The following morning began normally enough. Sarah arrived at work on time as usual, and even had a good half hour of time to herself to get paperwork and filing done before anyone came through the door. For a brief time, it seemed as though the day might pass uneventfully.
But as the morning continued, a strange atmosphere fell over the workplace. An odd current of excitement and catastrophe ran through the entire building. Ronan disappeared upstairs for far too long, and on her way back from the bathroom Sarah heard snatches of a conversation between two employees speaking lowly to each other by the copier.
"—left actual finger marks on his neck, I heard—"
"—oh, that's sick, I knew he wasn't as heroic as the news says—"
The employees continued on their way and their voices faded out. Sarah watched them go apprehensively, debating whether they had been talking about the person she thought they were, or if her imagination was simply lending context to their conversation when it wasn't really there. She had to wait another hour to find out, when a tall man in a leather jacket came out of the elevator and headed towards the front door. Another man who had been coming out of the stairwell hustled to catch up with him, calling out to the taller man to wait up.
"Hey! I heard you were one of the ones that found Yates," the shorter man said, huffing slightly from his jog across the lobby. "So, uh, what's the story? What happened?"
Sarah listened closely, being careful not to look up from her computer screen. There was a strange feeling of dread hanging low in her stomach.
The first man felt around in his pocket and retrieved a pack of cigarettes before he responded. The two appeared not to even register Sarah sitting there, and she tapped randomly on some keys to give herself the appearance of being busy not listening.
"Looked like an interrogation gone wrong to me," the tall man responded. "Guy was tied to a chair, and he was kind of bloodied up, like someone had been smacking him around."
"So, what, he got beat to death?"
"Nah. I guess whoever it was got tired of interrogating him. Choked him to death."
"That's what everyone's gossiping about? Christ. I thought it was something interesting. I mean, it's not unheard of for people to get choked to death around here, am I right?"
"Well, word has it that this one was the work of Daredevil. Some neighbor saw a man in a black mask leaving Yates' apartment last night, and when we stopped by this morning Brian was long dead. Guess Daredevil didn't like whatever the poor guy told him, huh?"
Sarah heard a ringing in her ears, and her mouth was suddenly very dry. She could barely comprehend what the man had just said. The two men continued out the door together to smoke their cigarettes, and she took her shaking hands off the keyboard and pressed them to her mouth.
"This one was the work of Daredevil…this morning Brian was long dead…."
Brian Yates was dead. The man whose address she had given to Matt was dead.
His words echoed in her head, and suddenly it was like a horrible fog had been lifted, and she could clearly see how stupid she had been for the past week. Playing spy with a vigilante like this was a movie. This was real life, and a man had just been murdered. A man whose blood could very well be partially on her hands. If what that men in the lobby had said was true, and Matt did kill him…what did that make her? An accomplice? An accessory?
Holy shit.
Sarah shoved her chair back abruptly and grabbed her purse. As she rushed towards the front door, she almost ran directly into Ronan, who made a snippy comment about her leaving her post.
"L-lunch break," she mumbled, not bothering to stop and hear his response before bolting out of the building. She made her way down the sidewalk and around the corner to an empty bench at a now out-of-service bus stop. It was just out of sight—and earshot—of Orion.
Sarah fumbled in her purse for her phone and pulled it out. She found his number under recent calls—she had refused to save it in her contacts the night they met, as one last act of denial. She didn't know if he carried his burner phone on him during the day, but she hit call anyway. The phone rang once, twice, three times. The nausea began twisting her stomach harder as she waited. Finally, she heard the line click as he answered.
"What's going on?" Matt said in a low voice, not bothering with a greeting.
"Did you kill him?" she asked, breathing hard.
"What?"
"Brian Yates. Brian Yates. Did you kill him, Matt?" she said, unable to keep the hysteria out of her voice.
"Sarah, I—hang on—" He paused and she could hear muffled movement as he apparently moved someplace more private. "What are you talking about? I didn't kill anybody."
"You went to visit him last night and now he's dead, Matt. Everyone at Orion is talking about it. You said you were going to talk to him!"
"No—what? I didn't—I didn't kill him. He was alive when I left that apartment."
"They said he was tied to a chair. Said it looked like an interrogation gone wrong. That's exactly what you were going there to do."
