He didn't ask you. He sent me a calendar invite. Daniel, he manages me like an appointment. Her voice was controlled but tight around the edges. The way a rope gets right before it snaps.
3 weeks ago, I told him I had other plans. He just rescheduled around my objection. Like my objection was a scheduling conflict. What are you going to do? She looked at him steadily.
I'm not going to the brunch, she said. He felt his chest tighten, not because she was wrong, because he knew what not going to the brunch meant inside the Witmore family dynamic. It wasn't a missed meal. It was a declaration. He's going to know you made that choice consciously, Daniel said.
Not a scheduling thing, not a conflict, a refusal. I know. And he's going to look for why. She met his eyes. I know that, too.
The weight of that landed between them, and neither of them moved away from it. Lauren. He kept his voice low. Level. He's going to look at who you've been spending time with.
I know and I need you to understand what that means for me specifically concretely. I know what it means for you. Do you? I wasn't sharp about it. He was honest about it because my daughter's school, my apartment, my health insurance, my ability to provide stability for a 9-year-old kid who has already lost one parent to bad choices.
All of that runs through my job, and my job runs through your father. Lauren looked at him. Her eyes were steady, but something in them shifted. Not guilt exactly, but weight. Like she was actually taking on the specific gravity of what he was saying rather than just hearing the shape of it.
I'm not going to let you be the reason he comes after you, she said. That's not entirely in your control. It's more in my control than you think. She paused. Daniel, my father is a businessman.
He goes after things that threaten his plan. If his plan changes, if I'm not the piece on the board he thinks I am, then you're not a threat. You're just an employee. Or he decides I'm the reason his plan changed and makes my life difficult on principle. Also possible, she said quietly.
He exhaled, looked out at the park, a man jogging past with a dog, two women with strollers, a city going about its business without any awareness of the thing he was standing inside of. I'm not going to tell you what to do. He said, "That's not my place and it's not who I am, but I need you to know the stakes on my side of this. Not to make you feel responsible, just you said you're not careless with people. I believed you.