Chapter 49: The Girl with a Chip on Her Shoulder
The living room light was on when Andrew got home.
Christie was at the table with a textbook open in front of her and a pencil she'd been chewing on. She looked up when he came in and gave him the specific look of someone who had things to say and had decided not to say them.
"Still up?" Andrew hung his jacket by the door.
The look intensified.
He understood it. The study schedule he'd put together for Christie was not gentle. He'd looked at where she was academically, cross-referenced it with where she needed to be to skip a grade and enter a good middle school on track, and built a plan that closed the gap. It was a lot of work. That was the point.
Christie was sharp — genuinely, unusually sharp, the kind of mind that had been honing itself on real-world problems since she was old enough to notice them. She could handle the workload. She just hadn't decided to be grateful about it yet.
"You picked this," Andrew reminded her pleasantly, moving to the kitchen to put on the kettle.
The sound Christie made was not quite a word.
He made tea, settled into the couch, and stretched out with the particular satisfaction of a man who had come home to a quiet apartment and had nothing pressing for the next several hours. The TV was off. Christie's pencil scratched against paper. Outside, the city made its usual sounds.
"Bliss," Andrew said, to the ceiling.
Christie's pencil scratching paused briefly in a way that suggested she had opinions about this characterization.
He let himself think through the near-term picture. The food truck permit was coming through next week — he'd been told to expect it Thursday or Friday, barring something bureaucratic. Once that happened, he could hit the streets immediately. He'd been building the menu in his head for weeks, testing recipes on Christie and using her feedback with more reliance than he'd admit out loud, because her feedback was specific and consistent and she had no incentive to flatter him.
The cooking had been progressing steadily. He was close to a threshold he could feel approaching — not there yet, but close, the way you can tell when you're about to crest a hill even before you can see over it. The daily cooking was moving things forward, just slowly. Christie's appetite, reliable as a metronome, helped.
The financial picture was comfortable in a way he hadn't expected when he'd first counted what he had. Two thousand a month from the fund, the money left from the bar gig, the food truck and its parking covered. Nearly three thousand in reserve. Enough.
He'd grown up, in both lives, with money being the thing that was always either about to run out or already gone. Learning to think about it differently — as a condition that was currently fine rather than a emergency perpetually about to happen — was genuinely new.
He thought about his father. Evan had been a specific kind of disaster as a parent — absent, unreliable, self-involved in ways that had cost Andrew in real and lasting ways. And also, evidently, the kind of man who sat down with a friend fifteen years his junior and said here's what I want to happen when I'm gone. Both of those things were true. Andrew had stopped trying to reconcile them.
He was selfish. He knew this about himself without apology. He'd spent a whole life being pressured to be otherwise, to perform gratitude and warmth and selflessness for an audience that required it, and he was done with that particular performance. He'd take the money Evan left him, he'd use it for himself, and he'd build a life that was actually his rather than a version of what someone else needed it to look like.
That felt right. More right than anything had felt in a long time.
"Christie," he said. "I'm making a snack. You want something?"
Christie put down her pencil. "Yes," she said, with the exhausted dignity of someone who has been studying for four hours and deserves something good.
He went to the kitchen.
She appeared in the doorway a minute later, leaning against the frame with her arms crossed, watching him move around the kitchen with the practiced ease of someone who'd made this particular space his.
She'd gained a few pounds since moving in — he'd noticed without saying anything, because saying something would have been the wrong kind of attention. She'd been thin in the way that happens when meals are inconsistent, and now she wasn't, and that was simply better.
He wasn't going to make a thing of it.
"You look like you're about to complain," he said, without turning around.
"I'm not complaining," Christie said.
"You're thinking about complaining."
She was quiet for a moment. "The schedule is a lot."
"Yes," Andrew agreed. "That's by design."
Christie made a sound.
"You're smart," he said. "Smart enough that taking it easy would be a waste. I'm not interested in wasting things." He set a plate on the counter and slid it toward her spot at the table. "Eat. You've got another hour of work tonight."
Christie looked at the plate. Looked at him. Sat down and started eating.
He made his own plate and sat across from her, and they ate in the quiet companionship of two people who had figured out how to occupy the same space without requiring anything performative from each other.
It was, Andrew thought, a reasonably good arrangement.
The next morning. Nine-thirty exactly.
He came out of the building and Lily was sitting on the front steps. She was up on her feet before the door had fully swung open, turning toward him with a combination of relief and a reflexive effort to look like she hadn't been waiting.
She was dressed more practically than the last time he'd seen her — jeans, a plain jacket, the dramatic makeup toned down to something that was still clearly her but less theatrical. The baton was presumably not on her person, which he appreciated.
"Let's go," Andrew said, and started walking.
Lily fell into step behind him and then beside him, maintaining the slight distance of someone who hadn't decided yet what the dynamic was.
"You made me wait," she said, after half a block.
Andrew looked at her briefly. "Nine-thirty was the time. I came out at nine-thirty."
"I was here at nine-fifteen."
"Then you were early. That's different from me being late."
Lily pressed her lips together.
"Here's something worth knowing," Andrew said, not unkindly but not softly. "When you're asking someone for help — and you are asking me for help — patience is the minimum. You'll spend your whole life needing things from people who aren't obligated to give them. Learning to wait without making it their problem is one of the more useful skills you can have."
Lily was quiet.
"I'm just saying," Andrew added.
"I heard you," she said. Not agreeable exactly, but not combative. Which, for Lily, was probably the functional equivalent of taking notes.
They walked the rest of the way to Central Perk.
The coffee house was in its morning rhythm — the breakfast crowd thinning out, Gunther behind the counter looking like a man who had already handled three things before eight AM and was expecting more.
Andrew had called ahead. Gunther needed waitstaff and was willing to take someone young if they were reliable — daily pay while they were getting started, which was the piece that made it workable for someone in Lily's situation.
He'd vouched for her. He wasn't entirely sure why, except that he'd looked at her on those steps this morning and seen someone who'd shown up when she didn't have to, which was the first real data point in her favor.
Whether she made anything of it was going to be up to her.
"You'll work hard," Andrew said, as they reached the door. "Whatever attitude you've been running on, you leave it outside. You show up on time. You do what you're told."
Lily looked at the coffee house through the window. "What if they're rude to me?"
"Then you handle it professionally and you talk to Gunther afterward." He pulled open the door. "You don't handle it the way you handled the food truck situation."
Lily had the grace to look slightly uncomfortable at the mention of that.
"Come on," Andrew said. "I'll introduce you."
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