Matt didn't know why he had woken up, he was so exhausted that he'd anticipated sleeping through most of the day. But there was a frantic edge to his heartbeat, and his hands had automatically curled into the sheets, as if his body was getting ready to launch itself up and out of his room.

He spent several seconds controlling his ragged breathing- and that, at least, made sense. He did have several broken ribs, and the anxiety humming under his skin wasn't helping matters.

Still, there was nothing unusual happening in his building or the street outside, and he hadn't had any nightmares for once, so there was no reason for the way his heartbeat was still a little too fast.

"Make it stop please god make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop."

He'd finally gotten himself under control when he heard the pleading. It was soft and desperate, and so incredibly quiet.

"Please please please please please."

Her voice cracked with pain, and it set Matt's teeth on edge to hear it. He was having a hard time finding where she was, though, and he suspected he might have a mild concussion because he also couldn't hear anything around her, just her voice.

"It'll be ok, just get up and go. You're ok, you're ok, you're ok-"

She kept repeating it over and over again, and he could finally hear her surroundings. She was alone, which confused him a bit, until he realised who exactly he was listening in on. The woman from last night.

"Oh god, I'm out of my meds. This day is going to suck."

He clutched at the sheets a little tighter when he heard her start crying, soft and careful like she didn't have the energy for anything more.

Matt continued to listen to her for several long minutes, not quite sure what was wrong, before he remembered her mentioning that she'd have a migraine the next day. He winced, knowing he was the cause for her pain.

It was several minutes more before he realised that he'd woken himself up because he had been subconsciously listening to her, and he sighed, knowing he'd have to begin filtering her out. It was too easy to accidentally listen in on her, the same way he'd done to his neighbors when he'd first moved in. All those people living next to him, and he'd had to spend an entire month learning to filter them out and treat them as white noise.

She was still crying, drinking her third cup of coffee and sluggishly putting on her shoes, still chanting you're ok, you're ok, you're ok.

He really should start filtering her now.

"Foggy. Foggy. Foggy. Fogg-" Matt fumbled for his cell phone, answering it groggily.

"You got any plans for the day? I was thinking of going to that new bakery that opened up, and thought to myself- who freakishly always knows what the best pastries are going to be? Or when something is stale before wasting money on buying it?" When Matt didn't respond right away, Foggy continued, "didn't think that'd be a hard question. I'm talking about you. Wanna go?"

"Yeah, yeah that sounds nice Foggy. I don't think I'll be up to it until later today, though. I overstretched my ribs last night at the gym and getting out of bed is going to be a production."

"What do I keep telling you man? You've got a good enough thing going when it comes to the chicks, you don't need to add on being perfectly chiseled too."

"Who says it's for women? Maybe I just want to finally be able to body-check the bicycle carriers that keep knocking me down," Matt said, smiling into the phone.

"Alright, yeah, that sounds like a worthy goal. Go forth with your crusade of spite workouts. I'll swing by your place around three, that good for you?"

"I think I'll have managed to drag myself down the stairs by then."

"Bye Matt. You need me to bring an ice pack over?"

"No, thanks, I'm good. Bye Foggy."

By the time the conversation was over, she had already left.

Work went about as well as could be expected. They'd recently had to cut back on the number of free print pages everyone got due to a grant they relied on falling through. So on top of having a killer migraine, she'd spent her day arguing with people.

"Yes ma'am, I know last month you were able to get fifty for free, but unfortunately we don't have the funding anymore-"

"Don't have the funding? How much could it possibly cost? A ream of paper is what, five dollars? It's gotta cost less than a hundred a month. Are you telling me that you're so bad at budgeting that you can't even swing a hundred a month on paper? What a waste of taxpayer money."

"Ma'am, we spend more than three hundred a month on paper, which is about thirty-six thousand dollars a year. We, as a library, decided that programming and books for the community was more important than providing a service that people can get elsewhere."

"But it costs money everywhere else!"

"Yes it does. And if you'd like, I have a list here of locations and their average prices-"

"Fuck you, this is ridiculous! You can't just deny me a public service!"

"I'm not denying you anything, ma'am, I'm simply letting you know of a new policy change. And if you continue to curse at me, you will have to leave the library for the day."

"I can't believe this!"

