Almost immediately after entering the apartment, Lauren scurried down the hallway to the bathroom to pee, leaving Matt alone with Cecilia. It was far from his ideal way of spending the evening, and it would seem as though Cecilia agreed, if the unhappy sigh she heaved was any indication.

"So, you're like a public defender, or what?" Cecilia asked, sounding bored by the conversation already.

"No, actually. A private defense attorney," he replied.

"Really?" she said. "I wouldn't think Sarah could afford that. I mean, look at this place."

Matt gave her a tight smile, waiting for the predictable moment of realization. Of course, he was somewhat aware of what the apartment around them looked like—he knew it was small and a bit run down, but Sarah kept it clean and decorated—but there was no way for Cecilia to know that.

He heard her shift uncomfortably in her seat. Down the hall, the bathroom door opened and Lauren's footsteps came towards them.

"I meant—I just assumed she'd end up with some court-appointed hack," Cecilia clarified stiffly. He noticed she didn't backtrack on her slip up, which was something at least. The constant tripping that people did to avoid saying any words related to sight could wear on the nerves. "Not an actual law firm."

"My partner and I own the practice, so we can work out our own rates," he said.

Lauren slipped past them and began rummaging around in the mesh storage space behind the stroller, straightening back up with a few bags in her hands. From the smell of them, they were full of groceries. This was confirmed when she carried them into the kitchen and opened Sarah's fridge.

"Listen, I'm shoving all this food in Sarah's fridge and I don't want either of you telling her or she'll make me take it back home with me," Lauren called from the kitchen. "I'm banking on her not checking until we're gone, and then she'll have to keep it."

Matt's lips twitched, while Cecilia ignored her completely.

"Your own firm?" Cecilia said. "That's convenient. That way you get to pick and choose which criminals you help go free."

There was a crinkling sound as Lauren whipped one of the balled up grocery bags in Cecilia's direction, where it bounced harmlessly off the arm of the couch. He heard Lauren's sweater swish as she tossed her hands up in the air in exasperation. 'Leave him alone,' she mouthed, whispering the words just loudly enough under her breath that Matt could hear her. Cecilia shrugged and mouthed back, 'What?'

"I'm sure Nelson and Murdock aren't out there defending serial killers, Cecilia," Lauren said. "It's people like Sarah and Mrs. B who are cool people but...you know, have no money."

It was nice—if a bit ironic—that Lauren wanted to defend Matt's firm, but not particularly necessary. This was far from the first time Matt had heard the argument Cecilia was making; he hadn't gone through law school and then an internship at a less-than-reputable law firm without hearing a few jabs about making a career out of helping criminals.

"It's alright. It might shock you to hear that not everyone who gets arrested is guilty," Matt replied, turning his attention back towards Cecilia. "There's a reason the system requires everyone be allowed a lawyer. I'm sure if you were wrongly arrested, you'd want one too."

Cecilia's reply was a noncommittal hum. Lauren returned from the kitchen and took a seat next to him on the couch. It was strange to have her sitting within such casual proximity; in the few times they'd met, she'd kept such a careful distance from him that he'd gotten used to her standoffishness. Now she was sitting two feet away while Cecilia perched on the nearby armchair, pushing the stroller back and forth with one hand to lull the baby to sleep.

"Where'd you go to law school?" Cecilia asked.

"Cecilia," Lauren warned again. She must have sensed that her cousin was zeroing in on Matt.

"Columbia," Matt answered.

"Columbia," she repeated, sounding more interested now. "I went to Dartmouth."

Matt, who still had the bulk of his attention focused on the stairwell for Sarah's footsteps, nodded.

"A good school," he said idly. How long should he wait here before heading out try to find her himself? He had no idea where she'd even called him from.

From the low exhale of air through Cecilia's nostrils, that wasn't as enthusiastic a response as she'd been hoping for. He wasn't sure why other people who attended Ivy League schools always wanted to talk about it with him; it was what they were doing with their degree that interested him, not where they got it from. He'd witnessed lawyers from dirt cheap state schools wipe the floor with Yale and Harvard graduates more times than he could count.

"So, if you went to Columbia Law, why aren't you working for a big law firm?"

