Chapter 67: Free Days
"There's something else," Miranda said, before he could respond to the Carol news.
She reached into the inner pocket of her coat and produced a folded document — a photocopy, the kind that came from a records request rather than an original file. She set it on the table between them.
Andrew picked it up.
It was an adoption application. Filed with the New York City Administration for Children's Services. Two applicants.
Carol Willick. Susan Bunch.
Stamped at the bottom in red: APPLICATION DENIED — Applicants do not meet current eligibility requirements.
The date on the filing was February. Two months ago.
Andrew looked at it for a long moment.
"Where did you get this?" he said.
"Background check. I run them on all parties in a divorce case — both sides. Standard practice." Miranda's voice was professionally neutral, but he could hear the thing underneath it. She'd found something she thought he should know about. "I had a contact at ACS pull the recent filings when Carol's behavior started seeming inconsistent with someone who actually wanted a divorce."
"You thought she was running a play."
"I thought it was worth understanding her motivations." Miranda picked up her coffee. "In my experience, when a spouse behaves erratically around filing — delays, withdrawals, sudden procedural moves — there's usually a financial calculation underneath it."
Andrew set the document down and thought through the timeline.
Carol and Susan had applied to adopt in February, while Carol was still technically in the process of separating from Ross. The application had been denied — two unmarried women in 1993 trying to adopt jointly were going to hit that wall, regardless of other circumstances. Then, two months later, Carol had terminated the divorce petition.
He thought about what he knew that Miranda didn't.
Carol wasn't running a financial play. He was as certain of that as he was certain of anything. She was genuinely in love with Susan, genuinely building a life, and genuinely — in the way of people who had been in long relationships and hadn't fully metabolized that they were ending — still connected to Ross in ways that made clean breaks feel impossible. The adoption rejection had probably hit them harder than Miranda's version of the story accounted for.
And then there was the other thing he knew, from a television show that hadn't finished airing yet in the life he'd come from: Carol was going to get pregnant. The timeline put that somewhere in the next several months. The adoption denial might have been part of what led there.
None of which he could explain to Miranda.
"It's not a financial play," he said.
Miranda looked at him. "You sound certain."
"I know Carol. She's not that person." He folded the document carefully and set it aside. "She's confused. She's been in a marriage for years and she's trying to figure out how to leave it in a way that doesn't destroy everyone. That's different from a scheme."
Miranda was quiet for a moment.
"You might be right," she said, in the tone of someone who had seen enough cases to know that people were often more complicated than their legal behavior suggested. "Either way, Ross fired me this morning, so it's not professionally my concern anymore."
"Thank you for telling me."
"Don't mention it." She picked up her coat from the back of the chair. "Literally. Don't mention it to Ross — the document, any of it. He doesn't need the extra layer right now."
"Agreed."
She stood. Adjusted her collar. Looked at him with the expression she wore when she was about to say something she'd decided was worth saying.
"Get a tax accountant," she said.
He blinked. "What?"
"You run a food truck. It's been operating at high volume for four months. If you haven't filed a Schedule C you're already behind, and if you've been earning what I suspect you've been earning, the IRS will eventually find that interesting." She pulled a business card from her wallet — dense with information, the card of someone who had a lot of contacts and organized them carefully — and set it on the table. "Howard Kessler. He does small business and self-employment. Tell him I sent you, he'll give you a reasonable rate."
Andrew picked up the card.
"He's good?" he said.
"He's thorough, which is better." She put her coat on. "He won't let you make mistakes, and he won't let you miss deductions. Tell him your gross monthly and he'll tell you what you owe."
"Thank you."
"That one you can mention." She almost smiled. "Take care of your friend."
She left.
He took the subway home with the adoption document in his jacket pocket and Miranda's accountant card in his wallet, and thought about Carol and Susan on the train.
The math of it, from a purely outside perspective, looked suspicious — Miranda wasn't wrong about that. Terminate the divorce, conceive a child, collect support. It was a pattern that existed. But Carol wasn't that person, and Susan wasn't either. They were two people who had wanted to build something and hit a wall, and were trying to figure out what came next.
