Archive of Our Own

i.

He sits in the back.

They’ve got a big picture of her up. For some reason he wasn’t expecting that.

It’s a shot of her, caught her off-guard, leaning over her desk at work. Her gaze is far away, glancing at someone – Ellison, maybe, coming in through the doorway, and although her stare is intense, her mouth is just beginning to curl up. As if she sees the photographer out of the corner of her eye and it’s proving a distraction, one that’s about to derail her train of thought and make her laugh. Her hand is resting on the desktop and he can see all her clutter. A stack of post-it notes, a frame with a photograph in that’s fallen out of focus, a pen in a pot with a big feather on the end, so out of character she must have gotten it as some stocking filler novelty gift.

He hates that she’s dead and there’s no evidence there that they even knew each other.

There’s not many people at the wake, but no one questions him when he slips in. Murdock spots him lurking by the food table – he’s got a plate in his hands and he’s been staring at the sandwiches for five minutes now – but he doesn’t say anything, just gives him a little nod and carries on talking to some stranger Frank doesn’t recognise.

He’s convinced that it’s not real – that she’s still alive out there somewhere, playing a big trick on all of them – right up until he spots Karen’s dad outside, smoking a roll-up and staring out at the storm clouds.

‘Want one?’ The man offers when Frank steps outside. He hasn’t had a cigarette since he was in Afghanistan but he takes one anyway and breathing the smoke into his lungs comes so easy he wonders why he ever gave it up.

He considers giving his condolences, but he supposes Paxton Page has heard enough of that today. So instead he hangs his head and blows out another mouthful of smoke to the floor and waits for the man to ask;

‘How did you know Karen?’

‘Nelson and Murdock were my lawyers. She did a lot to – to help my case.’

It’s the lie he’d practised in the mirror as he’d put on his tie. He’d had to retie it three times because his hands were shaking so bad.

It sounds so pathetic now. Nowhere near enough. So he offers out;

‘My wife and kids they… They died a long while back. Since then, Karen – closest thing to a friend I had.’ He laughs at the end, but it’s weak and watery and Paxton just crooks an eyebrow.

‘She killed my other kid.’ The way Paxton says it, it’s casual. Frank blinks. He feels like he’s been punched in the throat. ‘Yeah. Wouldn’t believe it, would you? Sweet girl like that. She was high as a kite, ran the car right off the road.’ Paxton shrugs. As if it were nothing. ‘Makes sense that I outlived both of them in the end.’

There’s nothing but the rain and the quiet hiss of Frank’s cigarette as the ash runs through and the butt drops to the floor. When Paxton looks back at him Frank isn’t sure what he sees – can only know what he feels, which is his hands curling together into tight fists, joints clicking, and a rage so hard and painful he shakes with it, the world bleeding away at the corners of his vision – but he flicks his own cigarette to the floor, grinding it out with his heel.

‘I should get going,’ Paxton says, and dissolves back into the rain.

When Frank heads back inside, Nelson’s just wrapping up. His eyes are rimmed red but he’s smiling, and the people gathered around have that same softly shell-shocked look. No one turns at the gentle clink of the bell over the door, but Nelson catches his eye once he’s finished, and Frank forces himself to stay rooted as he approaches.

He looks good. His hair’s grown out a little, something between the boyish lawyer he’d known during his own trial and the sleek, together shark he’d seen on the news every now and then. When he reaches him, Frank’s surprised by the way he pulls him into a hug. It’s brief and he stiffens under it, but Nelson claps him on the shoulder as he pulls away anyway and Frank’s grateful for it.

‘Hey, Pete,’ Nelson tells him, the name enunciated carefully. ‘I’m glad to see you here.’

Frank searches the man’s open face and sees he’s genuine in what he says. He nods and realises his jaw is trembling. He thinks he might be about to cry. Nelson nods to the corner, where Ellison is speaking, so uncharacteristically quiet that Frank can’t even hear him from the other side of the cramped deli.

‘You wanna say something?’ 

‘I, uh –’ no, his brain pleads, a part of him stuck at the funeral of Maria and Lisa and Frankie Junior, watching Billy give the eulogy because he couldn’t trust himself to speak without screaming, without taking out a gun and shooting every fucker there who got to go home to their wife and kids when all was said and done.

‘How did she die?’ He asks instead, watching Nelson’s face blanch at the question. No one had spoken about it directly during the ceremony. Murdock’s eulogy had been lots of gone too soon and everyone since had skirted around it so he figured it must be something bad, something no one was quite ready to comprehend yet, and so –

‘I’m so sorry, Frank, I thought you knew,’ Nelson starts up, eyes beginning to fill with tears again, and Frank’s heart is so full of hurt he doesn’t even worry about the slip up. Nelson’s voice goes quiet and crackly. ‘She, uh – she killed herself. She knew Fisk was after her and so she – she jumped, uh – she –’

‘Okay, alright, it’s alright,’ Frank finds himself murmuring. Carefully, he lets Nelson fall into the front of his shirt for a moment, cups the back of his head and shushes him the way Billy had held him that day in the hospital, when he’d woken up and found out his life was all dust.

When Nelson pulls back his face is wet but his eyes are dry and he forces a wobbly smile.

‘I, uh, I know she really would have liked you to say something.’ Nelson pauses, considers him carefully, and the smile nudges into something a little realer. ‘She always did have a soft spot for you.’

Frank nods.

‘Sure, Foggy. I’ll say something.’

He allows himself to be led to the front of the group and he faces them down. Unfamiliar face layered upon unfamiliar face. Murdock is considering him carefully behind those dark glasses, head tilted to one side, and Nelson watches expectantly and Ellison, a man he has never met but a face he knows, can’t look at him for some reason, gaze on the floor as he begins to speak.

When he gets back to his apartment, he takes his pistol out of his bedside table and lets it sit in the palm of his hand. Feels the weight of it. Holds it up to his temple.

Lowers it, god knows how long later. His forearms are trembling with the strain of holding it up so long.

‘No,’ he says, aloud, to his empty apartment. To Karen, maybe.

Not yet. He has some things he needs to do first.

ii.

 ‘Pete?’

Nelson sounds surprised to hear from him. Frank can’t say he blames him.

‘Hey. It’s me,’ he says pointlessly, aware of how dull his voice sounds. ‘I need some info.’

There’s a long, rustling pause on the other end of the line. Frank is faintly aware that it’s two a.m. It’s dark outside and when Nelson speaks again his voice is thick with sleep and confusion.

‘Have you – do you have the wrong number?’ Another pause. ‘It’s Foggy – Foggy Nelson –’

‘I know who you are,’ Frank finds himself snapping, too tired to rectify it with an apology. He hasn’t slept in a long while. ‘I need some info.’

‘Frank –’

‘Fisk. Where’s he holed up these days?’

‘Frank –’

‘I need the address. News sites are all saying he moved somewhere new after his wedding.’

‘I think he’s on a honeymoon. Frank, is this –’

‘Honeymoon? Where –’

‘Frank.’

He’s so surprised at the usually gently-spoken Nelson shouting over him that he automatically goes silent. Immediately, he’s reminded of the man who’d spoken on his behalf in court, who’d gone from shaking mess to frighteningly competent lawyer in a matter of minutes. And then, of course, as he thinks of the courtroom, he remembers all those hours sat next to Karen. He’d been so curious of her back then, and so painstakingly aware of her presence – the heat of her bare elbow near his, close enough to reach out and brush with his own, the smell of her perfume, floral and a little sweet. The way she’d watched Murdock, those big, heartsick eyes – and how she’d watched him when he’d lost it on the stand, hands clasped to her mouth like she was looking at – at a monster, and –

‘This isn’t what she would have wanted for you, Frank.’

