"You're up early."

Sarah glanced over her shoulder and saw Lauren propping herself up on her elbows and squinting at her sleepily. She was right that it was still early—the sun had only just come up. Of course, for those who had barely gotten any sleep the night before, it seemed awfully late.

"Yeah. I have a lot to do today," Sarah said softly as she slipped her shoes on. She pinched the bridge of her nose, hoping to ward off the headache that was already starting to build somewhere behind her eyes. "I'm sorry."

"I feel like a one-night-stand who's getting the brush off," the blonde muttered resentfully, before letting her head fall back against the pillow again.

"Hey," Sarah leaned over and nudged her friend to stop her from drifting back off. "When does Greg get back into town?"

"Mmm?" Lauren murmured, clearly only half-listening. "I think maybe the day after tomorrow. He has some big meeting this week he can't miss."

"Good. I'll call you to check in, but I'm not going to be able to stay here with you," Sarah said apologetically. "Maybe you could get your mom to come down and spend a few nights, if you want someone."

"Why?" The sleepiness was gone form Lauren's voice as she struggled to sit up more, now giving Sarah a suspicious look. It was rare that either of them ever recommended Lauren spend more time with her mother. "What's going on?"

Sarah's first instinct was to tell her that nothing was going on—when had it become second nature to lie to her friend? She had to stop herself, shaking her head as she picked her phone up from the nightstand and opened the picture message with its accompanying foreboding message before handing it to Lauren.

Lauren looked at the screen for a long minute as she processed what she was looking at. "What the hell? Who sent you this?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?" she repeated, sounding alarmed.

"I mean, I have a pretty good idea," Sarah clarified hastily. "It definitely sounds like Ronan, and I can't imagine who else it would be. But I don't know for sure yet."

In reality, Sarah did know for sure that it was Ronan. Matt had called her back last night after checking out her apartment, and he'd let her know that Ronan's scent was all over it—a thought that was nearly enough to make her gag. But she couldn't very well tell Lauren that Matt was able to pick up on things like that.

"Ronan. The one who tried to..." Lauren trailed off, but Sarah tensed up anyway.

"That's the one," she muttered unhappily as she pulled her sweater on.

"Why are you not freaking out? Is this not a freak out thing? Because it feels like it should be. "

"I am freaking out," Sarah admitted. "I just...I need to do something about it. I can't sit around and think about how much I'm freaking out. It'll just make it worse."

"So, where are you going?"

"The hardware store."

"Right. To buy...hammers. So you can hit people with them," Lauren guessed.

Sarah shot her a funny look. "To buy stuff to change my locks. And maybe another deadbolt, too."

"Is your landlord going to care that you're changing the locks on a rental?"

"I haven't seen that guy since the day I signed my lease," Sarah said. "I don't think he cares what we do so long as he gets his rent on time." Which, if her finances continued the way they had been, might not be guaranteed for much longer.

"You shouldn't go back there. Why not stay here?"

"Lauren, no—"

"I'm serious. Even after Greg gets back, he can just, like, sleep on the couch," she said, waving her hand carelessly over her husband's potential sleeping arrangements. "You can stay here with me."

Sarah flashed a sad smile as she regarded her friend seriously.

"No. I can't. You know that. I need you safe. Both of you," she said significantly, nodding to Lauren's stomach. Then as an afterthought, she added, "And Greg, too."

It looked like Lauren wanted to argue, so Sarah pressed on firmly.

"While we're on the topic of you being safe: You can't be randomly showing up at my apartment now. Not for a while, at least. I don't need you running into anyone else who might also...be there unannounced."

To her relief, the other woman didn't protest. Instead, she just looked frustrated.

"I want to help."

"I know."

"I could help you set up some elaborate trap like in Home Alone," Lauren offered hopefully.

"I'll keep that in mind as a backup plan," Sarah said. She was about to get up with Lauren spoke again.

"Is he helping you with this?" she asked quietly, picking at a loose thread on her blanket. "The man in the mask, I mean."

"Yeah," Sarah answered after a pause. "Yeah, he is. I called him last night when I saw the text."

