Archive of Our Own

The stillness of after is suffocating.

There are nights when he lays awake, listening to the sirens outside of his window, the low hum of the electricity and thinks he might go crazy from it -- the silence of a life without a war to fight.

He says as much to Curtis one night, out at some shithole bar somewhere after too many beers.

“Then add some noise into your life, man.”

Frank gives him a wry look, swigs his beer in his hands.

“What, like talk to myself? Sing in the shower?”

Curtis shakes his head.

“Other than me and the guys in group once a week, who do you talk to? Who do you see?”

He shrugs.

“Not really much of a people person, Curtis.”

“Bullshit, Frank.” Curtis shakes his head. “Everyone needs people.” He catches the look on Frank’s face. “Someone more than a guy you have a beer with every other month.”

He scoffs, leaning back against the bar and taking in the scene around him. He can feel Curtis staring at him, waiting for him to say something about the emptiness of his life without a gun in his hands or the rush of vengeance in his blood.

He takes a long drink of his beer instead.

Curtis sighs, taps his fingers against the top of the bar.

“You know what I think, man? I think you’re lonely.”

He wants to scoff, but the word strikes a chord within him and for a moment all he can hear is Karen’s voice, anguished and trembling and more than he deserves.

All I see is this endless, echoing loneliness...

So instead he just looks down at the beer in his hands and blows out a breath that he tells himself isn’t weighed down with longing.

“Yeah, you’re the second person to tell me that.”

“Yeah? This other person -- they good at seeing through your bullshit, too?”

The corner of his mouth turns up as he glances over at Curtis. He nods once before he looks away again.

“Karen - yeah, she uh, she’s probably the best at it.”

He can feel Curtis's gaze boring a hole into him, but he just brings the beer bottle to his lips, takes a drink as he keeps his stare steady straight in front of him.

“You know the only time I ever really see you smile is when you talk about her?” Curtis says, a question that isn't really a question. A question that he doesn't really have an answer to.

Luckily, Curtis doesn't seem to expect one.

“Karen - she say anything else that I'll probably agree with?”

He leans back against the bar.

“She said that, uh - that I was full of shit when I told her I wasn't lonely.” He looks over at Curtis with a wry smile.

Curtis huffs a laugh.

“You know, I might like her better than I like you.”

He shrugs.

“Wouldn't trust you unless you did.” He takes another drink - a long pull of beer from the bottle that empties it, that leaves him with nothing but the sound of Karen saying his name reverberating in his brain, the memory of the softness of her cheek beneath his lips. He clears his throat, squinting out at something that isn’t there - a flash of blond hair, wind whipping off the water and bringing with it the phantom scent of flowers and newspaper. “She told me that we're all - that life is just us fighting not to be alone.”

He looks over at Curtis and sets his beer down on the bar.

“So, am I ever gonna get to meet her?” Curtis asks, a too casual question that isn’t casual at all.

He shrugs, but doesn’t meet the other man’s eyes.

“Frank?” Curtis ducks his head and waits until Frank meets his eyes. “Hey, she does know you're alive, right? Right, Frank? You are not that big of an asshole.”

He takes a sip of his beer, feels the weight of Curtis’ disappointment as the other man stares at him.

“She knows I’m alive.”

“Because you told her? Because you talked to her.”

He lifts one shoulder in a shrugging motion.

“In a way,” he says, thinking of the pot of yellow daffodils pressed in his hand, a box of .380 bullets hidden among the stems.

He had left them on the window sill of her apartment, next to the place where she’d once put out the white roses. It’s a cowardly, bullshit way to let her know he’s alright and he’s fully willing to accept being called an asshole once or five times when he finally does talk to her.

“It’s only been three months,” he says finally, glancing over at Curtis. “I keep thinking - I wake up sometimes and wonder when the other shoe is gonna drop. When someone is gonna step out from behind an alleyway and try to pump me full of lead.” He looks down, squeezes his hands around his beer bottle to keep his trigger finger from tapping against it. “Sometimes I wish someone would.” He looks up at Curtis, shakes his head at the worried look. “Nah man, not cuz of that - cuz it’d mean I’d have a new war to fight.” He blows out a harsh breath. “It’s not fair to drag her into that - either of those.”

“I don’t think it’s fair to make that decision for her,” Curtis says, even as the look on his face is filled with understanding. “But you’re gonna deal with your shit the way you’re gonna deal with it.” He takes a drink of his beer, then sets the bottle down on the bar. “I’ll tell you this, though. That feeling you have - the one where you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop - that’s not just you. All of us who come back have that feeling. But you can’t let it control your life.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Live your life like it’s never gonna happen. Get a dog, join a gym, find a hobby.” He raises his eyebrow at Frank and grins. “Spend time with a friend more than once every other month. Maybe even find more than one friend, if you really wanna get crazy.”

He signals to the bartender for the tab, then turns back to Frank. “She’s right, you know. All of us are fighting not to be alone. Even you.” He tilts his head and stares intently at him. “Especially you.”

 He thinks about those words as he makes his way home from the bar, feeling slightly buzzed, and goes to sleep with the phrase echoing in his mind.
The next day, he joins a boxing gym that’s around the corner from his apartment.

It’s small but clean, with the gritty, lived-in smell and feel that he associates with hard work and dedication. The owner - a friendly man with a heavy Greek accent, graying hair, about twenty years older than him with an at least twice broken nose - shows him around, pointing out the equipment and other trainers while asking him questions about his experience.

He answers honestly: yes, he’d like to fight in matches; yes, he has experience in the ring; yes, he has broken his nose a couple of times in a fight.

It’s here that the man - Paul - laughs when Frank doesn’t answer quite as quickly as before when he asks if his nose was broken inside or outside the ring. It takes him aback for a moment before he realizes that Paul is probably just imagining him getting into stupid fights at bars or outside of clubs, not tracking down assholes as the Punisher.

He lets himself step inside this fictionalized version of himself, lets himself inhabit Pete Castiglione, a guy who knows how to fight and knows how to fix broken cars and broken pipes and who has never has nightmares about the way his dying wife looked lying broken on the ground.

He signs a waiver and carefully folds the requisite doctor’s paperwork he’ll need to bring back in next time. Paul sits with him as he wraps his hands, casting a critical eye at his work before he sits back and nods approvingly. He gets up as Frank is pulling on his gloves and comes back with his own hands encased in punching mitts.

They run a few basic drills, Frank easing back into the experience of hitting something that isn’t flesh and blood, that doesn’t need to stay down after he hits it. It’s obvious that Paul knows what he’s doing, the quickness of his hands and the steadiness of his stance seeming to belong to a man 15 years younger than him. For the first time in a long time, Frank feels himself relaxing as he fights.

Eventually, Paul slows down, ending the drill with one last hit to Frank’s bicep.

“Well, you weren’t bullshitting about having experience,” Paul says, a pleased look on his face as he pulls off the mitts. He stands and stares at Frank, a piercing look that’s so intent and incisive that for a moment he worries that he’s given away too much. Then, Paul smiles, a toothy grin that is nothing but kindness and guilelessness and glee. “It’ll be nice to get another good fighter in here. You oughta shake things up just right.”

He lands the mitt on Frank’s chest with a loud thwap, his smile stretching out when Frank stands steady.

“Pete,” he says with a chuckle, taking the mitts off and beckoning Frank to the front desk. “It’s a good name for you, you know.”

Frank cocks an eyebrow.

“Yeah? How’s that?”

“Comes from Peter, yes? Which means rock or stone in Greek.” He rifles around the desk, grabbing a stack of papers from under it and pushing them across the table top to Frank. “Means you’re steady, immovable, reliable - a good thing to be in the ring.” He pauses, fixes Frank with steady gaze. “And having Saint Peter,” and here Paul crosses himself, though he seems to do it in an order that Frank notices is different than the Catholics do, “as your namesake seems rather fitting.”

Frank blows out a breath and shakes his head.

“Pretty far from a saint, Paul,” he comments, stuffing the papers in his bag, making a mental note to find a doctor to give him a physical.

Paul chuckles at that.

“From the way you fight, that might be true.” He gives Frank a schedule of classes, the advanced fighter class circled for Mondays and Wednesdays at six. He taps his fingers thoughtfully across the table, gives Frank another one of those piercing looks as he walks him to the door of the gym.

“You know, our names have something in common.”

Frank grunts, is about to say a smartass comment about them both starting with P, but stops at the meditative look on Paul’s face.

“Peter and Paul,” Paul says, folding up the sleeves of his flannel shirt, ”were both second names given to men who had to become better than who they had been. They were names meant to signify a new beginning, a new relationship with God and the world.”

Frank stops at the door, his heartbeat speeding up.

“What - .”

Paul raises a hand, and now that his sleeves are pushed up, Frank can see the faded lines of an old tattoo. He stares at it, the symbols of it tickling something in the back of his mind. After a second, it clicks - the symbol fitting into his memorized list of mafia gang symbols.

“Just saying, Pete. It’s a good name for starting over.” He waits for Frank to nod before he smiles, shakes his arms until his sleeves fall down past his wrists once more. “See you on Wednesday,” he says, casting one last look in Frank’s direction before turning around and disappearing back into the dimness of the gym.

He starts running the mornings again. Partially to give himself some sort of routine again and partially because Paul busts his ass at training every week and he needs to build up his stamina.

He takes long, meandering runs through the city. Re-acquaints himself with the neighborhoods of his youth, maps new routes that he tries not to catalogue and categorize as escape routes.

Sometimes, he runs past the Verrazano bridge, casts a glance at the park bench and sees a flash of Karen’s hair in his mind’s eye as he does. The ache in his chest always expands when he does, but all it does it push him to run faster.

Other times, when it’s too early in the morning for anyone to be up, he runs past Karen’s apartment building. He always glances up at her windowsill, even though it’s the dead of winter and any flowers outside would likely freeze.

Still, he can’t stop the pressing weight of disappointment when the windowsill is just a windowsill, the shades drawn and gray against the glass.

One morning, he gets up later than usual and goes for his run when most respectable people are already at work. He runs for longer than usual, let’s his mind wander and his feet take him where they will -- is only mildly surprised when he rounds the corner and finds himself staring down the familiar road leading to Karen’s apartment.

Out of habit, he glances up at her apartment and stops in the middle of the street, stock still as he stares up at her window.

The shades are up for the first time since he started doing his morning runs, and he can just make out the bright yellow of daffodils pressed against the glass. His breath comes in short spurts, his heart beating fast in his chest in a way that he knows isn’t from the effort of running for the last hour.

Slowly, carefully, he walks towards her apartment, squinting against the morning sun. He catches a flash of blue sitting out on her windowsill, a lump that looks like it might be cloth resting close to the latch of the window. The angle he’s standing at doesn’t give him a good enough view of what it might be, but he at least knows for certain that there’s definitely something on the ledge and that it definitely wasn’t there two mornings ago.

He takes his hood off and glances down both sides of the street. There are a few people out walking, but mostly so engrossed in their phones or with one another that they don’t really pay him much mind when he jumps up and starts scaling the fire escape ladder above him. He does it quickly, taking three or four steps at a time, until he’s at the metal landing right next to Karen’s window.

He leans over and looks at what’s been laid out on her windowsill, a feeling that can only be tenderness spreading through his chest as he reaches out and grabs it.

It’s a beanie, thick and warm and knitted. It’s a lighter shade of blue than he might’ve picked for himself, but he doesn’t mind. It’s a color that reminds him of Karen -- her eyes lit up by the Verrazano bridge, the hue of her blouse the last time he saw her. He feels a lumpy package wrapped inside the beanie and reaches inside, can’t help the laugh that escapes from his throat as he turns the second gift over in his hands.

It’s a package of coffee, much more expensive and likely much better tasting than the cheap shit he gets at the convenience store around the corner from his apartment. He stares at both gifts in his hands, the weight of them dragging him back into the recesses of his mind. To places where the feel of Karen’s slight frame pressed against him doesn’t feel forbidden, where the sound of her quietly saying his name feels like something he might deserve.

He glances through the window, towards that space where she reached out to him, reminded him what human touch felt like, reminded him what softness was.

He wants desperately to jimmy the window open, crawl in through the gap and wait until he can say thank you, see the way her face lights up and softens as she smiles; or else, he wants to wait until she comes home from work, knock on the door and wrap her in his arms and whisper thank you into the softness of her hair.

But he does neither. Just takes the black beanie off his head and stuffs it in his jacket pocket along with the coffee beans, pulls the blue beanie down over his ears. Lets himself at least feel contentment in the knowledge that Karen thinks of him, wants him to be warm even as he remains unseen. Knows that there is now no other single piece of clothing in his limited wardrobe more precious than this, however absurd a sentiment that might be.

He casts one last look at her window before he climbs back down the fire escape. Thinks, not yet, as he climbs down the metal rungs; ignores the thrum of his heart as it asks, when, when, when.

It’s three weeks later, as he’s running through the park with Karen’s beanie on his head, that he winds up getting a dog.

There’s a table set up next to a bunch of kennels on the side of the path he normally takes, and for a moment all he feels is irritation that a group of people is blocking his way.

He slows down when a young girl wanders directly into her path, a leash in her hands, a golden retriever dutifully following behind. She’s dark haired and smiling, and he nearly trips under the weight of memory -- the thought of Lisa in a pet store, her hand in his, begging for a dog he promised they’d go get together when he came back from his final tour in Afghanistan.

He stops just beyond the row of kennels and table, leans over like he’s catching his breath instead of forcing his heart back down from his throat. His hands are shaking and numb, his chest collapsing in on itself.

He wants to both run away as fast as he can and sink into the ground and never get up; manages to do neither and stays standing where is, hunched over, the heavy tide of panic climbing up past his ankles, his knees, up to his chest.

Just when he thinks he might drown in it, he feels something soft and warm brush against his arm. He looks down and sees black, shiny fur brushing up against his arm, the pink of a dog's tongue lapping at his hand.

He breathes out shakily and unclasps his right hand from around his knee, reaches out a trembling hand to pet the dog that's standing next to him. The dog pushes its head into his hand, moving to stand closer to him, its tail beating a steady rhythm against his leg.

He feels the panic recede -- down past his knees, below his ankles -- until it’s lying back underneath the soles of his shoes.

He takes a deep breath in, blows it out again, repeats that same exercise until he can suck in air and let it again without any shakiness. He keeps his hand on the dog the entire time, grounding himself in the feel of soft fur, the soft woof every once in awhile when he scratches behind its ears.

Eventually, he gets down on one knee in front the dog, presses his forehead against the dog’s, is rewarded with a couple of messy dog kisses to the face that he can’t help but smile at it.

“I see you’ve met Gracie,” he hears a kind, crinkling voice say above him.

He looks up and sees a woman with short, graying hair and a generous smile, her teeth bright against her dark brown skin.

He nods at her. He knows the occasion calls for a smile, but he can’t quite focus on keeping the panic pressed firmly beneath his feet and force himself to turn the corners of his mouth up at the same time. Luckily, the older woman doesn’t seem to notice or care, just keeps on smiling at him in that kindly way that he associates with grandmothers and great aunts who don’t need much to keep a conversation going.

“I have to admit, she’s one of my favorites,” the woman continues as Gracie shifts over and rests her head on his knee. “I think if we hadn’t rescued her from a dog fighting ring, she would’ve gone home to a good family a long time ago.” Here, the woman sighs sadly and shakes her head. “But people are afraid to take home a former fighting dog - even one as sweet at Gracie.”

He grunts at that, then puts his hands underneath Gracie’s snout, his fingers scratching behind her ears as he looks her over. She’s obviously part pitbull -- has the deep chest and smaller eyes of the breed, the short, broad snout that makes so many turn away in misplaced fear. But she also has tall, pointed ears and a smaller, slightly narrower frame that gives away her mixed lineage.

She’s covered in short black fur that doesn’t seem to shed too much with a splotch of white across her chest, and he thinks that if you were to squint, and if you were so inclined, it might even look a little bit like a skull.

He huffs out something that might be a grunt, might be a low chuckle. Gracie responds by licking him on the cheek.

He doesn’t know whether it’s because he’s been spending so much time around Paul, who somehow manages to weave in stories of a different saint every time he comes to the boxing gym, who wears a black, braided prayer rope around his wrist and crosses himself before every training session, but he wonders if the God he doesn’t really believe in any more is sending him a sign.

He gives Gracie one last scratch behind her ears before he stands up and looks down at the woman next to him. She’s fixing him with a pleasant smile, her eyes slightly narrowed and wondering for a brief moment before they relax into a bright twinkle that matches the expression on her face.

“The only thing about Gracie -- she can be a little picky around other dogs. Only likes certain ones.” She reaches down and pats Gracie on the side of her haunches. “She’ll never win Miss Congeniality, but she’s loyal and loving and deserves some happiness after the life she’s had.”

At this point, he wants to look up at the sky and roll his eyes, tell God that enough is enough already, he gets it. But he wants the dog and he doesn’t think this woman is likely to let her go into the home of someone who is that obviously nuts, so instead he just looks back down at Gracie. She stares back at him with her head tilted before she jumps up and gently rests her paws on his leg before stretching up to lick his hand.

He looks back over at the woman across from him.

“I don’t have another dog in the house, ma’am,” he says in a low rumble, reaching down to rub his thumb across Gracie’s forehead. “But been thinking about getting a dog - seems like Gracie might be it.”

The woman beams up at him.

“Perfect!” She smiles at the way Gracie settles next to him, the side of her brushing up against his pant leg. “Seems like the feeling is mutual.” She glances behind her. “C’mon, let’s get you set up with the paperwork.” She leans in close to him, ostensibly to pet Gracie but it seems mostly to talk to him in a loud stage-whisper. “I’ll wave the fees, since she’s my favorite and has been rejected by so many families.” She looks fondly down at Gracie, then glances up at him and shakes her head. “People just don’t understand that all dogs need is the opportunity to be good.” She smiles kindly up at him. “They’re like people in that way.”

He feels her words landing squarely across his chest, wrapping themselves around his heart and squeezing. He thinks that might be one reason dogs are better than humans, but keeps that sentiment to himself.

The woman squints at him, and for a moment he’s reminded of his long-dead mother -- something about the way she looks both unimpressed and affectionate at the same time. She lets out an abrupt laugh and shakes her head at him.

“You don’t believe me.” She reaches down to scratch Gracie under the chin. “But you’ll see that I’m right.”

“I believe you about the dogs, ma’am.”

She waves a hand at him, sighing dramatically and rolling her eyes.

“You military men -- so pessimistic.”

He starts at that -- knows he didn’t mention any military history. She must see his reaction because she smiles in a way that is meant to be reassuring, and is surprised when he does, in fact, feel somewhat reassured.

“My son is an Army Ranger. Fifteen years now.” She grins at him. “I can always pick out another Filipino in a crowd, and I can always tell when someone’s been in the military,” she says with a hint of pride before she shakes her head and stares at him with a rueful expression. “You name your son after Saint Francis, hoping he’ll dedicate his life to the church, and instead he runs off and joins the military just like his father.”