He is pulled up short. He feels as if someone has tied a rope round his ribcage and tugged on it so hard all the wind is knocked out of him, even as he lurches forward into a steeple of air, floating in it for a distended moment before he falls.

‘Yeah, well, throwing herself off the fuckin’ Williamsburg Bridge isn’t what I wanted for her either, but here we are.’

Later, he gets a text.

You should go visit her grave. Before you decide on anything.

He's surprised by the amount of flowers there.

He shouldn't be, really. Although Karen didn't have friends - or at least, not many. Murdock. Nelson. Ellison. And he was her boss before anything else.

He'd thought they'd been friends, too.

I kissed her, he thinks, a little desperately. It had just been on the cheek but he had hesitated, stayed there for a moment with that heat and that floral warmth that somehow radiated from her even in the chill air, and that had meant something. He thought it had. He had thought that, perhaps, she understood – understood that he couldn’t give her everything he wanted to, that he wasn’t ready, but that maybe some day he could be. That if he could ever have an after, he would have –

The thought is too painful to finish, and so is another reiteration of asking why she didn’t call him, why she didn’t think he could – or, would – help her, and that really is so painful that he thinks he may as well kneel down by her grave until the knees of his jeans are soaked with mud and the damp of the ground, and he’s finally absorbed by the earth along with her.

The flowers, he refocuses himself, forcing him to think on them. Karen didn’t have many friends but she had coworkers, lots of them, and a few neighbours who seem to have like her, and a landlord she was on vaguely friendly terms with, and suddenly he is seething. Filled with fury for them. Empty platitudes left on bullshit cards that will rot in the rain and it seems desperately, horrifically unfair that these people who barely paid attention to her, barely knew her, got to see her day-in and day-out, whilst all he got were small scraps of stolen moments, tiny kisses and and –

‘Mr. Castle?’

He glances over his shoulder. Turns back to the grave.

‘It’s Castiglione, now,’ he mutters after a moment, reluctant to let his name hang in the air unchecked.

‘Pete Castiglione?’ Ellison repeats dubiously. He’s hunkered down under an unmbrella, regarding Frank warily. ‘That’s a pretty terrible cover name.’

Frank shrugs.

‘My dad liked baseball.’

He blinks. He hadn’t meant for the detail to come out and yet somehow, now, it stands between them, met by Ellison’s raised eyebrow before finally he twists around and says, a little vaguely;

‘I should go –’

‘You come here to pay your respects?’ Ellison nods. ‘I’ll get out of your way.’

He makes it a few steps before Ellison calls after him. When he turns, Ellison gestures him back. The grass is starting to get soaked beneath him and he notes that one of his boots has a leak, the dampening his socks.

They stand in front of the grave for a moment. Gingerly, almost as if he were hoping the man next to him won’t notice the motion, Frank leans out and presses a few fingers to the stone.

Karen Page. 1985 - 2018

Loving daughter and friend to many

“Do not stand at my grave and weep;

I am not there. I do not sleep.”

He knows the rest of the poem. I am a thousand winds that blow when you awake in the morning’s hush; I am the swift uplifting rush. He knows it by heart. The pastor – who had not known his family, a stranger – had read it out at the funeral.

He had hated it then; sentimental, generic bullshit that had nothing to do with his family. He can’t imagine it was something Karen ever would have chosen either.

‘She liked you.’ When he twists around, Ellison is pushing up his glasses, pointedly staring at the grave and not him. ‘We got into lots of arguments, but the biggest ones were always about you. Everyone knew – you don’t say a bad word against the Punisher. Not when Karen’s around. I thought she was crazy, but – she saw something in you.’ Ellison digs his hands into his pockets, long umbrella handle rested in the crook of his elbow. He hasn’t thought to offer it to Frank, for which he’s grateful; he’s not sure he could bear the intimacy of being huddled beneath an umbrella right now, the idea of someone’s coat brushing his running pins along his skin.

‘She ever tell you about her brother?’

For the first time, Ellison meets Frank’s gaze, looking up at him owlishly, unblinking. Slowly, Frank shakes his head and Ellison’s gaze skitters away, back to the grave in front of them.

‘I’ll tell you about it sometime.’

‘If –’ and Frank realises he has to pause, cough a little, his throat tight and raw; ‘if she wanted me to know she would have told me.’ He hates that he knows the secret already, the huge, ugly thing Karen kept close to her chest – carelessly revealed to him by her dickhead dad in the midst of a wake.

Ellison buries his nose a little further into the collar of his coat.

‘I never did understand what – goodness she saw in you,’ the older man tells him, matter-of-fact. ‘Not until she told me you took a bullet for her.’

Instinctively, Frank raises a hand. The scar is there, hidden at his hairline. The other, in his shoulder – it feels tight, every now and then, quiet twinges that speak Karen through his body.

‘I’m not sure Murdock or Nelson or anyone else she knew would have done that for her.’

‘I miss her.’

He hadn’t wanted to say that, but the words come out quietly anyway, broken in two by a catch in his throat. Trembling, his fingers go back to the stone, tracing the words with his fingers. Karen.

‘I – I need to go,’ Frank mutters, feeling his head twisting this way and that, trying to seek out a direction, an exit. ‘I have to –’

‘Fisk?’ Ellison interrupts, plainly. Frank nods.

‘I have to –’

‘She wouldn’t have wanted that for you, Frank,’ Ellison tells him, so gently that he’s instantly furious, wrenching himself away from the grave, from the man next to him, swiping the palm of his hand across his eyes to clear the tears as he snaps back, gruff and choked all at once;

‘You don’t know shit about what she would’ve wanted.’

Ellison stares after him, unimpressed. He’s taken a few steps back and the ground of Karen’s grave is uneven underfoot, still fresh enough that there’s a little raise in the grass.

‘Really? Really, Castle? You know who was there the day you died, the one who was with her when she was crying and in pieces trying to process the things you did? Were you there? No. It was me. I was there. And when you un-died all over national television – were you there? No. I was. I know things about her that she never told you, or Murdock, or anyone –’ and here Frank realises that Ellison is furious, in his own calm, contained way, his voice hard and fast as he stands a few steps away, hands buried rigidly in his pockets, face burning. ‘I knew her, and I was there. You weren’t. You want to honour her? You didn’t even know her. Go to Georgetown, go to Vermont – I don’t care. You go and learn her before you land yourself with a life sentence over some bullshit way of avenging her death that we both know damn well she wouldn’t have wanted.’

Frank watches Ellison walk away. His feet are soaking wet.

I need an address.

Fisk?

Yeah.

Frank, I don’t –

He snaps his phone shut before he can read the rest of Lieberman’s text. Switches the whole thing off and throws it in a desk drawer, abruptly furious.

When he wakes up twenty-four hours later, Fisk’s new address flickers up on his screen.

There is a long line of traffic piled up behind him.  

It’s early in the morning. The sky is an ugly grey and his fingers are delicately wrapped around his steering wheel, forehead rested on the backs of his hands. Behind him, a woman leans on the horn. His indicator clicks.

He shuts his eyes and tries to tune into the sound. In front of him, the road stretches. Someone has leaned outside of their car window to scream at him. Outside, it’s still raining. It has been since that day at the cemetery. The sound of it against the roof of his jeep washes over him.

On the radio, Shining Star begins to play.

Fuck, Karen, he breathes, and swings left, out of New York.

iii.

He wakes up with a crick in his neck, unsure of where he is.

For a moment he jolts wildly, thrashing against a constriction at his chest, hands scrabbling. He hits smooth metal, cool glass – car. He’s in his car, half-awake, having dozed off after the four-hour drive to D.C. and –

He had forgotten. Just for a moment. And now his stomach swoops down and he leans back against the headrest, breathes up to the ceiling in long, ragged exhales.