She'd had to deal with similar conversations her whole day, and at four when she finally had her lunch break she was almost too tired to move. But she'd forgotten her lunch that morning, and she was hungry, so she sucked it up and walked across the street to her favorite pho place. Well, more like down the block and across the street, but it was all semantics, really.

It was on her way back that her day went from horrible to pure hell.

She was waiting for the crosswalk to turn, scrolling through her phone to see if Vanessa had texted her back yet, when one of their regular library customers made an appearance.

He'd been banned from the library for a week last Thursday, and there were still several days yet before his exclusion was up. He'd been talking loudly on his phone, and when they'd asked him to take it outside he had completely lost it. There'd been a lot of cursing, several threats, and an overturned chair. Frankly, she was disgusted that he hadn't been permanently banned, but the final decision wasn't up to her.

They stood quietly next to each other, but while she pretended not to notice him at all, he stared right at her. Not knowing how to properly handle this situation, and feeling incredibly unnerved, she decided now was the best time to call her health insurance back about the denial letter they'd sent her. Maybe if she was completely occupied, he'd get bored and wander off.

So while she continued to wait at the crosswalk, she also impatiently waited on hold with her insurance company. Yet still, he stood there staring at her. And still, she refused to acknowledge him.

The crosswalk finally started beeping at them, and she shakily began to cross the street before even making sure that no one was going to run the light. He was barely half a step behind her, crowding her space, but she refused to speed up, not wanting him to know she was intimidated.

He followed her the whole way to the library, and just before she went to step inside, he roughly bumped into her, causing her lunch to splash all over the sidewalk, spilling onto her shoes and up her tights. He continued to walk down the sidewalk, for all the world looking like he hadn't been following her on purpose, and had merely been walking in the same direction as her by some coincidence.

With a curse on her tongue, she went to pick up her now wasted lunch, which was of course the exact moment she finally reached an actual person on the other end of her phone call.

"Feel free to call us back when you're willing to have an actual conversation, ma'am," the person snippily said, before hanging up on her.

She was left standing outside the library doors, with soggy tights and a dead dial tone, no lunch and no information about the denied claim. She pinched her nose tightly, looking into the front doors and watching an argument occuring at the front desk. She had four more hours of this, and her migraine had only eased up just enough for her think that maybe death wasn't her only option.

She almost cried in relief when her shift was finally over at eight. Her entire lunch break had been spent on hold with her insurance company, and she didn't leave the conversation with good news. Which, based on her day, made sense.

While she was relieved to be headed home, she was also incredibly warry after the encounter she'd had earlier in the day, and so she was thankful that she wouldn't be taking her usual route home today- she was stopping off at the pharmacy to pick up a refill for her migraine meds. Still, the walk home afterwards was spent in nervous anticipation, anxiety crawling up her spine and making her shoulders feel stiff, which hadn't helped her migraine at all despite the pill she had taken before even leaving the pharmacist.

Once she finally reached her apartment, she felt all the stress of the last two days catch up with her. Her body slumped in on itself, and it was difficult to coordinate her thoughts with her body, so she spent longer than normal trying to jiggle open her sticky lock.

Finally closing the front door behind her, she slowly slid to the floor and buried her face in her knees, breathing deeply in an attempt to control herself. When her phone chirped at her she lifted her head just enough to read the text message Leanne had sent her.

Hey! I know you've been busy all day and probably couldn't call, so I just wanted you to know that Bret was discharged a couple hours after you left, and he's doing fine! Thanks so much for waiting with me and calming me down. I know fixing a broken arm it isn't the worst surgery to get, but having you there really helped. Love you best!

Shit. She'd been so caught up in herself and the drama of having a terrifying masked stranger in her home that she'd forgotten all about her best friend. How could she be such a horrible person? How do you forget about someone who had been a friend for more than twenty years?

And just like that she was sobbing, unable to do anything else with the stress that felt like it had permanently settled in her bones. It was deep, painful sobbing, and she felt like she was horribly overreacting but she couldn't stop herself. She really needed to get ahold of herself- yes the last couple days had been stressful, but really, crying this often wasn't going to solve anything.

Mrrp.

"I know. I know I'm being ridiculous, it's really not all that bad," she responded to her cat, finally calming down several minutes later. "I'll just eat some peanut m&ms then go to bed."

Slowly stretching out, she made as if to stand up, but winced at the migraine that had come back full-force due to her crying "maybe also take like twenty ibuprofen pm. It'll work out."