He blinks rapidly, suddenly unsure if God is now just playing a hilarious joke and a really unfunny fucking prank.

“Your son’s name is Francis?”

She nods.

“Francis Abaya,” she says, looking closely at him. “Do you know him?” She asks, mistaking the look of recognition on his face for something else.

He shakes his head.

“Was in the Marines,” he manages to say, a momentary feeling of panic before he realizes that Pete, too, was a Marine. For the first time, he feels something akin to gratefulness to the Feds for giving Pete a military background. One less lie to keep track of, at least.

The woman -- Mrs. Abaya, he amends in his head, because she deserves more respect than just to be called a woman -- is still looking at him expectantly.

“I - uh - I have a friend named Frank.” He pauses. “Had.”

Mrs. Abaya nods, then bows her head, crossing herself before looking back up at him.

“It’s hard -- coming back when so many don’t.” She reaches a hand out to his arm and squeezes it gently. “I pray every night for Francis while he’s away, and I’ll pray twice as hard when he returns again.” She sighs heavily, then shakes her head and smiles gently back up at him. “Dogs are good for that, too, you know. Good for the loneliness and the worry. I have a dog a lot like Gracie at home -- too much like her, actually, which is why I couldn’t take her home myself.”

She pets Gracie.

“But looks like she was just waiting for you to come around -- .” She cocks her head to the side and lifts a brow, obviously waiting for him to provide a name.

“Pete,” he says roughly, then clears his throat. “Pete Castiglione.”

“Ah, Pete, nice to meet you.” She smiles widely at him. “I’m Carol Abaya - I’m the head manager at the shelter.” She gestures over to where the kennels and tables are set up. “Let’s get you set up to take Gracie home.”

She turns around and begins heading back towards the table that’s set up on the opposite side of the walking path. He falls in step with her, Gracie staying close to his side as he walks up to the table. Mrs. Abaya walks around to the other side of the table and grabs a clipboard. Gracie stops when he does and sits immediately next to him, stretching her neck up again to press her nose into his hand.

“She have training?” He asks, because Gracie walks politely and sits when he stops and hasn’t once gone tearing off after any other animals or humans. She just sits, looking interested in the other people around them and decidedly uninterested in any of the other dogs.

Mrs. Abaya nods.

“Trained her myself, which is of course why she’s so polite.” She peers at him from underneath her glasses, which materialized on her face once she started looking through the paperwork on the clipboard in front of her. “And I expect you to continue to bring her to our classes, Pete. She’s a smart dog - she needs to keep learning new things to keep her from being destructive”

He pets Gracie absently and nods.

“Of course, Mrs. Abaya.”

She smiles when he calls her by her last name, that same pleased smile his friend’s mothers used to give him before remarking how polite he was, and begins checking off and scribbling through sections of the forms in front of her.

He sees her pen hovering over the section that talks about fees, ready to mark through it.

“That’s not necessary.” At her confused look, he motions towards Gracie. “I can pay the fees. I’d like to, actually. It’s good work you’re doing -- taking in these dogs, trying to get them into good homes.”

She smiles at him and nods, fills out the rest of the form before giving it over to him to sign.

Thirty minutes later, he’s heading home with a wad of paperwork folded up in his hoodie pocket, Gracie’s leash in his hands and a promise to Mrs. Abaya that he will, in fact, show up to the Tuesday and Saturday obedience class.

He finishes his morning run with Gracie at his side, stopping at a bench halfway to his apartment to let her rest and pouring out water from a bottle he bought earlier so that she can have a drink. He reaches underneath his beanie to scratch his forehead, smiling as he thinks of Karen, some stupid part of him wondering if she thinks of him on cold mornings like this.

He pulls the beanie back down over his forehead and looks down at Gracie, an idea suddenly springing to his mind.

He asks her to sit and gets his phone out of his pocket, clicking over to the camera. He reaches up with one hand and scratches behind Gracie’s ear, long scratches that go underneath her snout, lifting her head up. She’s panting still from their earlier run, and it makes it look like she’s smiling widely at the camera when he snaps a couple of photos.

They walk across the street to a convenience store, the store clerk some 17 year old who only coos delightedly when he brings Gracie in and asks how to print a photo from his phone.

Gracie licks the store clerk’s hand as she shows him how to print the photo, helps him look through his camera roll and picks the best one.

He and Gracie jog home, where he finds a couple of old blankets for Gracie to lay on, which she very promptly does. He gets his deepest bowl and fills it with water, sets it down in the kitchen before going to his bedroom and finding his old black beanie, wedged in the corner of his dresser. He stuffs it in his pocket along with a roll of tape, gives Gracie a few pets and heads out the door.

Half an hour later, he’s standing underneath Karen’s apartment. He jumps up to the fire escape and scales up easily to the landing next to her window. He takes out the black beanie from his pocket and loops the duct tape to the back of it, presses it firmly against the window in an obvious way. Mumbles a brief word of thanks to whomever might be listening -- and after today, he’s less certain that it’s no one -- that her shades aren’t drawn on this day.

He takes the photo of Gracie out from his pocket and smiles. Her eyes are wide and bright, her tongue lolling out of her mouth as she pants in a way that makes it look like she’s grinning widely at the camera. On the right side of her face, you can see his hand, fingers caught mid scratch behind her ears, the black of his sweatshirt clearly visible.

He sticks another loop of tape on the back of it and places it in the beanie, careful to make sure that it’s both securely fixed to the fabric and that enough of it sticks out from the brim so that it’s noticeable.

He brushes his hand over the beanie on his head and smiles as he turns away from her window.

Thinks, not yet, as he slowly climbs back down the fire escape; listens to the thrum of his heart as it asks, when, when, when.

He pulls up at David’s house two weeks later during the middle of the day, Gracie curled up in the passenger seat of his truck.

It looks the same as when he last saw it all those months ago on Thanksgiving Day, right down to the fact that the same red Honda Odyssey is sitting in the driveway. He sits in the driver’s seat for close to ten minutes, his hand on the steering wheel, casting sideway glances towards the house. His hand goes to the keys about three different times, and he nearly turns the ignition over the third time around -- but then Gracie sits up in the seat next to him and gives him a look that he swears is disapproving and he ends up dropping his hand and sighing heavily.

“Yeah, alright, alright, Gracie,” he mutters, reaching over to give her a scratch underneath her chin. She lets him give him a few scratches before she licks his arm, then turns in the seat and faces the window, glancing back at him once with what seems to be an encouraging look before turning back around again.

He grunts, thinks that the fact that he’s ascribing very human, complex emotions to his dog probably points to the very reason that he needs to get his out of this truck rather than turning it back on and driving away.

He gets out of the truck and goes around to let Gracie out. She jumps down from the seat, landing softly on the ground next to him and trotting out in front of him as far as the leash will let her. She stands in the middle of the street, tail wagging, and looks back at him. He sighs, then walks to where she’s standing, keeps walking forward until he’s on the sidewalk in front of David’s house.

He stares at the front door but makes no move to walk towards it. He lets his gaze drift across it, then to the front two windows, the manicured lawn, finally landing back on the car next to him. He vaguely remembers a memory from those months in the basement, David admitting to the fact that he was never really the type of guy that checked the oil or made sure to take the car in for regular checks, but that if he had the chance, he’d always make sure to the type of guy who did both those things.

He huffs at the memory, notices that the front window of the car is down and decides to take a moment to see if David made good on his promise. He reaches over, opens the door and pops the hood. He’s unscrewed the cap to the oil when he hears the front door open and realizes that he can recognize David’s shuffling kind of walk coming down the driveway.

“Hey, Frank,” David says, coming into view around the other side of the car.

He glances over at David, notices that his hair is a little shorter than when they last saw one another, his beard a lot more trimmed and manageable. He’s wearing a sweater and dark jeans, has the look of a man who’s spent the last six months rebuilding his life, reinhabiting the role of husband and father all over again.

He checks his own heart and recognizes the envy pulsing in the corner of it, but also the sense of satisfaction and happiness that’s laid out on top of it.

He nods in the other man’s direction.

“David.”

“Uh - what are you doing?”

He lifts the oil dipstick in his hands and raises a brow, as though it’s not at all strange for him to show up at David’s house after nearly half a year of no contact and check the oil in his car.

And maybe it isn’t really, or it at least isn’t in terms of their friendship, because David just lets out a small laugh then nods.

“So, I haven’t actually been checking the oil.”

The corner of his mouth turns up as he wipes down the dipstick and replaces it again.

“Yeah, I noticed.”

They’re both quiet for a moment, Frank focused on checking the oil in the car, before David clears his throat and glances down at Gracie before looking back up at him, an amused expression on his face.

“If I had known that you’d show up out of the blue one day with a mascot, I might’ve been more motivated.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“Mascot?”

David gestures towards Gracie.

“A black dog with a broad chest that has a white splotch on it? It’s a little on the nose, Frank.”

He scoffs and tries to level a glare at David, but he must either be out of practice or it must have completely lost its effect on him, because David just chuckles.

He replaced the oil cap, scrubs a hand across the back of his neck.

“Yeah, I - that’s not why I got her.” He reaches down to scratch Gracie on her haunches. “She ran up to me first. It was, uh, one of those - an adoption event in the park I run at. Wasn’t even really looking for a dog when it happened, but - .” He shrugs. “She was a good fit for me.” He glances up at David, who’s looking at him with a curious expression on his face. “Shelter told me she was rescued from a dog fighting ring - that she’d gotten passed over a lot cuz of that. Stupid, cuz she's a sweet dog.”

David purses his lips, squints at Gracie.

“So a dog that looks like that, with that backstory, just ran over to you while you’re randomly running at the park one morning?”

He nods.

David huffs a laugh.

“I guess God isn’t really much for subtlety, yeah?”

The corner of his mouth lifts in a grin.

“Guess not.” He glances down at Gracie then back up at David. “The lady runs the shelter - older lady named Mrs. Abaya - one who helped me get all set up with Gracie?”

David nods, shifting his feet a little as Frank turns to lean against the car.

“She’s talking to me and lady reminds me so much of my mom, you know? Not an inch over five feet, smiled a lot - but just had this look like she knew all about your bullshit and wasn't having any of it.”

It's an impression that's only been strengthened by his twice a week obedience classes at the shelter. He’s come to find that she’s equally as adept at training people as she is at training dogs and thinks that the shelter is one of the best run places he’s ever seen. In the two short weeks since he’s been taking Gracie to classes, he’s seen her stare down a heavily tattooed biker-looking man three times her weight and twice her size and watched her reform even the most spastic of dogs.

He’s also found out that she has a daughter in the Army JAG in addition to an Army Ranger son, and had asked at the end of the last class -- after seeing her get eight different dogs and twelve different humans to immediately snap to attention when she’d called out a stern command -- if she was sure she hadn’t ever been an Army Sergeant herself.

That had earned him a loud, genuine laugh from her, then a soft pat on his stubble roughened cheek.

“You know, my kids - they always said I should’ve been the one to go into the army rather than their father,” she’d said, smiling at him. “But I think the Army would not have been able to handle me - what do you think, Peter?”

The way she’d said his name -- a kind of maternal fondness that he hadn’t until recently realized he even missed -- made him smile as he nodded down at her.

“I think you would've been too good for the Army, Mrs. Abaya. But you would've made one hell of us a Marine Gunnery Sergeant.”

He clears his throat, shaking himself out of his musing to continue his story to David.

“So, she’s telling me Gracie's not into other dogs so much but she’s loyal and smart, talking 'bout how dogs are good for loneliness and worry and all that shit, and she mentions that she's got a son.” He shakes his head and looks over at David with a wry grin. “Guy’s an Army Ranger for the last fifteen years and his name is Francis.”

David blinks rapidly, a broad smile breaking on his face before he chuckles and nods his head slowly at Frank.

“No shit?”

Frank lets out a short laugh.

“No shit.”

David laughs and crosses his arms in front of him.

“Well, then I guess you had to take her, right? I mean, you’re stubborn but you’re not dumb. It’d be, like, uh - bad for your juju if you hadn’t adopted her.”

“I think my juju’s probably already pretty fucked,” he says dryly. “But I was thinking about getting a dog anyway and like I said, she was a good fit.”

David nods.

“So, new dog, new truck, anything else I should get an update on?”

Frank shrugs.

“Not really.” He squints at the disappointed look on David’s face. “I - uh - joined a boxing gym.”

“Because you’re a guy that really needs to learn how to fight, right?”

Frank scoffs at him, before reaching up and unhooking the stand from the hood of the car and letting it drop back down with a loud thud.

“Curtis said - uh - that I need, that I should try to stop living my life like I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop all the time, so -.” He lifts one shoulder, before leaning back down on the hood on the car. “Trying to keep busy. Group with Curtis, fights at the gym, training with Gracie.” He smirks across the hood of the car at David. “Here, trying to make sure you don’t run your cars to shit.”

David gives him a long, inscrutable look, like he’s waiting for him to say something else. When Frank doesn’t, he just blows out a breath and gestures to the car.

“So, uh, I think the oil needs to be changed in that car too, yeah? If you want to come back in a few days.” When Frank nods, he glances at the house, then back at Frank. “I work from home, so I’m always here. Kids and Sarah don’t start coming home until 4:00 most days.”

Frank nods, then reaches down to scratch Gracie behind the ears. She indulges him for a moment, then walks over to where David’s standing and looking up at him expectantly. David just stares at her for about fifteen seconds before she tilts her head and gives a short snort, the expression on her face something akin to impatience.

David laughs and leans down and frames her head on either side with his hands, his fingers scratching along her neck and underneath her ears. If Frank didn’t know better, he’d say the look on her face is something approaching smug.

“She is a weirdly expressive dog.”

Frank grins.

“Thank God you think so, too. I was beginning to think that I just wasn’t spending enough time with people.”

“Well, that’s probably true, too.” David gives Gracie one last good scratch behind the ears before he stands up and crosses his arms in front of him, clearing his throat as he rocks back on his heels.

“So, what about Karen, Frank?”

Frank purses his lips, looks away from David as he answers.

“She knows I’m alive.”

David scoffs, then shakes his head.

“What, did you drop off another pot of flowers and a box of bullets to let her know you were ok?”

Franks blinks rapidly, a scowl flashing across his features before the expression softens to something that’s halfway sheepish.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, shaking head as he rubs his hand across the back of his neck. “We spent way too much time together in that basement.”

“Maybe.” He blows out a breath. “Probably.” He crosses his arms in front of him. “So, I’m taking that as a no?”

Frank raises an eyebrow. David sighs.

“A no that you haven’t talked to Karen beyond leaving her flowers or bullets or books or whatever shit you can tell yourself isn’t a romantic gesture on her windowsill.”

He shakes his head, and there’s something both annoying and comforting at the fact that David knows him as well as he does and is no longer afraid to verbalize it.

“It’s - I don’t - It’s not the right time, yet.”

David looks over at him skeptically.

“Is it ever going to be, Frank?”

He doesn’t say anything to that, just reaches up to rub a hand the edge of the beanie that Karen gave him. Even though he’s basically worn it every day since she gave it to him a little over a month ago, there’s still a warmth that blooms in his chest every time he reaches up to touch it. It’s a reminder that she’s real, that she does more than just exist as some sweet memory -- that she thinks of him, wants him warm and wrapped up in some way by her.

That she should still think of him, that she should regard him with anything approaching affection or tenderness or warmth sometimes feels like nothing short of a miracle.

Suddenly he’s struck by the fact that it’s been six months since he last saw her, that his last glimpse of her is associated with a throbbing in his shoulder and an ache in his chest.

There’d been a steeliness to her gaze that he’d admired, even as he could see the tears pooling in her wide, blue eyes. It’s a look that he holds close to his heart, that he brings out and falls into on nights when he has trouble sleeping. It’s a look that perfectly encapsulates her -- the strength and softness of her, not warring or at odds -- but coexisting side by side, one strengthening the other rather than lessening it.

He sighs heavily, his fingertips tracing over the knit of the beanie before he drops his hand and stuffs them both into the pockets of his hoodie.

“Remember what you said to me -- that night we both got drunk? When we, when you - uh - when you first suggested that we go to Madani?”

David gives him a long, pensive look.

“I said a lot of things that night, Frank. Most of them I didn’t mean.”

Frank shrugs.

“Maybe.” He gives David a sidelong glance. “You said that I had nothing but a war inside of me.” He bites his lip, chews on it for a moment before continuing. “That was true - when you said it. Some days, I think it still might be.”

David nods, then tilts his head over at Frank.

“I get that. But Frank, all this,” He gestures to Gracie, to the car, to the space between them. “Someone who only has a war inside of them -- they don’t do stuff like this.”

Frank makes a noncommittal sound deep in his throat before he shrugs his shoulders.

“I still have dreams sometimes, you know? Ones where Billy gets away, or - .” He swallows thickly. “Ones where Lewis lets go of that damn bomb switch and I can’t save Karen.” He draws in a sharp breath, has to clench his fist in the fabric of his hoodie to keep it from shaking. “And I wake up screaming and hateful and just - I wake up ready to go to war, David.” He shakes his head. “There’s a part of me that’s still preparing for the bottom to drop out. It’s - it’s, there’s still too much of me that feels like it’s at war, that expects it.”

He cuts off before he says the rest of what he’s thinking - something about building an after that he can be proud of, about building himself back up until he’s more man than war, about being someone worthy of that combination of softness and steel without feeling like he’s sullying it with the blood on his hands.

Again, he’s reminded of just how well David knows him, now -- reminded and is thankful for it, because David seems to understand all that goes unsaid anyway. Studies him with a serious, sad expression before he breathes out heavily and nods, one shoulder lifting in a half shrug.

“I get that, Frank. I get it. Just - .” He bites the side of his lip, before he sighs and nods at Frank. “Come by on Tuesday, alright? You can help me change the oil on my car and we can have a beer and watch baseball or whatever and act like we didn’t spend a stupid amount of time hiding from the feds and living in a basement together.”

Frank gives David a small smile before he nods.

“See you, David,” he says, clicking his tongue in Gracie’s direction and waiting for her to trot over to him. He glances back over at David. “You’ll have a jack? I’ll bring over the oil and drain pan.”

David nods slowly.

“I’ll have a jack.”

The corner of Frank mouth quirks up.

“You’re gonna to go out and buy a jack, aren’t you?”

David grins.

“I am definitely going to go and buy a jack, yeah.”

Frank chuckles, then reaches over to smack David lightly on the chest before he turns to go.

“See you Tuesday, David.”

“Hey - uh - Frank?” He calls out when Frank is at the end of his driveway

He turns around, raises an eyebrow. David shuffles his feet, one, then the other, his hands gripping the insides of his hoodie pocket.