It was like this with Maria sometimes, too. He would wake up and roll over in bed, looking for her. Hand outstretched, wondering why the other side of the bed was cold under his palm. And then he would remember and bury his face into the pillow, desperate to fall back asleep, back into that small patch of world where his family were neither dead or alive, and everything was nothing.

But he’s awake, now, and Karen is still dead, so he rubs at his face and goes to buy a toothbrush from the dollar store down the street.

Georgetown University looks like a castle. He never went to college, didn’t even consider the Ivy league – Columbia worlds away from him even when it was just a stone’s throw down the street. He tries to picture her, wide-eyed, books hustled to her chest, making her way across the long stretch of grass into the imposing building in front of him.

But he can’t place her here. Karen will always be that tall, imposing woman who seemed so unafraid of everything. The woman who introduced herself by telling him she’d broken into his house. He can’t see her as one of these shrimpy college kids, eighteen or nineteen, head bowed, rushing to class, hanging out on the green with her friends in the summer. His only understanding of college is through movies and he’s aware of how out of place he is, huddled into a dark coat, his broad shoulders stark against the bright colours of the space – red brick, green grass.

At least it’s stopped raining. He had awoken to sunshine and now it sits, low and weak in the sky. Yesterday’s rainwater spills like oil across the pavements and the sun catches it so the whole place seems to glow. He pulls his baseball cap a little lower over his head, self-conscious as a few passing students shoot him an odd look, aware of how aimless he is here.

Ellison had told him get to know Karen but he can’t find her here. There is nothing of her to dig up, no parts of her in this clean, neat space.

He goes to a diner off-campus instead. The waitress is tall and skinny, an older lady, and she squeezes his shoulder as he pours him a dark coffee as if it’s written across his face just how tired he is. Or maybe he looks beaten-up. He spends so long covered in bruises he’s given up checking to see if they’re still there, or healing. He’s fairly sure, based on the pockets of tenderness across his face, that he’s sporting a black eye, maybe a few bruises along the bridge of his nose. He hasn’t looked in a mirror in god-knows how many days. Not since the funeral, when he was tying his tie –

God. She had sat across him in a diner just like this and he’d known, even then, that she was – was something. Something special. But he hadn’t wanted to think it, couldn’t – so he’d pushed her away, poked and prodded about Murdock as some distant, far away part of him was just screaming. He remembers his boot in that thug’s skull and the whole time asking himself, as Karen cowered in the kitchen with her hands over her mouth, what the hell is the matter with you?

Sometimes he thinks back to that doorway in the forest, listening to her screaming his name and he wants to rip through the seams of himself. Wants to tear it all up because he was so stupid and he had heard her, even from that far away – those loud, horrible sobs by the car, and he had stood for a moment, hand shaking on the handle, forehead rested against the wood of the door, trying to force himself to her.

Sometimes he thinks everything he’s done since then – bringing flowers to her apartment, kissing her cheek, taking a bullet for her – has all been to make up for that one moment where he’d left her bleeding in the wind.

‘You look like you could do with another cup,’ the waitress tells him, reappearing by his shoulder with a coffee pot, and when he catches his reflection in the window he sees that his face is white and his eyes are red and he’s breathing too quick, chest heaving in and out in shallow little pumps.

‘I need – I –’ he can’t breathe and the waitress is talking to him but everything is high pitched whines and nothingness and when he finally comes back to himself he’s out on the street, his head between his knees, mumbling her name over and over again.

He vomits, wipes at his mouth and then stumbles back inside to pay for the coffee. The waitress tells him not to worry about it and she’s so kind he could cry.

When it’s dark enough, he heads to the closest bar he can find and drinks three beers in quick succession.

The world is beginning to tilt hazy around him when he spots a golden flash of hair in the corner of his eye. His stomach loops and flips. She holds herself the same; shoulders straight, neck long and lean, and he’s convinced. The bar is busy, filled with college students, and he has to elbow his way through – loses her, for a moment, swallowed by the crowd, and the world is pressing in on him when he spots that blue blouse again. Blue always was her colour – brought out the brightness of her eyes and his skin is on fire because he knows this is impossible, but he is heady with a delirious kind of delight because he would know that sheen of hair anywhere and –

She turns, someone calling her name. He reminds himself - staring breathlessly at a stranger with dull, blonde hair and a close approximation of bright blue eyes - that Karen is dead. And just like Maria, and Frankie Junior, and Lisa, she is not coming back.   

Still. The blonde stranger sees him looking and blushes – all over, all at once, and although it’s nothing like what Karen would have done (Karen never blushed, would instead turn sheepish and twisty, somehow flipping the conversation so the focus fell on him instead, and eventually he was the one left hot and embarrassed inside) – it still drags him closer. The girl’s face flushes prettily at him now and he ducks his head.

He buys a beer. Drinks it. Orders a few shots. Drinks them mechanically – then another beer. Waits for the fuzz to settle in, feels the world begin to melt inwards at the edges and when he turns he can see there is a haze of golden-blonde in his periphery. 

He’s pretty drunk, but so is she, and he must be charming enough because she slips free of her friends. The bar is busy now, and her thigh brushes against his as she leans her elbow close and asks him if he’s going to buy her a drink. He think he might be sick again.

Instead, he orders her a pale ale and leans down a touch so she can shout her name in his ear, lost somewhere above the bar’s noisy rumble.

And then time flutters by, immaterial and unimportant, and in the haze of people she leads him by the hand to the bathroom. The light is blue, the kind you get in airport toilets to stop people shooting up because they can’t see the veins. He stares down at his own hand. Scars and marks and bruises and short, grubby fingernails. No veins. His knuckles are black and blue and he wonders if these hands even belong to him, if they ever have. He is aware that his mind is running away from him because when the girl takes his hands in hers and kisses him, sweetly and a little clumsily, on the mouth, he barely feels it.

The window is open, though, the cold air sharpening him and suddenly, with his eyes squinted slightly in the dim light, and the long column of this girl’s throat in front of him, he is sobered a touch and abruptly overwhelmed with a wanting that is painful, starting in his crotch and travelling up to the sickly low of his stomach, somehow starting an ache in his collarbones, the small bones of his wrist.

She is kissing him again, purposeful - a little more forceful now, and he shuts his eyes. Lets his hands rest on her waist, just hard enough that his fingertips dig into the soft flesh there, and he feels a moan rumble in the back of his throat even though her lips are hard against his, hard enough to bruise, and so he pulls away and clumsily kisses at her throat instead, like some drunk virgin.    

With his eyes screwed tight shut like this and the smell of her perfume in his nose and that long, long sheen of hair that he buries his fingers into, it’s almost, almost –

‘Oh my god,’ the girl is muttering, pulling away from him sharply, and he can’t understand her look of horror until he comes to understand that his face is wet and that he is crying – ugly, jarring sobs that echo round the small bathroom stall they’re in.

The girl is staring at him. He takes in the darkness of her eyebrows and the roots of her hair, the slight downward curve of her mouth, the flecks of grey in her eyes and realises, of course, that she looks nothing like Karen.

Shame curls through him.

He wakes up with a dry mouth.

Someone is pounding on the door to the cheap motel room he’d crawled into last night. Face buried in the pillow, he waits for the noise to go away. Last night is hazed, stitched with humiliation and shame; when he lets himself drift he can only see the girl, the way she’d stared at him, her hair almost green under the blue light. How she’d pulled up her jacket and handbag from the sink and rushed away, and when he’d finally emerged from the bathroom she and all her friends was gone and the bar had been empty except for him. They’d cut him off not long after.

He hurls a pillow at the door. It lands short with a gentle thud.

‘Piss off,’ he snaps. It’s probably the cleaner. He’ll leave a tip to make up for it.

The voice, when it comes through, is familiar.

