Chapter Text
Despite the impressive resume of an investigator, both in the newspaper and in the law firm, Karen was given the position of the most ordinary reporter and was given a little bit to write columns. In fact, they reduced her experience to simple and tasteless news coverage that did not require serious investigation, searching for evidence and revealing important truths and falsehoods. The Daily Globe had already given her too many privileges, thanks to Ellison's recommendations, so Karen didn't even think about asking to be retrained for a more interesting position. Besides, there was something soothing about it. No stress, no pressure, no danger. Sit at your desk, type on your computer for fun, sometimes call someone for comments, and then go home. And although sometimes the itch in her hands demanded that she cling to some intricate riddle, her brain always reminded her that it was time to settle down.
Her near-emergency escape to San Francisco had already hit her finances so hard. She lived in a rented apartment. Again. A minimum of her own belongings, as much as possible of someone else's. Her rent was lowered, again thanks to the good word that Ellison put in for her, but it was still hard. It was hard to imagine that a few months ago she could have her own house, where everything would belong to her. Albeit, with one important caveat, but still her own house. Now she couldn't stay in New York.
That mocking "Hello, Karen" continued to haunt her in her nightmares. There was a whole layer of reasons to believe that she was to blame for everything again. Poindexter was extremely punctual in his villainies, and his failure to kill Karen many years ago had completely destroyed his life and psyche. She should have taken a bullet. She was supposed to be bleeding on the sidewalk. She was supposed to die. But Lady Luck not only protected Karen herself, but also reminded her in every possible way of the price that this very luck was getting to her. At the cost of the lives of others.
The scariest thing about losing Foggy was how quickly she came to terms with it. People died in her arms so often, and she believed it was her fault, that when the coffin was finally lowered underground, she stopped feeling anything. And it scared her to the point where she wanted to burst into tears. But what's even scarier is that it didn't work out. There were no more tears, no more strength to cry. And she had to accept this growing feeling of emptiness inside her, so monstrous in its essence that she simply could not look at herself in the mirror. There were too many memoriesof Foggy in New York. About who he was to her.
He was her friend. He was her business partner. He was her family, her brother. The man who knew how to get her out to the bar at times when she thought she would never leave the house. The man who made her laugh until her stomach ached with his quips and silly puns. A man who always knew how to comfort her. He never judged. He always tried to be there for her. He was gone, and as soon as he was buried, Karen stopped feeling anything. It's like all those years never happened. It was as if they had never been friends, never shared bitterness and joy together. It's like Foggy never existed at all. And she just couldn't bare it.
An office, a bar, the streets of Hell's Kitchen, a favorite coffee shop, a park, a butcher shop, the supreme court. It was all Foggy. Now he was gone, and Karen didn't know what to do about it.
She probably shouldn't have moved to San Francisco. The picture of Foggy dying in her arms is so firmly ingrained in her subcortex. Each time, Karen closed her eyes and saw blood oozing from the wound on his chest. And although there was nothing in San Francisco that could remind her of Foggy, sometimes in the morning, fog came from the Pacific Ocean, enveloping the city in a dull white pall. The associations suggested themselves. San Francisco... maybe she wanted it to be better in some way. A city where she could get lost. The last few months had turned her world upside down. Did she think that leaving New York would fix everything? No. She wasn't that naive. She just wanted a change. She was looking for a place that didn't remind her not so much of Foggy as of Matt.
Matt... The guilt that she had let Foggy go so easily, that she had so easily forgotten about all the years she had spent with him, intensified when Matt came back into her field of vision. He hasn't come home in weeks. He did not answer calls or messages. Along with helping with funeral arrangements, Karen searched diligently for him. He came back in his civil clothes for the funeral. He was supposed to deliver a eulogy, but as soon as he approached the coffin on shaky legs, his previously cold face twisted into a terrible grimace, and he immediately ran out of the church. Karen ran after him, but he disappeared again, as if he had never come at all.
She had no idea where he was, but she had lost him too. In the rare moments when he did return to the apartment, it was usually only to pick up something from the first-aid kit. He chose moments when Karen was too tired from the endless crying to wake up to his arrival, but a couple of times she caught him, and he didn't tell her anything, no matter how hard she begged him to talk to her. His detachment was unbearable. She thought she wouldn't feel any worse than when she thought he was buried under Midland Circle. But seeing him alive and at the same time a mere ghost was much more terrifying.
