Alexis awoke in the middle of the night beside Shane with a horrible pain in her belly, the worst cramps she'd ever experience in her life. She reached down between her thighs, and when she felt the wet stickiness there, she groaned. Having your period was brutal enough but bleeding like this was even worse. Sitting up with an impatient, painful groan, she turned on the lamp.

And froze.

The bed sheets were ruined with blood, the sight of which had Alexis going right into a panic. She balled her hand into a fist and pounded Shane's shoulder.

'Shane, get up,' she said in a rushed voice. 'Get up now.'

'What is it, Lex, you see a roach?'

'I'm bleeding, like really badly.'

In an instant, he was awake despite an eighteen hour shift and flipping on the lights. He eyes popped in sheer terror at the sight of their bed - Alexis' side was drenched red and she was sitting there looking at the mess, terrified.

'I'm calling nine-one-one.'

Alexis was too stunned to do anything but nod; the next action she registered was a lovely Persian woman shining a light in her eyes.

'Alexis, do you remember me? It's Jayla.'

'Dave's partner,' she said blandly, then blinked at her, tried to clear the fog from her brain. 'What is going on?'

'Alexis, I need you to lie back, honey.' Now it was Dave's voice she heard and remembering what he did for a living she felt a punch in the stomach.

'Dave...'

'It's okay, honey, just try to relax.'

She answered his questions as they gave her the once over and despite her protests, Shane insisted she go in for an exam. He held her hand the entire time down to the ambulance.

Once in the ER at Saint Vincent's, Shane was asked to wait in the lounge for emergent cases until someone had something to tell him. He paced the floor in a short walk, hoping the sick feeling in his gut was wrong but the fact they'd sent Dave and Jayla told him he was horribly, horribly right. The notion of it made his head spin as questions fought each other for space in his brain as the sickness threatened to take over.

He stopped pacing when one of the doctors came in, his face solemn.

'Shane Weaver?'

'Yeah, that's me.'

'I'm Doctor Walsh, I am attending to your fiancee. She's asking for you.'

'Is she okay?'

Walsh didn't answer him, just took him into the room where Alexis lay in the hospital bed, pale as chalk and eyes wide and staring. The cloudy blue focused on him when he entered the room, and Shane went right over to give her a supportive, reassuring kiss.

'Shane,' she murmured.

'I'm here, baby, I'm here.'

'I'm terribly sorry to tell you this,' the doctor said gently, 'but Alexis has suffed a miscarriage.'

Shane's shoulders slumped at the doctor's words, the feelign in his gut spreading through his entire body. He bent to press his forehead against Alexis' and wasn't surprised when he heard her begin to cry softly.

'I'm so sorry.'

'It's okay, Lex, it's not your fault.'

'I'm...I didn't even know I was pregnant. I just thought I was late because of stress.'

'You wouldn't have known anyways yet,' the doctor told her. 'The embryo was barely three weeks old and simply didn't survive. That is no reflection on either your or Alexis' fertility, it was just bad luck.'

'Will you need to keep me here over night?' Alexis asked in a small voice.

'Yes, we want to give you some meds for the blood loss along with a small transfusion.'

'Okay.'

The door opened and a caramel-skinned woman in a day's-activity worn suit stepped in with a leather-bound file folder. 'Doctor Walsh?'

'Good evening Miz Cooper. This is Doctor Shane Weaver and his fiancee Alexis Castle.'

'What is going on?' Shane asked, fingers tight on Alexis' still-shaking hand.

'It's standard protocol that all women in this hospital who come into the ER with a miscarriage and their partner be asked some questions. Separate from their spouses.'

The implication of it had lights bursting in front of Shane's eyes. 'You think I had something to do with this? You think I beat her and put her there? You heard her, she didn't even know she was pregnant.'

'As I said, it's standard protocol. Shane, if you could step into the room across the hallway with me?'

Pride and righteousness propelled him forward, and once alone with the social worker Shane sat straight-backed in the chair. Cooper opened her folder, pulled out her pen.

'Can you walk me through the events of this evening?'

'I was working the swing shift, I'm a pathologist with the OCME,' he explained, 'and Alexis and I met some friends after my shift at a diner for a bite to eat, then we saw a movie and arrived home around eleven. Here.'

Shane reached for his wallet, produced the credit-card receipts from the restaurant and the theatre. 'We got home just after midnight, and I was in the mood to make love with her but she said she was feeling crampy and bloated and was expecting to get her period within the next forty-eight hours so I backed off and we fell asleep. The next thing I know, she's waking me up and telling me she's bleeding.'

'Had she ever been late for her period before?'

'Yes. She's a first-year medical student at Princeton, stress is inherent in her daily life and this was the third time since January she's been feeling off in regards to her monthly cycle.'

'Was there any possibility she could have been pregnant those other times?'

'There's always the possibility when you engage in any kind of intercourse,' Shane countered evenly, 'but as it happens, she's been on the hormone needle since before we started dating nearly two years ago, and I can count on one hand the number of times we haven't used a condom. We take our responsibility to each other very seriously and if Alexis even suspected it for a fleeting moment, she would tell me.'

Cooper nodded, made notes. 'There is quite a significant age gap between you and your fiancee, isn't there?'