‘Open the door Frank.’ Pitched low, round and rough and he rolls onto his back, lets his gaze track up to the ceiling. There’s a water stain shaped like Italy up there. ‘Frank! I’ve been out here for half a fuckin’ hour, open the god damn –’

David Lieberman pulls short. Stares him up and down. Laughs; a quick, surprised little huff.

‘Are you hungover?’ He asks, rubbing at his jaw. The scraggly half-beard Frank had always hated has been trimmed down, a neat line of stubble there instead. He looks good – healthy, a little more filled out than the wiry scarecrow Frank had knew. Still in jeans and a holey pair of boots but at least he’s wearing a sweater rather than a hoodie. Or a poncho.

‘Yes. What the hell are you doing here?’ Frank grumbles, body firmly wedged between the door and the frame.

‘You weren’t answering my texts so I tracked your phone – did you throw a pillow at me?’

‘No. I threw a pillow at the door you were stood behind. What do you want, Lieberman?’

David stares up at him. As if it were obvious.

‘What do I – Frank, I –’ and the man breaks off, folding his arms across his chest, giving Frank that strange little look he always had, eyes preternaturally wide but forehead pinched. ‘I was worried about you.’

‘Well, I’m fine,’ Frank snaps, feeling the sourness of the words curdling on his tongue, ‘so –’

‘I heard about Karen.’ Frank’s head drops to his forearm, rested up against the doorframe. His head is throbbing and his mouth tastes like ass and Lieberman is still talking. Guy never did know how to shut the hell up. ‘Frank, I’m so –’

‘Will you quit whining? I’m fine, it’s fine, you can go home.’ A beat. Frank’s heart feels so heavy in his chest. ‘Go home to your family.’

He moves to snap the door shut but David always was a sneaky piece of shit and somehow he’s past him and in the motel room. Frank is aware of how dingy it looks with the hard daylight creeping in; the walls are grey and the dresser is furred with dust along the tops of its drawers and Lieberman glances around him with a small, sad look of disappointment.

‘How’d’ya find me?’ Frank grumbles, collapsing back on the bed.

‘Should switch your phone off if you don’t want to be found,’ David mutters, going to the curtains and throwing them open, ignoring Frank’s protests. There’s a quiet shuffling sound as David begins to tidy; the quiet clunk of closing doors, glasses washed up in the sink, Frank’s strewn clothes folded on the chair. Finally, the mattress dips with the weight of David’s body. Frank retreats further under the covers.

‘We gonna talk about it or you gonna hide out like a baby all day?’

‘I already told you. I’m fine.’

‘Really? So you decided to come to a shitty motel right by Georgetown University for – what? A holiday?’

‘D.C.’s close. Thought I’d take in some culture –’

‘Frank.’ The covers are ripped away from him and he feels horribly naked without them, even with his t-shirt and boxers. It’s the way David’s looking at him, concern writ with frustration – the way he’s holding himself, his long frame dense with anger, solid with it as he glares down at Frank, on the bed, loose-legged and exhausted. ‘Will you cut the bullshit?’

The silence stretches as Frank stares, blankly, across at the wall. His eyes are welling up. He hates that. Feels like he’s cried more in the past week than he has in the past two years. Since Maria and the kids. He feels like he’s been saving up all this sadness in small pockets all across his body – in the heel of his hands, the rigid point of bone at his shoulders, the sore ache of his calves – and now it’s pouring and pouring and it won’t stop. Maybe ever.

‘What do you want me to say?’ He asks quietly. His voice is thick and he finds himself wishing it away.

‘I think you need to talk. About Karen. About how you feel.’

‘I don’t feel anything.’

‘Frank –’

‘What do you want me to say, huh?’ And now he’s shouting, whole face red, and he can feel the way his face contorts with fury, can see it reflected in Lieberman’s widened eyes. He doesn’t flinch, though, not even when Frank stands, fists curled up and every part of him pulsing with anger. ‘You want me to talk about how sad I am? You want me to cry? Well I’m sad, Dave, and I’m fucking crying. Is that enough? You want me to talk about how every morning since she died I wake up thinking that she’s still alive and I have to remember, every single day, that she’s gone? You want me to talk about Maria, too, while we’re at it? And my kids?’ And he is crying now, the tears pouring down his face, and he’s just so tired of it all – the crying and the sadness that seems determined to consume him. He’s tired of this, right here, of screaming at David even as he tells him, spittle firing from his mouth with the quick-fire fury of his words; ‘want me to talk about how them dying was my fault? How I stood there and did nothing as my little girl bled out in my arms? All ‘cause of how I fucked up? And now Karen – now Karen, deciding she can’t take any more of it and – and – and I wasn’t there, David. I wasn’t there! I could’ve – I could’ve protected her, and looked after her, but I didn’t, and she died and all I can think about is how I wasn’t – wasn’t enough and how she – she didn’t even call, you know that? You know? She didn’t even try, didn’t even call me before she – she –’ and then David’s skinny arms wrap around him and he dissolves, pouring all of himself away to the dingy motel room carpet.

Later – much later, the sun hanging low and bright in the sky now – David hands him a cup of coffee and a bagel.

‘S’all they had downstairs.’ Frank waves him off, biting into the bread. It tastes like chewing on rubber and he makes a face, shoves it back in the wrapper and downs the coffee instead. ‘You should eat,’ David tells him, all pinched up with worry.

‘S’alright. I’ll pick something up later.’ His face feels puffy and sore and he turns away, embarrassed, now, at all of it.

‘You want a lift back to the city?’

‘Nah. Gonna finish some stuff up here first. You headed back now?’

‘Yeah. Gotta pick Leo up from soccer practice.’ Frank’s too tired not to flinch at the mention of the kids, hating himself for it. ‘They miss you, you know. Zach and Leo. And Sarah, too. They all keep on asking when you’re gonna come round for dinner.’ There’s an awkward little pause as David, fiddling with the zipper on his jacket, casts his gaze to the corners of the room as he mumbles, ‘I miss you too.’

‘What was that?’

‘I said I –’ and then he breaks off, catching Frank’s small, shit-eating smile. ‘Alright, jack ass. Just – come by for dinner sometime soon, alright?’ Frank nods, distracting himself with making his bed – tucking the sheet corners in neat, just how he likes it, like how they taught him in the army – and when he sits on the end, surveying his good work, David is close by, eyes huge and soulful. To Frank’s surprise, he settles next to him and puts a hand on his shoulder where it rests, a gentle pressure. ‘Seriously, Frank. Don’t – don’t leave us, alright? Don’t do anything stupid.’

For a moment, Frank can’t talk past the lump in his throat. Just nods – until David squeezes his shoulder, tells him again; ‘I’m serious. You promise?’

Frank nods – and then, when that doesn’t seem to be enough, he murmurs I promise.

The lie tastes sour in his mouth.

He’s exhausted but he heads out to the college. Grabs a map from a little information kiosk and tries hard to ignore the students milling about him. They ignore him right back.

The library is a little walk away from the main building and when he reaches it he’s almost glad for its familiarity; a huge, ugly concrete building, standing tall and grey against the skyline. When he heads inside he’s hit in the chest with its smell – sharp, dark coffee and paper and dust. Reminds him of the hours spent at the library at school, where he would hide out to skip classes and read. Maria used to say that he must’ve been a bad boy but really he’d been something of a dork, all big ears and lanky limbs, nose usually stuck in a book. It wasn’t until he joined the army that he became someone new. And someone new again, after Central Park. And again, after Karen and after all of this.

He consults the library map – aware that he’s never been in a library so big it requires a map – and heads up to the fifth floor. It’s quiet here – hushed. Oddly reminiscent of Karen’s apartment. She’d had books on every surface, always had the quiet air of study about her. Once the nervous energy and grit was peeled away, he always got the feeling she was soaking up every part of him.