Foggy meant even more to him. She couldn't even imagine how important Foggy was to Matt. And while Karen believed that she was to blame for what happened, Matt got it into his head that he was the culprit. That he failed Foggy. That he couldn't save him. That he had put himself in danger too often for Foggy, worried about him, not to tell him about the details of this complicated case he was working on. And it cost Foggy his life. Not surprisingly, along with Foggy, a part of Matt also died. But he was still alive. And everything around Karen reminded her of him. About a living dead who was loitering in the middle of nowhere, trying to assuage his pain. So strong that he just couldn't bear to share it with anyone.
Once again, waking up in bed all alone, Karen realized that she couldn't do this anymore. And she ran away. She ran away as soon as possible. She always ran away from problems, even when she thought she had finally stopped. She ran away because she couldn't stand the terrible guilt that had befallen her. She ran away because she wasn't sure if Matt would be safe with her. He was never safe, but the scratching claws on the walls of her heart told Karen that the longer she continued to be around, the more likely it was that Matt would one day be on the list of those who would take over the deferred doom for her.
No one condemned her for her choice. Everyone knew exactly what she was going through. It was so unusual that so many people now knew what was on her mind. And everyone wanted to help her. But they couldn't come close to filling the hole that had formed in her soul, which could only be filled by two specific people. One of whom died, leaving behind only a funeral card with his name "Franklin Nelson", and the other was too broken for Karen to have enough of her excessive stubbornness and love to put together these fragments that once bore the name "Matt Murdock". She believed that if she disappeared, it would be easier for him.
And then, closer to Christmas, he started calling her.
Karen ran to the phone and was about to press the green icon, but she froze in horror. She went into complete denial rather than face the harsh reality. Matt came to his senses. He came to his senses and found that she was no longer around. Once again, shame and fear gripped her, but there was nowhere else to run. She's already crossed the country. She just stood in the middle of the cramped apartment with her phone in her hands and was shaking. She would never be able to look him in the face, knowing what she had done. That she ran away. Left him. She promised that she would never leave him again. And what now? He's still in New York, in an apartment where there's nothing left of her, but all the furniture, all the rooms, all the household, the first-aid kit, the clothes, were soaked in her scent. Now she had become a ghost herself, who was impossible to capture.
And then another terrible thought crept into her head: "It's his own fault".
The call stopped. And he didn't call back.
Karen woke up feeling cramped in a single bed. How cold she feeling without arms wrapped around her torso. She started crying again, remembering what she had done. But then, when it came time to get ready for a new job, a boring and inconspicuous job at the The Daily Globe, she started pretending. Pretending was easy. She always knew how to do it. Pretending helped her to forget, to get lost in this lie and not feel guilt, fear and pain. But once a week, her heart would shatter again when her photo and Matt's name appeared on the phone screen, and the device vibrated actively and persistently. And every time it happened, she sincerely tried to pick up, but she didn't have the spirit or the conscience to do it.
She prayed that he would forget her. That he would stop calling. She wanted him to stop. To disappear. But as soon as she thought about it, she immediately added in her mind: "No, please keep calling". At some moments, when something in her pretending during the day made her lose her temper and made her blood boil, she thought so, because Matt would suffer. That he would have known what it was like to be in her shoes. At some moments, when she messed up, she was reprimanded and again convinced of her spinelessness and insignificance in order to torment herself, to slash her back with a metaphorical whip that accused her of being a monster, for her crime of her erasing the last ten years from her biography.
Karen wanted Matt to keep calling. Moreover, he started doing it less and less often. But she's never been able to pick up the phone and just say "hi." She was afraid to hear his voice. It doesn't matter which one, the main thing is that it's his. And she was afraid to let him hear her voice. The voice he praised and loved so dearly, trembling with horror. She wanted him to remember her other voice. A voice he liked listening than this pathetic parody.
Everything changed on her birthday in February. The same scenario. The same call. The same daze with which Karen once again looked at that damn photo she took when he took her on a date to the renovated Connie Island. A photo of him smiling broadly and stupidly, and she kissing his temple. The call stopped. Karen was about to sigh. She held her breath every time. It's not clear why. And then her phone suddenly announced that she had received a voice message and automatically played it to her. Karen specially set up her phone so that if her new colleagues tried to give her some information, they would immediately get down to business, especially when she was not in the mood to communicate at all. Sometimes her daytime pretense ran out of any communicative resource.
Karen should have canceled the audition immediately, but she couldn't resist. She wanted so much to know what he would tell her.