"What did he say?"

Not much. Matt had seemed frustrated that she hadn't told him earlier about the ghost calls, which she had to admit she probably should have. He had wanted to go to her place and check it out immediately, but she had convinced him to go to her father's place first and make sure nothing was wrong. The creepy texts had come in a few hours before she read them, anyway—whoever had sent them was surely gone already. Matt had reported back that there was nothing out of the ordinary at her dad's, but that her apartment had reeked of cigarette smoke and cheap rum. He could smell it from the fire escape, which was endlessly weird to her.

After a short discussion, she'd decided to remain at Lauren's for the night. Unlike her own apartment building, this one had security cameras and a doorman, and there was no reason to believe that anyone knew she was there. So, unable to sleep, Sarah had passed the hours last night by slipping a pair of Lauren's headphones in and watching YouTube tutorials on her phone on how to change the locks on her door. As soon as the sun came up, she had quietly slipped out of bed, hoping to leave without waking her friend up.

"He said that he'll find him soon," Sarah reassured her, despite the fact that she wasn't sure she believed it herself. "He's good at that stuff."

"I hope so." The tight worry didn't leave Lauren's face.

"I really have to go now. I'm sorry; I'll call you later." Sarah stood up from the bed and shouldered her purse. "You should go back to sleep. It's Saturday."

"Wait, wait, wait," Lauren said, holding her hand out so that Sarah could help pull her out of bed. "I have things to send you home with."

Despite Sarah's protests, Lauren insisted on loading her down with an entire bag of food and alcohol before she would let her leave. As Sarah left with a full bag of what appeared to be every grocery item Lauren had in her kitchen, she couldn't help but feel grateful to have her best friend back on her side, even as things seemed to be looking worse.

The feeling had faded by the time she got back to her apartment, where she stood outside of her door for a long time before she convinced herself to go inside. Matt hadn't been happy that she was going back home, but he had begrudgingly admitted that there was nothing dangerous left in the apartment.

Sarah slowly walked through the apartment, looking for the signs that Ronan had been there. They were small, but noticeable. The most obvious sign was that all of her photographs were now missing: the assortment of pictures from college she had on her fridge, the old family portrait that had been hanging on her living room wall, even the small photo of her and her dad from her first piano recital as a child, which had been sitting in a frame on her desk.

Swallowing down the disgusted lump that had formed in her throat, Sarah turned away from her desk, only to be met with another disturbing sight: there was a dress laid out on the bed that she hadn't put there. She walked closer and recognized which one it was right away: a simple floral dress, nothing scandalous. But she remembered that she had stopped wearing it to work shortly after she started at Orion, because it always attracted Ronan's attention even more than usual. She wasn't sure what he had hoped to achieve by leaving it out for her to find, but it only made her angry.

She snatched the dress off the bed and threw it in the trash. Then, feeling as though that wasn't enough, she yanked the sheets of her bed too, throwing them in a pile on the floor to be washed. Or maybe burned, depending on how she was feeling later.

Suddenly everything in her apartment felt incredibly dirty, and she wanted to fix it. She moved from room to room, scrubbing every surface she could reach. She cleaned her shower and emptied her fridge, washed all of her dishes and threw all of her towels in a pile to be washed. Obviously, Ronan couldn't have gotten his grimy hands on everything in her apartment, but cleaning it all was one small thing she had control over, and she found it to be surprisingly therapeutic.

But once everything had been sprayed and scrubbed and wiped down, the anxiety returned to Sarah's chest, and it only worsened once it got dark outside. She had already changed the lock and installed the new deadbolt hours ago, but the peace of mind it gave her had been brief. So she dragged each of her dresser drawers out of her bedroom and dumped them out onto the floor of the living room, hoping that the mechanical process of sorting through her clothing—something she hadn't done in a long time—might help keep her mind occupied.

When Matt's familiar knock came at the window that night—earlier than usual—it wasn't unwelcome, if only because Sarah desperately didn't want to be alone anymore. She paused the show she'd been playing for background noise—the Spanish soap opera that she and Foggy had bonded over—upon hearing the knock and pulled herself to her feet, stepping over several different piles of clothing to reach the window.