“I just want you to know - I have those dreams, too. Ones where we didn’t get to Sarah and Zach in time, or we never got Madani on our side. And I wake up angry and screaming, ready to do God knows what.”

Frank gives him a long look, then nods.

“Yeah?” David nods. “So, what do you do?”

“I roll over and hug Sarah, hold her and remind myself over and over again what actually did happen. That she’s safe, that she’s here, in my arms.” He holds his hand up, stopping the words that he can see rising up from Frank. “And I know it’s different between you and Karen. I know that it’s - it’s whatever it is.”

He takes a few steps in closer to Frank, looks at him intently, his normally languid pattern of speech turning animated and quick the longer he speaks, as though he anticipates Frank will interrupt him at any time.

“But I know - I mean, I think, it’s a mistake for you to wait until you let go of that war inside of you. I think seeing her again - I think sitting down, talking to her, having a conversation that doesn’t involve revenge or mortal peril or the names of men that are dead or thought to be dead or are soon to be dead - that’s gonna be the best way to stop having those dreams. Because it’ll remind you of what is, rather than what might’ve been.” He takes a deep breath in, levels a weighty stare at Frank. “Seeing her again, Frank - it’s the only real way to remember that there’s more than just a war inside of you.”

He takes in the flat look on Frank’s face, and puts both his hands up in front of him. “And that’s all I’ll say about that.”

Frank snorts and shakes his head, though he has to press his lips together to keep the edges of his mouth from turning up.

“I really doubt that that’s all you’re gonna say about it but - .” He shuffles his feet, rubs his hand across the edge of his beanie. “Thank you,” he finally says after a long pause. He’s not sure if he believes David because of how much he wants to see Karen again or because he actually thinks David is right; understands that either way, David is motivated by nothing but the desire to see him happy.

“I’ll see you Tuesday, David.”

David nods at him and gives a lazy wave.

“See you Tuesday, Frank.”

He takes the long way home from David’s house the following Tuesday.

It’s an inconvenient, circuitous route that he likes because it generally has less traffic on it on any given day, one that Gracie seems to like better too for all that she stays seated up and starting out the window rather than curled up and sleeping in the passenger seat like she normally does. That it happens to take him right past Karen’s apartment is something he tells himself is an additional benefit, rather than the entire reason.

The moment this thought crosses his mind, Gracie looks over at him and snorts before licking his hand, and he thinks -- for about the thousandth time -- that she's way more perceptive and emotionally expressive than any one dog has the right to be.

Almost without meaning to, he slows the truck as he glances up towards Karen’s window. His heart knocks against his chest when he sees the pot of yellow daffodils sitting out on her windowsill, the weather now warm enough by midday to warrant putting them outside her window rather than pushing them up against it.

He circles the block twice before he finds a parking spot. He rolls down both windows about a quarter of the way. It’s still cool enough outside that he isn’t worried about Gracie getting too hot in the car, but figures a little extra air wouldn’t hurt. He gives her a few scratches under the chin, then gets out of his truck and tries to keep himself from jogging over to her apartment building. Manages it, but just barely.

He squints up at her window, shading his eyes against the afternoon sun. He doesn’t see anything held in place by the pot, but thinks he sees something small and flat stuck between the stalks of the flowers.

The corner of his mouth quirks up as he reaches up to grab the fire escape ladder, scaling it quickly and with ease, as though he’s done this two dozen times before instead of just the three.

(He wonders -- briefly -- if dreams can give you muscle memory.)

He reaches the landing outside her window and leans over, grabs what looks to be a photo wedged between the flower stems.

He turns it over in his hands and sucks in a sharp breath, his hand coming up to rub against the edge of his own beanie, the ache in his chest crystallizing into a sensation that can't be ignored.
She’s standing in front of a semi-frosted window, the words Krav Maga Institute visible behind her. She’s clad in all black -- black tights, a fitted black tank top -- with a smirk on her face, her bright blue eyes especially piercing in contrast to the plain black beanie that sits low on her forehead.

He leans back against the peeling wall and looks closely at the photo, tells himself he’s studying the contours of the knitted cap rather than the shape of her mouth, the curves of her form. He swallows thickly, tells himself that the beanie could’ve been from anywhere or anyone, that it doesn’t necessarily have to have been the one he left her all those weeks ago, that photo of Gracie stuck against the seams of it.

But no -- he looks again, sees where she’s folded it up to keep from falling over her eyes, finds his eyes drawn by the fraying edge caused by his own worrying fingers. Her head is tilted slightly down, her hand reaching up to brush against that worn edge of it. He looks closer and smiles, swears that there’s a teasing edge to her smile, a radiating warmth in her eyes as she looks directly at the camera.

The effect of it -- of seeing Karen wrapped in what he’s now sure is his plain, black beanie, her long blond hair tucked underneath it and framing her face, her blue eyes made brighter by its darkness -- is immediate and intense and absurd. It sets off a sensation that nearly overwhelms him -- a thrumming through his veins more pointed than the undefined longing he's long grown accustomed to. It’s something sharper, more heady and intoxicating. Something that feels dangerously, exhilaratingly close to want.

He blows at a harsh breath and shakes his head, looks back down at the photo again. Stares at it like it’s the world’s last work of art, studies it like it’s some sort of sacred text rather than a 4x6 photo with CVS printed across the back.

She looks stronger, though he has to admit it’d be hard for him to really know since he’s only ever seen her wrapped in coats or else buttoned up in pencil skirts and blouses. But her posture is solid and straight, her arms curved with muscle, a coiled sort of readiness in her stance even though everything about her is relaxed. He thinks she looks happier, too -- her expression shot through with real glee, her eyes wide and sparkling at the camera. It makes him smile, even though the ache of missing her, the low grade pain of absence that he tries to keep locked away in the very darkest corners of his mind, flares up as he does. It combines with the hum of desire in his veins in a way that’s nearly maddening.

He sighs and closes his eyes -- builds a new life around Karen in his mind’s eye based on the photo in his hands and the six month of Bulletin issues piled high in the corner of his apartment, rather than on the memory of the last time he saw her.

Imagines her learning to break wrists and crack ribs, her lithe form and wide-open features now twice as deceptive as before. Pictures her happy and cared for, with someone close enough and trusted enough on the other side of the camera to take the picture without asking too many questions about what or who it might be for. He envisions her running down a lead or chasing down a harried cop, disarming them with her piercing gaze alone, then gathering up the wayward pieces of a statement or a casually dropped observation and fitting them together into a story with a satisfied smile on her face.

He glances back down at the photo, at the beanie pulled down low on her head, and chews on the corner of his lip. He can’t tell if it’s a trick of lighting or the yearning in his own heart, but he swears that it looks a little more worn at the edges than when he last saw it.

For a moment, he lets himself indulge in the pleasure of believing that she’s worn it as frequently as he’s worn the one that she gifted to him. Lets himself believe that she thinks of him during those dark, cold nights in the city; finds satisfaction in thinking that some part of him is able to keep her warm even from afar.

He pushes off from the side of the building and glances into her apartment, wonders what her expression might be if he were to be waiting for her when she gets home. If she would be wearing his black beanie, if she would be clad in all black again just having come home from training. Wonders what exactly his own reaction might be.

He takes a deep breath and very firmly steps back from that line of thinking. Tells himself that for now, it’s enough to know that she thinks of him, that he’s important enough for her to leave him tangible snippets of her.

He very carefully places the photo in his jacket pocket, looks at the daffodils on her window sill one last time, and climbs back down the fire escape. Thinks of what he might leave her in return the entire way home to his own apartment.

He’s early to Gracie’s final obedience class a few weeks later, his toolbox in hand.

Mrs. Abaya sees him from across the training field and smiles, walking over to him and giving a few pets to Gracie before looking up at him with a feigned look of surprise.

“You’re an hour and a half early, Peter. Were you really so excited for your last obedience class with Gracie?”

He gives her a wry look and shakes his head, lifts the toolbox in his hand.

“Heard you talking last class that the kitchen sink in the staff lounge was leaking. Figured I could try and help some if you were ok with it.”

Her face lights up with delight as she claps her hands in front of her, taps them against his chest.

“Oh, praise Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Peter. We’ve just turned the water off for the last two days. I kept meaning to call someone but, you know -- I get so busy here.”

“Uh huh,” he says with a skeptical look and a teasing lilt to the words. It’s the sixth time in the last four weeks that he’s come over early to fix something around the shelter -- a leaking faucet, a blown circuit, a faulty switch. The first time had been purely coincidental -- he really had overheard Mrs. Abaya fretting about the fans in one of the kennels that had gone out and wondering if they had the money to fix it.

He’d come back the next morning with his toolbox, had simply asked to take a look at the broken fan and spent the rest of the morning fixing it until it ran smoothly.

That night, he’d noticed that Mrs. Abaya had refunded the entire cost of both the beginner’s obedience class he’d finished up and the intermediate class he was currently taking, a point of fact he’d made sure to bring up to her the following day at the end of class.

“I don’t need that money back, Mrs. Abaya. In fact, I’d rather you keep it. Fan’s not a big deal.”

She’d simply hummed some non-committal noise and patted him on the cheek before mentioning that the women’s bathroom toilet was constantly running, maybe he might have a second to look at it?

She never took the money back out of his account. But she also always seemed to mention whatever might be broken right when he was just within earshot, so it’s a trade he doesn’t mind making. Besides, he likes Mrs. Abaya, likes being at the shelter, likes doing something with his hands that reminds him that they can do more than cause pain and violence.

He walks with her to the lounge, listening to her talk about the new dog they just picked up that day, the string of families that have come in looking for a pet. She walks him just to the entrance before squeezing his arm and turning to go.

“I’ll go and get your assistant,” she says teasingly, smiling at him before turning around and shuffling back down the hallway.

He sets his toolbox down reaches over to pet Gracie before walking over to the sink and bending down to open up the cabinet doors.

“Hi, Gracie,” he hears a small, quiet voice say to the right of him. “Hi, Tito Peter.”

He looks over and sees Mrs. Abaya’s granddaughter, eight year old Emeline, with a young Doberman Pinscher mix as her side. She occupies the unique position of owning one of the few dogs in the class that Gracie actually seems to actively like rather than just barely tolerate, which is a godsend considering how much time she spends at the shelter. Her parents -- a bleeding heart immigration lawyer mother and a social worker father -- work long hours, which means Emeline spends a lot of her after-school hours helping out Mrs. Abaya at the shelter. It also means that she’s become his de facto helper around the shelter as he fixes up faucets and fans and fences.

He smiles at the signifier before his name, which as far as he can tell is a Filipino word for someone who is but isn’t really your actual uncle. It opens back up a piece of his heart that he’d forgotten existed -- the part that always wished for a brother growing up, the part that took pride in being called uncle whenever he met the kids of the guys in his unit.

He crouches down so that he’s not bearing down on Emeline from his height, smiles as she leans over to give Gracie a kiss on the forehead then steps forward to give him a hug.

It had surprised him the first time, the ease with which she was willing to throw her arms around some relative stranger introduced to her by her grandmother. But after having spent an increasing amount of time around Mrs. Abaya in these last four weeks and having met not just Emeline, but Emeline’s parents, a few of Emeline’s cousins, Mrs. Abaya’s sister and about half a dozen other members of the family -- half of whom he’s not even all that sure are actually related to Mrs. Abaya -- and receiving hugs and pats on the back and cheek, arms around his shoulders and kisses to his cheek, he thinks that touch and affection must come easy to them.

It doesn’t always to him, but there’s something comforting about knowing that it does to others, about recognizing that there’s a world in which softness isn't a weakness.

He sometimes has the vague sense that he’s been adopted in some strange way, given that Mrs. Abaya has started showing up with trays of homemade lumpia and pancit that seem freshly made even though she swears they’re just leftovers that she doesn’t want going bad, the way she’s always fretting about the amount that he is or isn’t socializing in his free time.

Some part of him wonders if he should be wary or, at the very least, annoyed by the amount of attention and interest. But mostly he finds himself touched by it. And though it is Pete Castiglione, not Frank Castle, that Mrs. Abaya cares for, she knows enough of the very broad strokes of his story that make the two similar -- widower, grieving father, former Marine -- for him to feel at least a tiny bit less alone.

“What’re you fixing?” Emeline asks, breaking him out of his reverie as she rises up on her tiptoes to look over his shoulder at his toolbox.

“Your grandma said this is leaking,” he says, gesturing to the pipes under the sink. “So, here I am.”

She nods and then sits cross legged next to his toolbox, reaches over to open it.

“I’ll help you.”

He nods, then raises a brow at her.

“Your homework done already?”

She furrows her brow at him and blows air up through her bangs, an exaggerated look of exasperation on her face that only children can somehow manage to make and still be endearing. She’s too polite to roll her eyes at him, but somehow he gets the impression anyway -- has to bite back a smile so that he can keep a stern look on his face.

“Ye - yes, I finished it.” She shrugs as she hands him a wrench. “It was only that one time that I forgot -- just that one time, Tito. And I finished it after we got done with the bathroom and before mommy came to pick me up.”

He nods and lies down on his back, begins going through the process of fixing the pipes in the same way that he’s done every piece of maintenance with Emeline as his side -- by carefully pointing out just what he’s doing, explaining each step of the process, wriggling out from under the sink and letting her help when and if she can. She’s surprisingly quick at picking up what he’s doing, easily remembering the tools and steps even though this is only the second sink she’s seen him fix.

It’s relaxing -- working with his hands, chatting with Emeline about her day. She’s different enough from either Lisa or Leo for it not to ache too much when he does, and there are sometimes whole minutes that go by when he’s able to disappear into the fiction of Pete Castiglione -- someone’s almost-uncle who can be counted on to fix leaking pipes, who can laugh at a truly nonsensical second grade joke without being reminded of another joke, another 8 year old, another life.

When they’re done, he has her run around the back and turn the water back on. They test the sink and she gives him a high five and wide, toothy grin when everything drains through the pipes instead of pooling at the bottom of the floor.

“Mommy says that I’m probably better than Daddy now at fixing stuff,” she says proudly, calling her dog Macey to her side and giving her a good pat on the back.

“Oh yeah?” He picks up Gracie’s leash and starts to walk over to the training area. “Maybe your grandma can hire you instead of me to fix stuff around here.”

“Noooo,” she answers, drawing out the o sound as she shakes her head. “Lola says you're the best. And besides, I need a lot more practice.”

“How much more practice, do you think?”

“Hrmmm.” She scrunches up her face, then squints up at him. “Like eleven years probably.”

He purses his lips to the side as he tries to force his smile back. He wants her to know that he takes this all very seriously.

“And how old will you be in eleven years?”

“Ummm - 19,” she says quickly, her eyes widening. “I'll be old!”

He chuckles at that, then nods.

“And if I'm 36 right now, how old will I be then?” He asks, because he knows they're learning to add double digits right now.

“You'll be...you'll be 47!” She exclaims triumphantly, and there's a part of him that's proud of how quickly she gets there.

She stops in the middle of the hallway.

“Tito, you'll be really old,” she says, her voice hushed.

“Who’ll be old?”

He turns around and sees Mrs. Abaya walking up behind them.

“Uh - well, apparently me in eleven years.”

“He’ll be 47 then, Lola! That's older than Mommy or Daddy.”

“Pah, anak,” Mrs. Abaya says, swooping down to rub her cheek and drop a kiss on top of Emeline’s head. “That means he's 36 now? He's only two years old than your parents. That's still young.”

She says it to Emeline but he has a sneaking suspicion that it's directed at him for whatever reason.

He doesn't really have time to think about why that might because in the next moment, she's shooing them off to the training grounds, telling them they better get ready for their session.

The final class concludes with a mini graduation ceremony. The dogs all get graduation caps and he’s stupidly proud of the fact that Gracie stays completely still as Mrs. Abaya puts on her cap, and that she’s one of the few dogs (Macey is another one) in the class that doesn’t immediately try to paw it off.

Gracie walks across the small, raised platform with her chest puffed out and what seems to be a smug look on her face, stands tall as Mrs. Abaya loops a ribbon that says “Overall best behaved” around her collar. He sneaks a few treats to her from his pocket as Mrs. Abaya makes a small speech talking about how proud she is of all the dogs and the trainers, and how there’s always more classes and things to teach themselves and their dogs.

He walks over to where Emeline is taking at least two dozen photos of Macey with her mom’s phone.

“Marisol, Jeremy,” he says in greeting, nodding to both of them as he stretches out his hand.

“Hey man! Good to see you again,” Jeremy says, taking his hand and giving it a firm shake, his face lit up with a big grin. “Emeline was just telling us how she helped you fix the kitchen sink.”

“And how apparently she'll need another eleven years of practice before she's as good as you,” Marisol adds, reaching over to give him a warm hug as she smiles at him.

He grins and shakes his head.

“Nah, she'll need, you know, maybe another five years, tops, before she’ll know everything I know.”

Both Jeremy and Marisol laugh, and it seems like Marisol is about to say something else before they hear Mrs. Abaya’s voice from behind them, calling for Marisol to come over.

Marisol gives him an apologetic look and excuses herself, Jeremy following behind her with his hand at the small of her back.

He inwardly thanks Mrs. Abaya for the interruption, takes his phone out of his pocket and crouches down in front of Emeline.

“So, think you could take a picture of me and Gracie?” He asks, handing the phone in her direction.

“Yeah, I can!” She clicks over to the camera as he backs up until he's crouched down next to Gracie, holds up her certificate in front of them both so that it faces the camera.

“Make sure you get the certificate in there, sweetheart.”

She gives him a look that says, of course, that same look that says she's rolling her eyes without rolling her eyes, which makes him huff out a laugh.

He waits until Emeline is satisfied, which means he's told about seven different times that he needs to smile, then scrolls through the three dozen or so photos quickly.

“Are you gonna put it as your phone background?”

He glances over at Emeline, who's peering over his shoulder, looking at the pictures flashing across the screen.

He briefly considers just saying yes. Knows that’s the best way to keep away from the line of questioning he’s sure to get from Mrs. Abaya the next time he sees her.

But there’s something about keeping it a secret that feels wrong, makes it feel illicit rather than important. And there’s a part of him, too, that wants it to be real in some other way outside himself, that wants some evidence that it won’t disappear the moment he opens his eyes in the morning.

“It’s, uh, it’s for a - a friend of mine,” he finally says. There’s an instinct to frown when he says friend, even though that’s as good a descriptor as any for what Karen is to him, so he immediately follows it up with - “Karen - she, uh. I think she’d like to see how Gracie’s doing.”

Emeline narrows her eyes at him a bit, and for a moment the expression on her face is so uncannily similar to one Mrs. Abaya might give him that he nearly laughs out loud. She doesn’t say anything, just reaches over his shoulder and scrolls three photos to the left.

“There. That’s the one you should send her.”

He looks down at his phone. The photo she picked is him caught mid laugh, a small but genuine smile on his face, his eyes crinkled up with real amusement. Gracie faces towards the camera in complete seriousness, looking almost regal despite her ridiculous graduation hat.

