Chapter Text
If Carmen is going to fucking leave her the restaurant, Sydney tells him, then he needs to finish getting the shit out of the basement.
And dutifully, he listens, nods quickly. His shoulders are slumped and his eyes are cast downward, and while any outsider would think she was the one abandoning him the restaurant based on body language alone, it is a nice break from his usual sad boy stare, like that dog denied fucking cupcakes.
It's been more than a week since he dropped that bomb on her and she's barely had a second to process it, because his big revelation just so happened to occur as The Computer's clock hit zero which is just, yeah, it's pretty fucking convenient on his part.
Sydney isn't so proud she won't admit that it's the sandwich window, lunch, that last bit of Mikey that survives, that saved their asses. Carmen had sat silent and morose beside her, Nat, Pete-holding-Sophie, and Richie the next morning as Mr. Kalinowski Unc, The Computer, Ebraheim, and some random fucking guy presented them with the sudden new business opportunity to franchise The Original Beef, which she now was apparently an owner for, that might just get them back to a place where they are like, metaphorically floating in an inner tube and chilling a little, instead of desperately grasping for the life preserver that was just out of reach.
The Bear will live on, for the time being at least. It is nice to know Sydney was a proud part owner of a restaurant that isn't about to immediately shut down, but it isn't like she'd had a chance to celebrate. No one has breathed a word to the crew yet, but they know something is up. Family has been a tense daily occurrence, and the cold shoulder Syd and Richie were giving Carmy was pretty obvious.
It should be her day off. She should be out with Chantel and Mary, but just like her cousin intimated, she's had to cancel. She should be dragging details out of TJ about the sleepover before Christian begs all three women to leave please, just go already. Instead she's sitting in the office staring at a blurring screen, and she's putting distance between herself and Carmen by banishing him to the basement.
It has to be Carmen that does it. There's so much crap down there that got removed and then somehow returned to the restaurant and Sydney knows there's Mikey's stuff down there, shirts and a phone and knickknacks and she's not touching it. It's felt like having a Ouija board or a haunted doll or something in the basement since she found it. If she's doing this she's getting rid of anything that could be contributing to that energetic mustiness and the Berzatto family's ghost needs to be exorcised.
Sydney rubs her eyes and reaches for the stock cup of diet coke, taking a sip like it's something stronger. Is this when she should go smoke? She's still figuring that out. Nat said she'll be stopping in later in the afternoon with Richie so they can all look numbers over and maybe pry answers out of Carmy together. She's done her share of number crunching and reports and color coding in the past, but now they're a legit business, with Nat, and The Computer and like, actual decent software, and she needs a tutorial. If this is going to be hers, she needs to know, have some control.
She hates that she knows the sound of his footsteps. Even slow and stilted as they are now, she knows it's Carmen before he calls out her name, voice tight and high and shaking, and he appears in the doorway, paler than normal, and Syd has only just arranged her features into nonplussed prompting, but whatever is affecting him has her genuinely concerned because he's staring at the phone in his trembling hands. Is someone hurt? Is there some kind of emergency alert he got? When did he downgrade his phone?
"Sydney," Carmen repeats, with his gaze now boring into hers and chest heaving. "W-why is your name in Mikey's phone? And why the fuck did you send him this fucking picture?"
She doesn't have to ask which picture he's talking about. There's only one. There was only ever one. Because it is The One.
It's Carmy's paupiette of hamachi with blood orange.