She continued to sit on the floor, quietly crying, for close to twenty minutes before she had enough energy to stand up and shuffle to her bedroom. She quite literally passed out several minutes later, not even having the strength to take her pho-soaked tights off.

Matt's day had improved significantly the moment he met up with Foggy. His friend spent the entire day trying to talk Matt into being closed every Monday, without success.

"Come on Matt! Isn't this great? Wouldn't you like to spend every Monday enjoying ourselves while the sad-sack crowd has to go to work. I don't want to be part of the sad-sack crowd anymore, Matt."

"Foggy, we're only closed today because they're fumigating. Besides, I thought you wanted to make money, and you can't do that if we're closed three days a week."

The new bakery had been delicious, and he'd enjoyed flirting with the owner. She was a delightful seventy-year-old who had told him he was full of shit. Foggy had exasperatedly told him later that she had clearly been a pin-up girl in her youth, the same amused frustration he had whenever Matt decided to be just a shade too friendly.

Headed home just after seven, he decided to read up on past cases involving similar circumstances to Karen's. She'd been acting a bit off lately, and he suspected whatever she was doing might require a lawyer down the line. Their lack of clients allowed him plenty of opportunity to prepare himself.

For the second time that day, he was once again jerked into awareness by the sound of crying. Though calling it crying was really an understatement, this sounded like full-body sobbing. The kind that came with a life falling apart.

Realizing who it was pretty quickly, Matt groaned in frustration at himself. He'd thought he had managed to filter her out, he'd heard nothing from her when he'd arrived home past seven. Yet here he was, shortly after eight at night, listening to her cry yet again.

This didn't sound like it was just over a migraine, though. It didn't have the same sound as earlier, when she had been silently crying over how much pain she was in. If he concentrated hard enough, he could hear the way she curled tighter into herself, the soft grind of the bones in her hands as she clutched them together tightly. The way her breath caught in her throat and never completely filled her lungs. This was a breakdown, and he felt like a voyeur by listening in.

"I know. I know I'm being ridiculous, it's really not all that bad."

She snapped back to herself quickly, leaving Matt frowning over her words and wondering just what had happened to her during the day. It wasn't his business though, and he needed to stop eavesdropping on her. The last thing she needed was him being a party to her private life.

"Maybe take like twenty ibuprofen pm. It'll work out."

Resigning himself to the long month of work it would take to properly filter her out, he decided to spend the rest of his night meditating. Before he'd properly started, he heard her fall into bed, still crying even in her sleep.

The first time Matt entered the library he felt like a stalker. A feeling that was made all the worse by the fact that he was, in fact, being a stalker. He didn't think that having good intentions really allowed him the privilege of the moral high ground in this situation.

He'd woken up that morning, and after several hours had gone by he'd realized that he had successfully blocked her out. It had been a pleasant surprise, and he had high hopes that it meant he wouldn't need to spend so long actively working towards filtering her.

Only he'd started to get worried shortly before lunch. She'd been doing terrible yesterday, what if she had actually taken too many ibuprofen? Or her migraine had messed with her balance and she had fallen down the stairs? What if she hadn't been paying attention to her surroundings- something she did even when she was healthy- and had been mugged on her way to work? And he knew she'd opened her windows again, so that was a whole other thing that very easily could've been a problem.

In short, he was worried that he hadn't heard her this morning because something had happened, and not because he was getting better at filtering out unwanted sounds. He was a bit surprised by the level of worry he carried, but he was just as concerned for Claire, and he did owe her for helping him.
So here he was, on an early lunch break, carefully making his way into the only library in Hell's Kitchen.

She wasn't at the front desk when he arrived, and the library was surprisingly busy enough to cause him difficulty in pinpointing her, so he'd asked to be escorted to a nearby chair where he could listen for her.

"Mica! Good job being a banana today!"

What?

"Alright everyone, story time is almost over- we've got just enough time for one more song, or one more book- which do we want to do?"

"Banana song!"

"Again? Are you all sure? Ok, ok, one more time. Let's get our banana peels ready- wave 'em up hiiiiiiigh, wave 'em down looooow-"

Right. She'd mentioned that there was another Mica in her story time, he'd thought she was just trying to be personable when she'd said it. Apparently not.

She was doing fine, and he had worried over nothing, though he could tell she was still in pain because of how stiff she was holding herself. Still, she was fine, so he could go eat an actual lunch on his break instead of sitting in the library.