"Hi, Kar," Matt's hoarse voice came. So dear, so gentle, but so sad that all the old wounds opened up and began to bleed harder. "I... I know you won't answer... I'm not even sure if it's still your number and that I'm not just bothering some stranger... Anyway, I thought I should tell you... At least something. I bought you presents. On your birthday. A couple of new books, a jewelry, your favorite perfume... I don't know why I did this, I don't even know your new address. I mean, I was told you're in California now, but that doesn't narrow it down at all, you know. I'd mail it all to you, but I'm afraid I'll have to keep it. I've booked a table at our Indian restaurant. I'm not going there anyway, but it's just... I wanted to delude myself a little bit with illusions that it would somehow bring you back. I... I miss you, Karen..." There was a long pause, filled with heavy, oppressive silence. "Happy birthday, my love."
With shaking hands, Karen had already begun to dial his number, whispering curses at herself, barely holding back tears, when suddenly the light went out, and with it the connection disappeared. Lady Luck is back in business. It took Karen away from what she thought was a mistake for months. The news would later say that during the next battle of Ant-Man, electricity and cellular communications in the city were damaged, and after that Karen would not find the strength to call him back.
Karen got distracted from another boring story she was assigned to write, scrolling through the cloud storage on her phone with hundreds of photos taken over the years. She deleted the photos from the device itself when she suddenly got drunk and something in her head made her want to completely erase this part of herself and never think about it again.
Foggy stands surrounded by all the goodies that the customers have brought: pies, fruit crates, a couple bottles of wine, something wrapped in foil. He was standing in a funny pose, smiling. Matt in his funny Christmas sweater at a party hosted by Danny Rand, which says "I'm not Daredevil" in big white letters. Foggy, again, standing on a stepladder, hanging a large sign with the inscription "Nelson, Murdock & Page" at the entrance to the office, again making funny faces, imitating something that was about to fall. Matt grimaced at some strong smell in a restaurant, which he smelled, at the moment when he also feigned a gag reflex for a comical effect. Here the three of them were at some fancy event, beautifully dressed, standing on the roof, and behind them was a breathtaking night view of New York, shimmering with different colors. Karen and Foggy set up an "investigation board" in the office, on which they posted some little nonsense that didn't relate to any case they were working on. Karen made herself comfortable on Matt's shoulder on his couch when she pursuaded him to watch some TV show. There are also a number of photos from the office, court, Josie's, Foggy's parents' wedding anniversary in Tampa. These two are everywhere. Foggy and Matt.
Suddenly, someone called her. Karen was so rarely called by her first name at her new job that she jumped in surprise and put the phone screen on the table, covering it with her hand so that no one would see what she was so actively looking at there. In fact, no one at The Daily Globe knew who she was, what her story was, or why she moved to San Francisco. Karen was known only by her articles, but nothing more. No one knew about her tragedies and misfortunes. Just that she's a damn good journalist.
Ian Hunter, the editor, a charming man, slightly younger than her, polite, careful and very sensitive to other employees. Karen managed to talk to him several times about her articles, after all, he's an editor and all that, and was sensitive to the author's opinion regarding his editing. Or maybe he was just like that with Karen. Who knew?
"Is something wrong?" Karen frowned. It seemed that Artie had edited her last articles, so she was embarrassed when Ian suddenly appeared at her desk.
"No, it's just... I was thinking maybe we could go get some coffee after work." He tucked his hands into his pockets.
Ian blushed a little, put his hands in his pockets and swayed from side to side. He was sweet, especially when he was so shy. But Karen didn't show it. Mostly because she wasn't sure if it was a good idea. Yes, she seemed to want to make strong new acquaintances here and lose herself in this completely different new life, but putting together the man's embarrassment and his suggestion, it became clear that there was more involved than just a desire to be friends. After all, he was an adult man, she was an adult woman, and she knew about her attractiveness well enough to understand that the editor was preparing the ground in this way so that he could invite her to dinner or something like that. She looked him up and down. Ian is too good for Karen. Too simple, untouched by all kinds of troubles. She would have ruined it.
Still, he was nice. And interesting. Maybe if she keeps pretending, she can turn a bad idea into a good one. And she agreed.
Everything happened as she expected. First, coffee, a short walk to the bus stop, and the next day he invited her to dinner. To the most inconspicuous restaurant, so it wasn't a date yet. It's all at his expense. He was joking quite well. Not like Foggy, but good enough to make her grin and smile. For the first time in a long time. Although over the course of many conversations, Karen realized more and more that their interests did not match at all, she decided that their views on life and their experiences did not necessarily have to match in order for something to come of it.
