From Fear to Forever

Chapter 2: Tell Me Everything

Five pictures were laid on the table in a neat row. In each picture, there was a smiling little girl dressed in her Sunday best, looking directly at the camera with the glow of youth in her eyes.

"Okay, so, that's Rory," Sara said, pointing to the first picture. "This is from her Freshman year picture day."

The author nodded.

"And there's December, Beth, Felicity, and Dawn. I've ordered them from oldest to youngest, as you can see," she continued, gesturing to each individual picture as she said the girls' names.

"Yes," he chuckled, "Very organized. Also very clever."

"I try," Sara laughed.

She had been released from the hospital just a couple of days before, and she was already back on her feet and doing well. Yesterday, she found an apartment that she could afford and struck a deal with the landlord allowing her to move in well before the date he'd listed on the website. Sara knew that she was enormously lucky, lucky that James hadn't tried to find her, lucky that she'd had money saved up from her days as a lawyer, lucky that she had enough cash on her to be able to pay her first month's rent without dipping into her savings Lucky that cash was almost entirely untraceable. She was lucky indeed.

There they were now, in that apartment in Brooklyn. Sara was wearing what she'd been wearing for the past two days, since clean clothes weren't exactly things she'd thought to bring when she ran from the Penthouse on the Upper West Side with five girls in tow.

"So what exactly happened?" Castle probed, "On that fateful night. June 14. How did it all go down?" He took a momentary pause before adding, "Off the record. Only if you're comfortable sharing, of course. You can tell me anything and everything"

Sara's airway constricted and she could feel her vocal chords strain. There was no one in the world who knew the story of what happened just a couple days ago. Not Castle, not the Willport daughters, and, Sara joked with herself, maybe not even myself.

Somehow, she persuaded herself that this man before her; Rick Castle, author, former playboy, private investigator; really did want to know her story, and really was going to help her.

She sighed and said in a very light, airy voice, "Okay. Are you listening? It's kind of a long story,"

A/N!!!

Hi all! If you've gotten this far in my story tysm for reading and sorry for the sparse updates!! Also sorry that this was a short chapter, but the next one I think will be pretty long, so I felt like I should make this one shorter.