"And now it's time toooooooo go bananas! Go bananas! Go go bananas!"

He continued to sit in his chair, twisting his cain in his hands while he listened to her finish the song. Her lack of embarrassment while she swung around wildly and sang slightly off-key was amusing, and it was a much more pleasant thing to listen in on than the argument happening at the front desk; something about printing limits.

"Oh man. You guys are getting really good with your lefts and rights, I'm super impressed. Unfortunately story time is over today. Show of hands, how many of you are planning on gettings books before leaving? Wow! That's a lot of books getting checked out! I'll meet you all upstairs and help you check out when you're ready."

There was a chaos of sound as twenty kids grabbed their stuff and rushed up the stairs- Matt frowned to himself at this, he hadn't realised she was downstairs and he didn't like that it had escaped his notice- and in the noise he temporarily lost track of her. Once the kids had all massed in the children's area on the opposite side from him, he was able to hear her again.

He wasn't surprised that she was singing, and he thought it might be the same song she'd been listening to in her car the other night. This time, though, she seemed to know the lyrics, instead of haphazardly guessing at them.

He forced himself to stop listening in, once again reminding himself that he was supposed to be trying to filter her out, not follow her around. Still, he continued to sit in his chair, letting himself get lost in the goings-on of the library.

There was a young woman upstairs stealing one of the books, and a kid down the way arguing with his parents over the book he wanted. He could hear the employees in back gossiping about a customer they all hated, and could smell the burnt TV dinner someone was throwing away in the break room. There seemed to be a never-ending printer whir, and it felt almost hypnotic in its constant background noise.

"Hey Olivia! How'd story time go?" The woman at the front desk, the one who had helped him find a chair, broke through his thoughts.

"It went well, they all actually wiggled left when I asked them to, even Page who keeps getting lefts and rights mixed up. There was a new family here today, too, the kid had the cutest coke bottle glasses."

Olivia. It felt like another invasion of her privacy, knowing her name without her telling him. He shouldn't be at her work, he shouldn't be listening in to her going about her life, he shouldn't be spending this much energy worrying about her. The guilt of it constricted his throat, and he stood to leave.

He didn't have enough time to side-step her before she was running into him, the books she had been carrying falling to the floor with a loud thump.

"Oh no, I am so sorry! I should've been paying attention, I was just so focused on getting these books in order that I didn't see you standing there. Are you ok?"

She was already picking up the fallen books, and he kneeled on the ground to help- spreading his hands out on the ground and searching for the nearest one, trying to appear as if he didn't know exactly where all ten of the books were.

"It's fine, I stood up rather suddenly," he said, standing up while clutching four of the books. It was true, he had stood up rather suddenly, but he hadn't expected her to be walking so close to the chair he was sitting in- there was a whole stretch of library for her to walk in.

"Thank you so much, and again, I'm really sorry," she made to reach for the books he was holding, not seeming to realise he was blind. He continued to hold them in his arms, looking just to the right of where she was standing.

"I have a question, if you've got the time?" he heard himself say.

"Of course, how can I help?" He could hear the fatigue in her voice, and felt the familiar guilt creep back up his throat. He shouldn't be keeping her from doing her job, just because he couldn't stop worrying about her. All day he'd wondered if her migraine was gone, if she'd made it to work ok, what had caused her to break down the night before, why she had left so early in the morning and arrived home so late at night.

There was no true reason to be worried about these things. Except. She kept her windows open, even after a masked stranger that she was terrified of had been in her apartment. She showed up to work the next day, even knowing that a potentially dangerous man knew where she worked. She drove down back alleys in the wrong part of town and two in the morning. She was so unobservant that a blind man could quite literally sneak up on her. The fact that he knew exactly where she was wasn't important.

He worried about Claire, too, especially since there was a strong possibility that the Russians could find out where she lived. The difference was that Claire didn't spend her nights making long strings of questionable decisions. True, she had let him into her home, but she was also an ER nurse who knew first-hand what he did to criminals. She wasn't helping him purely on gut instinct and a vague story she'd heard about in the news. Unlike Claire, Olivia had let a potential kidnapper into her car. Unlike Claire, it wasn't Olivia's job to save people.

"How do I get a library card?"

And just like that, Matt knew he'd be stopping by during some of his lunch breaks. Probably more lunch breaks than he'd be willing to admit to.