About the third time they were drinking coffee together, he took her hand and she almost went crazy. It had been so long since anyone had touched her in such a way that she had already forgotten what it felt like. Ian had finally invited her to dinner, and now it was obviously a date. Dim lights, smooth music on the background, beautiful landscape of the embankment outside the window, wine. Ian offered to walk her home, but for some reason, Karen decided that it was better to offer to walk him than to let him see an area that was not the most favorable, which was also so far from the their meeting place.
Anyway, she missed having some kind of intimacy. She hadn't felt affection yet, but she realized that if she didn't at least try to start over with a clean slate for real, she probably wouldn't ever be able to. A measured kiss, satisfying enough. Ian invited her over for another cup of coffee. And then she was in bed, naked, pressed by a man's body into the mattress, her wrists in a rough grip.
And she realized that she didn't like it at all. No, Ian was a good guy. Funny, kind, and all that. But that wasn't it. She couldn't get pleasure, he didn't give it to her. It seemed to her that sex would help her drown out the buzzing in her head and allow her to breathe deeply, but Ian was too focused on himself and on how intensely he could penetrate Karen. He didn't even kiss or stroke her. He puffed and wheezed, thinking that the harder he pushed, the more pleasure he would give her. And once again, Karen had no choice but to pretend that everything was fine. She moaned, but hardly moved, humbly accepting the thrusts. She tried to entice him to caresses by stroking his back, but to no avail. And before she even had time to pay attention, Ian came, and she faked an orgasm as awkwardly as possible. And then, tired and sweaty, he collapsed on the other side of the bed and fell asleep almost instantly.
Karen continued to lie completely naked on the bed, not even covering herself with a blanket, allowing the coolness to creep into her bones. She didn't feel better. She was just pretending. She glanced at Ian, who was lying with his back to her. A part of her still hoped that, at least in his sleep, he would turn to her and try to hug her, but that didn't happen. The frustration grew by the second. And that's what it was all about? All those compliments, restaurant, coffee, and so on. Just to have the most meager sex possible? So that not a single muscle in her would tense up from pleasure? So that she wouldn't hear all the different sounds from herself that sometimes surprised her?
Karen got out of bed and went to the bathroom. Maybe a hot shower would help wash away all these thoughts, all this persistent emptiness, the absence of any emotions. The warmth of the water washed over her, and she braced her hands against the tiled wall, breathing heavily and looking down at her feet. Karen closed her eyes, trying to remember how it used to be. When she had Matt. Her hand arbitrarily went between her thighs, hoping that at least the memories would help her lighten up her spoiled mood a little. Memories of how he kissed her neck and forehead, how he pressed against her back, how he smiled broadly at her, and how he caressed the most sensitive areas of her skin all over her body, knowing exactly what would bring her pleasure.
At first, the movements of her fingers on the soft flesh were measured, slow, but as the memories moved further away from office days and got closer to the weekends in his apartment, the friction became faster and harder. Matt was broken, just like her, but he tried to be better for Karen. He sincerely tried. Even years later, he kept apologizing for the pain he had caused her, even though she had forgiven him long ago. He put her at the top of his list of priorities, to make her feel good, to keep her safe. He opened up to her slowly, cautiously, but still allowed her to look deeper into his soul, and in the end, Karen saw him all. The real Matt. And she let him do the same to her. He made Karen feel special. Loved. Needed. Important.
She remembered his tenderness, his soft touch, his whisper in her ear. She remembered, but didn't feel it. And because she couldn't feel it, her finger movements became aggressive, to the point where she felt more pain than any pleasure. Karen squirmed, and then, after her several diligent finger movements did not give results, she simply pulled her hand away and rested it against the wall again, holding back a strangled painful groan.
Karen turned off the shower, dried herself off with a towel, got dressed and ran away, after sending a text message to Ian that the evening had been wonderful, but it seemed to her that nothing worthwhile would come of it.
Matt hadn't tried to call her in six weeks. However, she could understand it. He had a new job now. The joint venture with Kirsten McDuffie is prestigious, not like "Nelson, Murdock & Page". It was hard to believe that Matt could even do that. To work in a stylish law firm, where he protects people with money and gets a normal salary, not baked goods. And yet, it was the fact. Kirsten is good, she is a professional, an ardent advocate of justice, and believes in the law. Foggy liked her. If anyone was suitable for the role of a new business partner, it was Kirsten.