"I used to. I interned at Landman and Zack. It wasn't for me."

"Right. Well, I have heard it's a high-pressure environment. Not for everyone, I suppose," Cecilia said.

Before Matt could reply, Lauren stood up from the couch rather quickly.

"I think I forgot to bring a few things into the kitchen," she said. "Cecilia, will you help me?"

Cecilia sighed, uninterested in going along with Lauren's charade. Neither of them bothered to pretend like they were grabbing anything before going into the kitchen together, where Lauren immediately dropped her voice to a hushed tone.

"What are you doing?" she whispered fiercely.

"Waiting for your psycho best friend to make her grand entrance?"

"Don't call her that," Lauren said. "And you know what I'm talking about. Is this you flirting, or are you just interrogating him for fun?"

Cecilia's hair brushed against her shoulders as she turned to look at Matt, then shrugged.

"Both, maybe. He's cute, in a...cheap suit kind of way," she answered.

"He's also cute in the 'normal-person-who-doesn't-flirt-by-being-mean' kind of way."

Cecilia snorted. "I doubt it. He's a lawyer; they love arguing."

"Well, can you tone it down? Because right now you're just coming across as rude, and the last thing we need is for you to scare off the one private attorney who Sarah can afford," Lauren hissed fiercely.

"You really overestimate how much I care about helping Sarah with whatever legal trouble she got herself into," Cecilia pointed out.

They continued bickering, unaware that Matt could hear them, but by then he'd mostly tuned them out. He'd just wanted to make sure there was no hint of either of them deducing who he really was, and it sounded like there wasn't.

Suddenly, Matt made out a familiar set of footsteps coming upstairs, accompanied by a heartbeat he'd be able to pick out anywhere.

Finally. He felt a rush of relief that she'd gotten home safely from wherever she'd called him from, but that was short lived as he picked up on the smell of alcohol and blood clinging to her. Then the lock on the door clicked open and Sarah half-stumbled into the apartment.

The first thing Sarah saw when she opened her front door was Matt waiting for her on her couch, still wearing his glasses and suit jacket and looking oddly tense. He slowly got to his feet as she leaned back hard against her front door, trying to breathe evenly despite the sharp pain in her side.

"You're here," she greeted him in relief. She hadn't been certain if he'd been able to hear her asking to meet here. "I wasn't sure—"

"Sorry for the intrusion," he interrupted her, his voice clipped and professional. Sarah furrowed her brow at him in confusion. "I was waiting outside to discuss a few updates to your case, and your friends very kindly let me in."

He nodded his head towards her kitchen, his eyebrows going up meaningfully.

Sarah stared at him for a moment, then slowly took a step further so she could see into the kitchen, where Lauren and Cecilia were giving her confused looks.

Shit.

"Lauren," she managed to force out, her brain still struggling to reconcile the fact that the two different sides of her life were currently standing in her cramped apartment together. "...hi."

All too late, she remembered that she had made plans that night to have dinner with the two of them, a sort of trial run to show she could be a responsible friend who lived a normal life. That seemed like it was shot to hell now. And even worse, her screw up had unexpectedly landed Matt in a room with Lauren, who had met his alter ego and might very easily figure out his identity, and Cecilia, who—having never met Daredevil—was less likely to make the connection, but who posed a much greater threat if she did.

"Are you okay?" Lauren asked, her eyes wide as she took in Sarah's disheveled appearance. Luckily, the oversized denim jacket Sarah had snatched from the patio concealed the blood staining her shirt, although it didn't do much to stifle the stench of vodka that had soaked the fabric. She clutched it tighter around her, ignoring the jagged jolt of pain the movement sent through her.

"Yes—yeah—me?" Sarah said. "I'm good."

"Okay," Lauren said slowly. "Well, we ran into Matt outside your apartment and I really had to pee, so we let ourselves in. Hopefully that's...okay?"

Sarah noted that Lauren was using Matt's name, and that he'd purposefully mentioned discussing her legal case, so it seemed he'd introduced himself by his real name at least, and not by some pseudonym. She supposed that made sense; it offered a built in excuse for his presence there.

"Oh, you ran into Matt," she repeated, hoping she sounded casual. "Uh—Murdock. Mr...Matthew Murdock, my...lawyer."