“Why that one?”

Emeline shrugs.

“You look happy in that one. I think she’d want one where you’re happy, don’t you?”

He thinks about that question the entire drive home, mulls it over as he stops by CVS to print out the picture. The next morning, he pulls on his beanie and sweatshirt and tucks the photo into his pocket, doesn’t look at it again until he’s perched outside Karen’s window.

He turns the picture over in his hands, thinks about the photo she’d given him, carefully tucked away in the pages of In Cold Blood -- the curve of Karen’s smile, the brightness in her eyes, the way it both soothes the ache in his chest and amplifies the humming in his veins to see it.

He wedges the photo between the window and windowsill, looping tape around the back to make sure it doesn’t fly away. As he climbs back down the stairs, he imagines her finding it. Wonders if she’ll build a life around him the way he has for her. Hopes she’ll know how hard he’s trying to build an after that means something, that he’s doing so to build his way back to her.

He blows out a harsh breath. It’s a hell of a lot to pin on one photo, on one look, on one windowsill. But he remembers the meaning in a single gesture, whole conversations told in single looks in and silence. Thinks about how much can be said in a single photo. Thinks about how it can be enough, for now.

He’s helping Curtis stack chairs after group the following Wednesday, Gracie laying down next to the table at the far end of the room.

It's the first time he's brought her to group, but if tonight is any indication he doubts it'll be the last. She'd spent the entire time slowly inching her way to the side of each of the men in the group, resting her head on their lap when one would get agitated, nudge a hand with her nose when another’s voice started to shake with sadness.

Each time, he'd notice the way the other man would climb back down from his anxiety, or back out of his sorrow as he slowly ran their hands over Gracie's fur.

It's not exactly surprising, given the amount of times Gracie has done the same for him on those off days where his memory is sparked by some random song on the radio, some random scent in the park. He’s lost track of the amount of times he’s been jolted out of some hellish nightmare to find her licking his face or whining in his ear.

He glances over at where she's now seated, Curtis crouched down next to her and giving her scratches behind the ear. He smiles, thinks that being emotionally expressive and emotionally attuned to others must go hand in hand.

“Gracie’s a hell of a dog, Frank,” Curtis calls out from across the room, is immediately treated to a doggie kiss on the face as he says it. Curtis grimaces as Frank grins -- not used to dogs, then -- then goes over to drain the last of the coffee pot.

“Yeah, and doesn’t she just know it?” Frank says wryly, stacking the last chair before walking over to him.

Curtis chuckles.

“You know, you should look into getting her officially trained as a therapy dog. Saw a lot of guys down at the VA really benefit from having one, and Gracie looks like she’s basically already halfway there.”

Frank looks down at Gracie, then back over at Curtis.

“Huh.”

It honestly has never occurred to him, though now he can’t understand why. He and Gracie sped through obedience class together, and he doesn’t think it’s favoritism for either of them that made Mrs. Abaya constantly compliment how smart and disciplined Gracie is. He also knows that there’s a therapy dog training class at the shelter, which will give him yet another reason to stick around once the agility class is over.

Curtis shrugs.

“Just something to think about, Frank.”

“No, I - I ‘preciate it, Curt. I’m gonna look into it.”

Curtis smiles at him, a mixture of satisfied and proud, before he turns and begins emptying the grounds from the coffee pot.

Frank looks at him for a long moment before he sighs and grabs his phone from his pocket.

“Hey, so - I, uh - .” He shuffles back and forth on his feet as Curtis looks on, drawing his eyebrows together. “So, I need you to take a picture of me.”

Curtis blinks rapidly and purses his lips before he nods and reaches out to grab Frank’s phone.

“Alright. Just...you? Standing there?”

Frank shakes his head, breathes out heavily.

“Nah - just.” He shakes his head again and scrubs his hand across the stubble on his chin. “Give me a sec.”

He takes out a carefully folded bandana from his back pocket and shakes it out, then crouches down in front of Gracie and ties it around her neck. He walks to the far wall which holds the bulletin board for the church and the cross and stands in front of it, calls Gracie over to him and waits until she sits next to him before he forces himself to meet Curtis’ stare.

Curtis looks between him and Gracie, his eyes darting between the bandana wrapped around her neck and the shirt that Frank is currently wearing. It’s a flannel button up that he quite likes -- a dark blue and black pattern that gives some variety to his wardrobe without straying too far from the colors he’s used to.

It also happens to be the exact same fabric and pattern as the bandana around Gracie’s neck.

Curtis takes a step back, looks at both him and Gracie standing there next to one another, then takes a deep breath and bursts out laughing.

Frank rolls his eyes.

“Yeah, yeah, get it out now, Curt.”

Curtis swallows back the rest of his laugh, though his eyes are still lit up with pure glee, his face stretched by a ridiculous grin.

“Frank, I’m sorry. I mean, I’ll take the picture of course. But I just -- you’re really gonna need to explain this to me.”

“Yeah, man. Look, I - .” He looks at the grin on Curtis’ face, which is so clearly of the shit-eating variety, and sighs heavily as he rubs his hand across the back of his neck. “Karen got it for me -- for us,” he says, gesturing between him and Gracie. “Probably kind of, you know, as a joke, but also. I, uh, I like the shirt and Gracie likes the bandana, so.” He shrugs. “Wanna let her know I appreciate it.”

Curtis’ grin stretches out even wider which, shit, he didn’t even think was possible at this point. The guy seriously looks almost manic with glee.

“So, how come I didn’t know you were seeing Karen again?”

“Cuz, uh, I - I’m not, Curt,” he says, clearing his throat and shrugging.

The look of disappointment on Curtis’ face is so sudden and so exaggerated that Frank might laugh if it didn’t sent off a low burn of guilt in the pit of his stomach. Because he knows what Curtis is going to ask next, or at least going to ask eventually, and he’s having a harder and harder time coming up with an answer that doesn’t sound vaguely like an excuse.

“You’re not.” It’s not phrased like a question, but he answers it anyway.

“Nah, I’m not.”

“But you’re talking to her?”

Frank starts to nod, then shakes his head, then bites the corner of his lip and just shrugs.

“Not...really? I mean yeah, kind of, but not...guess not the way you would expect.”

Curtis frowns.

“Frank, what the fuck does that even mean?”

He heaves out a long sigh and leans against the wall.

“She reached out to me a few weeks ago. Gave me, uh, left me a gift. Some coffee, new beanie.” A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth as he glances over at Curtis, who’s looking at him intently. “So, I’ve been doing likewise - pictures and shit - so she knows how I’m doing.”

Curtis stares at him intensely, turning over his words in his mind.

“So, these gifts - she just randomly, what, fedexed them to you? How does she even know where you live?”

Frank shakes his head.

“She doesn’t. She - uh.” He stops and rubs his hand across the back of his neck and up the side of his head. He has a sudden and irrational desire to ask Curtis not to tell anyone what he’s about to say, but swallows it in the last moment. It’d be a stupid and pretty insulting thing to do, seeing as Curtis has kept more important, deeper secrets than the one he’s about reveal. And he’s pretty sure the desire is driven more by a faint sense of embarrassment than anything else.

“When I was -- ah -- before, you know. When no one could really know I was alive.” He glances at Curtis, who folds his arms across his chest and nods. “If Karen needed to get a hold of me, she’d put this pot of flowers out on her windowsill, and I’d know to call her.”

“Whose idea was that? The flowers, the windowsill?”

“Mine.”

Curtis nods slowly.

“Why not a burner phone?”

Frank shrugs.

“Wanted to keep her as safe as I could. Phone’s can still be tracked.” He glances over at Curtis, chews the corner of his lip. “And we, uh, we didn’t exactly, you know, part well when I saw her last. Thought she at least deserved some flowers for not just telling me to go to hell.”

Curtis nods.

He clears his throat, shoves his hands into his pockets and rocks back on his heels a bit.

“That’s how I let her know I was ok after -- after everything. Left a pot of daffodils and a box of bullets out there for her.”

Curtis snorts a laugh at the word bullets, shakes his head and looks at Frank wryly.

“Of course you did.”

The corner of his mouth lifts in a half smile.

“Yeah, uh. Yeah.” He clears his throat. “So, a few months ago - little bit after I started boxing - I notice the flowers out there on her windowsill.”

“Because you just happened to be walking by her place for no reason,” Curtis says flatly, his lips pressed tightly together in an attempt to keep himself from smiling. “But go on.”

Frank purses his lips and looks away, squints at the far end of the room.

“Well, I told you -- she’d left me a beanie, some coffee.” He looks over at Curtis, then gestures towards Gracie. “Few weeks later, I got Gracie, figured I’d let her know. Took a picture and left it there for her and - .” He lifts his shoulders. “It’s gone back and forth like that a few times now.”

Curtis is quiet for a long moment, looks down at the phone in his hands and then back up at Frank.

“So, Karen gets you and Gracie matching shirts, and you wanna give her a picture of you two wearing them as a thank you.”

Frank nods.

“Why not just say thank you in person, Frank?”

He pushes off from the wall, then crouches down to pet Gracie, running his hands over the softness of her fur as he turns the question over in head.

“Because from where I’m standing,” Curtis says, ducking his head down to catch Frank’s eye, “you look like a guy who isn’t living his life like he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop any more. You have a dog, you have hobbies, you have a whole two friends that you see on a regular basis. So what’s stopping you from seeing Karen?”

He takes a deep breath and stands up, rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet, scrubs his hand across the stubble on his chin.

“Karen gave me this picture of her -- it was the, uh, the second thing she left me.” He tries and fails not to smile as he thinks of it. He’s kept it hidden between the pages of a used copy of In Cold Blood, but has taken it out and looked at it so many times that the edges of the pages have become worn down and bent from the frequency. “It’s nothing special -- I mean, uh, it’s - it’s her standing in front of a Krav Maga gym, probably right before she went in. And she’s wearing this beanie I left her, just this old crappy black beanie that I used to wrap the picture of Gracie in that I left her...and she’s smiling at the camera.” He looks over at Curtis. “And she just looks happy, you know? Just, just fucking bea - .” He stops abruptly and shuffles his feet, refuses to look at Curtis. “Anyway, she looked bright and happy and like...like life was going well for her.”

He licks his lips and looks down at his hands, twists his fingers around one another.

“And yeah, it makes sense that she would, you know? I mean, of course. Yeah...yeah, of course.” He glances over at Curtis, who just nods, makes a motion for him to keep going. “So, you know -- do I really need to drop all my shit back into her life just when she got out of it? I mean, all my... all my shit from before -- Kandahar, Schoonover, Rawlins, that shit -- that shit had an end, Curt. That shit was gonna end one way or another. But this shit…” He makes a vague gesture towards himself, towards the deads that can’t be undone, a past that can’t be unseen. He shakes his head. “There’s not really an end to it. There’s just dealing with it.

“And you think Karen wouldn’t want to deal with it.”

He shakes his head.

“Nah, she would. I know she would. She’s - she’s all heart.” He chuckles a bit at the words, though he knows it’s only an inside joke with himself, though it sets off a burning in his veins that he can’t ignore. “She would deal with it. I just don’t know if she should have to.”

Curtis reaches a hand out towards Frank.

“And I don’t know that you should be the one to make that decision for her, Frank.”

He nods, is quiet for a long moment before he starts speaking again, his voice low and uncertain.

“Me and Karen -- it’s not like me and you. You knew me -- knew who I was before all this shit.” He glances over at Curt and worries his lip with his teeth. “Karen -- she, we -- there’s never really been the two of us without the war, my war. Without all my shit, without my mission. So what am I to her now -- now that she doesn’t need to help me with that?”

Curtis shakes his head forcefully.

“Karen didn’t care about your mission, you asshole. She cared about you. Cares about you still, from everything I can see.” He blows out an exasperated breath and throws his hands up in the air, begins to pace in front of him. “The beanie and the coffee, Frank, what are those for? Sure as hell isn’t your mission. They’re because you spend half your life wearing one and you drink more black coffee than anyone else on this planet. You put yourself through hell making sure Lewis didn’t hurt her, so she starts going to a gym to let you know she can take care of herself, but she wears your beanie so that you know she’s still thinking of you.” He stops pacing and folds his arms in front of him. “Jesus, Frank, she cares about you. Is that really so hard to believe?”

Frank licks his lips and looks down, lifts his shoulders in a small shrug but doesn’t say anything. Curtis takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. When he starts speaking again, his voice is softer.

“Maybe you’re right, Frank.” He steps away from the wall, turns and faces Frank. “Maybe Karen doesn’t know who you were, maybe she can’t know everything that you’ve ever done.” He unfolds his arms, spreads them out in front of him. “But maybe she knows who you might be -- who you could be. Maybe she could help you figure it out.” He pauses, waits for Frank to look up and meet his gaze. “Don’t you think you both deserve to at least try?”

He wakes up the next day with Curtis’ words reverberating in his mind.

He runs his hands through his hair, then laces his fingers behind the back of his head and looks up at the ceiling like it’ll give him some kind of answer he’s looking for.

When it doesn’t, he just sighs and runs his hands through his hair a few times in frustration before he gets out of bed and walks out to the bookshelf in the living room, Gracie padding softly behind him.

His eyes immediately drop to where In Cold Blood is tucked away, on the middle of the second from the bottom shelf like it’s some small, forgotten book rather than the one he goes to most often. He forces himself to look away from it, steadies his fingers which are twitching with want of it. He lets his eyes drift instead across the spines of the books in front of him, most old and battered, bought from the used bookstore around the corner.

His eyes land on the first book he ever bought, all those months ago -- a worn, paperback copy of Moby Dick. He’d read it over and over again in those first few months -- when it had just been him, alone in his apartment, with only his own morbid thoughts and memories and nightmares for company.

He takes it out and thumbs through it, page after page filled with his observations and questions in the margins, quotes underlined, words circled.

It’s been nearly four months since he’s picked it up, but reading through his notes still offers both a mirror and a window into him. A window into that moment of his life, into Frank Castle without a family, without a home, without a mission. But it’s a mirror, too, because he can see himself so clearly in those words -- in the melancholy of Ishmael, in the intensity of Ahab.

He finds himself reading through it for nearly an hour, jumping to passages he can almost recite by heart and re-reading his margin notes. It’s only Gracie’s whine from beside him that pulls him away from the spray of the sea, the rocking motion of the Pequod. He looks up from the book and glances over at the clock, shocked to find that it’s nearly 9:00 in the morning.

He sets the book down and pets Gracie before standing up.

“Sorry, Gracie,” he says, scratching her behind the ear before going to the kitchen and filling up her bowl with kibble. He gives her an extra scoop as an apology for being forty-five minutes late giving her breakfast.

He changes into a pair of shorts and a t-shirt while she eats, laces up his tennis shoes as she takes a long drink of water after finishing up her breakfast. He very carefully does not look at Moby Dick as he puts on Gracie’s leash, very forcefully does not think about it as he and Gracie go for their morning run.

It’s only a couple hours later, after he’s showered and changed, after he’s made lunch and eaten it and read The Bulletin from front to back, that he picks it up again.

There’s so much of him in it. In the way the book seems to crawl into his heart and reflect it back at him, in the way that he’s written so much of himself into -- his anguish and anger and fear scribbled as notes in the margins, his own arrogance and shortcomings underlined in black ink on the pages.

It’s not a perfect portrait of him. There’s not enough of the man he was, before -- there’s little of Frank, the marine, even less of Frank, the family man. Still, he finds a version of himself in it, the version of him that comes after.

After his life fell apart.
After there was nothing left but vengeance.
After there was nothing left, not even vengeance.

So much of him is in that book, laid bare. It’s terrifying in its realness, in its rawness, in its honesty.

It’s that last word that bangs up against Curtis’ question in his mind, against his memories of Karen -- her jumping at the clattering of silverware in a diner, her asking him where it all ends as she’s lit by the lights of the Verrazano-Narrows bridge.

So before he loses his nerve completely, he walks across the room with the book in hand. Grabs the photo of him and Gracie dressed in their matching shirt and bandana and tucks it carefully within the pages of the book, grabs his keys and calls Gracie to his side as he walks determinedly out of his apartment and down to his truck.

He keeps one hand on Gracie the entire ride over to Karen’s, the feel of her fur and the dampness of her tongue as she gives his hand a doggie kiss every now and again helping to keep him focused, helping to keep his truck driving in the direction of her apartment.

He stops a couple streets over and parks his car, walks slowly over to her apartment with the book in one hand, Gracie’s leash in the other. He loops the end of her leash around a stop sign pole and tells her to sit, then jogs over to the ladder and scales it easily.

He breathes out sharply once, then reaches over and drops the book and the photo onto the ledge. As nervous as he is to lay himself out so bare, so clearly before her, there’s also a certain kind of relief at doing it so many steps removed from her. At dropping off a part of himself without ever having to see the moment when she chooses to take another step towards him, or else chooses to recoil away from him forever.

He tells himself that it’s better to do it this way, that it’s practical instead of cowardly. He repeats it over and over again as he walks back to his truck, as he heads out of the city to David’s house. By the time he gets back to his apartment later that afternoon, he almost believes it.

It's two days later when he gets a present back from Karen.

He's running past her apartment with Gracie, expecting nothing but the low grade thrill he always gets when he runs past her place, when he looks up and sees the pot of daffodils sitting out on the windowsill.

He stops abruptly on the sidewalk beneath her fire escape, the movement so sudden that Gracie yelps a bit as her collar digs into her throat from the force of the stop.

He immediately drops down to one knee and loosens her collar, rubbing his fingers across her neck.

“Sorry girl,” he says softly, breathless in a way that he knows is only partially from the effort of running the last half hour.

He squints up at windowsill, trying to make out what might be waiting for him. It’s looks too big and heavy to be her simply returning the book to him, which he knows is a ridiculous fear to have but has weighed heavily on his mind in these last two days anyway.

He gives Gracie a few more rubs to her neck, then walks her over to the streetlamp nearby and loops her leash around it and tells her to sit and stay.

A few minutes later, he’s back down with a substantially heavy box under his arm. He almost wants to wait around for Karen, for any number of reasons, really, but right now because of the fact that she’d left her window half open and wedged the box underneath it to hold it in place. He’d closed it firmly before he’d descended down the ladder, but just knowing that it’s unlocked, capable of being easily opened and slipped through by any passing stranger sets off a wave of anxiety in the pit of his stomach.

He feels Gracie brush up against him and drops down to his knee to scratch behind her ears.

She lets him get in a few scratches, but it’s obvious that she’s far more interested in the box in his hands. Which makes sense, since he’s pretty sure it’s mostly for her seeing as the words Bark Box are stamped on the front of it.

He opens it up and finds an explainer card for what is apparently a subscription box meant to spoil Gracie every month. This month’s theme is apparently “May Flowers,” a small point of fact that makes him smile.