Beyond him, out the window, the Potomac stretches, the sun bouncing up off it. He stares out, shielding his eyes from the glare. He’d only been to D.C. once before; he was posted there for some training before he headed out to Afghanistan for the first time, before he met Maria. Couldn’t have been older than twenty.

Some students come across him almost bent at the middle, all the air socked out of his lungs, and ask him if he’s okay. His palm is rested against the cool glass of the window and he centers himself around it, counts to three before he straightens and turns.

‘I’m fine. Out of breath from the stairs,’ he tells them, talking through the scratched-up sound of his voice, brushing past them and up.

(He had realized, and confirmed later against Karen’s student record, that they had been in the city at the same time. He’d been there in late August; the sun had been low, the whole place covered a thick haze of cloud and heat, and all any of them could think about was girls. And sex. They would tease the college girls on nights out, in bars and clubs, trying to rile them up, make them laugh. The idea that Karen might have been there – that their paths had somehow crossed, in some tiny, inexorable way – had winded him.)

There’s no articles written by her in the records centre.

He wonders if she ever wrote for them at all, or if the copies were seen as inconsequential, never kept or stored. He still has a small collection of The Bulletin, which he normally picked up from subway cars or park benches. It had gotten to the point, though, where he would go out and buy a copy from the bodega down the street from his apartment every week, scouring the pages for her name. It brought her closer, somehow.

So he heads outside, back down the steps, past the books and the plant pots that remind him sorely of her apartment, past the spot where he’d had to stop, and outside. By the time he reaches the quad the sun is almost ready so set, the air aglow with golden hour light around him, turning everything a liquid bronze. He wanders, aimlessly. Tries to remember his time in D.C., tries to remember if he ever caught up with a serious-looking girl with long blonde hair carrying books in her arms, tried to tease her and make her smile. He’s caught somewhere between invention and memory when he sees her face.

A grainy little picture, up on a notice board marked Notable Alumni. Her name, with Class of 2007 printed next to it. A little spiel about her career – a noted journalist with The New York Bulletin, Karen Page started her career with critically-acclaimed coverage of Frank Castle, also known as The Punisher, at the time of his trial, and went on to cover local New York news. Perhaps most notably, she wrote about the actions of terrorist Lewis Wilson – and then a few silly questions and answers. He wishes he could read the words, take any of it in, but he feels as if his gaze has clouded over, feels as if -

‘You know her?’

He turns. There’s a girl at his elbow – young, surrounded by a huge cloud of matted hair, staring up at her. There’s a flicker of recognition in her when their eyes meet, but he pulls the cap of his baseball hat lower and she simply returns to the board, looking at it carefully.

‘She died, right?’ The girl doesn’t wait for him to answer. ‘Shame. I used to live in Hell’s Kitchen – I always liked reading her articles.’

Frank ducks his head. He wants to tell her – this random stranger – that he has no idea who Karen Page is, that he was just stopping to read on his way somewhere else.

Instead, he tells her;

‘Yeah. Me too.’

When the girl leaves, backpack hiked high up on her shoulders, he finds he can see a little clearer. Studies the dumb questions-and-answers – her favourite movies, the best professor at Georgetown. It’s all short, clinical. The only answer that’s elaborated on beyond a few words is the one where she names her favourite off-campus spot.

Denny’s bodega on Prospect Street does the best coffee. It’s where I used to go to buy lottery tickets.

By the time he gets to the bodega the sky is blushing pink.

There’s a student accommodation building just across the street, a cluster of kids stood smoking by the doorway. He wonders if that’s where Karen used to live. If she’d come out on this street every day for her lottery ticket and her coffee, maybe cross the busy road the other side of the green and go stand by the river, take in the tall, tall buildings a little further away and think about New York.

‘Black coffee, thanks,’ he murmurs to the man behind the counter, digging in his pocket for change. And then, after a moment’s pause, he flicks a finger at the display and asks for a lottery ticket too, throwing a note down on the counter.

The man stops, regards him carefully. He’s an older guy, Portuguese, with dark hair and black eyes.

‘What’re you in town for?’ He asks quietly, pouring some coffee in a take away cup and rootling around on the shelves for a lid. The bodega is small, cramped, with a random assortment of products – tampons and toothpaste and boxes of cereal, all mingled together. Here, finally, is somewhere that makes sense for Karen. He can see her now where he couldn’t anywhere else. Browsing the aisles, picking up her coffee, pausing over the papers. He feels as if he’s found her.   

‘Visiting a friend,’ he mutters – and then, when the man straightens, fixes him with dark eyes, he amends himself; ‘sort of. Girl I knew – used to go to college here.’

The man nods, frowns seemingly to himself. He’d been struggling with the plastic lid as Frank was speaking but now, finally, it seems to click and he pushes it across the countertop towards Frank.

‘The, uh – the lottery ticket?’ Frank prompts. He’s met with another frown, mouth twisted up to the side strangely – and then the man nods. Reaches under the counter and pulls out a single ticket, pushes it across the counter along with the ten dollars he’d put there.

‘Hey, you –’ but the man waves him off, pushing it all across to him rather insistently. Frank feels his eyes on the back of his head until the door clangs shut behind him.

The lottery ticket already has the numbers scratched out.

The lottery ticket already has the numbers scratched out and the longer he looks at them the more he swears blind they’re co-ordinates.

The lottery ticket – the one the bodega owner had pulled from under the counter rather than from the machine out on display – already has the numbers scratched out.

The lottery ticket has the numbers scratched out and hope is so high in his head he feels as if he might be sick.

iv.

Hains Point is cold and dark and there’s no one here.

He was an idiot for coming. He feels like hope is a painful knot inside him that he can’t untie, keeps bobbing up to his wind pipe, his throat, stopping him from breathing, from speaking. And until he coughs it up he’s always going to be saying her name, always going to be hoping she’ll somehow appear around the next corner.

He walks the whole park. Looking – for a clue, a sign. He walks until his feet are bleeding in his shoes and the sky is like tar, and when he finds the silver giant pressed into the ground – he’d read about the statue when he was a kid, had nightmares about being buried alive after – he sits on the cold ground, back laid against the rictus-stiff curve of a foot, and falls asleep whispering her name.

When he wakes up, there’s a weight on his shoulder.

The first thing he sees when he opens his eyes are his hands. His fingers are blue and everything feels numb. He’s faintly aware his teeth are chattering. The hand on his shoulder – brushing downwards now, to his arm – feels unreal, a barely-there pressure that he leans into, head lolling. Still half-asleep and freezing.

Someone shakes him and he forces his eyes open again. Forces himself to look up.

Karen’s there. The sky is dim, that hesitant moment pre-dawn where everything has begun to lighten but the world around him is still a pale, unsure blue and Karen’s skin is tinged with it. There’s that blonde hair, lifted gently by the wind, almost white in the light, and her lips are red and stark against her skin. She looks unreal. A ghost. An angel. He thinks he might be dead. Or maybe just sleeping, still – and this is a dream.

He reaches his hand out and finds hers. It’s warm in his palm.

‘Frank.’

He jolts awake. There’s a jacket over his shoulders and a presence beside him, warm and rigid all at once.

He turns. Karen is still there.

‘You’re not real,’ he tells her. The sun is beginning to rise now and the world is still sleeping, sun catching on mist and dew, turning everything silver and hazed. ‘I’m still asleep,’ he murmurs. She’s holding his hand.

Swiftly, she leans over and pinches him.

‘Jesus,’ he snaps. ‘What the hell was that for?’

‘You can’t feel pain in dreams. This is real. You’re not asleep.’ Karen stands, slowly, brushes mud of her knees and regards him carefully. Coldly. ‘What are you doing here, Frank?’