"And I did, but I didn't kill him. I don't kill people."
"He was choked to death, Matt! Someone choked him with their bare hands. Isn't that kind of your move?" she said, brushing her fingers against her own throat, where he had cut her own air supply off not too long ago.
"Sarah, you have to calm down," his low voice came through the line. "I did not kill Yates. I went to his place but he didn't know anything useful, so I left. He might have been a bit worse for wear when I was done with him, but he was alive, I swear."
"If you didn't kill him, who did?"
"I don't know!" He sounded agitated. "Maybe someone at Orion."
"On the very same night you went to interrogate him?"
He was silent on the other end of the line. Sarah pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut.
"I—I know how this looks," he said finally. "But you need to believe me."
"I gave you that address, Matt," she said desperately. "I sent you there. If you killed him, th-then so did I. Oh, my God. Oh, God, what was I thinking, getting into this…"
"No. Sarah. Listen to me," he said, and she could hear alarm in his voice. "Do not start second guessing this arrangement."
She laughed hysterically. "Yeah, why would I do that?"
"I know you're upset and—and scared. But I need you to promise me that you're not going to do anything crazy," he said slowly, like he was talking to a spooked animal.
"Like what, l-like choke someone to death?"
There was another silence. "Like involving…people who don't need to know about this."
She exhaled shakily. He still thought she was going to go to the police. As if she could do that now. She had willingly worked with a vigilante, even though she knew he was dangerous, knew that his morals were a grey area. And it might have cost a man his life. And if Matt didn't kill him, then someone else was out there murdering people, and the police couldn't protect her if that someone came for her.
"I'm—I'm not going to the police. But—" The words caught in her throat.
"Sarah? But what?" She thought she could hear a note of anxiety in his voice.
"Just…please tell me that I didn't help you kill a man, Matt. Please," she whispered.
"You didn't. I promise you."
She ran a shaking hand through her hair. She needed time to think, to process all of this.
"I—I have to go," she said.
"Sarah, wait—"
She hung up before he could finish.
Looking back at the tall, uninviting building waiting behind her, Sarah bit her lip. She couldn't go back in there. Instead, she slipped her phone back into her bag and walked the other way, not sure of where she was even planning to go.
She ended up at a park outside of the borders of Hell's Kitchen, closer to her father's apartment, and a good hour and a half walk from work. She was grateful that she had worn her flats that day and not heels, although she knew she would still have blisters when she took them off. She didn't particularly care.
There was a large metal swing set in the middle of the park, and figuring any neighborhood kids were probably in school, Sarah tiredly walked over and sat down on one of the swings. She kicked off her shoes, then listlessly pushed herself back and forth a few inches, letting her foot brush against the dusty ground.
She had spent the entire walk thinking about what had happened, and she still couldn't decide if she thought Matt was telling her the truth. On the one hand, she knew he saved people, helped people. She'd heard the stories about him saving girls from getting raped in alleyways, or beating up hired guns who were targeting helpless families. He was making a difference in Hell's Kitchen, a positive difference. What she was less sure about were his methods of doing so.
Sarah had heard the rumors about the decapitated Russian. That was the worst one. Some people said it was Fisk, others said it was Daredevil. It was widely acknowledged that Fisk had arranged for those two police officers to be killed in order to frame the vigilante, but until the actual court case got underway that wasn't official. Whispers of other mysterious deaths surrounded the vigilante constantly—a drug addict who had been thrown off a roof; a thug who had been found with his face impaled on a metal stake; even James Wesley himself had been found mysteriously shot to death in a warehouse. It seemed like too great of a coincidence that all of these deaths just happened to follow the masked man around, with no witnesses and nothing but his word that he didn't kill them. That he simply didn't kill people, as a principle.
People like Brian Yates. She hadn't known the man. She didn't even know what he did at the company, but she felt like it wasn't too big of an leap to assume that he hadn't been a great person. Most clandestine nighttime meetings at her workplace—like the one at which he had gotten his fingers broken—were to make plans too dark and illegal to discuss during work hours, even at a company like Orion, which clearly functioned as nothing but a front for such activities. But despite her confidence that he had been a horrible person, she didn't think she could accept having played a part in taking his life. That wasn't what she had signed up for. She just wanted them all in prison or somewhere far away, so that she and her father could continue their lives in peace.