He -- with plenty of help from Gracie -- rifles through the box and finds two toys, a bag of treats and a rawhide chew stick. In the corner of the box, wedged between plush, stuffed flower pot and a rubber flower chew toy, is a mug with painted pitbulls on it. Inside is a gift card stuck in a plain brown envelope with an address written on the front in Karen’s firm, looping script.

He opens up the bag of treats and gives Gracie one as he looks up the address on his phone. He and Gracie walk over to his truck so he can drop off the box -- to her great consternation -- then keeps walking West from Karen’s apartment.

The coffee shop is just a few blocks down, a relatively nondescript brick storefront with the wide open windows and plush seating you might expect from any other coffee shop. He leans over and looks at the name -- Vigilantes, written in bold, blocky font on the front window.

He squints a bit at it and tilts his head, considering the name. He’s about to loop Gracie’s leash around one of the chairs when he sees a sign on the door that reads, “Dogs welcome and encouraged!” The corner of his mouth quirks up as he reaches out and opens the door, steps inside to the pleasant smell of coffee beans.

The walls are covered with art of the many different superheroes this city’s got zipping around it at any given time, interspersed with framed front pages of newspapers with headlines about aliens and science experiments gone wrong and gods from other worlds.

He walks up to the counter and is greeted by a kid who can’t be any more than 19, long dark hair falling in waves around his face. The kid smiles widely at him, energy practically buzzing off of him.

“Hey, hey, welcome to Vigilantes. Have you been here before?”

“I have...not.” He holds up Karen's gift in his hand. “Got a gift card.”

“Cool, man, cool. So, each of our orders is based on a different superhero or vigilante. For example,The Hulk -- the beans are roasted --.”

The kid’s voice fades into the background as he scans the menu in front of him. When he sees what he's looking for, he holds up a hand to him.

“Hey, uh -- can you tell me what type of drink I get if I order a Punisher?”

The kid -- Allen, according to his name tag -- smiles widely.

“Yeah man, sure, sure. That's actually one of my favorites. So, it’s just straight up black coffee, no fuss, no muss, nothing added. The beans are roasted at a shop here in New York -- little place in Saratoga Springs. It's this incredibly bold flavor with a kick -- oh, shit, sorry! I'm supposed to show you a bag, too, in case you wanna buy some -- hold on.”

He ducks down for a moment, then comes back up with a black coffee bag in his hand.

Frank grabs the bag of coffee and studies it. It's all black with a skull and crossbones stamped on the middle of it, the words Death Wish Coffee Co. circling around it.

“So, yeah,” Allen continues on rapidly, “it's called Death Wish Coffee, and like, perfect right? They say it's the strongest coffee in the world, which I absolutely believe, because this stuff will absolutely, absolutely kick your ass.”

Frank purses his lips for a moment to try to keep from smiling, then just bows his head towards his chest and laughs -- a deep, loud sound that comes from some place in him that only rarely sees the light of day.

He looks up and sees Allen looking at him with a confused expression and clears his throat, though he knows that there’s probably still a too-wide grin on his face.

“I’ll take an 8 ounce Punisher, Allen.” He holds the bag of coffee up. “And I’ll take one of these, too.”

He hands the card over to Allen, who smiles brightly at him.

“Alright man, cool, cool.” He looks down at the screen and taps it a few times. “Oh! You want beans or grounds? Because I gave you beans.”

“Grounds,” he says, handing the bag back over to Allen, who takes it and disappears beneath the counter for a second before coming up with a different bag.

“Here you are, man.” He swipes Frank’s card, then turns the screen around so that it faces Frank. “And just so you know, you had 50 bucks on the card originally, and you have 27 bucks left on the card after the drink and the grounds.” Allen smiles even wider as Frank taps for a 20% tip. “Oh hey! I think I know your friend who got you this gift -- Karen, right? Blonde, tall and, like, willow-y -- works for the Bulletin?”

Frank blinks rapidly. Her name catches him off guard, and he hopes that he’s managed to smooth out the longing in his expression to something flatter, more neutral.

“Uh, yeah, sounds like her.” He glances around the shop, imagines her walking in, her blue eyes bright and sparkling. He feels his expression falter. “She in here often?”

Allen makes a so-so motion with his shoulders, tilts his head back and forth.

“I mean, we just opened last week, so we haven’t had too many people come through yet, but she’s been in two or three times at least, I'd say -- on her way to work. I remembered her because there haven’t been many people who’ve bought a gift card, and definitely no one else who bought one for fifty.” He clicks his tongue, bounces up on the balls of his feet as he thinks. “And I just remembered her working at the Bulletin because she said that she doesn’t write up food or drink stuff, but that she’d pass our name along to the guy who does, which is good because -- .”

Jesus, this kid must drink the coffee by the gallon. He can practically feel him vibrating with energy.

“Yeah, that’s Karen,” he says, and he manages to shake himself free enough of his distracted longing to offer the kid a genuine smile. “She, uh, she knows I’m a big coffee guy. Always looking for the strongest stuff.” He grabs the cup that’s materialized in front of him during Allen’s long, rambling explanation and takes a sip, then whistles low and smacks his lips together. “And I gotta say, that does feel like a bit of an ass kicking.”

Allen smiles broadly at him. Frank wonders how the kid’s cheeks don’t hurt all the time from the force of his continued smiling, but also decides that it’s somewhat endearing in its own way.

“Yeah, right? It totally is.” He swivels the screen back around to face him. “So, also, there’s a dog bowl of water in the corner over there if you want to sit and chill a little bit with your dog. And treats, too -- homemade!”

Frank tips the coffee cup in Allen’s direction, then walks over to the recliner in the corner that he pointed out. There’s a jar filled with bone shaped treats next to him, and he promptly finds the biggest one and gives it to Gracie before he sits down.

It’s actually a pretty nice little place, all things considered. The decor on the walls is interesting where it might be kitschy, there’s a glass display case of some nice looking pastries, and he hadn't been lying when he said the coffee was the strongest he’s ever had.

Gracie finishes up her treat and stretches in front of him before laying down at his feet and resting her head on top of his shoe. To anyone that might be watching, he knows it must look like a quiet moment of contentment. And it might be, too, if he could manage to tamp down the excess of emotions that have been slowly and steadily rising up from the pit of his stomach ever since Allen said Karen’s name at the counter.

Because all he can think about is sharing in this place, in this moment with her. All he can think about is the wry look on her face as she watches him order a Punisher, the pointed way she’d order some other drink -- a Thor, maybe, or a Captain America. It’s absurd how clearly he can see the teasing glint in her eyes, how distinctly he can hear her laughter in the air. He thinks about the way she would brush against him as she laughed, the easy way he might knock his shoulder into hers to let her know he’s teasing. As if they’ve spent endless conversations laughing and joking with one another, as if they’ve ever had more than mere moments of lighthearted conversation.

It’s ridiculous, he knows, to miss something that you’ve never even really had in the first place.

But it doesn’t stop him from missing it.

“So, I didn’t realize that you and Karen had been in touch,” David says a few nights later, looking across the table at him.

He huffs out a sardonic laugh and sits back down heavily across from him, picks up his beer bottle and takes a swig before answering.

“So, what - you two -. “ He levels the bottle and between where David and Curtis are sitting. “You just gossiping about me while I’m in the bathroom?” He shakes his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t’ve asked you both to have a beer after all.”

Curtis laughs as David shrugs, a grin stretched out across his face.

“Gifts on her windowsill, Frank? Really? I was half-joking when I said that to you.”

“I don’t know why you’re even surprised,” Curtis says, leaning back in his chair and eyeing David. “You knew about the flowers on the windowsill from before. I just found all this shit out last week.”

“Which, by the way,” David says, narrowing his eyes at Frank, “I can’t believe you’ve been coming over twice a week for, like, over a month and you never mentioned this.”

Frank purses his lips, then shrugs a shoulder.

“You never asked.”

David huffs.

“I was trying to be, you know -- cordial or some shit. Wait for you to bring it up.”

“Not really much to bring up, David.”

Curtis laughs as David swivels in his chair and looks at Frank incredulously.

“You and Karen are leaving each other hats and photos and whatever other shit on her windowsill like you’re in some sort of 18th century, like, Victorian novel or something. That’s definitely something, Frank.” David narrows his eyes, tilts his head at Frank. “You do know we have email, right? The postal service even?”

“Nah, that’s not dramatic enough for Frank,” Curtis says, a truly shit eating grin on his face. “Man’s got a love for the theatrics.”

Frank scoffs and finishes up the rest of his beer, then looks across the table at the two men opposite of him and shakes his head.

“You know, I'd think you two would have something more interesting to talk about than how I spend my free time.”

Curtis just smiles at that while David leans in across the table.

“So, what’d you give her other than the photo of you and Gracie?”

He tilts his head, narrows his eyes at David.

“What makes what you think I gave her anything else but that?”

David shrugs.

“It’s not exactly reciprocal in nature, right? You leave Karen flowers and bullets, she leaves you coffee and a beanie. You leave her a picture, she leaves you a picture. It wouldn’t be even if she gave you and Gracie a gift and you just gave her a picture of you two, yeah?”

Frank shrugs, tries to keep a neutral expression on his face.

“Seems like you sure think you’re right.”

“That means you’re right, man,” Curtis adds in as he leans back in his chair. “Now I’m curious, too, Frank. We know that it’s gotta be something that tells Karen something about you or how you been doing.” He taps his fingers on the table, a thoughtful look on his face.

David glances over at Curtis.

“Why is that something that we know?”

Frank turns towards him as well, curious about his answer.

Curtis gestures towards Frank as he turns towards David.

“Well, that’s the pattern as far as I can tell -- Karen gives him things to let him know that she’s thinking of him, Frank gives her stuff to let her know how he’s trying to build a life that doesn’t revolve around vengeance.”

“That's - huh.” Frank sits back in his chair and purses his lips, nods as he considers Curtis’ words.

“You really didn’t realize that was the pattern?” Curtis shakes his head and huffs a laugh. “I thought it was pretty damn obvious.”

“Yeah, well -- sometimes Frank has trouble seeing what's obvious to everyone else,” David adds, grinning over at Frank, who has the sudden urge to both roll his eyes and punch David squarely in the chest.

He does neither, just reaches across the table and finishes David’s beer with one long swig.

“I left her a book,” he says, wiping his mouth before setting the empty bottle down in front of him. “Moby Dick.”

David and Curtis both give him near identical looks of exasperation and disapproval.

“Frank, what the hell,” David blurts out, at the same time that Curtis says --

“Are you serious, Frank?”

He shrugs.

“It’s one of my favorite books.”

“Makes sense,” David says, giving Frank a crooked grin. “Not exactly subtle though, yeah?”

Curtis is just shaking his head next to him.

“Jesus Christ, Frank. She gives you a nice shirt, and you give her a homework assignment.” He furrows his brows. “Hold up -- that doesn’t exactly follow the pattern you two have set up. So there has to be, I don’t know, some kind of specific reason for it.”

“A reason other than that you want her to stop communicating with you altogether because you gave her a 700 page novel about a whale,” David jokes, a slight tinge of incredulity to his words. “Moby Dick, Frank. Seriously?”

“Well, it was my copy of Moby Dick, if that makes you feel any better.”

David raises an eyebrow.

“It...doesn’t. Should it?”

Frank sighs and leans back, stretches his arm out across the back of the chair next to him. There’s a part of him that just wants to shut down the conversation completely -- shrug it off and stonewall the two, or just get up and pay his tab -- but it’s overruled by the part of him that knows that this is all part of building a friendship, of building his life back up from nothing. So he just sighs heavily and looks over at Curtis.

“I was listening to you, you know.” He makes a looping gesture with his hands. “Uh, what you said -- what you said to me the other night.” He fidgets a bit, taps his fingers along the side of the chair. “Karen -- she doesn’t really know me, she doesn’t...she can’t really know me.”

“That’s not all I said, Frank,” Curtis replies, shaking his head.

“Yeah, yeah, I know, but…” He rubs his hand across the back of his neck. “But it’s true, right? It’s -- .”

“It’s not the whole truth,” Curtis interjects. “If you remember, I also said that Karen could help you figure out what -- who -- you might be.”

“But she, uh, deserves to know -- should at least have the chance to know who I am. As much as, you know, as much as anyone can.” He folds his arms in front of him. “The copy that I left her...it’s the one I read, shit, at least half a dozen times when I first got my apartment. It has, uh, it has all my notes and shit in it, right? Shit I wrote in the margins, shit that I underlined. It just, it -- it has all my shit in it. It...it has a lot of me in it.” He swivels his head between Curtis and David. “Figured Karen at least should...she reads that, and it gives her a pretty good idea about me. Then, you know.” He shrugs and nods. “Whatever she decides.”

He sees Curtis and David glance at one another.

“Well, I think you're an idiot,” David says.

“Thanks David. Appreciate that.”

David gives him a wry look and shakes his head.

“Not for giving her a book -- for thinking that could change anything.” He looks around, then leans forward in his chair. “She met you when you were on trial for murdering 37 people, Frank. She's not gonna care that you have some weird affinity for Ahab.”

He has both the urge to argue with David and the desperate need to believe him. Gives in to neither and instead settles for giving David a long, inscrutable look.

“It's not,” he finally says, because he’s suddenly struck by the fact that two men sitting across from him know him better than anyone that’s currently alive, and that neither of them know much at all about what Karen is to him. At least, who she is as much as he can explain it.

He’s not quite sure he can handle any more lines of questioning about what Karen may or may not do, about who he is or isn’t. But he can talk about what Karen has done for him. He thinks the two men sitting across from him deserve at least that.

“It’s not…” David starts, a questioning look in his eyes. “You don't have a weird affinity for Ahab?”

Frank shakes his head.

“Nah, man -- it's not when I first met her. Not, you know, technically, at least.” David looks surprised, while Curtis just looks interested. “She was helping to protect this shitbag Kitchen Irish member -- Grotto -- and...”

Curtis raises an eyebrow.

“And you were…”

Frank shrugs.

“Shooting at Grotto.”

David, for some reason, looks infinitely disappointed in this story.

“Ok, so, not quite the meet-cute I had in mind for you two.“ He sighs heavily, like he’s just had some dream of his ripped to pieces. “I guess that is a more you story though -- meeting Karen when you’re shooting at her.”

“At Grotto.”

David rolls his eyes.

“In her direction, then.” David tilts his head and furrows his brows. “I’m going to assume that your second meeting was less, you know, guns and violence, since somewhere down the line she actually wanted to help you.”

He looks down at the table, scratches at a mark that’s probably been there for the last ten years, then licks his lips and looks back up at Curtis and David.

“Second time I met her, I was in police custody. Beat to hell, strapped to a hospital bed. They had this, this red fucking tape -- just this box around my hospital bed that no one was supposed to cross for their own safety or some shit.” The corner of his mouth quirks up, even though the memory can’t actually be described as anything even approaching pleasant. “Karen crossed it, though, ‘cause…’cause that’s just who she is.” At this, he can’t help but smile, thinking of her. The fearlessness, the determination. Thinks she would’ve made a hell of a Marine. “She was with the two attorneys on the case, and I just...I didn’t give a shit about them, about the case, about anything. I was just -- I was done, you know. Just really done.” He shakes his head. “But Karen, she was just getting started. She’d done all this research, you know, looked into my story, realized that something wasn’t right. That there was some shit going on. So she sees me, and she knows that I’m just some asshole who’s gonna end up dead if I don’t get my shit together, so she crossed that tape, right, she crossed that line. And she -- she shows me this picture of my family -- me, Maria, the kids at the carousel and…” He trails off, finds that he can’t meet either man’s eyes for a moment.

“How’d she get a picture?” David asks. “I wouldn’t think that’d be in your file.”

He looks up, lifts a shoulder in a half-shrug.

“She broke into my house.”

Curtis blinks rapidly at that, while David just shakes his head and lets out a small chuckle.

“You know, it’s no wonder you like her so much -- you’re both driven as hell, and neither of you have any kind of sense of self-preservation.”

Frank ducks his head down, thinks about the truth of the second part of that statement and frowns. He wishes that was one thing that they didn’t share.

He clears his throat.

“The whole time, you know, that whole trial -- it, uh, it mattered to her.” He glances sideways at both Curtis and David once, before looking back down at the table. “Finding out the truth about what happened to me, what happened to my family. It mattered to her that we did something about it.”

Even now, he can hardly believe that it’s true. He wonders if she knows what that meant to him -- to have someone notice that he was once a man, to have someone remind him what it meant to be more than a mission. He hopes she does -- hopes that their wordless exchanges aren’t limited to matters of safety and times of crisis.

(Another part of him, quiet but insistent, tells him that he doesn’t have to simply hope. That this is an exchange that doesn’t, needn’t be wordless. He ignores it. Finds that it isn’t as easy as it was before.)

Curtis rubs his temple, narrows his eyes at Frank.

“You mattered to her, Frank.” He waits for Frank to meet his gaze before he continues, picks up that prior thread of conversation like it hasn’t been over a week since they first started talking about it. “That’s what this tells me. It’s never been about your mission or your war. It’s always been you.”

He doesn’t say anything to that, just tilts his head back and forth, makes a noise that might be agreement, might just be him clearing his throat. He notices David and Curtis exchanging glances again, but can’t quite make out what passes between them.

Finally, David clears his throat.

“I guess it makes sense -- her wanting to make sure the truth came out. That’s what she did with Union Allied, too, right?”

Frank furrows his brows.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, that’s how she ended up working for your attorneys, uh --.” He snaps his fingers a few times. “Nelson and Murdock -- that’s it -- in the first place, right?” He frowns at the look on Frank’s face. “She got framed for murdering someone at Union Allied, Nelson and Murdock took her case on against the murder charges, turned out there was some shady shit going on at Union Allied that she knew about? I mean, stuff that went all the way up to Wilson Fisk.” He spreads his hands out in front of him, palms up. “Shit, Frank, do you really not know any of this? I mean, I didn’t even have to dig very deep for it -- few front page articles, connected a couple of dots.”

Frank crosses his arms tightly in front of him. David squints at him, takes in his posture, his expression.

“It bothers you.”

“What?”

“It bothers you that I might know more about Karen than you do.”

He grunts, raises his shoulders in a tight imitation of a shrug.

“Maybe it bothers me that you felt like you needed to look her up.”

“Frank, c’mon. I didn't know who she was. I didn't know how she fit into everything, and you weren’t exactly as chatty as you’re being right now.” He sighs. “I needed to know that I could trust her.”

“And what you found -- that made you trust her?”

David shrugs, the corner of his lip turning up in a small half-smile.

“I learned to trust you.”

Frank relaxes his shoulders and forces the scowl off his face, lets the air of his lungs slowly.

“Yeah, alright.” he mutters. “Ok.”

“You know, what you could do if it bothers you that David knows all this stuff about Karen that you don’t?” Curtis asks. “You could just ask her about it yourself.”