God, Karen was acting like a stalker, reading every post about Matt's successful deeds. But is she to blame for the fact that the news about the successful high-profile "Murdock and McDuffie" case was published in the New York Bulletin, which she still sometimes read, and then wrote her former colleagues positive review and chatted a little? Unlikely. Besides, that's how she finally found out that Matt had started moving on. Or tried to move on. It doesn't matter, the main thing is that the calls stopped, and Matt himself began to appear in public. Karen should have been happy for him, she tried to be. But if he moved on, then she was just stuck in this limbo and couldn't get out of it.
Of course, she found her new rhythm. She made a couple of acquaintances, the girls from The Daily Globe were very kind and friendly to her. She even went out to a bar with new, not-quite-friends several times a week and drank a measured portion of alcohol, not from a bottle alone in her appartment. It wasn't Josie's, and the company wasn't anything like Foggy. No one even suggested any madness, like drinking a bottle with, as they thought, an eel to the bottom. Over time, the pain subsided, but still the back of her head sometimes itched from unpleasant thoughts caused by pleasant memories. They echoed off the cracked walls of her soul, but they didn't hit as hard, without tearing her heart even more. Karen hadn't cried in months. She stopped feeling insignificant and began to fully arrange her life. Periodically, she still saw Ian, but he either harbored a grudge or something else, so he began to communicate with her as coldly as possible.
One day, Karen decided to sort out those personal stuff that she had hurriedly taken away from Matt's apartment. These are mostly some books, a couple of small ornamental plants, all kinds of accessories, photo frames, and some memorable artifacts. Basically, most of the memorabilia was stored in the office, so Matt probably sold everything out when he closed the doors of "Nelson, Murdock & Page"... No, he wouldn't do that. He probably kept everything for himself or just hid it much more securely, but did not get rid of it. He couldn't get rid of everything that served as a memory of what he once was himself, who was in his life and who they were to him. If not out of love, then out of self-loathing.
And at the very bottom of a small gym bag that had been lying in the pantry for six months now, which she opened once a month if she couldn't find something specific, Karen found a chipped Daredevil's horn.
She had completely forgotten how, under the influence of some strange feeling, as if something was wrong, she started looking for Matt and returned to the crime scene in the middle of the night. She made her way through the security tape, walked through the ruined room of Josie's, and somewhere on the stairs noticed a shiny speck hidden from everybody's view, which she noticed only with a flashlight. She found the chipped horn, put it in her pocket, and then left the building, finding nothing that would in any way indicate a different nature of the Poindexter's attack. Then she hid the horn somewhere, and completely forgot about it. With her fingers, she fingered the pyramidal shape, the blunted tip with a peeling red coating. Well, at least she had something of him left. At least something valuable. At least something from a past life. She recently read that New Yorkers are concerned that Daredevil hasn't appeared in too long. Of course, he always took long breaks, especially after serious injuries, but this was a new record.
Her wits told him that Daredevil died on the same day as Foggy Nelson.
Her colleague April took Karen to a lounge bar with a dance floor, karaoke, and neon lights, but most of the time, she just sat on a soft couch and fingered Daredevil's horn in her pocket. The phone vibrated. Matt. Again. She stared sadly at the picture on the screen and ignored the call again. Naturally, this did not go unnoticed. Besides, April was also a journalist and a couple of times she saw someone calling Karen, she did not answer, but her face was distorted in melancholy.
"Ex?" suggested a colleague.
"What? Oh—" Karen said. "It's complicated."
"Do you want to talk about it?" April showed mercy.
"No, I am... I don't think there's anything to talk about."
There was actually a lot to talk about. But Karen still had trust issues. She was afraid to show someone the dark corner of my soul. The real Karen.
Karen soon left the establishment under the pretext that she was feeling unwell from the bright flashes of spotlights and loud music. As she walked down the street, she kept fiddling with the horn in her coat pocket with her fingertips, and then she opened her voicemail and began listening to what Matt had said to her. He rarely left voice messages. Usually only on important dates.
"Karen..." Matt's voice said in a strangled voice. "I... I know you probably won't listen to this, but... I want to ask you something."
"God, tell me that you will be at the airport in San Francisco tomorrow and you need me to meet you, shelter you for the night and just talk to you face to face," she expressed hope to herself.
But, of course, Matt may have been called a Man Without Fear in the press, he was a coward. Not in a bad way. He respected Karen's personal boundaries, tried not to violate them, and probably believed that his calls violated those boundaries enough. He wasn't the persistent romantic to drop everything, fly across the country and beg her on his knees to come back. Matt wasn't like that. Matt was too skittish. And he respected Karen too much. And she didn't give him any hint that he could break her personal boundaries and invade her space as much as he wanted, because he was her personal space.