He needed to talk to Susan. Not about the document — he wasn't going to wave a copy of their rejected adoption application at her. But she'd be back from Vermont soon, probably back at the gym by tomorrow, and there were things it would be useful to say.
He called Howard Kessler from the apartment.
The man picked up on the second ring, professional and direct, the voice of someone who billed by the hour and respected people who didn't waste it. Andrew said Miranda's name. The voice warmed by a few degrees — not effusively, just the incremental shift of someone extending professional courtesy to a referral from someone they trusted.
They set a meeting for Thursday morning.
Andrew gave him the rough numbers: gross monthly from the truck, operating costs, the fund disbursement he received monthly, the guitar income from the coffee shop gigs which he'd mostly stopped doing but hadn't formally closed out. Kessler made sounds that were neither alarmed nor dismissive — the sounds of someone taking notes.
"Bring your bank statements from January forward," Kessler said. "And whatever receipts you have for operating expenses. If you don't have them organized, don't worry about it, we'll reconstruct what we can."
"I have them organized," Andrew said.
A brief pause, the sound of someone revising their expectations upward. "Then this will go quickly. Thursday at nine."
Andrew hung up and checked the panel.
[Cooking (Expert): 5/100][Boxing (Proficient): 94/100][Observation (Proficient): 70/100][Martial Arts (Proficient): 89/100]
Still stalled on Boxing. He'd been here for two weeks. The panel was patient in a way that felt pointed.
He made dinner — something simple, pasta with olive oil and garlic and a handful of parmesan, the twenty-minute kind — and ate it standing at the counter in the quiet of the apartment.
[Cooking (Expert): 6/100]
The apartment was unusually itself without Christie in it. He hadn't expected to notice her absence as a thing with weight, but it did have weight — the cereal she liked still in the cabinet, the stack of practice exams gone from the counter, the second bedroom door open on a room that had been reorganized around her being in it and was now just a room again.
He'd check in on her at the first parents' weekend. She'd tell him she was fine and mean it, and he'd be able to see whether that was true, and it would probably mostly be true.
He washed his plate.
He watched television for a while — a Thursday night lineup that held his attention intermittently, the familiar faces of shows that were part of how this decade sounded. He tossed and turned on the couch through a nature documentary about something in the Pacific Northwest.
By eight-thirty he was done with being inside.
He put on his jacket and went out.
New York at night in late March had a specific quality — the cold was still real but it had stopped being aggressive about it, the air carrying the first tentative suggestion that winter was negotiating its exit. The streets had the particular evening energy of a city that ran three shifts, the dinner crowd thinning out and the later crowd finding its footing.
He walked without a specific destination, which he rarely did. Usually his walks had purposes — routes between places, errands embedded in them. This was just movement for its own sake, the city as company.
He found himself on Columbus, past the block where the truck parked. The spot was empty, the parking permit bolted to the signpost, a minor fact that had become part of his geography over four months.
Monday, he'd be back out.
He kept walking, turned downtown, let his mind do what it did when he gave it space — not solving problems exactly, more like turning them over, seeing what light they caught from different angles.
The Boxing problem had one real answer and he'd been avoiding it.
Bolton had almost said it out loud twice. Andrew had watched him pull back both times — some combination of not wanting to send Andrew somewhere that might not be right for him, and not being sure Andrew was ready to hear it.
The sanctioned amateur circuit would give him opponents. But it would also give him a public record and a face in a database and the incremental visibility of someone who kept winning. That wasn't nothing, given what he was trying to avoid being.
The other option was the thing Bolton hadn't said. The thing that existed in every city, that solved the problem of visibility by operating without it.
He'd have to think about it more.
He walked until ten, bought a coffee from a cart on 72nd that was still running, and headed home.
The apartment was exactly as he'd left it.
He made a note to call Susan tomorrow, locked the door, and went to bed.
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