At the thought of her father, Sarah sighed and checked her watch. She had left Orion at around 1:00, and between her phone conversation and her long trek across town, now it was almost 4:30. She hadn't realized she had been sitting on the swing for so long.
She looked up just in time to see a red headed woman with a small toddler looking at her distastefully from across the playground, eyeing her bare feet, windswept hair, and disheveled office attire. The woman shook her head and walked away, and Sarah just barely heard her telling the young boy to always avoid drunk adults who were lurking on playgrounds in broad daylight. The boy looked back at her with wide eyes.
"No! No, I'm not…not drunk," she began to protest, but trailed off. The woman and her child were too far away by that point to even bother. Still, Sarah took that as her cue to get off the swing and head to her father's.
"Kind of wish I was drunk," she muttered to herself as she slipped her shoes back onto her dusty feet and picked her purse up off the ground.
Tuesday dinners always began at 5:30 sharp, and Sarah always tried not to be late, so as not to throw off their careful routine. Today, she was early. She rang the doorbell at 5:16 on the dot, and Mitch Corrigan answered the door, wearing an old plaid button down and worn jeans, as usual.
"Hi, honey," he said, giving her a tight hug. "You're early! You look…tired."
Sarah looked down at her slightly disheveled appearance and laughed, and she was proud to hear only a tiny note of hysteria behind it. "Yeah, I've had, uh…a day."
She dropped her purse near the door as she entered, inhaling the familiar comforting scents of the house.
"I'm thinking we go simple tonight," she said, turning to her father. "I don't have a lot of energy to cook. How about…spaghetti?"
"You know I love spaghetti," Mitch said. "But you don't have to cook if you're tired. We can order in."
"Oh, no. You order in all the time; the deal is that I cook you something when I come over," Sarah responded, making her way into the kitchen area and rummaging through the cupboards for pasta. Her father procured two plates and some silverware, bringing them over to the kitchen table. This was their routine: Sarah would cook, and her father would set the table with plates, napkins, condiments. She knew that the familiar, mechanical routine was good for him.
As she busied herself boiling the water and heating the sauce, Mitch settled himself at the kitchen table.
"So, how is everything?" he asked. "How's work?"
Sarah kept her eyes trained the pot of water, studiously avoiding looking at him. "It's great!" she lied, forcing herself to sound cheerful. "I, um, I'm working on an accompaniment piece for next week. I'll be playing with this…really great soloist."
"That's great, honey. Do they have a good piano for you to work with?"
"Yeah, it's a Baldwin. Really nice."
"A Baldwin…that's a good one, then?
"Yes, definitely. I've played them for other soloists; they're really well built."
"Good, good. I'm so glad that's working out so well for you. I always told everyone you would get places with your talent."
Sarah felt a sharp pang in her stomach and hurried to change the subject. "What'd you do today?"
He paused, thinking. "I…did a puzzle. And I watched a few of the games on TV. Do you know when the Rangers are playing?"
"Tomorrow night, I think," she said, searching in the fridge for parmesan cheese. "At seven."
"Oh, good," he said. "How's, ah…Lauren doing?"
Sarah brightened at how quickly he remembered her friend's name. "She's really great. She's huge, though. I think this baby is going to be born, like, full size. Like maybe a five year old."
"Lauren's having a baby? Your friend Lauren?"
She turned to him, the smile falling from her face slightly. "Yeah, Dad. About eight months. You, um, you've seen her a few times sine then. I brought her by about three weeks ago and you felt the baby kick."
He stared blankly at her for a second before recognition swept across his face. "Yes. Yes, I do remember. Lauren's the blonde one, then. I thought that was…Anna?"
She closed her eyes briefly before responding in a purposefully light tone, "No, I think Anna was your friend, remember? You guys went to high school together. But she did have blonde hair in the yearbook pictures, I think."
Sarah was focused on not burning the sauce and didn't notice for few minutes that he didn't answer. She turned back to him and frowned when she saw the bits of white littering the placemat in front of him. Her father was staring vacantly at the table, absently shredding the paper napkin in his hands into small pieces. She walked over and gently put a hand over his own to stop him.
"Dad," she said softly.