"Could you... Could you go to church tomorrow?" he asked with a distinct doubt in his voice. "I know you're not religious, but tomorrow... Tomorrow is Foggy's birthday and I... I... I can't. I can't just go there. To church. I don't... I don't have the guts to just walk in there. You don't have to do this, but... Please. Light a candle for him. Say a prayer. I don't know... I'm sorry.."
And the voice message ended.
At midnight on July 10, Karen crossed the threshold of the first church she saw, sat down on a bench and just sat in front of the altar for a few minutes, thinking.
When she'd first left Fagan Corners, settling into a motel on her way to the New Hampshire border, she'd been overcome with withdrawal. A terrible cocaine withdrawal, which caused her to crouch on the floor in front of the toilet, vomiting under herself, endless tears and a dull pain all over her body pierced her like needles. Her head felt like it was being hammered, and her stomach was turning inside out.
A pathetic sight. 19-year-old Karen Page was unable to leave the toilet, lying on the floor in the fetal position and whining like a beaten dog. It had been like this for a week, and now she was vomiting from her own smell and spent the whole day in a cast-iron bathtub, wasting the motel's water. After she was finally released, she realized that she didn't have enough money at all. Her father, of course, gave her some of his money, but it wasn't enough at all. Like a homeless woman, she wandered around the surrounding city in search of practically alms, and when she saw a suspicious guy in a hood at the supermarket, she turned around and walked back, wanting to resist the urge to suck in some more drugs.
Her college application to Washington was no longer valid, so in the summer she started looking for another, cheaper and less prestigious college in Massachusetts. She worked at some roadside diner, no longer knowing what else she could do after spending years at Penny's Diner. All she knew how to do was cook scrambled eggs and serve coffee. At the same time, she took secretarial courses, hoping that one day she would be able to find a more promising job, even if it was just as monotonous, boring and not in her interests at all, but in any case better than a waitress. It took a long ten years until she saved up enough money to move to New York, right after it was destroyed by aliens.
In such conditions, it was easier to find a job in some good company, the competition was much less, because salaries were cut to cover the costs of the damage. That's how she ended up at Union Allied Construction. She rarely met anyone, and she spent most of her free time in a small apartment almost on the outskirts of Manhattan, not far from docks, warehouses, and other things. And then she found this ill-fated pension fund, and in a few moments she was already preparing to spend the rest of her life in prison. A fitting punishment for Karen Page, who ceased to exist back there in Fagan Corners when her mother died, and then she unwittingly ruined her brother and broke her father's heart.
And then she heard "we are her lawyers" and her life changed. Two Samaritans, one who comforted her in his arms, and the other who vowed to protect her. Matt and Foggy didn't just snatch her freedom and her life back, they didn't just give her a temporary job and fun company. They helped Karen discover her incredible talent, inspired her to fight for the oppressed, to go ahead for the best for others, not to pity herself, but at the same time taught her to love herself. To be as honest with herself as she demanded of others. They showed that she is capable of much more than serving coffee and destroying those who were once close to her.
That's what Karen has left of Matt and Foggy. Not Daredevil's horn, and not a funeral card. She was their own legacy. And she was planning to just let it go? Spend another ten bleak years trying to come to terms with herself? But she won't have time anymore. If she spends these blurry years of slow decay, she will literally wither. And no one will ever be able to replace these two or even come close to what they meant to her, so it's pointless to look for a replacement for them. To give up and give in to despondency was to bury everything they had done for her, and it was wrong. Karen was strong, she had to be strong. She's lonely, sick, and sad, but she won't give up. She'll get better. Even if it's a completely different life. She won't become a shadow of herself. She'll get her life back.
Foggy would like her to move forward, strive for more, achieve the best. So that she can still be herself, even if she can never fully open her soul to anyone else. All Karen has left of him is herself. And although she could hardly imagine the possibility of an afterlife, their world was amazing and full of the most unusual marvels, so incredible that sometimes Karen sincerely wanted to believe in something beyond the mortal physical existence. She took a candle, lit it and put it on the candlestick, then froze between the benches and prayed in a low whisper. She didn't quote anything specific, she spoke from her own heart, in her own words, but most importantly, she addressed Foggy. She promised that she would not let his work, his love, his support go to waste. She'll keep it all and maybe find the strength to pass it on to someone else.