‘Karen –’

‘I didn’t think – I didn’t think it would be you. I told Ellison –’

‘Karen –’

‘It wasn’t supposed to be you –‘

‘Karen.’ Finally, she quiets. ‘Come here.’ He nods to the patch of ground next to him and, sighing, she lowers herself. Slowly, ever-so-slowly, his body aching and cold and sore, he raises up onto his knees. Arranges himself so that they are facing one another.

She doesn’t look any different. Her eyelashes are darker than he remembers, and in this light her eyes are stormy and rich. But other than that – the same.

Carefully, he rests his forehead on her shoulder and feels himself tremble. Moves his shaking hands up and around her waist, allows the warmth of her body to ground him, waits and buries tears into the soft material of her coat as she, slowly, gingerly, wraps her arms around him. One hand goes to the back of his head, fingers just-barely brushing into his hair, the other wrapped across his broad, broad shoulders, and when her head presses against his he feels as if he’s never been this close to another human being before, that this is what they meant when they said two people can be one, and he allows himself to tell her, quietly,

‘I thought you were dead.’

‘I know,’ she murmurs. Around them, the park is silent and the world stretches across the water and everything seems to hang in the air – the sun, the leaves falling from the trees, the early-morning birds. All still as she whispers it’s alright. It’s okay. I’m here now, Frank. I’m here.

‘Do you – do you remember, back around when we first met? We were in the jail and you asked me if I would do something for you.’

Karen stares at him.

He’s on the sofa, a blanket piled in his lap, while she sits in a chair across from him.

She’d brought him back to the apartment she’s renting here. Had driven while he slept in the front seat. He’d refused to let go of her hand – hadn’t realized until he woke up and felt the embarrassment curl round his stomach. But he’s still not sure she’s real, still needs to touch her, to have his cool skin meet her warmth to remind himself that he’s not dreaming.

‘Frank. I need to know why you’re in Georgetown.’

‘D’yoou remember? You said I need you to do something for me. And I – I laughed.’

Karen’s mouth opens to speak – and then she pauses. Considers him and sighs. She remembers it exactly. His head had jerked back, just a little, his brows quirking together, all accompanied by this strange sound -

‘You didn’t laugh. You made this – huffing noise.’ She wraps her fingers together, staring down at her hands. ‘Like you couldn’t believe I was asking you a favour.’

‘I was surprised. I always worried – sometimes, when I thought of you, that was the moment that kept coming back. In my head. I was always worried that I’d offended you. I was just surprised that you – you were so smart. Weren’t afraid of shit – weren’t afraid of me. I was…’ and here he stops, feels his voice go small and weak as he explains; ‘I was surprised that you thought there was anything I could do for you.’

Karen looks like she might be about to cry. He watches her face change, her lips rubbing together before her gaze skitters to the window, whole face tilting away from him.

‘Get some sleep, Frank,’ she tells him, standing and crossing to the kitchen. He thinks he sees her swipe at her face as she goes. ‘You’ll feel better for it.’

He wakes out of a nightmare he doesn’t remember to find Karen. She’s the first thing he sees. The apartment is murky, light coming in occasionally as cars swing by the road, headlights sweeping up and across the ceiling – but other than that, it’s dark. He listens to the rumble of a car and watches as an amber light tracks across her for a moment. She’s in a t-shirt and socks, long legs bare, and she’s stood staring at him with her arms crossed over her stomach.

‘Are you alright?’ She asks him. ‘You were screaming.’

‘’m fine,’ he murmurs, twisting over and snapping on the light by the sofa.

She looks different like this. He never really thought about the fact she wore make up until now, seeing her without it. Her eyes are somehow less defined and bigger, a paler blue without the ring of mascara to embolden them. Her hair is simple, pulled back off her face and as she pads to the kitchen, flicking on the kettle, he notes the soft almost-pudginess of her elbows.

She hands him tea, which he screws up his nose at but drinks anyway. Puts it down on the coffee table in front of them and resists the urge to lean close so that her shoulder brushes his as she sits.

‘’Spose I deserve this.’ At her questioning gaze, he clarifies; ‘That time I pretended to have gotten blown up on a boat?’

‘Yeah. I was – I was pretty torn up after that.’ She laughs but the sound is hollow.

‘Well, this ain’t exactly been a picnic either.’

Silently, she reaches across and takes his hand. Some of the stiffness in his shoulders drains away.

‘Will you tell me why you came here now?’

He turns. Reaches behind her until his fingers find her hair tie.

‘Do you mind?’ He asks. He thinks she might be holding her breath because she shakes her head, watching him intently as he pulls her hair loose. Immediately he’s hit with the smell of her conditioner – coconut, maybe – and that familiar splay of curls across her shoulder. Carefully, he tucks a few strands between his fingers for a moment before resting his hand back to his lap. ‘I was going to kill Fisk then myself.’ Karen blinks – one-two, the movement such a tiny fracture it barely belies the shock he can feel in her, in the jolt of her hand against his. ‘But then Ellison told me to come here instead. Said I never really knew you. Thought being here might help.’

Karen nods. There’s something chewed up and lost on her face and he’s burning to press his thumb in the fold between her eyebrows – his hand almost raising to do so when she ducks her head away and mutters,

‘He wasn’t supposed to tell you.’

His hand grits to a stop mid-air. Karen’s shoulders are hunched, her whole body tilted away from him, and the hair that he had let loose falls over her shoulder so he can’t see her face. Just the red skin on the back of her neck.

‘He knew?’ There’s a choke to his voice and he clears his throat, starts again, words whisper-thin even as he tries, hard, to add some force behind them; ‘Karen, did Ellison know –’

He breaks off. She’s still not looking at him but he can see her head bobbing up and down in a nod and he is sick to his stomach, can feel his lower lip wobbling the way Lisa’s used to when she was trying not to cry. She would suck her lip up into her mouth and look away, jaw clenching and he never knew that she got that from him until now.

‘Ellison was meant to tell Matt,’ she explains, and she might as well have slapped him with the way he rears away, head jolting backwards, ‘meant to send him here so we could figure out a way to take down Fisk. It was too dangerous – for me to be in New York – this was the only way –’

‘The only way?’ And he can feel himself come to the surface, as if he’s been wading through a half-foot of water this whole time and now, finally, he’s broken clear, all the rage and fury and anguish quickening his step as his voice raises; ‘the only way – are you fucking kidding me?! You think – what? That if you’d have called I wouldn’t have helped? Wouldn’t have taken down Fisk for you, wouldn’t do – do anything you asked me to?’ His jaw chatters like a shiver and he can feel her staring at him – but he’s tired, he’s so god damn tired, too tired to look back now. Too tired to stop his mouth running loose, to stop himself from saying; ‘Karen, I’d – I’d do anything for you.’

When he can finally take her in her face is pale and wet with tears. She hasn’t wiped them away yet. Her mouth has fallen open, just a touch, so he can see the redness of her lips, the wetness that rests inside.

‘I wanted to call you,’ she tells him. It sounds like a confession. ‘I did, Frank, but – I knew. What you would want to do. And – I couldn’t. Couldn’t ask you to – to kill someone. For me. There’s just –’ she takes a deep breath and he can almost feel the quake in her chest, the way her diaphragm flutters on the exhale, the little one-two beat of her breath as she forges onwards; ‘there’s been so much death, Frank. You know? In my life. I’ve – I’ve hurt so many people. I didn’t want – I didn’t want any more blood on my hands –’ and here, finally, she splits in two, breaks apart and rests herself in his arms, head pressed tightly to his clavicle as she cries and he pushes his mouth to the top of her head, breathes into her hair and prints kisses into her scalp until she pulls away, puts her hand on her jaw and tells him, throat thick; ‘I wanted to tell you. More than anyone. I wanted to tell you. This whole time I’ve been here, waiting for Matt, and – you were the one I kept seeing. I saw you everywhere. I would run up to strangers in leather jackets on the street and I would just think to myself – thank God. He’s here. He’s finally found me. And then – and then you did. I’m so sorry Frank –’

‘Hey. S’ok. I’m here. We’re here. I’ve got you, Karen. I’m here.’

v.

