they haven't until now. That they haven't been meeting on any point, however hard they're trying.
"They took me," he says, not even knowing that he needs to say it until it's out. Not even knowing that he needs her to hear it until then.
"They took you." She repeats it immediately. With conviction. She tips his chin up so he can see she believes it. She believes it. "That's where it starts."