Renee hadn't been exaggerating when she said she and Andrew were a lot alike. They had violent, unstable upbringings thanks to their mothers and spent time in both juvie and the foster system. Their paths split irrevocably after their respective adoptions. Renee let Stephanie shape her into a decent human being and atoned for her past brutality whereas Andrew murdered his mother the first chance he got. Neil finally understood why Renee wasn't afraid of Andrew.

"Then why don't you and Andrew work?" Neil asked.

"I'm sorry," Renee said. "Work how?"

"Why haven't you asked him out?"

The look on her face said it was the last question she'd expected from him. She bought herself time by motioning Neil into the next shop. Neil went in first but stepped aside so she could lead the way. The look she gave him on her way by was assessing, but she turned to the task at hand soon enough and rummaged through the trinkets on the closest shelf.

"What is all this about, if you don't mind my asking?" she asked. "You've never seemed interested before."
"I'm not," Neil said, but that didn't make sense considering he'd been the one to bring it up.

Neil grasped for a good way to explain. He didn't want to tell her he'd spent Friday night thinking about dying. He hadn't wanted to think about a future he didn't have, so he stood at the railing and thought about his teammates instead. It was a strange exercise, as fascinating as it was discomforting. He wasn't used to worrying about anyone but himself and his mother, but he'd tried imagining the Foxes' lives a year or two down the road. He wondered what sort of strikers Kevin would recruit to replace him and how much fallout the Foxes would face after he gave himself over to the FBI.

But mostly he thought about them as the people he'd spent the evening with, the people he was getting to know almost against his will. They'd never be perfect, but they were going to be all right. They'd come to the Foxhole Court as fractured messes but they were fixing each other one semester at a time. Even Kevin was going to come out of this on top. He wasn't going to fade into obscurity like Tetsuji and Riko thought he would; he would ride the Foxes' resurgence to the top and reclaim his place in the spotlight.

The only one besides Neil who didn't have a way out was Andrew. Kevin and Nicky both thought they had the right solution for Andrew's problem, but Neil wasn't sure anymore which one of them he believed. But he couldn't tell Renee that, either, because he didn't want to explain why it was suddenly so important. It wouldn't mean anything to her when she didn't know who he was and what Andrew had offered him.

"Never mind," he said.