Mitch blinked and seemed to return to the room. He looked down at the shredded paper in his hands, confused.
"I'm sorry. I'm not sure why I did that," he said vaguely.
"It's okay," Sarah said, smiling sadly and sweeping the pieces off the table and into her palm. "I'll grab you a new one."
"Do you know when the Rangers game will be on?"
"Seven o'clock tomorrow night," she answered patiently. "I'll call and remind you."
"Thanks, baby girl."
She finished cooking the spaghetti and brought it over to the table. They made small talk as they ate, with Sarah trying not to mention anything that might tax his memory more than necessary. He had his good nights and bad ones, and tonight seemed to be leaning towards bad.
"I was actually hoping you could do me a favor, sweetheart," Mitch said during a lull.
"Is it to make you a delicious pasta dinner? Because, done," she responded, grinning.
He laughed briefly before turning more serious. "Actually, I, uh, I need you to go talk to the police about this…traffic ticket I got."
Sarah looked at him sharply. "A traffic ticket? What are you talking about? You don't drive. I didn't think you even still had keys to the car."
"I found a spare the other day, and I took the car to the store on the other side of town. The one on this side never has the sunflower seeds I like."
"Dad! That's so dangerous! You don't have a license."
"I…I thought I did. I don't know why. I haven't had a license in so long. But I didn't remember that until…until I was already being pulled over," he stood and walked over to the desk, grabbing a slip of paper and bringing it over to her. "I guess my tags are expired. The officer let the tags slide, but gave me a ticket for driving without a license. It's an expensive one."
She glanced at the ticket. It was expensive. She looked back up at her father. "The police can't nullify tickets after they've been processed, though, Dad. Only a judge can do that."
"I know, I know. But, they can recommend a dismissal, or at least leniency. It makes it easier to get the ticket lowered in court," he said.
Sarah frowned at him. How was it that he couldn't remember his television schedule or who her best friend was, but he could remember all of the legal loopholes in the book? She sighed.
"Yeah, I'll give it a try. I guess it can't hurt."
Her father smiled at her. "Thanks, Sarah. You're good at being charming. I know they'll listen to you."
"That's not really what I'm worried about, Dad. You know you can't be driving. It's so dangerous. And it's illegal."
Mitch looked at her sadly. "I was never very good at avoiding either of those things, was I?"
Neither am I these days, she thought to herself. She hated seeing the pained look on his face; the guilt he still felt over things that half the time he couldn't remember doing. Money he didn't remember owing, people he didn't remember angering.
"I'll do the dishes real quick, alright?" she said, trying to lighten the atmosphere.
"You know, I can do dishes on my own. I think I learned once, back in the day," he said good naturedly. "You use soap, water."
"Yes, but you always somehow manage to get water all over the counter," she retorted, smiling. "We're less likely to drown if I do them. But if you want, you can dry."
She threw a dish towel at him and turned on the tap. They made conversation while she washed and he dried, and the dishes were done quickly. Glancing down, she saw that the sponge in her hand looked just about spent. She tossed it in the trash and opened the cupboard under the sink to grab a new one, but didn't see any.
"Hey, do you know where all of the extra sponges are?" she asked, straightening back up. "You had a bunch last week."
"Yes," he said, and the sudden agitation in his voice caught her off guard. "I think the neighbor took them."
She slowly wiped her hands on the dish towel, looking at him questioningly. The sudden mood swings still took her by surprise; one second he could be cheerful and clear headed, and the next it was like a storm cloud had descended on him.
"The neighbor took them?" she asked doubtfully.
"The new one. I don't like that her," he said. "The blonde woman next door with the pink bike and the German Shepherd."
"Mrs. Matheson?" Sarah asked, confused.
"I don't know her name! When did she move in?"
"She…she's always been there, Dad. She's lived there since before we have. She used to babysit me. Remember?"
"No. I think she's been hiding some of my things. Not just the sponges. My crossword book is gone, and so are a pair of my nice dress shoes. And I know it was her," he said. The hard lines of suspicion and paranoia on his normally open face made him look almost unrecognizable to Sarah. Her heart twisted as she tried to calmly reassure him of the reality of the situation.
