A/N: Just to make sure everyone understands this---the quote at the start of the chapter is meant to be ironical. At this point in the story, Bridget is a shade to the left of naive. Keep that in mind.

..Somewhere down this road / I know someone's waiting / Years of dreams just can't be wrong / Arms will open wide, I'll be safe and wanted / Finally home where I belong.

- Anastasia

She'd first concocted this plan two years ago, the day that fateful newspaper had arrived on their front step, but she hadn't actually put it into motion until Christmas of last year, when she and Lucas had become engaged. It was a knee-jerk reaction to the panic attack she'd had that night, lying in her bed and realizing that she had a fiance.

The plan had seemed much more dramatic then--her whisking off in a cloud of mystery, possibly with an extremely chic hat on her head, and a lot less...painful then it was shaping up to be. Her feet were killing her.

The train station was miles from the house, and there had been no way for her to organize a carriage to pick her up without her mother noticing. She'd covertly cleaned out her savings account at the bank yesterday in town, telling her mother she was going to look in the dress shop. The clerk had given her a strange look, before she'd sweetly reminded him that she was getting married (as if anyone in the town was still unawares of that fact) and would be moving all of her assests to a joint account with her husband. The word 'husband' nearly blew her cover, because saying it always tripped her up. The idea of her being someones wife was ridiculous enough, but the idea of that someone being Jonas Pierpont, who always spoke to her in a very soft voice, as if he was afraid her eardrums were to delicate to stand his voice at audible tones, was enough to make her want to laugh, very hysterically. Which would have only served to frighten the other customers at the bank.

It had been a lot of effort for a small result. She only had a little over a fifty dollars in her account--the result of a year of scrimping and saving birthday, christmas, and pocket money like a common street woman. She was thoroughly dissapointed in herself. After the cost of the train ticket, the price of a new suitcase (her old one had burst in an explosion of lingerie two miles from the train station), maybe a book to keep her company..oh, and a good hot meal (nerves had prevented her from eating a thing all day, and she was suddenly ravenous) she wasn't sure how long she would be able to survive in a big city like New York on such a meager amount.

Sighing and grappeling with the broken valise she had clamped in her arms to prevent another showering of her under garments, she forced herself to keep moving, one foot in front of the other, and kept her eye on the prize; New York. Finding Ben. Starting over.

Once she found Ben, she reasoned to herself, he would gladly let her stay with him---it wouldn't matter that she didn't have very much money, she told herself comfortingly. She wasn't sure how much Ben made---she supposed he was still a newsboy, and she didn't think they made very much--but she knew her brother well enough to know that whatever circumstances he was in, he would have made the absolute best of them. Ben would never be content to just be a newsboy---perhaps he was head of circulation, or something important sounding like that. She had the utmost faith in Ben, always had.

So, Ben could support them, and in return she would do his cooking and cleaning (she could cook and clean---couldn't she? Wasn't it a given that all women could do these things from birth?) or whatever it was that common women did. And she could get a job (the very notion would have given her mother a panic attack, and Bridget clung to it gleefully, like a talisman) maybe as a shop girl--or, maybe, she could get a job at one of the theatres New York was so famous for. Yes--that was what she would do. Work at a theatre. Then, when she became famous (And now, ladies and gentleman, the lovely Bridget Conlon!) and bought herself a big mansion of her own, her parents would have to admit that they had been wrong.

She grinned despite the needle-sharp pain in her feet. Reunited with Ben----it was going to be so wonderful. She just knew it.

Maybe she should buy some new shoes before she got there.