He chews the bottom of his lip, tilts his head, looks back and forth between the two men.

“I left her that book, right?” He scrapes a hand across the stubble on his chin. “We’ll see how she feels after it.”

He says it with a finality that signals that the conversation, as far he’s concerned, is over. And it must speak to his friendship with both Curtis and David that they simply accept that, easily turn the conversation to other, more mundane and normal aspects of their lives.

He’s glad to have them both here, together; knows he’s fortunate to have a sounding board and a guiding hand and sharpened steel knife when he needs it. But it’s exhausting, too -- laying himself open like this, pulling parts of himself and holding them up to the light.

Which is why it’s only a little bit later that he wraps up the night, citing an early morning run and a long boxing workout with Paul as a reason to head home before 10 p.m.

Curtis nods as David signals to the waitress for their check.

“So, this early morning run -- doesn’t by any chance take you right past Karen’s, does it?” David asks as he stands up to go.

“Maybe,” Frank replies mulishly.

David grins.

“Well, in that case, I fully expect to hear about you seeing Karen in person the next time I see you because she is not going to give a shit about whatever it is you wrote in Moby Dick.” He claps Frank on the back, then holds out a hand to Curtis. “Good seeing you again, Curtis.”

Curtis stands up, pulls David in for a half-hug.

“You too, David. We’ll do it again soon.”

David smiles at that, gives both men a final wave before he heads out of the bar.

Frank signs his receipt and stands up, stretches his hands above his head.

“You are though, right?” Curtis asks.

“I’m gonna…?”

“You’re gonna see Karen in person once you get your book back? You’re not gonna drag this out or wait for her to give you a goddamn, I don’t know, handwritten invitation or something before she finally convinces you that she really does want to see you?” He ducks his head down, raises an eyebrow. “You’re not gonna be a wallowing asshole, right, Frank?”

Frank purses his lips and nods.

“I -- uh -- yeah, Curt, yeah. I’m not gonna be a wallowing asshole.”

“Good, because that offer still stands -- I will kick your ass for being one.”

He huffs out a small laugh, shakes his head and glances up at Curtis.

“How are you on her side and you’ve never even met her?”

Curtis breathes in deeply, reaches out and rests a hand on Frank’s shoulder.

“I’m on your side, Frank. I always have been.” He drops his hand, crosses his arms in front of him. “You’d rain down hell on anyone that messed with Karen, wouldn’t you? On someone that hurt her?”

He narrows his eyes at Curtis.

“You know I would.”

Curtis tips his head in Frank’s direction.

“Well, you keep this up much longer, Frank, and that person is gonna be you.”

His early morning run does bring him past Karen’s apartment.

It’s a dark, cloudy day. There’s a weird, final cold snap of weather that has him wearing a sweater and his beanie for the first time in weeks.

Amidst the backdrop of the gray sky and gray pavement and sullen gray-toned brick is the pot of yellow daffodils, so bright it might as well act as a beacon to him from the down the street.

Sitting on the ledge of her window is his worn, battered copy of Moby Dick. He picks it up carefully and opens it, flips through the pages hesitatingly. He’s not quite sure what he’s expecting to find, not quite sure what might hurt him the most -- that there’s something within its pages that speaks to her lack of understanding of him, or that there’s nothing within it at all.

He breathes out a long sigh of relief when he sees that she’s written on nearly every page, forces himself to close the book with a sharp thwap because he can’t trust himself to stop wants he gets started.

He runs back to the car with the book gripped closely to his chest, keeps it tucked up next to him as he drives back to him apartment. Some practical, logical part of him knows that it’s no more or less from Karen than any of her other gifts to him, but it’s overshadowed by that deeper, more sentimental part of him that believes Karen has in some way looked into his soul and at least not found it wanting.

He opens the book up in the silence of his living room, his breath loud in his ears, his heart thumping painfully in his chest. A quick flip through reveals that she’s left nothing tangible in it; has instead chosen to leave pieces of herself as words on the pages -- answers to his questions, questions to his underlined passages, replies to his notes in the margins.

By now, he knows the story by heart, could simply read through Karen's margin notes and be done in a single afternoon.

But this gift is not a photo or a thing -- it is not a single moment, frozen in time, or a single object, static and unchanging. Instead, what he holds in his hands feels like something closer to a conversation, more intimate and real than the drawn out months of exchanges they've had by way of gifts.

He reads the first few pages of the novel, then reads his notes aloud, muttered softly under his breath. He flicks his eyes over Karen's written reply, his gaze moving slowly over her firm, slanted script, the words so completely her that he can almost hear her voice echoing in the emptiness of his living room.

So he decides to re-read the entire book again, decides that he can’t fully understand the conversation between him and Karen without falling back into the story at the same time.

That first day he has the book back, he has to put it down halfway through the third chapter when he looks up at the clock and realizes that he’s supposed to be on his way to the boxing gym. He grabs his gym bag and, at the last moment, throws the book in there, too. He knows he won’t have any time to read it -- especially not since Paul will likely make him run at least two extra laps for being late -- but it gives him a small sense of comfort just to have it nearby.

Paul makes him run through extra drills for being late, but he doesn’t mind -- it makes the time go by faster, helps him to forget the lingering presence of Karen in his bag by the door.

He barely has time to shower and change before he’s rushing off to Jeremy and Marisol’s house, making good on a promise to Mrs. Abaya that he’ll fix their dryer.

He’s five minutes later than he said he would be, but it works out fine because there’s no car in the driveway when he pulls up. He doesn’t mind. He knows Jeremy is perpetually late -- a point of fact that makes Mrs. Abaya call him an honorary Filipino in a fond tone of voice -- and it gives him time to sit on their front stoop and read through a few chapters of Moby Dick.

Even just as words on the page, she’s spelled out her compassion, her empathy, her reserve of steeliness. Even this far from him, even as just a haunting presence in the book, she pushes against him. Pushes him to think beyond himself, asks him questions that he desperately wants to try to answer, even if he doesn’t know how.

If you’re Ahab, does that make me Ishmael?

He pauses at those words, reads the question over and over again. Tries to imagine how she’d say them if they were two people sitting across from one another in a coffee shop -- if there’d be a teasing spark in her eyes or if she’d lean forward, a serious expression on her face, her blue eyes swallowing him up completely.

He’s shakes himself out of his daydream when he hears Jeremy pull up into the driveway.

“Tito Peter!” Emeline shouts, opening the door and leaping out of the minivan before Jeremy even has a chance to turn off the car. She launches herself into his arms and hugs him like it’s been weeks since she’s last seen him rather than just three days. She’s wearing a soccer uniform, the knees all stained with grass, her bangs stuck to her forehead with sweat.

“Hey honey,” he says, rubbing her on the back before leaning away so he can talk to her. “How’d you do? Did you guys win?”

A wide grin splits her face.

“Yea - yes, Tito! And I scored the winning goal!”

“Course you did, Emeline!” He wraps his fingers around her arms, raises them up above her head in a gesture of victory. “Nice job, sweetie. Wish I could’ve been there to see it.”

She sighs heavily.

“Maybe you can tell Paul to move your training sessions, Tito. Then you can come and watch me.”

He smiles.

“I’ll give it a shot, Emeline. Paul -- he’s pretty strict, but I think I’ll be able to convince him.”

Emeline lights up, bounces up on her toes.

“You can bring him along, Tito. He can cheer for us.”

“Alright, Emeline, you need to go take a shower while Tito Peter helps daddy with dryer,” Jeremy says, coming up behind her. “Hey Pete, good to see you,” he says, nodding to him and reaching out a hand. “Thanks for coming over, I appreciate it.”

“But daddy, how are you going to help Tito?” Emeline asks, a thoroughly confused look on her face. “You don’t know how fix a dryer -- that’s why lola asked Tito peter.”

Jeremy grins, glances over at Frank.

“Out of the mouth of babes, huh, Pete?” He turns to Emeline. “Well, I’m gonna hold his beer, for one. And then I’ll hand him a wrench when he asks for it. And then I’m gonna send him off with some of your lola’s lumpia that she told me to give him once he’s done.” He leans over and unlocks the door, gestures towards the inside of the house. “Now, off to the shower with you.”

She giggles, then rushes through the door.

“I can help better than you can, Daddy!” She shouts as she speeds down the hall. “Just wait for me, Tito Peter!”

Jeremy laughs, then gestures inside and follows Frank.

“So, hey, I really do appreciate this.” He’s glancing down at the stack of mail in his hands as he says it, a nervous of energy to him as he speaks. “It’s a new dryer -- well, new-ish -- so hopefully it’s nothing major and -- oh shit!” Jeremy’s face is a mixture of shock and excitement as he looks down at the opened letter in his hands, which then very quickly shifts into disappointment as he rifles through the packet of papers it’s attached to. “Oh shit. Oh. Shit.”

Frank shuffles from one foot to another, slaps his hands in front of him as he does.

“Everything ok, Jeremy?”

Jeremy looks up, blinks a few times and tries to smile.

“Yeah, God, sorry Pete.” He flips the paper around to show Frank the letter -- just long enough so that he can see the words “congratulations!” written in fancy lettering at the top before he turns it back around. “Emeline -- she got accepted into this really great private prep school. Great STEM program, you know? Our little engineer -- though God knows where she got that from.”

“So, that’s, uh, good, right? I mean, that’s where Emeline belongs.” He squints at the crestfallen look on Jeremy’s face. “What’s the problem then?”

Jeremy sighs heavily.

“There’s just no way, Pete -- no way that we can afford the tuition. School will cover up to a half of it -- needs based, you know. But the rest -- I mean, even paying half is too much for us -- we’d have to get private or outside scholarships and I’m not sure...”

He shakes his head.

“Doesn’t hurt to try though, right?” Frank asks. “See what’s out there?”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re right. There’s a general scholarship application that the school sends out to donors, so there’s a chance. Just -- damn -- I was hoping they’d cover a little bit more.” He folds the letter back up and sticks it in his back pocket. He smiles at Frank, though it's strained at the edges. “Anyway, we’ll figure it out. Let’s tackle this dryer first.”

They spend the next hour or so fixing the dryer, Jeremy and Emeline taking turns helping him. Jeremy mostly hangs back and lets Emeline run around Frank, asking questions and taking turns with tools. He tries to cover it up, but Frank can tell how defeated the other man looks as he watches his daughter unscrew the various parts of the dryer and put it back together.

He thinks about that look as he drives home, can feel the outline of a plan form in his mind. Once he gets home and takes Gracie for a walk, he’s mostly managed to fit it all together. It mostly depends on David, which basically means it’s as good as done.

He spends the rest of the night laying in bed, Gracie at his feet, Moby Dick resting against his chest as he reads.

He likes that Karen’s notes become more intimate, more direct as the book goes on, her voice so loud and present he can almost hear it in the quiet of this apartment. She challenges him easily, like she has since they first met. She also disagrees with enough to make him nervous, wary that they’ll break on something fundamental. But it never even skirts close to a line of rejection, to a place on incompatibility. Instead, she pushes him to re-think passages, pushes him to want to ask her about a word or phrasing or observation in person.

The whale isn’t Evil incarnate, Frank -- it’s nature, or the universe, or God himself. They don’t care about any of us the way Ahab thinks they do. They don’t care about us at all, really. There’s something sad and comforting about that at the same time, don’t you think?

He closes the book as he thinks about those words, thinks about a life in which a negligent God might be a source of comfort, thinks about what kind of life Karen has led for her to think that and just how little he knows about it.

Promises himself that he’ll ask once he sees her again.

“So, any news on the Karen front?” David asks the next day.

They’re sitting the shade of his house, the half-finished patio deck behind them. It’s a slow going project, made slower by the fact that David tends to forget what exactly it is he’s supposed to be doing at any given time. He’s not incapable, Frank’s found, only unmotivated. And he basically has no motivation to finish up this patio deck project seeing as it’s mostly to give Frank an excuse to come over in the afternoons. He thinks that there must be some part of David that is afraid that he’ll just stop coming over if he has no obvious reason to do so.

He wouldn’t, of course, but he doesn’t mind having something to do with his hands when he wants to drown out David’s rambling.

He shrugs his shoulders. He doesn’t want to lie, but he also isn’t prepared to discuss the truth

“It’s a long book, David.”

David chuckles.

“Yeah, Frank.” He shakes his head, gives Frank a rueful look. “Yeah, it is.”

He looks like he’s about to say something else, so Frank clears his throat to head him off.

“So, uh, listen. Wondered if you could do a favor for me?”

He tries to keep his tone light, his expression easy. It’s been nearly seven months now since it was just the two of them living together in that basement, where favors and plans meant murder and mayhem, but he thinks that those memories must not easily fade. They haven’t for him at least.

David must notice, because he looks more curious than anxious.

“Yeah, sure, Frank. Whatever you need.” He tilts his head. “What’s up?”

“The lady that runs the shelter -- Mrs. Abaya. She’s got this granddaughter, right? Smart kid, name’s Emeline.” David nods. “So, she got into this prep school but the tuition -- her parents are gonna have trouble paying it. I figure since I got all this money and no real reason to spend it, might as well do something good with it.”

David blinks rapidly and the edges of his mouth turn up in a smile, though there’s a twinge of confusion in his gaze.

“Ok, that’s, I mean, that’s great Frank. But I’m not sure where I come in.”

He stuffs his hands into his pockets, licks his lips.

“Well her parents -- they’re not just gonna let me hand over thousands of dollars. So, I’m wondering if you, you know, set up something that makes it look like she got a scholarship, right? You make it look good, make it look legit, so they don’t know it’s me.” He takes out a folded piece of paper from his back pocket. “So, that’s the school and the amount over the next four years and, uh, as much as I know about the process and Emeline’s application. Figure you can find out the rest -- whatever else you need.”

David reads it over quickly then smiles broadly at him and nods.

“Yeah. I can do that.” He pushes off from the side of the house, reaches over and pats Frank on the shoulder. “It’s a good thing you’re doing, Frank. You’re a good man.”

He looks away and shrugs, holds his hands out in front of him in a dismissive gesture.

“I’m not -- it’s just the thing to do. Emeline deserves it, so do her parents.” He’s almost embarrassed by how David’s looking at him, so he ducks down and picks up his toolbox. “Gonna get going but you’ll, uh, let me know when it’s done?”

David nods, gives Frank a distracted wave and a faraway smile that makes him grin. He wouldn't be surprised if everything was set up by the time he goes to bed tonight.

He stops off at a coffee shop that he likes on the way home. Or rather, a coffee shop that Gracie likes since the coffee’s subpar but the baristas all love her enough to keep the specific brand of treats that she likes for when he stops in.

He settles in the corner of the patio, hat pulled low against the midday sun, and opens up Moby Dick. He loses himself in the story, in the push and pull of Karen’s words, in how desperately he wants to believe in them.

Yes, Ahab wants revenge too, but he’s dragged this whole mess of people along with him and doesn’t care about how it affects them. He’s selfish and egomaniacal. You aren’t. You’re a good man, Frank, in a way that Ahab never could be.

He has to resist the urge to trace his finger over those words, has to stop himself from pressing them into the broken cracks of his psyche. He closes the book like it’ll provide some sort of barrier between him and those words -- a good man -- which he doesn’t know can ever really apply to him, doesn’t know if they ever really could.

His phone buzzes in his pocket.

He clicks open the text message from David and purses his lips, impressed.

Everything’s all set up. Jeremy Morgan should get an official letter in his e-mail detailing Emeline’s scholarship award in the next day or so.

His next text is a link, which Frank clicks on and then snorts when he sees the website it pulls up.

The Castle Foundation the header reads, bold white text on a black background. Underneath it, in smaller letters --

Proudly serving the needs of military families from underrepresented and minority communities

He spends the next fifteen minutes scrolling the site, clicking on all the different links, reading the about and history and FAQ. The entire thing is so polished and so thorough that even he almost has trouble believing it isn’t actually a real foundation.

He x’es out of the website and taps into his messages.

Thanks. A little excessive though, don’t you think?

Can never be too careful. Hope it goes well!

Goes well turns out to be a bit of an understatement.

On Wednesday, he shows back up at Jeremy and Marisol’s house, ostensibly to fix a broken dishwasher and is ushered into the kitchen by Jeremy, who cannot stop beaming at him. He walks in the room to find a cake, Emeline in a party hat, about a dozen different Abaya family members that he only vaguely recognizes and both Marisol and Mrs. Abaya crying.

He shoots a questioning look over to Jeremy, who manages to beam even more brightly at him, a feat which had previously seemed impossible.

“Sorry, Peter, I announced it a little early because I was so excited but -- we are celebrating our one and only darling Emeline going to the Horace Mann School starting next fall...on a fully paid scholarship until she graduates!”

He’s never been an exceptionally good liar, so he’s glad when everyone in the room turns towards Emeline and cheers out loud despite apparently already hearing this news. He wades through the crowd and gives Emeline a hug, is enveloped by one from both a teary Marisol and Mrs. Abaya.

He’s standing back from the crowd as half a dozen aunts start setting up catering trays and plates when he feels a tap on his shoulder, looks over to see Jeremy gesturing for him to follow him out into the hallway.

“Hey, I just wanna say, man,” Jeremy claps his on the shoulder. “Thank you so much for what you did.”

“What I -- what exactly did I do?”

Jeremy smiles.

“Hey, no worries, Pete, I didn’t tell anyone since I know you want it kept a secret. Just, you know, I get this email yesterday, right? This foundation I never heard of and it, I mean, it sounded almost too good to be true and their name wasn’t listed on the official foundation list that I got in the mail from the school. So I call the number on the website just to verify -- talk to the public relations guy there. Michael...something…” He snaps his fingers a few times. “Michael...Mike Roe!”

Frank barks out a laugh that he very hastily covers up with a cough and hopes that Jeremy doesn’t notice.

“So, uh, what’d Mike say?”

Jeremy grins widely at him.

“Says they’re a new foundation, just starting out -- which is why they hadn’t been on the mailer -- but a lot of money behind them. Anyway, we get to talking and -- well -- he finally says that you’d been the one to put in a nomination for Emeline.”

This time, he doesn’t have to pretend to be surprised.

“And hey, I get it -- why you didn’t tell me. In case it didn’t work out, right?”

Frank purses his lips and nods.

“But, damn man, did it work out. That must’ve been some nomination you submitted because Mike said they don’t normally hand out awards this big.” He shakes his head, breathes out sharply. “And I just -- I really appreciate it, Pete. It was gonna break my heart to tell Emeline we couldn’t afford it.”

He nods, looks away from Jeremy and shrugs.

“No big deal, Jeremy. Didn’t really do much, you know -- just told the truth, clicked a few buttons.”

Jeremy laughs and shakes his head.

“Well, either way, I appreciate it.” He reaches over and gives Frank a quick hug. “Now c’mon, let’s go in there and eat before we get in trouble by one of the aunties.”