It’s later, again.

They settle in a diner, the same spools of yellow light and red seats as before, and although neither of them say anything the familiarity of it crackles and Karen even smiles at him a little as the waitress comes to pour them a black coffee each. They’re both exhausted but they order food – and that’s new, different from last time, and he learns that Karen likes her eggs poached over scrambles and that’s – new, too.

‘So what now?’ He asks, as Karen pierces the yolk of her egg with a fork. She seems to be considering her plate, watching the yellow spill across it.

‘I’m not sure. I – I’ve just been waiting for Matt to turn up. I’ve been researching, thinking of ways – legal ways – to take Fisk down.’

‘Found anything good?’ He asks, is met with a shrug, a twist of the mouth.

‘Few pieces here and there.’

‘Alright,’ he nods, pushing bacon round his plate. ‘Way I see it – you call Murdock, right? Figure out a plan, back to New York –’

‘I can’t go back,’ Karen says, laughing. As if it were obvious. At his scrunched forehead, she leans over and steals a bite of his food. ‘I didn’t know you liked pancakes,’ she comments, chewing thoughtfully.

He hates the way she looks at him sometimes. As if she can see right through him, past all his bullshit to the deep deep marrow of him. Like she knew him, all of him, from the first time she saw him.

‘I didn’t know you liked stealing my food. Why can’t you go back to New York?’ He screws up his gaze as she starts tearing up toast with her fingers, watching people rush by the windows. D.C. feels so different to New York – fresher, greener. A little smaller. Infinitely more manageable. ‘What,’ he probes, ‘you don’t want your life back?’

‘I’m not on some witness protection programme, you know. Ellison and Mahoney – they helped me get out of the state but it’s not official. Frank, I faked my own death - I broke the law. I might never be able to go back to New York.’

‘Fuck that,’ he snaps, throwing his napkin down. ‘Fisk – he doesn’t get to do that to you. You call Murdock –’

‘What if I didn’t,’ she interrupts, so quiet he can barely hear her, isn’t sure if he even heard her right. She stops tearing at her bread, whiping her fingers on her napkin and finally looking him dead in the eye, squaring her shoulders a touch. ‘What if I didn’t?’ Didn’t call Matt. Let him think I was dead. He’ll figure out a way to get Fisk in prison, and I just – stay here. Away from the city.’

‘You won’t miss it?’ He asks, head tilting to one side. He wants, with an itching curiosity, to ask if she’ll miss him, Murdock – but instead he skirts round the question, tells her plainly instead; ‘you’ll be lonely.’

She nods. Huffs in a long breath.

‘I’ve been lonely before. I can be lonely again.’

He wishes that they weren’t here – so public, so surrounded by people, with the waitress eavesdropping by the counter and a bickering couple in the booth next to them considering the menus amidst snipes. But they are, so he takes a sip of his coffee and mutters into the mug;

‘I could stay.’

‘What?’

Gingerly, he puts the mug down on the table top. Listens to the clink of ceramic meeting wood. Folds his hands together, fingers linked, and tells her, his voice twisty and low;

‘I could stay.’

(Later, he realises that he had spotted the expression that breaks across Karen’s face before she manages to smother it down. The little sun-burst of hope and delight that has her shoulders raising, her back straightening, the quirk of her lips that had made him want to reach across the table top and kiss her right on the corner of her mouth.)

‘I can’t ask you to do that.’ He quirks an eyebrow and she sighs, rolling her eyes as she leans back in her chair. ‘You’re – you’re not Frank Castle any more. You’re Pete. You’re free. You got a second chance. I can’t ask you to throw it away and come follow me round the country.’ Karen pauses, fiddles with her fork. Looks at him with hollow eyes and asks, a crack in her throat; ‘aren’t you so tired of running?’

He rubs at his eyes. She’s right. He is tired. He’s fucking exhausted. And yet –

‘D’you remember what you told me down by Williamsburg Bridge that night? About afters?’ He waits for her to nod. ‘This is it. You not – me thinking you –’ he pulls in a breath, wills himself not to cry in the midst of this busy diner, pulls yourself together, Castle, c’mon - ‘when I thought you were dead,’ he starts up again slowly, carefully, ‘it made me realize that you – you’re…’ You’re the after. Karen. You’re it. You’re all there is. ‘I just –’

She reaches across the table and puts her hand over his.

‘It’s ok, Frank, I –’

‘Being free, having an after – none of it means shit if – if –’ and he can’t finish the sentence, can’t force himself to say the words, can’t push out if you’re not there but Karen is nodding, eyes shiny with tears and she squeezes his hand and it falls out of him, I can’t be alone any more, Karen.

‘Alright,’ she murmurs. ‘Alright.’

They spend a day back in her apartment sorting through all the files and notes and scraps of information she’s collated. Eventually, after twelve hours spent with him calling out the dates and quotes she’s scribbled down and Karen typing it all up, her fingers a constant clacking on the keyboard – it’s enough. Not enough to indict Fisk but it’s a start – beginning at his childhood, murdering his father with a hammer, to every minor infraction Karen had managed to dig up. A week spent in juvie for shoplifting when he was fifteen. An investigation into the disappearance of his college roommate, which was dismissed due to lack of evidence, but came with mounds of testimony about Fisk’s tempestuous relationship with the boy who was later found floating face down in the Merrimack, faded bruises round his neck. Every single potential charge and investigation that was thrown out and put away or simply drowned in money.

They encrypt the file and, in the end, bypass Matt entirely. They send it to David. Then they take Karen’s laptop to a pawn shop, destroy the hard drive and trade the whole thing in for a wad of cash. 

‘Alright.’ Karen’s driving his jeep, her hands wrapped firmly round the wheel, staring down the parking lot stretched ahead of them. ‘Where do we go now?’

He smiles at the nervous hitch of her breath, reaches over and, on instinct, squeezes her knee. It’s just quick, the barest of touches, and she doesn’t turn to look at him but her mouth twists up into a smile – then breaks into a laugh.

‘Where’d’you grow up?’

‘Vermont.’

‘Let’s go there.’

‘You wanna go to Fagan Corners?’ Her nose wrinkles with distaste. ‘Really?’

‘I heard it’s nice this time of year, right?’ Those blue eyes turn on him, cool and discerning, and he shifts uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Ellison told me I didn’t know you. And – I think he was right. I wanna – want to get to know you.’

She nods, slow and steady, looping her head as she twists the key in the ignition.

‘Fagan Corners. Okay.’ And then she pauses, twists in her seat to look at him. ‘Okay?’

He laughs, quiet and gruff.

‘Okay.’

vi.

He offers to navigate for Karen but finds she knows the route by-heart. She tunes through the radio until she finds a station pumping out mindless pop, singing along when she knows the words and tapping her hands on the steering wheel when she doesn’t. She doesn’t speak to him much, except to ask if he wants to stop at a restroom, or what he wants for lunch.

This is her journey, really. He’s just along for the ride.

Still. When she pulls into the tiny town, past the town hall with the mountains stretching along in the background, he’s reminded of his own hometown upbringing, before New York and Afghanistan swallowed him whole.

They park outside the library. She stares out the window, fingers held up to the glass, as if she’s afraid to step out.

‘I used to come here all the time when I was a kid,’ she tells him. ‘Kevin and I would ride down on our bikes and stay all day, in the summer.’

‘Kevin?’

In the reflection of the window, he can see her shut her eyes.

‘My brother.’ She breathes against the glass so it steams up, absently traces a smiley face with her finger tip. ‘I would read all the classics but Kevin – he loved the comic books.’