The two of them had kept in touch over text throughout the day—a condition of her returning to the apartment alone—so she didn't need to catch him up on the missing photos or the dress. She had hoped that would mean they could put off discussing the topic altogether, as even thinking about it made her head spin. But she had no such luck. As soon as he got to her place, Matt was firing off questions about the man—who she now assumed must have been Ronan—that she had seen in the alleyway a few nights prior, and about the number that had been calling her.

"And none of this struck you as something you might have filled me in on?" he asked, after she had explained everything that had been going on more fully.

"It—it didn't sound like anything worth bothering you with," she said halfheartedly. "Sometimes people stand around in alleyways. And silent calls aren't that weird."

Matt pulled his mask off and tossed it on the table before running an agitated hand through his hair, causing some of it to stand up at odd angles. "Did you block the number?"

"No."

"Why not?" he asked sharply.

"Well, I was thinking he might call back while you're here. I thought maybe you could do your, um...super-hearing thing and see if you can pick up on anything to help us figure out where he is," she said hopefully.

Matt just jerked his head in reluctant agreement. "Don't answer otherwise. And don't reply to any messages he sends you."

As it turned out, Bossy Doctor Matt—as Foggy had dubbed him—was nothing next to Bossy Bodyguard Matt, who seemed to have no trouble ordering her around in much the same way he had when they first met.

"I'm not an idiot, Matt," she pointed out. "I'm not going to do anything to encourage him."

Matt halted his pacing with a frown at her words.

"I know you're not an idiot," he said quietly.

"I'm glad. So, are you...all done yelling at me?" she asked, slightly exasperated.

He threw her a dirty look—Clearly not done, then—but seemed to get the point she was making. With a frustrated sigh, he sat down on the arm rest of her couch, moving his head slightly as he finally took in the state of her living room.

"Why is everything you own all over the floor?"

"I'm cleaning," she explained, to which he gave her a confused look.

"This is cleaning?"

"Well, I'm...organizing, now. I already cleaned everything. I don't like the idea that he was in here touching my stuff. And I needed to clean it anyway since I'm hosting a baby shower here in less than a week—assuming that I don't get murdered in my sleep first."

Matt's face darkened slightly, and Sarah quickly changed the topic, not wanting to trigger another lecture on safety.

"You're not usually here this early," she noted. "Couldn't find any bad guys to beat up tonight?"

The vigilante didn't look fooled—or amused—by her quick topic change, but he answered anyway, relaxing slightly.

"The opposite, actually. I finally managed to track down the base of this drug ring operation I've been looking for. Found them all in an abandoned studio a few blocks from where I had originally been searching."

"So, finding a building full of people that want to fight you is a...good night for you?"

"It was more the fact that I didn't need stitches afterwards," Matt said wryly. "And I managed to get in touch with an officer I trust, so I know the police will actually deal with them. Figured I'd call it a night before my luck ran out. Come make sure everything was alright here."

Sarah shook her head in faint disbelief. "I would think you'd want to go home and celebrate by actually going to bed before three am. Do you actually sleep?"

Matt laughed, tilting his head back and resting it against the wall. Sure enough, he did look drained.

"I fall asleep at work sometimes. Does that count?"

"I'd fall asleep at work too if I was my own boss," Sarah said as she got up from her position on the floor. She kicked a few high heels out of her path as she made her way to the kitchen. "Do you want a beer? Since you're done with the crime-fighting for the night."

Matt threw her a doubtful look. "Is it from the same place you got that vodka?"

Sarah made a face as she grabbed two bottles out of her fridge and popped the lids off. "I'm still not ready to think about that liquor without gagging. And no, it's not. This is the good stuff. Lauren gave it to me."

Matt took the bottle she offered him. "How did everything go with her?"

His tone was casual, but it was obvious that he had been waiting for the topic to come up. It made sense—he had just as much of a stake in it as Sarah did.

She leaned against the dining room table, facing Matt's position on the arm of the couch a couple feet away.