Forty-five minutes later, Jeremy is walking him to the door, a plastic bag holding various tupperware filled with leftover food in his hands.

“So, the dishwasher is actually broken,” Jeremy says sheepishly. “That wasn’t, like, a ruse or anything to get you to come over here. I just figured you wouldn’t wanna sit and fix it while everyone was having fun around you.”

Frank shrugs.

“Wouldn’t’ve minded.”

Jeremy laughs.

“I believe it.” He gestures towards the living room. “Sure you don’t wanna stay a little longer? Pretty sure someone’s gonna break out the karaoke machine soon, so that’s always a good time.”

Frank smiles and shakes his head.

“Maybe next time. I -- uh -- have a book I’ve been trying to finish, so --.” He shrugs. “You know.”

Jeremy nods, waves him out the door with an enthusiastic smile.

He sits in his car for a moment and scrolls through the pictures on his phone until he finds the one he wants to send.

It’s Emeline, standing in the kitchen, a crooked party hat on her head, flanked by her parents and Mrs. Abaya, with Frank crouched down next to her. He hadn’t wanted to be included, had only agreed when Mrs. Abaya had shot him a stern look and given a pointed gesture to the space next to Emeline -- which makes him almost 100% certain that the secret of his ‘nomination’ is no longer actually a secret.

Emeline is holding up her acceptance letter to Horace Mann, her parents and Mrs. Abaya beaming. His smile in the picture, too, is wide and genuine -- Emeline’s excitement rubbing off on him, maybe. Or perhaps from the warmth of Mrs. Abaya’s hand resting on his shoulder, Emeline’s arm threaded through his -- that feeling of belonging, of family.

He looks at the photo for a long moment and finds that his throat feels tight as he does. He takes a deep breath in and clears his throat before sending the picture to David.

Went well. Guess you’ve gotten pretty bad at keeping secrets though, Mike Roe.

David sends back a thumbs up emoji, followed by a text a moment later --

Thought I shouldn’t be the only one to know that you’re a good guy.

It’s been almost a week and he’s only managed to get just a little more than halfway through the book.

This is partially because the story is pretty fucking dense to begin with, and each page is now filled nearly to the edges with some combination of his cramped letters and Karen’s looping script.

He also has a tendency to stop reading the moment he starts getting sleepy, which on some nights is embarrassingly early. He tells himself that it’s because he doesn’t want to accidentally gloss over or skip completely anything that Karen has written down, and yeah, it’s that, too. But there’s also the haunting memory of falling asleep midway through chapter 25 and dreaming himself into a conversation with Karen, her legs tucked up underneath her on his couch, Gracie sleeping in the space between them. He can still remember the way she’d tilted her head at him and asked a question he couldn’t answer in his dream, a question he now can’t remember in his waking hours. He’d reached out to brush her hair back from her face, an attempt to distract her that only succeeded in distracting him, an attempt he doesn't think he would've made in real life.

He’d woken up just as Karen had turned her face into his hand; had been breathless and wanting, a hopeless, desperate ache in the center of his chest.

So now he makes sure to set the book down now the moment he feels heaviness start to creep across his eyelids. He always picks it up again and reads it as he drinks his first cups of coffee, finds comfort in starting his day with Karen’s words on the page, her voice ringing in his mind and through the emptiness of his apartment.

But he also comes to realize that the other part of his slow progress is that he just has so much less free time now than in those first few months when he initially wrote himself into the book. Between training with Paul at the boxing gym and training with Gracie at the shelter, group with Curtis, afternoons at David’s and random invites to dinner and requests for handy work from various members of the Abaya family that he always gets paid way too much for (meaning being paid at all, despite the myriad of ways he tries to protest it), he finds himself with an increasing scarcity of time to just sit and immerse himself in the story of Ishmael and Captain Ahab.

He comes home late one night from some shitty bar around the corner of the gym -- a post-fight outing to celebrate winning his first official boxing match that had included some guys from the gym and David and Curtis, who had come to watch, and looks over at Moby Dick lying on his kitchen table, unread for the entire day. He sits down and taps his fingers idly across the front cover, realizes with a start that he’s somehow managed it --

Has managed, against all odds and at a pace slow enough to mostly escape his notice, to build a life for himself, to learn how to live life without waiting for the other shoe to drop. Has managed to fill in the silence with the sounds of something other than the quiet rustling of turned pages, something other than the sounds of his own labored breathing after a nightmare.

It fills him with a conflicting sensation of pride and frustration. Pride that he’s managed to build an after that he can look at with some small measure of satisfaction, frustration that it’s left him with only snatches of time here and there to indulge in this phantom, ongoing conversation with Karen.

So he starts to carry the book everywhere with him, slowly makes his way through it page by page as he's sitting at Vigilantes, or waiting for Emeline to finish her homework so he can check it, or at the dog park mid-day while Gracie sniffs around the fence posts. It gives him a small bit of peace -- knowing that even disconnected from him, she’s still managed to become interlaced into the pattern of his life, is still present in all the ordinary little moments of living.

There are times as he’s reading that he can picture her looking at his margin notes and then shaking her head at him. He pictures her looking up from the book and staring at him across the miles of asphalt and glass, imagines her looking straight through him with those wide blue eyes, their irises filled with a compassion and a sadness that he both wants to fall into and run from.

He thinks of this when he comes across one of her notes in the back half of the book -- a circle drawn around a question of his and a note next to it that reads:

Frank, stop. Of course not.

He imagines her reaching out to him as she says it. Imagines her leaning forward in her seat and brushing her fingertips across the back of his hand in an effort to make him believe her, him brushing his thumb against the soft skin on the underside of her wrist to let her know that he wants to.

Other times, he can almost hear her scoffing at what he’s written, can see her rolling her eyes at him in a way she never has in all their interactions together.

There’s a jaggedly written note at bottom of one of the chapters, one of his observations circled multiple times with an arrow to Karen’s reply, which is just:

Don’t be an asshole, Frank.

It makes him laugh out loud when he gets to it. Reminds him that he’s always been more than just the Punisher to her -- that he’s also just a man, just Frank to her. That he is someone she would cross red lines and red tape for to find the truth, someone she trusts enough not to be afraid of, no matter how much blood is dripping from his skin.

Some part of him sees that note to him -- the brazenness, the openness -- and remembers the steely-eyed honesty that Karen has always had when talking to him, the utter lack of fear when she pushes against his actions or his words. Can think nothing but of course -- of course they’d make him want to see her again, of course he likes that time and distance has not lessened the honesty between them.

Another part of him thinks that he must really be truly fucked if what he wants is to hear her call him an asshole in person.

“So, any movement on Moby Dick?” David asks the following Monday.

He’s been at David’s for close to an hour now, and has managed to accomplish nothing but to install four more of the frame joists. David has been essentially useless for most of it, though that’s no more or less normal than all the other times he’s come over.

Frank sets down his hammer, picks up his beer and takes a long drink before answering.

“Some.” He glances over at David, who’s staring at him with an intensity he thinks is a little much given the question and the moment. “She gave me back the book, left me notes in it. Been re-reading the whole thing. Still got a few more chapters to go.”

David nods, then eases back and rests his elbows on a tall stack of lumber.

“Good, good, that’s good, Frank.” He clears his throat. “So I, uh, got an interesting message from Madani for you.”

He furrows his brows and tilts his head at David, who gives him a crooked smile.

“You’re still talking to Madani?”

David nods.

“Yeah, well, I work for her. Officially. Well, more technically than officially.” He shakes his head and bites his lower lip, then huffs out a laugh. “Or actually, not officially at all, you know, but technically.”

Frank nods slowly, narrowing his eyes at David.

“Huh. How long’s that been going on?”

“Few months. Well, no. More than a few -- basically a month or so after, you know. Everything with Billy.”

“Weird that you didn’t bring it up before now.”

David sighs.

“Yeah, I know.I wasn’t trying to hide it or anything, Frank. I was trying to, to, you know -- .“

Frank tilts his head and raises an eyebrow, stretches his hand out in front of him with his palm facing up.

“You were -- ?”

David clears his throat, throws his hands up in front of him with his palms in front of him.

“I was trying to keep it all separate from you. Protect you, I guess.” He looks away from Frank and clears his throat, looks back up at him. “When you showed up again, I thought about mentioning it. But I didn’t want you to get back into that headspace, into -- into that place. Not when it seemed like you were working so hard to dig yourself out of it.”

Frank looks away from David, down at his hands, over at the unfinished deck. Looks back over at David and nods. Hopes that David knows him well enough to see the ‘thank you’ that’s implied.

“So, what’s this message from Madani?”

“It’s -- .“ David laughs, though it’s a mix of bewilderment and nervousness rather than straight amusement. “So, here’s something that I just found at the other day -- Karen and Madani...they’re friends.” He catches the look on Frank’s face and grins. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Madani asked her for help with something she’s working on for Homeland and I guess, you know, they really hit it off because now...now they apparently go out for dinner and drinks a few times a week.”

He blinks rapidly a few times. It’s not the last thing he would’ve thought to hear from David, but it’s pretty damn close. He has to take a few moments to process it. Once he does, he looks over at David, then tips his head forward and lets out a long, loud laugh.

“Jesus Christ, David. Karen and Madani -- friends.” He shakes his head, a grin still tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Goddamn, I wouldn’t want to be on those two’s shitlist.”

David smiles, then tips his head in Frank’s direction.

“Well, right now, that's you. At least for Madani.” He clears his throat. “She told me to tell you to stop being an asshole”

Frank purses his lips and frowns, gives a slow, small nod to David as he does.

“She, uh, a little more specific about what exactly? I’m kinda an asshole about a lot of things.”

“Kinda, Frank?” David laughs at the scowl that Frank gives him. “Well, you’re not really going out and, you know, punishing anyone lately, so what do you think?”

When Frank doesn’t say anything, David huffs out a laugh.

“About Karen, Frank. Obviously.”

He licks his lips, squints over at David. He mostly doesn’t want to ask his next question because he feels a little bit like some awkward middle school kid, passing notes and information through a long line of friends rather than risk talking to someone face to face.

He asks it anyway, because he’s too curious not to.

“She say anything else except not to be an asshole? Is there something in particular I’m supposed to stop being an asshole about?”

David shakes his head.

“No, but we can assume, right?” David clears his throat. “I mean, you are kind of being an asshole by not seeing her.” He glances over at Frank. “She write anything of note in Moby Dick for you?”

He shrugs, has to bite his lip to keep from grinning.

“Well, she, uh, she also called me an asshole.”

It must be a pretty poor attempt to hide his smile because David takes one look at him and laughs.

“Of course you’d find that appealing.” He shakes his head, chuckling to himself. “So I’m guessing I was right and she doesn’t give a shit that you have a strange affinity for Ahab?”

He pulls in his bottom lip between his teeth and lifts a shoulder.

“Haven’t finished the book yet.”

“Well, I’m sure when you finish it, I’ll still be right.” He steps away from the pile of lumber he’s resting on, stretches down to grab his beer. “And when you’re done, you’re gonna stop being an asshole, right?”

“That’s -- you know -- that’s a pretty big ask, David.”

David laughs.

“Well, you’re gonna stop being an asshole about Karen, at least?” He tips his head down to catch Frank’s eye. “That is the plan, right Frank?”

“Yeah, David.” He says, looking away then back at him. “Yeah, that’s the plan.”

David smirks.

“Good, because I don’t won’t have to protect you from Madani. I mean, I will -- I just, you know, don’t want to have to.”

Frank huffs a laugh.

“You will not have to protect me from Madani.”

David nods, satisfied, then steers the conversation away from Karen and Madani, onto more mundane things like the fact that he still can’t install a deck joist despite being shown how to on three different occasions. Sometimes Frank thinks he’d have better luck and faster progress working with Leo.

They do actually manage to finish installing the rest of the frame, and the work does a pretty good job of keeping his mind off of Karen for the rest of the afternoon.

He winds up thinking about her on the drive from David’s to the gym. Thinks about that picture of her outside the krav maga studio. Wonders if it was Madani that took that photo, wonders just how much shit the two of them are managing to stir up together.

He smiles at that thought, even as he ignores the low of hum of worry that it drags up within him, too. Madani is certainly no amateur and Karen is nobody’s fool, and he really did mean what he said to David -- he doesn’t envy whatever piece of shit winds up on the opposite end of whatever crusade those two decide to go on.

He wakes up the next morning nearly an hour before his 5:30 a.m. alarm goes off, his dream fading to the edges of his mind.

All he can recall are snippets of it -- a flash of blond hair in the sunlight, blue eyes hovering above his, the feel of soft skin beneath his fingertips. The images flicker in and out of his consciousness, like he’s looking at the dream through the slats of a fence. It’s so brief, so fleeting, but it’s still enough to set off a low buzz of want in his veins, to press against the inside of his ribcage and leave him just a little breathless.

He sighs heavily. It's a better way to wake up than from a nightmare -- heart pounding, mind racing -- but it still manages to throw him off balance all the same.

He runs his hands through his hair, one, two, three times, each one rougher than the last, then sits up and turns on the light. He looks over at Moby Dick on his nightstand. He'd tried to put it down the moment he felt his eyelids start to droop, but apparently it still wasn't soon enough.

He grabs the book from his nightstand and starts reading, tries to force the dream back from where it’s creeping into the center of his chest, tries to lose himself in the salty spray of the sea, in the mad ferocity of Ahab.

But of course it doesn’t quite succeed in helping him forget the dream either, because Karen is all over these last chapters, her looping cursive becoming more compact to accommodate the flood of words.

Towards the end of the book, she’s circled a passage he’d underlined and written a reply to his notes that spans the next three pages, that ends with:

Ahab had it wrong. There’s nothing preordained about the paths we choose to take -- there are just the things that happen to us, and the choices make in the aftermath. Sometimes none of the choices are very good, but we have to make them anyway. Sometimes we choose wrong. Either way, we have to go on living with what we’ve chosen to do. We have to make a life out of those choices. We have to at least try.

He has the sensation, one that has increased in frequency the further into the book they’ve gone, that what she’s writing is just as much about herself as it is to him.

He thinks back to what Curtis said that night at the bar -- that Karen leaves things to let him know she’s thinking of him, while he leaves things that tell her about himself. Thinks of how the exchange of this book has flipped that pattern, has been given back and forth in a way that takes on the other’s intention.

He’d offered it to her as a way to tell her about himself, true -- but it had also been a way to tell her that he was thinking of her. That he hasn’t stopped thinking of her since that night at the bridge when she’d asked where it all ended, when she'd ask him to think of his after. Then, the answer had only been never or in death, his after only defined by suffering.

Now...now, the answer is different for both those questions. That’s what leaving her Moby Dick was meant to do -- to draw a line from who he was that night at the bridge to who he is in the silence when the gunfire ends and to make her understand that drawing that line is only possible because of how often he thinks of her.

And what she’s given him in return is a way to see into her -- to look past the steeliness of her spine, the softness of her touch -- and understand how both can exist. This book is no longer just about him, it’s about Karen, too -- about how she sees the world, how she sees him, how she sees herself. She writes herself into her words, raw and real and intimate, puzzle pieces of who she is that he hoards, tries to fit together in some semblance of an image of her.

It can only ever be incomplete, but it’s still more than he’s ever known given the lack of opportunity, the lack of quiet, the lack of stillness; it’s still more than she’s ever offered to him before.

He thinks that would still the want in his veins, but it only ever serves to magnify it.

 The last Tuesday night group participant is barely two steps out the door when Curtis turns towards him and crossing his arms in front of him, and there’s something about the way he does it that makes Frank feel like he’s about to be reprimanded for something.

He’s pretty sure he already knows what it is.

“So, I got an interesting visitor after Monday night group.” Curtis says, an aggravated look in his eyes. “Karen came to see me.”

He freezes with a chair in his hands raised mid-air. Slowly brings it back down in front of him, grips the back of it so hard his knuckles go white.

“Yeah?” He asks, and he’s proud of the way that his voice stays steady.

Curtis purses his lips, taps his fingers on his bicep in a way that seems vaguely threatening.

“Yeah,” the word cut short, clipped at the end.

He’s tempted to ask how she’s doing, how she looked, if she was as happy as he’s been imagining since he got that photo of her. Realizes that each question is more ridiculous than the last to ask of someone that’s only met Karen for the first time.

He swallows thickly, rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet before he looks over at Curtis.

“How’d she know to find you here?”

“That picture you took, Frank. That’s why you stood where you stood, isn’t it? To let her know you were coming here, let her know you’ve been healing.” He nods his head. “She’s a journalist, right -- figured out when and where and who I was.” He points at Frank. “And you know what -- you are just damn lucky that I didn’t tell her to just show up on Tuesday night.” He shakes his head. “Part of me still wishes that I did.”

Frank looks down at his hands.

“Thanks for that, Curt.”

Curtis scoffs.

“You know what, Frank, you need to explain this to me before I really do get up from this chair and kick your ass.” He leans forward in the chair, rests his palm flat on his knee. “Because I thought you said you wouldn’t be a wallowing asshole. I thought you had committed to not waiting for the other shoe to drop. I thought Karen was -- is -- your friend.”

His head snaps up at that.

“C’mon, Curtis, Karen’s...” He trails off, not sure how to end that sentence.

“Well, is she?” Curtis asks.

“What?”

“Is she a friend?”

He shrugs, though it’s a stiff movement. He knows he should just say yes, because it’s not untrue, because it’s the easiest way to explain what Karen is to him. But it also feels wrong, because friend seems like such an easy word to hold the complicated swirl of emotion he feels when he thinks about Karen. It’s both too much and too little to describe what she is to him -- a person who has been ally and advocate and antagonist all rolled into one, whose name has been both an invocation and affliction, whose memory sets off a warning light behind his eyes and a low, steady burn of longing across his veins.

“She’s...important to me. You know that, Curt.”

Curtis looks askance at him.

“Yeah, I’m not sure I know much of anything, Frank.” He folds his arms in front of him. “Because I know you finished that book again almost two weeks ago. But you know what she told me? That she hasn’t heard from you since she gave it back to you -- not a photo, not a note, not another pot of flowers. Nothing.” He shakes his head. “And she didn’t tell me this, but she obviously came here trying to look for answers. She was here trying to figure out if you were ok, if something had happened to you. And the only thing I can think of that happened is that you decided to be ten kinds of asshole after all and just leave her hanging.”

“It’s not -- that’s not. I didn’t want to do that. I don’t.”

“Well, it’s what you’re doing, whether you want to or not.” He scoffs, then takes a long, slow inhale before he starts talking again. “What was in that book, Frank? The way she was talking about you, asking about you -- seems like all she wants to do is see you.” He leans back, crosses his arms again in front of him. “So why don’t you want to see her?”

He shakes his head, barks out a laugh that’s more bitter than anything.

