Chapter 17: Second Thoughts
He was halfway up the stairs when it hit him.
He'd told Phoebe about Bonnie.
Andrew stopped on the landing, hand on the railing, and just stood there for a moment running back through the conversation. Your neighbor. The one with the little girl. She's in some kind of trouble. He'd kept it vague, but he'd confirmed enough — that Bonnie was real, that Christie was real, that they were connected to whatever Danny Kowalski had been sent to find out.
And he'd done it without thinking. Because it was Phoebe, and his gut reaction to Phoebe was safe, had always been safe, the way you felt about someone you'd known for years.
Except he hadn't known her for years. He'd known her for a few weeks. The Phoebe he trusted was a character from a television show, and whatever overlap existed between that person and the actual woman who'd just walked him to his block, he had no real way to measure it. TV flattened people. It gave you the charming parts, the funny parts, the moments that made the audience love someone. It didn't give you the full picture.
He'd just handed information about a woman in hiding to someone with established connections to the crew looking for her, because she seemed like someone he could trust.
That was stupid, he thought. That was genuinely, actually stupid.
He filed it away as a lesson with teeth: what he knew about these people from before didn't transfer cleanly to who they actually were. Phoebe had been kind tonight, and he believed that was real. But kindness and reliability weren't the same thing, and he needed to stop treating prior knowledge as a substitute for actual judgment.
He wouldn't make that mistake again.
The apartment was dim when he came in, the only light the cold blue flicker of the television. Bonnie was stretched out on the couch in the dark, volume barely audible, some late-night talk show doing its thing on the screen. She didn't look up when the door opened.
"You're late," she said.
"Had a situation." Andrew hung up the guitar, traded his shoes for the spare pair of slides he kept by the door, and came around to the other end of the couch. He sat down. After a moment he said, "I ran into someone connected to the people looking for you. On the way back from the bar."
Bonnie didn't move. "And?"
"And it got handled. But they know I'm connected to you."
She was quiet for a second. Then: "You scared?"
"A little, yeah." He said it straight, without dressing it up. There wasn't much point pretending otherwise.
Something shifted in her expression — not quite softening, but adjusting. She looked at him sideways in the TV light. She'd expected him to say no, he realized. Or to make it into something bigger than it was. The plain answer seemed to catch her off guard in a way the other options wouldn't have.
"Relax," she said, after a moment. "They're not going to try anything in this building. Last time one of those crews made noise in this neighborhood, three of them spent the night in holding." She picked up the remote, turned the volume down another notch. "Gangs have a hierarchy. They make money for people. And the people they make money for don't want problems in neighborhoods like this one."
Andrew nodded. He didn't entirely find it comforting, but it was a more sophisticated read on the situation than he'd expected, and he filed it away.
The talk show moved through its monologue. The audience laughed on cue.
"What are you going to do?" Andrew asked. "After this week."
Bonnie was quiet long enough that he thought she wasn't going to answer. "What kind of question is that."
"A straightforward one."
"I don't know." She said it the way people said things they'd stopped letting themselves think about. "Day at a time. Figure it out."
"And Christie?"
The room went very still.
It was the right question and she knew it, which was probably why she didn't answer it with words. He'd learned enough about her in three days to understand that direct emotion was a door she didn't open from the inside — she'd had too many years of nothing good coming through it. But she hadn't left Christie at the school. Hadn't left her anywhere, through everything. That meant something, even if she'd die before she said so out loud.
She moved closer on the couch.
"That's not an answer," he said.
"No," she agreed, and it wasn't.
Andrew leaned over and turned the TV off. The room went dark.
He was up first in the morning, the way he always was.
Christie was already on the couch when he came out of the bedroom, sitting in her particular contained way — spine straight, feet together, hands folded — watching cartoons with a focus that suggested she'd been awake for a while and had been very careful not to wake anyone. The volume was set so low he could barely hear it from the kitchen.
He got the eggs going, dropped two slices of bread in the toaster. Poured a glass of orange juice and set it on the coffee table next to her without saying anything about it.
She looked at it. Then at him.
"There's more in the fridge," he said. "Help yourself whenever you want."
She nodded very seriously, the way she nodded at most things he said to her — like she was committing it to memory but wasn't quite ready to test it yet. He'd noticed she hadn't opened the refrigerator once since she'd been here. Not the pantry either. She ate what was put in front of her and didn't ask for anything.
Eight years old and already completely fluent in the language of not being a problem.
It made him tired in a specific way he didn't have a good word for.
Bonnie appeared twenty minutes after breakfast was on the table, materialized from the bedroom in a t-shirt and cutoffs, hair loose, moving with the slow deliberateness of someone who'd had a short night. She sat down, ate without complaint, and didn't mention anything about the previous evening's conversation or anything that had followed it. Neither did Andrew.
"Be careful today," he said quietly, when Christie had drifted back to the living room.
Bonnie looked at him over her coffee mug. Raised an eyebrow. "Of what?"
"Of everything." He said it evenly. "You know what of."
She held his gaze for a moment, then made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite dismissal. It was the closest thing to okay that he'd gotten from her on anything that mattered.
He went out to run after breakfast.
The system had been quietly consistent on this — it tracked his physical output the same way it tracked his cooking and his guitar playing, logging incremental gains in stamina and speed that were invisible from the outside but showed up clearly in how his body felt after a mile versus two months ago. It made the boring parts of exercise genuinely interesting, which he suspected was the point. Progress was motivating when you could actually see it.
He ran north through the park, came back down the west side, and then, as had become habit, wandered.
The food truck problem had been sitting in the back of his head since yesterday and the walk crystallized it.
Manhattan barely had food trucks. He'd noticed this in a vague way before, but this morning he was actually looking and the absence was stark — a handful of halal carts, a couple of hot dog stands near the park entrances, nothing like the density you'd see in Midtown or out in the boroughs. The reason wasn't hard to figure out once he started paying attention to the parking situation.
He stopped at a commercial lot on Columbus and read the posted rates. Then he walked two blocks and checked another one.
The numbers were bad.
Not catastrophic-bad, not quite as bad as he'd feared, but bad enough that when he added the monthly parking cost to the price of a used truck in workable condition and the licensing fees he'd already looked up, the total landed within range of what it would cost to lease a small ground-floor retail space for a year. Not a good space. Not a West Village space. But a space.
Which meant the thing he'd been treating as a future-Andrew problem — shop or truck — was actually a present-Andrew problem that he needed to think about clearly.
He sat on a bench outside a deli and worked through it.
The truck had real advantages: mobility, low staffing, the ability to build an audience through unpredictability. No lease with a landlord who could raise his rent. No front-of-house to manage. He could cook, sell, and move, which suited his actual skill set better than running a dining room ever would.
But a truck without a place to park it was a truck you were paying for while it sat somewhere expensive doing nothing. And in Manhattan, somewhere was always expensive.
A shop was the opposite problem. Fixed overhead, fixed location, fixed identity. You needed the neighborhood to come to you, and if it didn't — if you picked the wrong block, or the wrong concept, or the wrong time of year — you were burning through savings with no exit. It required a kind of business instinct he knew, clearly and honestly, that he didn't have. The proficiency system had given him everything it could give him. That particular gap was his alone to fill.
He sat there long enough for a pigeon to decide he wasn't going anywhere and begin investigating his sneakers.
"Shop or truck," he said, to no one.
The pigeon offered no opinion.
He got up and headed home, no closer to an answer, but at least clearer on what the question actually was.
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