Outside, the sky is not so much grey but white, thick with clouds. The whole town is desaturated, all the colours on the signs faded, worn away from years of sun bleach. Even Karen seems to have lost some of her colour just being here – her hair a little paler, eyes lighter, not as sharp.

‘It all looks the same,’ she breathes.

‘How long’s it been since you were here?’ She chews on her thumbnail, take a little time before answering;

‘Must be ten years now. Maybe more. Not since –’ and here she breaks off, lets her gaze track to him, shrugging helplessly. ‘I left when I was a teenager. Never came back.’

‘You know I have an uncle?’ She blinks at him in disbelief. ‘Yeah. He, uh – lives in New Orleans, actually. Only ever met him once, when I was a kid, but – he’s still alive.’

‘Never thought to go see him?’ Karen asks, turning back in her seat, feet rested up on the dash. He mimics her pose, slumped down in his chair, toes tapping up against the windscreen.

‘Nah. Didn’t think – I mean, Jesus. His nephew’s the Punisher. After the trial -’

‘I get it.’ She reaches across the gear stick and holds his hand.

‘We should get out of the car,’ he tells her, after a few quiet minutes sat listening to the static crackle of the radio.

‘Just a little longer.’

‘Alright,’ he tells her, and lets her sit in quiet as they stare out through the windscreen at the parking lot, busy with people and cars, together.

‘Where are we going?’

Every so often, she’ll tug at his sleeve, pulling him round this corner and that. They’ve been walking uphill for a while now and he can see her getting out of breath, face flushed even with the chill of the wind surrounding them. It lifts her hair in strands and waves across her face, so that when she turns round to raise her eyebrows at him – deliberately not answering him – he gets a mirage of gold and cream, a sharp winter’s sun that’s finally broken through the cloud turning every inch of her so well-defined he’s not sure he could ever forget how she looks in this moment.

‘C’mon,’ she insists, breathlessly, when he pauses to just breathe, take in the mountains beyond, the dark scrap of trees and a sky with bite, blue but still icy. He can’t imagine growing up here, surrounded by so much space. Even with his smalltown upbringing, he was never far from the city – New York was a constant for him. Most of his childhood memories are permeated with a sense of claustrophobia – not bad, necessarily. He has always felt a comfort to being boxed in. Nothing like this place – four hundred people, no cinema, no theatre, a pokey library and a town hall and not much else.  

They reach a diner. Karen pauses at the perimeter of the space, arms wrapped round her stomach, staring. Slowly, cautiously, he comes up beside her. Absently tucks some of her hair behind her ear and allows her to just stare.

‘This is where I grew up,’ she murmurs, resting her head against his arm. ‘Every weekend – me and Kevin would work here. Even when we were little, we’d help my mom. Measuring out the flour for pancakes, wiping the tables down.’

‘I didn’t know your mom was –’ he lets the sentence splinter. He’s never, not once, heard Karen talk about her mother.

‘She died,’ she says. Plainly. Pulls away and heads to the doorway. He misses the warmth of her against his skin. 

The door to the diner clangs noisily as they walk in. Frank watches Karen falter at the sound – but she seems to resolve herself, square her shoulders and sit in a little corner booth where the sun comes through the window just right, bathing the table in light.

A girl – tall, blonde, skinny – comes to pour them coffee. She stares at Karen as if she’d seen a ghost and rattles of the specials with a stutter. She could be Karen in miniature; Frank is so struck by the similarity he feels the breath rush out of his chest as he stares at her.

Behind the counter, in a back room, is the hiss of a grill and the warm, familiar babble of a married couple, cooking and hustling back and forth, melted in with the occasional ring of a bell; order up.

‘My dad remarried a few years after I left town,’ she murmurs to him.

‘That was your –’

‘Half sister. Yeah.’ 

‘Does she know who you –’

‘Yeah.’ Karen stares down at the menu. ‘I think I might get the pancakes.’

It’s not until they’re leaving that Karen’s father emerges from behind the grill to serve a regular. Frank is peeling a few notes out of his wallet to pay the bill and Karen’s pulling on her coat when the man stops. Not frozen, necessarily – just paused, plate of food in one hand, the other rested on the counter top.

Frank can see the small similarities between them. Karen has his eyes, and the set of his mouth. Nothing much else.

Slowly, Karen raises her hand. Her father does the same.

‘A car crash.’

They’re stood in front of two graves. The sun is low now, and like so many of these moments since he’s left New York, the world is permeated with a golden light. It’s softer now, though – the softest it’s been, turning the cemetery gentle. He feels as if he could take the light and mold it between his fingers; something solid, something real.

Karen reaches out and presses a few fingers to her brother’s headstone.

‘I was high. Cocaine. Wasn’t looking where I was driving and flipped the car.’

Frank nods. Remembers Paxton Page, stood in the rain at Karen’s wake, telling him the same story.

‘And your mother?’

‘That was cancer. A few years before Kevin.’ She leans into him, presses her forehead to his chest for a moment. Unsure, he slips his arm around her shoulders – but it’s right, it feels good, and she huddles in closer for a second before returning to the graves.

‘Do you miss them?’ He asks.

‘Every day.’

‘Does it –’ he breaks off, stares down at the grass beneath his feet. The headstones are old, covered in moss, the stone beginning to crack at the top. Karen had thrown out the old, dead flowers from a mildewed jar by Kevin’s grave, replaced them with the lilies they’d picked up at the corner store. ‘Does it ever get easier?’

Her eyes, crinkled at the sun, greet his.

‘No,’ she murmurs. He nods; he had suspected as much.

They walk through the cemetery as the sun begins to set behind them, Karen’s hand wrapped up in his. They’re mostly silent, until Karen finally tells him;

‘I never got to go to Kevin’s funeral. I think that made it harder.’

Below them, Fagan Corners is laid to rest, spread out, swallowed slightly by the reach of the mountains, the dark scrub of trees that line them.

‘Ellison told me that you spoke at my wake.’ Karen tilts her head upwards, towards him. ‘Do you remember what you said?’

His mind spins back. They’re paused in their walking, regarding the view, and his arm is around her shoulders, hers around his waist. There are birds chattering and that pleasant, dusk chill surrounds them. He had always thought that this kind of cold almost had a smell to it – it hits him in his nostrils, met with wood smoke, and he shuts his eyes for a moment. When he opens them, the world is bathed in pink and Karen stands next to him, her hair turned strawberry blonde in the dying light and he finds himself leaning down, pressing a kiss to her forehead.

‘Yeah. Yeah, I do.’

vii.

Hi. My name is – um. Pete. I don’t know many of you here but, uh. I knew Karen. We met when she was helping Nelson and Murdock with my case. I was their client. She – she always surprised me. From day one. Came right up to my bed, waving a picture of my family in my face. Demanding justice, all that – that Romantic bullshit you never really think a person could actually believe in. She wasn’t scared of shit. She really – uh. Really believed in me. Believed that I could do better, be better. Have better.

She told me once, that I deserved an after. And that she thought life was all about trying not to be lonely. I didn’t know how to say it to her then, but I wanted her to know that I thought that was crap. Not because I wasn’t lonely – I was. I – I am. But life ain’t about avoiding loneliness. Life is about the bits in between loneliness. It’s the years I had with my family. It’s the time I had with Karen – all the times she showed up for me, and helped me, when no one else wanted to. My life has been – well, it’s been real lonely. And I know Karen’s was too. But she was one of the good bits. Maybe one of the best bits, in between.

Karen’s not here any more. She’s dead. So. I’m real sorry that this was her after. That this – this was the after she chose. But if she was here, I would tell her – I would tell her – Christ. I’m sorry. I would tell her that she deserved an after too. After all the loneliness. And if she were still here, I would give it to her. Make sure she got the best god-damn after anyone ever had.