“I do want to see her. I -- goddammit, it’s, it’s so...it’s so.” He exhales sharply and shakes his head. “It’s so fucking stupid how much I want to see her. I think about it all the time, you know? Imagining what she’s gonna look like, what she’s gonna say.” He huffs out a laugh and looks away from Curtis, runs his hand over his chin. “I mean, she’d probably call me an asshole one or five times, right? And shit, that’d be the least of what I deserve.” He glances over at Curtis, looks away, looks at his hands, at the way he’s twisted them around one another. “Believe me -- I think about seeing her all the time, Curt.”

“So why don’t you?”

He looks down, sinks further down into the chair. He twines his fingers together in front of his face, rests his chin atop his thumbs. He doesn’t say anything, just falls into the silence between them, lets it drag on and on.

Curtis closes his eyes and takes a deep breath in, lets it out slowly before opening his eyes again and sitting straight up in his chair.

“Is it Maria?”

Franks sucks in a breath at the sound of her name. He raises his eyes slowly over the edges of his fingertips until he meets Curtis’ gaze. Lifts his shoulders but still doesn’t say anything. It’s a question he’s been avoiding -- one that’s easy to, now, because there are so few people left alive who knew him as anything but Frank Castle: survivor, widower, Punisher.

“You’ve been making so much progress these last few months -- I didn’t want to bring her up unless I needed to,” Curtis says, his voice soft, almost cautious. “But now -- I think I do, don’t I?”

He drags his teeth over his lip, looks back down at his fingers, flicks his eyes back up to Curtis and nods once -- a small incline of his head that barely registers as a movement.

“I don’t dream about Maria the way I used to.” He says it quietly, his voice low in the back of his throat. As if he’s mostly saying it to himself. “If I close my eyes right now, I can still see her. Still see her smile, still remember the way she smelled, the way she felt.” He takes a deep breath in, lets it out slowly before he glances back up at Curtis. “But I don’t see her in my dreams any more. Not the way I used to.”

He chews on his bottom lip.

“I -- you know, I...I dream about Karen, sometimes. A -- a lot,” he stammers out, unable to look in Curtis’ direction. “Just -- just normal shit, mostly. Getting coffee, talking to her, arguing about Moby Dick.” He tips his head down and up again, darts glance between Curtis and the floor. “I try not to, you know-- I can’t even stay up late reading Moby Dick because all it does it give me dreams about her, about seeing her again. But I -- I can’t help it.”

Curtis reaches a hand out to him, fingers splayed, palm up.

“You need to be ok with feeling the good stuff, too, Frank. It can’t always just be about anger and sadness and regret. You’ve worked so hard to not have anger as your driving force forward. I don’t want to see you just turn around and replace it with guilt. You have to let yourself feel what you feel.”

Frank tilts his head, squints a bit at Curtis.

“You know, I said the same thing to Sarah once.”

It feels like a lifetime ago, now. In a way, he supposes it was.

“Yeah? You mean it?”

Frank shrugs.

“Yeah, for her.”

“But not for you.”

“Nah. Not for me.”

Curtis sighs, dips his head down, rubs his hand against his forehead.

“Why, Frank? Because it’s so different for you? Because you're the Punisher?”

He shrugs his shoulders, purses his lips and looks away from Curtis, drops his gaze down to his hands.

“Can’t really be the Punisher any more, Curt,” he says, a reply that answers the question without really answering it. That answers it as well as he can. He skims his eyes across the floor, the chairs in the room, then back over at Curtis. “There's no one left for me to punish.”

Curtis breathes in sharply.

“Except you,” He says quietly, his eyes wide with understanding. Frank looks down and bites down hard on his lip, then flicks his eyes up to meet Curtis’ for a quick moment before looking back down at his hands. “That’s what this is, isn’t it, Frank? Punishment?” Curtis tilt his head towards him, angles his face so that Frank is forced to meet his eyes. “That’s why you won’t see Karen -- even though you want to.” He softens his voice. “There’s no one left for you to punish, so now you have to punish yourself.”

He forces his gaze away, flicks his eyes back and forth between him and random spots in the room instead. It feels like Curtis is reaching in through his stare and taking out every hidden thought and feeling he’s kept stored away -- secrets he’s kept even from himself at times -- and bringing them out from the darkness, shining them up against the brightness of day and of truth and of time.

It feels painful and liberating at the same time, makes him want to draw closer and close himself off.

“You don’t have to spend the rest of your life avenging your family, Frank,” Curtis says, his voice soft, his tone gentle. Like he’s trying to ease Frank into the words, like he’s throwing them out as a careful lifeline.

Frank glances back down at his hands, chews on the corner of his lip.

“Without it...it feels like forgetting them. Like I’m trying to.” He looks up at Curtis. “I don’t want that.”

Curtis shakes his head.

“There are ways to remember them that having nothing nothing to do with suffering Frank -- other people’s or yours.” He pauses, leans forward in his chair. “I think it’s right to want to remember them, Frank, and you should. But it’s worth it to try and do more than remember them. It’s worth it to try and honor them, too.”

Frank drops his hands into the space between his outstretched legs, folds them one on top of the another, and taps a finger against the back of his hand.

“And how do you think I should do that?”

Curtis licks his lips, takes a deep breath in.

“I think you already know, Frank. What do you think Maria would want for you?” .

Frank gives him a long, unblinking stare. It’d be the wrong question to ask if it were anyone else but Curtis. Because how could anyone else possibly know? But Curtis is the last living person in his life who knew Maria -- ate her meals, heard her stories, probably listened to her complain about Frank at some point. He is the last living person in his life that Maria loved, too, and who loved Maria.

And he is the last living person in Frank’s life who would know when the answer is the truth, rather than just a reflection of his own hopes and wishes.

“I think she’d want me to be happy,” he finally says, surprised at how easy it is to reveal, only vaguely surprised at how right it feels.

Curtis nods slowly.

“She would, Frank. She loved you, and she was good to you and she wanted good for you. She’d want you to be happy, especially now.” He waits for Frank to meet his gaze. “She’d want you to at least try.”

“And you think...you think this -- doing this, seeing Karen -- that’s the best way to remember them? To honor them?”

He draws his brows together at the center of his forehead, narrows his eyes at Curtis, who simply nods at him.

“I do. I think sharing their memory with people you care about is how you remember them. And I think living a life that makes you happy, that has all the things they’d want you to have, all the things they gave to you -- that’s how you honor them.”

He clenches one hand in a fist, folds his other hand on top of it, holds them against his chin. He closes his eyes as he turns over Curtis’ words in his mind, thinks about memory and forgetting, looks closely at the separating line between avenging and honoring. Wonders where deserving and earning fit into it all.

“It’s worth a shot, right Frank?” He opens his eyes and looks over at Curtis. His are elbows resting on his knees and he his hands out in front of him, palms facing up. “You said it yourself -- you aren’t the Punisher any more. So maybe try figuring out something different this time. Shoot for happiness instead.”

Frank breathes in deeply and looks down at the floor, lets the breath out slowly before he looks back up at Curtis. Nods, once -- a short, small tug of his head that’s almost imperceptible.

It feels momentous anyway.

He licks his lips and nods again, the movement bigger, more obvious this time. He’s almost there, could almost go on without asking -- but he knows that this last, worrying question will keep digging at the back of his mind until he does.

“I do wonder, you know -- sometimes.” He clears his throat, flicks his gaze over to Curtis and away again.“I think maybe -- maybe this, all this -- maybe it’s more than I deserve.”

Curtis gives him a gentle smile, a half-shrug.

“Maybe, Frank.” He tips his head to the side. “But what about what Karen deserves?”

He lets the question hang in the air between them for a long moment.

Frank grabs it from the air, finds that he has a dozen different answers to that question -- all of them beginning with more.

Curtis studies his expression.

“I may not know everything, Frank, but I do know this: Karen knows what you’ve done, she knows who are you, knows who you aren’t -- and she isn’t running away. She wants to stay.” He pauses, then leans forward in his chair. “She wants to see you, in spite of and because of everything she knows about you. Whatever else you might think about her deserving more or better or whatever self-sacrificing shit you got running through your head right now -- the simple truth is that she wants to see you. Don’t you think she at least deserves that?”

And what can he say to that, except the only real answer there is --

“Yeah, she does.”

He spends the entire car ride home replaying his conversation with Curtis in his mind. Sits down at his kitchen table with Moby Dick laying across from him, stares at it and imagines that Karen is there in its place instead.

He flips through the book, the story that is now a composite of Ahab’s and Karen’s and his own. Stops when he gets to the section he’s looking for, rereads one of Karen’s final notes -- a trailing sentence written below one of the last scenes of the book:

We can be more than the stories told about us, Frank.

He closes the book again, leans back in his chair and looks towards the ceiling. Thinks about the stories that have been told about him, the stories that he’s told Karen, the precious few stories they’ve shared with one another.

He thinks of everything that Karen already knows about his past -- the broad strokes laid out in stark facts and figures in computer databases and official government files, the smaller details laid down by his own meandering stories to her. He thinks of everything he doesn’t know about Karen -- her past, apparently easily uncovered by a quick internet search; her present, steeped in loneliness, in the fight against it that he desperately hopes she’s winning.

It’s true that they’ve never really had the time, the space, the moment to indulge in anything even approaching normal. And it’s true that even despite this, there’s a connection between them, an intimacy -- one that has only ever been communicated in wordlessness: in the press of her forehead against his, the brush of her breath across his eyelashes, the feel of her arms wrapped around his shoulders.

But what’s also true is this: he has never asked for her own story, has never thought to delve into the specifics, has never paused to consider just why she offers up the entirety of herself in pursuit of the truth while offering so little of her own story to those around her. He wonders if it’s because she’s used to not telling it, or if she’s used to never being asked.

He wants to be the type of person who asks. No, not the type of of person -- He wants to be the one who asks. Who keeps asking. Who never stops letting her know that she matters, that she deserves to be known.

He wants to be the one who knows more than the stories that are told about her.

He flips to the very last page and rereads her ending note for what feels like the thousandth time. Traces over the words with his fingertip, feels them slide up his shaking hands and push out the trembling terror in his heart. Lets them blossom into hope instead.

When can I see you?

He wakes up even earlier than usual the next morning, gets to Vigilantes just as they’re opening for the day.

He orders a large Punisher to go. Shuffles back and forth on his feet, half hoping that he won’t run into her, half hoping that he will. He nearly sprints back to his car the moment he gets his order, checks and re-checks his rearview mirror to make sure there’s no telltale sign of blond hair flashing behind him.

The drink is half empty by the time he gets home, and he thinks that it definitely earns its title as strongest coffee in the world given how fidgety he feels. Though maybe it’s nerves and anxiety and excitement rather than the high volume of caffeine coursing through his veins.

It’s something approaching agony -- the prospect of the hour and a half wait until 7:00 am, a time he tells himself is appropriate to contact any normal person without them wanting to tell you to fuck off immediately. He goes on a forty minute run, takes a nearly twenty minute shower. Spends the next half hour after that pacing restlessly in his apartment, alternating between pretending he has the presence of mind to sit down and read a book and pretending he has the focus required to make a sandwich for himself.

He winds up reading the same two sentences over and over again, making a sandwich that has three slices of cheese, no meat and mayonnaise that he’s almost sure has been expired since he got Gracie.

A quick glance at his phone tells him that it’s five to seven, and really, there’s not a lot of difference between 6:55 am and 7:00 am, all things considered. But he’s so wired from nerves and caffeine and eight months of longing that he thinks even the slightest deviation from his plan would feel like an a bad omen.

So he forces himself to sit down at his kitchen table, fingers tapping across the cover of Moby Dick, grounding himself in the movement, in the tangible reminder that Karen wants to see him.

When the alarm finally, finally does go off, he freezes -- as if he hasn’t been waiting for this moment since the minute he woke up, as if he hasn’t been thinking about it since he came home last night.

(As if he hasn’t been dreaming of it for months now.)

He sits down at his kitchen table and takes Karen’s business card out from his pocket, a last parting gift from Curtis the night before.

It has the same number on it that he’s had stored on his phone for these last eight months -- the same number he’d told himself might no longer be hers on those nights he was tempted to call it, the same number his thumb has hovered over time and again but never touched.

He takes a deep breath and sets the card down, picks up his phone in one hand and the Vigilantes coffee cup in the other. He clicks on the camera and positions his phone in front of him, takes photo after photo after photo -- shifting the angle of the camera, rearranging the placement of his features. What he wants is to convey a sense of apology and hopefulness and excitement in his expression all at once; at the very least he wants to not look angry or bored, which is the expression his face inadvertently tends to take on when he isn’t smiling.

He clicks on Karen’s name in his phone and even that -- even just the act of tapping on her name -- gives him a thrill that’s as exhilarating as it is embarrassing.

He opens a new text message and inserts the photo that he just spent far too long taking --

Him looking directly at the camera, expression some approximation of hopeful and honest -- he thinks (hopes) -- the coffee cup covering half his face as though he’s drinking from it. The large, blocky lettering of Vigilantes is clearly visible and, just beneath it, written in his own crooked handwriting --

This Friday, 7am?

He hits send before he can talk himself out of not doing so. Feels a strange sense of awe at the ease of sending it to her -- at the knowledge that he could’ve done this months ago, that he might have never done it at all.

He puts his phone on the kitchen table, face down. Tells himself that Karen probably won’t respond any time soon -- that she has a job to get ready for, a day to begin. That the last thing she is expecting is some early morning text from someone who’s spent the last eight months as an object outside her window sill. That the last thing he deserves is for her to send him a quick reply -- not when he’s given her nothing but silence these last two weeks, nothing but irregular snippets of his life in the last eight months or so, nothing but a memory wrapped in sadness and gunpowder even before that.

He breathes in deeply and shakes his head, reaches for his coffee cup and takes a long drink of the long-cooled coffee.

Nearly drops the entire thing in his lap when his phone buzzes.

Of course, he does actually accidentally drop it -- but he at least has the presence of mind and the built-in reflexes to move aside in time and let it splatter all over the floor.

Gracie gets up from her bed in the corner and lets out a whining yawn, stretches out before padding over to him and resting her head on his knee. He reaches down to pet her, realizes that there’s a tremor in his hands as he does it.

He turns the phone over and clicks on Karen’s text message. Laughs out loud with relief and euphoria and something that kinda feels like it’s approaching delirium.

She’s sent him a picture in return, something that manages to both calm his nerves and set off a buzzing just beneath his skin. Her blue eyes are wide and sparkling, bright against her pale eyelashes and pale skin. He can’t be sure -- half her face is blocked by a plain cardboard box -- but he thinks she might be smiling. Her hair is down, the waves more pronounced and slightly darker than he ever remembers seeing it. He looks closer at the picture and realizes that it’s damp, that her skin has that fresh dewiness to it that he associates from just emerging from the shower.

He takes a sharp breath in, chews on the corner of his lip to distract himself from the sudden spike of yearning in the center of his chest, from the quiet sort of intimacy that the photo implies.

He moves his eyes onto the rest of the photo, to where the bottom half of her face is covered by a cardboard box. When he sees the block lettering that reads Bark Box that’s stamped across it, he laughs, even if he’s more than a little disgruntled that it blocks him from tracing the contours of her chin, her lips, her jawline.

Written beneath the words Bark Box is Karen’s own swirling script, bold and bigger than he’s used to seeing --

Bring Gracie!

And beneath that, written in slightly smaller text --

(Don’t worry -- there’s something in here for you too, Frank.)

He chuckles to himself. Spends the next few minutes studying the photo, overwhelmed by the the words she’s written to him, at the existence of this photo at all. It’s a reminder that Karen is no stranger, despite the strangeness of their connection one another. That she sees him, no matter how much he tries to stay hidden.

He looks at the copy of Moby Dick laying on the kitchen table, the photo in his phone, the bag of Death Wish Coffee sitting on his countertop. Glances over to the shelf, where the picture of Karen in his beanie is propped up against his copy of In Cold Blood -- no longer kept separate and hidden, because the only one he’d been hiding it from was himself. Because he recognized that he no longer needed to.

He knows that if he were to walk into his room, the blue beanie she gave to him would be on top of his dresser, that the plaid shirt she gifted would be hanging in his closet, that Gracie’s matching bandana would be draped over the side of his bed frame.

Everywhere he looks, he’s reminded of her, of what they’ve built between them in these last few months -- a framework constructed on photographs and flannel, on sprawling notes written across the pages of classic literature.

He laughs out loud, a sound that’s half joy, half bewilderment, finds himself wholly consumed by the sensation that he’s both a dumb and lucky piece of shit. Because he realizes that he doesn’t, won’t have to make room for Karen in the life he’s built for himself -- she’s already there.

He re-reads his favorite parts of Moby Dick that night before bed.

Or rather, he re-reads all his favorite things that Karen has written about Moby Dick. All of it seems more real, more present, more raw now that seeing her again is a fast-approaching reality rather than an ever-fading dream.

He tries to catalog everything he wants to ask -- about all things she’s written in the book, all the things she’s done in the last eight months, all the things he doesn’t know about her.

He reads and re-reads and re-reads her last note to him, can almost hear her asking

When can I see you?

Softly, her breath brushing up against his ear, her voice nothing more than a whisper. He drifts into that place between dreams and waking with that thought repeating in his mind, finds himself falling into a scene that’s more memory and dream --

It’s him and Curtis from the other night, wrapping up their conversation, saying goodbye. Everything playing out like it did in real life, except in this dream world they’re standing in his dimly lit living room rather than the harsh fluorescent lighting of the church basement.

“I’m gonna see her,” he says, the warmth and excitement and awe battling against a rising tide of anxiety. “I’m gonna see her,” he repeats, louder this time, as if he can will it into being that very moment by the force of emotion in his words. He huffs a laugh, then licks his lip and tilts his head. “But what happens after that?”

Curtis narrows his eyes at him momentarily, then chuckles softly.

“I don’t know, Frank. That’s living, right? Figuring it all out.”

Frank huffs a laugh.

“You know, I gotta admit -- I thought you’d have a better answer than that.

Curtis smiles.

“That’s life, Frank. Time to figure out how to live it again.”

He nods slowly at that and smiles, lifts a hand in goodbye and turns around.

“Hey, Frank?” A voice says behind him, and here is where he knows he must have sunken fully into a dream.

Because the words are quieter this time around, the voice higher, the tone shot through with affection.

He turns around, a hushed oh escaping from his mouth as he faces Karen, her eyes bright in the dimness of his living room, her smile radiant and warm. She’s lit with a soft glow of some cheap lamp behind her, beautiful in a way that he thinks has nothing to do with the fact that he’s dreaming.

He knows what she’s going to say next, knows the words because they’re the same ones Curtis spoke to him the other night.

But where Curtis was teasing and glib, Karen is tender and honest.

She steps in closer to him and cups his face in her hands, brushes her thumb across his cheekbone and smiles.

“Welcome back to the land of living, Frank.”