Franklin heard the number and told Andre privately that it was not a bad offer, that it represented a real return on a real risk, and that there was no shame in taking it. Eugene said nothing at all, which told Andre more than any argument in either direction could have. Gordon left the paperwork on the workbench and said he needed an answer within a week.
That evening, Andre went home and found Felicia at the kitchen table. She had lived with the weight of this alongside him without ever making a production of it. The overtime shifts she had picked up quietly. The mornings she left for the warehouse while he stayed at the garage. The way she had never once said he was wrong to try. She did not lead with any of that now, either. She put an envelope on the table where he could see it. The power bill, which she had delayed paying twice in the past two months. He would have enough cash to keep ordering components if he sold. She was not asking him to stop. She was making sure he understood that the cost of what he was building was not only being paid by him, and that he deserved to make his next decision with the full picture in front of him.
Andre sat with that for a long time after she went to bed. He thought about what eighteen thousand dollars would actually resolve. The lease. The testing bench. The outstanding component orders. The envelope on the table. He could return to school without the weight of a stalled business. The story he could tell himself was reasonable and clean. But he kept coming back to the shelves in the East End garage.
Neil called the next morning, needing seven alternators within the week. Three models his regular supplier was back-ordered on, with no confirmed delivery date. A garage on the north side of Bell Haven called an hour later with a similar situation. Then a third shop called, one that had only bought from Andre twice before, asking specifically about availability in a popular application family. Andre started making calls of his own and found that a regional remanufacturing distributor had closed its local warehouse to restructure its distribution network. The disruption was expected to last two to three months. In practice, it meant that shops and dealers who had depended on that supplier for fast turnaround on common applications were now staring at wait times they could not absorb. Andre stood in the East End garage and looked at his inventory shelves. He had built carefully during the weeks since North Delta had stalled, and what sat on those shelves was precisely the inventory the regional shortage was now making urgent. He had the right product in the right place at exactly the moment when the usual sources had gone quiet.
He called Gordon and declined the offer. Then he went home and sat down with Felicia and told her what he had decided, and why. Not to ask permission, but because she had been honest with him, and he owed her the same. He walked her through the supply gap, the calls that had come in over twenty-four hours, and what he believed the operation could do if it held together through the next two months. Felicia listened to all of it. When he finished, she picked up the power bill, folded it, and put it back in the envelope. “Then do it right,” she said. It was not enthusiasm. It was not a blessing. It was Felicia being exactly who she had always been. Someone who said what she meant, and not one word more. For Andre, it was enough.
Andre and Franklin spent two days restructuring how the garage operated. Instead of building units in response to individual orders as they arrived, which created bottlenecks and made consistency harder to maintain under pressure, they laid out a production plan organized by application family. They identified the six types showing up most frequently in the incoming calls from garages and built inventory in those categories first, in volume. The floor was organized into a defined sequence. Cores came in and went to the disassembly area, then to inspection, then to the rebuild stations, then to the testing bench, and finally to the finished-inventory shelf. Nothing moved forward in that sequence without clearing the previous stage. No exceptions, and no shortcuts, regardless of what was waiting to ship.