"Dad…I don't think she's hiding your things. She—she doesn't have any reason to, and she doesn't even have a key to your place," Sarah said gently. "She's a very nice woman. We've been friends with her for a long time."
The suspicion on his face slowly gave way to uncertainty. "My things are missing, Sarah. Someone—someone is hiding them…when I'm not looking."
"You probably just misplaced them. I'll look for them, okay? We'll find them. A crossword book and your dress shoes, right? And the extra sponges."
He nodded, but his brow crinkled in confusion. "Yes. Yes, I think so."
Sarah looked at him closely. The lost look on his face wrenched her chest. She touched his arm gently. "Why don't you go sit back down? I'll see if we have any cookies for dessert. Don't need plates for those, right?"
He nodded absently and wandered back over to the table. She quickly found a package of Oreos in the cupboard and brought them over to the table, where he had the sections of a few newspaper spread out in front of them. His agitation from a moment earlier seemed to have been forgotten.
"Lots of articles about that masked man who keeps running around your neighborhood, if you want to read them," he said, gesturing to a few papers before grabbing the brightly colored comics section. "Half of them say he's a savior, the other half say he's a menace. Me, I don't know what to think about him, so I figure I'll just read the comics."
"Yeah, I don't know what to think of him either," Sarah said softly, looking down at the two different newspapers he was indicating.
One had a small article about Daredevil saving a group of children from being sold into a human trafficking ring. The article was littered with quotes from locals swearing up and down that the man was a hero. Accompanying the text was a picture of one of the children, a small boy with huge blue eyes staring straight into the camera and grinning widely, even as he clasped a police blanket around his small shoulders. Unharmed, alive, reunited with his family.
The second article had a blurry photo of Daredevil on a security camera, leaving a warehouse where several high profile criminals had been found beaten and tied. The article argued that allowing anyone to operate outside of the law was dangerous, that eventually the vigilante would make a mistake and end up hurting or killing someone who had committed no crime, or who had simply run into him on an off night. The article was a bit sensationalist, but made some solid points. Daredevil was dangerous, and no one could predict what he would do, whether for better or worse.
Sarah sighed, staring at the blue-eyed boy in the newspaper photo for a long time. Thinking about what would have happened to him and those other children if not for the terrifying, confusing, unpredictable Matt Murdock.
Matt hadn't killed her, and he easily could have. He hadn't hurt her that night that he had come to Orion. He had known exactly where she was hiding; he could have easily hauled her out from under the desk and bounced her off the walls to see what she knew, broken some of her bones like he did Ronan and Yates. But he hadn't. When he found out that she knew his identity, he could have kept her quiet by bashing her head against the alleyway wall and leaving her for dead, or snapping her neck in her kitchen on multiple occasions. But…he hadn't.
He'd made it painfully clear that he wouldn't hesitate to hurt her, and the few times he had put his hands on her had left no doubt in her mind that he was capable of much greater violence. But she was still alive, and for the most part unharmed.
She bit her lip, looking at her father as he shuffled through the sections of the newspaper. Wasn't he worth it? Wasn't it worth it to keep him safe and trying to find a way for them to get out from under the thumb of Fisk and his successor? Wasn't that worth the risk that she might end up hurt, or dead, or something else entirely—whatever a person becomes when they find themselves burdened with the weight of taking a life?
When he had been diagnosed last year—"Early Onset Alzheimer's," the doctor had said clinically. "It can hit people as early as their forties. Millions of Americans have it," he had said, as though that made it any better—she had assumed she would move in with him to take care of him, or at least hire a nurse. But then she had been pulled into this whole mess with Fisk, and she knew she couldn't put him at risk if her work ended up following her home. She didn't even want to risk him finding out that she was working there, that she was no longer following her dreams like she once had. And with half of her paycheck going towards his debts there was no way they could afford a nurse. His insurance barely covered his medication as it was.
Mitch snorted as he read a Marmaduke comic. He always snorted when he laughed, and he was the only person she knew who found a cartoon dog so funny. Sarah felt a small, pained smile tug at her lips as she watched him.
Another week. She'd stick it out another week, give Matt the benefit of the doubt about Brian Yates. Maybe look into the possibility that someone at Orion really had killed him. She had no proof that Matt didn't kill him, but she also had no proof that he did, and her heart was desperate to believe that someone else was at fault, someone unconnected to her. At the end of the week, she would make her decision. And hope to God that she didn't end up regretting the wait.