"...yeah," Lauren said, looking at her like she was crazy. There was a bright flash of lightning outside, followed almost immediately by a loud boom of thunder.

"You know, the one you double booked us with," Cecilia interjected. "When you forgot about our dinner plans."

"I didn't forget," Sarah said quickly. She had, of course, but wasn't going to give Cecilia the satisfaction of rubbing her nose in it. "I...had a work meeting. It ran late."

"A meeting...in a distillery?" Cecilia asked. Lauren quickly shushed her.

Sarah kept trying not to glance over at Matt, as though pretending he wasn't there would protect him from this somehow, would keep either of them from looking at him too closely. She knew from experience that he was more than capable of schooling his expression into a frustratingly neutral one when he wanted to, so there was little point in looking to him for reactions anyway.

"So, it looks like maybe we should just try to do this another time," Lauren suggested slowly, giving Sarah a wide eyed look. "Is that okay?"

Obviously that was the smart thing to do. Send Lauren and Cecilia back home, let Matt patch her up, try again another night if Lauren would give her another chance. And Sarah really was about to agree when she caught sight of Cecilia, who rolled her eyes with a smug, knowing smirk. Like she'd known this was going to happen, had only agreed to come to see how badly Sarah would manage to screw it all up.

"No," Sarah said abruptly. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Matt cock his head in disbelief. Sarah herself was a little surprised. "No, I—I just need a few minutes to talk to my lawyer first."

"Are...you sure?" Lauren asked uncertainly, and Sarah nodded.

"Absolutely. Matt, do you, um, want to step into the other room to talk?" she asked.

Matt paused, a slight tick in his jaw. "Sure."

He stood up from the chair and reached for his cane, moving slower and more carefully than usual. He paused, and she realized he was waiting for her to tell him which way to go, because as far as Lauren and Cecilia knew, he hadn't been here enough times to know. He'd never gotten stitched up while slumped in her desk chair or stretched out on her bed, or fallen asleep on her couch with her head on his chest and Donovan's blood on his hands. Every inch of her apartment had traces of Matt, and it felt strange to pretend otherwise.

"It's...just down the hall to your right," she said. Matt nodded and followed her.

The moment the door to her room was closed, Sarah slumped against it, holding on tightly to the doorknob. Her head felt like it was splitting open, and if the pain in her side wasn't grounding her so efficiently she felt as though she might float away. She'd already been on edge after the events of the evening, and seeing Lauren and Cecilia in her apartment with Matt had completely knocked her off kilter. She closed her eyes and tried to steady her breathing.

"I'm sorry," Sarah whispered immediately. "I—I forgot they were going to be here. Today went—" she inhaled sharply as she shifted the wrong way and the glass dug further into her. "—ow—badly."

"Yeah, I put that together," Matt replied tersely. He pushed the denim jacket aside so he could brush his fingers around the bloodied side of her shirt, stopping just short of actually pressing against it. "What happened to you?"

"Jason wanted to surprise that tranquilizer guy at his nightclub, and it was sort of a disaster. How...how long were you here with them before I got here?" she asked tentatively.

"Fifteen, twenty minutes," he estimated.

"And Lauren hasn't...?"

"Realized she's met me before?" he finished for her. "No. Not yet, at least. But she might if you don't tell them to leave so I can fix this." He nodded towards the blood seeping through her shirt.

Sarah faltered.

"No, I—I can't do that," she said that, the words spilling out before she could stop herself. Tonight was supposed to be her chance to prove to Lauren—and to herself, honestly—that she could offer some shred of stability and normalcy. There had to be something she could do to still salvage part of that chance. "Not tonight."

Matt cocked his head. "What?"

"It's...hard to explain right now," Sarah said. She didn't know how to explain that technically she was freaking out over something as small as being able to babysit without sounding like a crazy person. Because it wasn't really just about being able to babysit—it was about having some tiny semblance of control over her life, and if she couldn't have any control over Orion or her dad, she could at least have some over tonight. "But i-if we can just get this one biggest piece of glass out, then—then I'll be fine to keep going for a while."