'Fifteen years. She just turned twenty-four in May and I'll be thirty-nine at the end of November. The whole reason we met was a mutual friend of ours thought I might be able to give her some good advice on being a medical student at Princeton, as that's where I went to medical school, and we hit it off.' Shane fought the sigh, and tried to treat it like he was giving testimony on one of his cases. 'Neither of us expected to have such a strong mutual attraction, as she was returning to complete her final year at Cambridge about a month after we began dating, and much of our first year together was spent apart with her in England. The last thing I'm going to do is lay a hand on her, unless it's to touch her so that we can make love.'

'Right.'

'Miss Cooper, I love my fiancee very very much and I would never, ever do anything to put her health, mental or physical, in jeopardy. We have enough outside stressors to deal with, like the long-distance thing, the nay-sayers who think I just want a pretty piece of ass, even my Jewish mother trying to handle the fact her only son is engaged to a gentile.'

'You sound earnest enough,' Cooper replied, closing her folder. 'I'll need to speak with her, and when I'm satisfied you pose no threat to her, you'll be permitted to visit her again.'

'How long will that be?'

'Perhaps an hour or two. I suggest you call her family, if they're local, and let them know what's going on.'

Cooper left then, leaving Shane behind in the room and he had to physically control the urge to hit something; it would look very suspicious on his part if he did that when he was being questioned over that very thing. Instead, he sat on the empty hospital bed and pulled out his cellphone to dial the Castle houseline.

Beckett answered on the fourth ring, sleep clogging her voice. 'Hello?'

'Kate? It's Shane.'

'Shane, what's going on?'

'It's Alexis.' Do it quickly, he thought, rip the band-aid off all at once. 'We're in the ER at Saint Vincent's. She's had a miscarriage.'

'We're on the way.'

Beckett and Castle raced into the ER, straight over to the desk. 'I'm Kate Castle,' she said in a breathless rush, 'my daughter Alexis Castle was brought in for a miscarriage with her fiance Doctor Shane Weaver?'

The desk nurse paged through her records on the computer and nodded. 'She has been moved from the ER up to the ICU. I believe the social worker with her case also has a few question for you as well.'

'Social worker?' Castle was baffled. 'Why would she need a social worker?'

'It's standard protocol at this hospital that any miscarriage is investigated for any signs that the miscarriage was caused by abuse or assault.'

He wanted to laugh - the notion of Shane beating on Alexis was absurd at best and ridiculous at worst - but he maintained his composure. 'Fine, then. What room can we find them in?'

'Miz Castle is in five-five-one. Doctor Weaver should be in the cafeteria.'

'The cafeteria?' Beckett asked, her own sense of outrage growing to match her husband's.

'Yes, again it's just protocol but the spouses are kept apart while the social worker is investigating the case. If you head through those doors-' the nurse pointed them in the right direction '-you'll find the cafeteria down that hallway to your left.'

'Thank you.'

Beckett waited until they were out of earshot, which in a busy ER didn't take much distance, before she exploded in a hiss of steam. 'This is absolutely asinine,' she vented to Castle, 'why would they think Shane would lay a finger on Alexis, unless it's to make love with her?'

'We know that, and you've been a cop long enough to know the signs of who is a smooth operator trying to give the medical staff a fast shuffle.'

'Not to mention the fact that Alexis more than likely didn't know she was pregnant, which is baffling even in itself since her and Shane are the freakin' poster children for safe-sex.'

'Kate,' Castle winced; there were some things a father never got used to hearing, even if his baby girl was a grown-up now. 'Let's just focus on being supportive, okay?'

'Exactly.'

When they found Shane in the cafeteria, listlessly stirring a cup of coffee, Beckett's heart broke for him. 'Shane?' she ventured cautiously and wasn't surprised when his head snapped up, his eyes were red-rimmed. 'Oh, Shane, it's okay, she's going to be fine.'

'The doctor said it was just bad luck this didn't stick and it's not even the fact she was pregnant and miscarried that has either of us upset. It's that fucking bitch, Cooper, she- sorry, Kate, I'm sorry, but you know I would never in a million years-'

'I know. Cooper, you said? Caramel skin, green eyes, looks like she has a stick up her ass?'

'That's the one, how'd you know?'

'I've run into her once or twice, like you do with homicide and abuse cases. I think I'm going to have a little chat with her upstairs.'

'She's on her way down here. Alexis texted me,' he said with a quirk in his lips. 'My crafty shani always knows how to figure it out.'

'Alexis learned out to climb out of her crib when she was fifteen months old,' Castle told him, 'if the girl wants something, she'll get it.'

They all pokered up as Cooper came back in and sniffed haughtily at the site of Beckett.

'Bringing police into this wasn't necessary, Doctor Weaver, unless you think you need them for protection.'

'I maybe Detective Kate Beckett but I am also Kate Castle,' Beckett retorted, 'and Alexis is my daughter. And whether it's as a cop or as a mother, I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that Shane would never beat Alexis, because he knows what would happen to him if he so much as called her a foul name, nevermind striking her.'

'In a nutshell, they'd never find the body,' Castle added, getting to his feet beside his wife, a wall of solidarity. 'So you can say whatever you need to in your report, but there is no cause for any further investigation into this matter.'

'Which is the same conclusion I reached after speaking to Alexis.' Cooper tugged at her jacket stiffly. 'If you like, you can all go and visit her now.'