She glanced at her father again, and this time he was watching her, too.
"You look tired, Sarah," he said concernedly. "Are you getting enough rest?"
Sarah sighed. "Yeah, Dad. I'm fine. I just…haven't been sleeping much lately."
"Why not?"
"Um, you know. Hell's Kitchen. It's a loud place. Lots of noises. Seems like there's something annoying that keeps bothering me at night." Her mind flashed to the masked man lingering on her fire escape the night before. "Kind of unavoidable, I guess."
"Well, why don't you sleep here tonight? It's quiet. No construction or anything. And your old room is always ready for you."
Sarah considered it for a moment. She hadn't brought a change of clothes, but she still had some old pajamas here, and she could always get up early so she'd have time to go home and get ready before work. She grimaced at the idea of a long cab or subway ride tonight, followed by an even longer night of anxiously looking out for surprise visitors.
"Yeah, actually. I think I will do that."
After she had gotten ready for bed and said goodnight to her father (and quietly fished the extra car key out of the junk drawer and pocketed it), she pulled out her phone to set her alarm for an earlier time than usual. She was tempted to not set an alarm at all, to just not show up to work the next day. Or the day after that, or the one after that. Just stay in her childhood bedroom forever, not thinking about dead coworkers and intimidating, morally ambiguous masked men. She pressed her palms to her eyes, willing herself to stop thinking about all of it, and let the day's exhaustion whisk her away into sleep.
The next morning, Sarah groaned as the alarm on her phone went off. Her back ached slightly from the uncomfortable mattress—Was it always this uncomfortable, or am I officially old now?—and her brain protested the extra early hour at which she was attempting to rouse it. She pawed at the screen with her eyes still closed, finally managing to turn the alarm off. When she finally opened her eyes and glanced at the screen, her stomach dropped.
She had two missed calls from Matt. One at 11:13 pm, and another at 1:40 am. She must have been so tired that she slept right through both calls. He had probably stopped by her place last night to follow up on their phone call and seen that she wasn't there. She wondered how he had reacted to that.
Sarah frowned, dismissing the missed call notification from the screen. She knew he had probably wanted to talk about Brian Yates, but she didn't want to think about him yet. Even though she had gradually—and begrudgingly—come to accept that it didn't quite make sense for Matt to have been the one that killed him, she still didn't feel like discussing it with until she absolutely had to. And anyway, she was a grown woman, and adults had the right to decide when they wanted a night off from being a vigilante's secret informant.
She slipped back into her wrinkled clothes from the day before, and was just grabbing her purse to leave when she heard her father's bedroom door open. Mitch wandered out, wearing pajama pants and an old blue sweatshirt that she had gotten him for his birthday a long time ago. His expression was clear and alert, not clouded by uncertainty, and she smiled at the sight.
"Early morning, huh?" he said.
"Yep. Gotta go get ready for work. Oh! I forgot to give you these last night." She rummaged in her large purse and pulled out two worn paperbacks, holding them out to him. "I got you a couple of books from that used book store on 111th. All of their old paperbacks are a dollar right now. These ones are by, umm—" she glanced at the cover, "—Richard Bachmann. I'm pretty sure that's an early penname for Stephen King. I know you already have most of his books, but you don't have his really early stuff, right? I can never remember."
"Well, you are getting on in your years," Mitch said, smiling slightly and reaching up to tap her temple. "Your memory's starting to fail."
She laughed softly at his joke even as she swallowed the lump in her throat.
"There's a smile. You're so serious these days, Sarah. Have a laugh occasionally. Even at your old man's expense, huh?" He smiled widely, his eyes clear of confusion and crinkling at the corners. For a moment he was the same person she remembered from years ago. "You are young, and beautiful, and already more successful than I ever was. You've got your head on straight. Life isn't that bad."
Sarah returned his smile, but she knew it didn't reach her eyes like his did. She leaned in to kiss him on the cheek. "Bye, Dad. I'll call and let you know how the ticket thing goes with the police, okay? No more driving."
"You got it, baby girl. Thanks for the books. Have a good day at work."
Unlikely, she thought to herself as she began making her way to the subway stop.