"Are you kidding me?" Matt said incredulously. He tilted his head back and blew out a long breath towards the ceiling. "Look, you're hurt. Something bad clearly happened, and you aren't thinking straight right now—"

"I'm thinking fine," she snapped defensively, as though her entire body didn't feel as though it was moving at a different speed than her head.

"Are you? Because the only choice that makes sense right now is telling them to leave, and you don't seem to be offering any reason why you'd rather them stick around while you keep bleeding through your shirt."

"I know, I know I'm not making any sense to you, but just—can you help me, please?" she asked desperately. "Then I'll figure out what to do about them."

Matt worked his jaw, but beyond that he was difficult to read; she wasn't used to seeing him with his glasses on anymore, and without Matt's expressive eyes to go off, she couldn't quite tell what he was thinking.

"Fine," he said finally. "I hope you know what you're doing, Sarah."

She didn't answer.

Matt helped her gently shrug the oversized denim jacket off her shoulders, trying not to pull on the wounded area too much. He frowned as his hand brushed against something in the inner front pocket. He tilted his head.

"What is this?" he asked.

"...five thousand dollars?" she answered as the jacket hit the floor. She'd switched the envelope from her purse to her pocket as she was coming home, paranoid that with her luck the bag would get snatched before she got to her door.

His eyebrows shot up, and he opened his mouth to ask a follow-up question, but then snapped it closed again.

"Let's....just get this done first," he said, still sounding less than pleased. He carefully peeled the bloody fabric of her blouse away from her side and pushed the shirt up her ribcage.

"This won't feel good," he murmured, positioning the tweezers over the edge of the glass shard.

Sarah took a deep breath, flatting her palm against Matt's chest as she tried to ready herself. Matt waited for her nod, then started to tug on the jagged glass. The moment he started, pain shot through her side so sharply that she had to bite the insides of her cheeks to keep from crying out. Her fist clenched around Matt's tie and she instinctively buried her face in the front of his shoulder, focusing on him and the sound of the rain outside and trying to keep her breathing steady.

The process didn't take long—maybe a minute at the most—but it was painful, much more so than stitches had ever been in her opinion. She wasn't sure if she would need those too after all the tiny glass shards had been removed, but if she did it would be easy compared to this step.

"It's okay," he said lowly, squeezing her arm with the hand that wasn't smeared with her blood. "We're done. It's out."

Now that the most painful part was over, Matt had her sit on her desk chair and press a towel to it while he knelt next to her first aid bag and fished inside for disinfectant. She glanced at the clock on her wall; not quite ten minutes had passed yet.

"Where'd the five grand come from?" he asked.

"Jason gave it to me. Well, he gave it to Tracksuit," she corrected herself. She couldn't even remember right now what stupid thing Tracksuit had done that Jason had gotten so excited about. "As like a...work bonus type thing. Then I gave him Elliott's name, and...he gave the money to me instead."

"That can't have gone over well," Matt said as he found the bottle he'd been looking for and pressed the open mouth of it to a cotton round.

"Bad enough that he ended up pointing a gun in my face," she said. The line of Matt's mouth grew thin as his face darkened. "That was, um, after he fired a shot into the ceiling and caused a stampede, but before we both got knocked into a liquor display."

"That explains the smell," Matt said. He dabbed the disinfectant onto her cuts, and Sarah sucked in a pained breath through her teeth.

"Have you had trouble with him before?"

"Not really. No more than with any of the others," Sarah said. "But he was pissed about the money, and our drinks had just been spiked—"

"What?" Matt interrupted sharply.

"I didn't drink mine," Sarah added quickly. She glanced at the clock again; she needed to get back out to the living room. There wasn't time to explain everything right now; it would have to wait until later. "I need to go back out there."

He hovered his hand over the injury, which was now covered by the taped down gauze.

"There's still more glass in your skin," he said with a tight frown. "Small enough shards that they shouldn't irritate you too much right now, but they will if they get infected."

"Give me...ten minutes," she said. "Just to try to smooth things over. I'll figure it out."

Matt looked like he wanted to argue more, but instead he just shook his head and stood up, wiping the blood off his hands with the clean edge of the towel. Then he opened her door and stepped out into the hallway, leaving her to struggle into a clean shirt.