"It went well. Like, really well," she said, trying to reassure him. "Even with the phone calls and everything near the end. Having Lauren back in the picture and being able to actually talk to her about some of this...it makes the rest of it seem, I don't know...more bearable."

Matt took a drink from his beer, then hesitated slightly before asking, "How much did you tell her?"

"A good bit of it. Pretty much everything to do with Ronan and Jason. With your parts, I had to...do some editing," she said carefully, glancing sideways at him. "I skimmed over a lot of the, um...early parts."

A familiar look of guilt crossed Matt's face as he nodded slowly. "You thought she'd change her mind about going to the police? If she knew how afraid you used to be of me?"

"No. She wouldn't go to the police if I didn't want her to. But was difficult enough to get her to look past the...conflicting reputations you have in the news," Sarah said, throwing him a cautious glance, but his expression was carefully neutral. "I didn't see any reason to make the conversation even more complicated by going into how we used to be. She just wanted to know if I trust you now. And I told her I do."

Matt seemed slightly caught off guard by the statement, but after a moment he gave her a crooked smile.

"Also, pregnant women get all weirdly protective. I think it's a maternal instinct thing," Sarah continued. "I'm just concerned for your personal safety."

"I appreciate the concern," Matt said with a short, surprised laugh, but his smile quickly faded. "I'd say you need to be more concerned about your own personal safety, though. You're in more danger than I am."

"I have one person that wants to kill me. I get the feeling you have a lot more, just based off of your choice of extracurriculars."

"None of those people know where I live," Matt shot back. "Which brings me back to you staying in this apartment."

"What else am I supposed to do? Just hide from Ronan for as long as it takes to find him?" Sarah asked. "I still have to go to work. Ride the subway. Go to the grocery store. I can't just stop living my life because of this. I'll go crazy."

"I know, I just...I told you that I'd keep you safe. That's what I'm trying to do."

"You can't be there to protect me all the time, Matt," she pointed out softly.

"No, I can't," he said resignedly. He had a contemplative frown on his face, tapping his index finger against the beer bottle as he appeared to think about something.

"What?" she asked him suspiciously.

Matt just took a drink from his beer, not answering her right away. She waited impatiently for him to bring the bottle down from his lips and get to whatever he was contemplating saying.

"I'm going to ask you a question," Matt said carefully. "And I'd like you to keep in mind what you just said about trust, and not take this the wrong way."

She eyed him warily. "Okay."

"What would you do if I attacked you right now?"

Sarah's eyes widened. "Wow. Why would I take that the wrong way?"

"I'm not going to attack you," he elaborated. "It's a hypothetical situation."

"You could have opened with that."

"What would you do?" Matt prompted again, ignoring her indignant tone.

"What, are you testing me or something?" she protested. Matt simply shrugged and she let her mouth fall open slightly. "Oh, my God. You are."

"I'm not testing you," he said. "I'm...curious. About what your plan is for if something happens and I'm not around."

"My plan? Am I supposed to have a plan?"

"Stop stalling and answer the question." So, we're still in bossy mode, then.

"I don't know. I'd probably run away," she admitted defensively. "I'm not a fighter. I'm a...run away-er."

Matt tilted his head as he thought about her answer, before taking another long drink from his beer.

"Do you want to be a fighter?"

She blinked. That wasn't what she had expected. "What?"

"I could teach you," Matt said hesitantly, as though he wasn't particularly sure about the idea, either. "Some of the basics, at least."

Sarah stared at him. "You want to teach me...how to fight people?"

"More like self-defense," Matt said. "Or, my version of it, anyway."

"Are you serious? I can't do any of that stuff."

"Of course you can. It's not like I'd be teaching you anything advanced. But I can show you some things that'll help you hold your own against anyone who's trying to hurt you. Like how to hit someone without busting all of your knuckles open again."

Sarah's gaze fell to her hands, where she could still see the small white scars crisscrossing her palms and knuckles. Still, she was doubtful.

"I know you can't see me and all, but I'm not exactly a heavyweight champ," she pointed out, and Matt cracked a grin.

"I've noticed. But you're pretty fast."