Lauren went very still. But he doesn't know. Daniel said that those two things can work against each other. Loving something so much that you forget to ask it what it wants. She looked at him.
Her jaw was doing that thing again, the holding something in place thing. But this time there were tears in her eyes that she was very clearly not going to let fall because that was not the kind of woman she was. He could see that immediately. She wasn't going to cry in a diner in front of her father's fleet supervisor. She blinked once, twice.
Then she picked up her fork because Gloria had brought the pie and neither of them had noticed. "How do you know that? " she said quietly. "About my father. The way he talks. I run his fleet.
I'm in a lot of meetings. I hear a lot of things and he never she stopped. What? He never said anything to you about this, about me? About Evan Hartley.
Not a word, Daniel said. Not until tonight when he called me to pick you up. She nodded. She ate a bite of pie. He ate a bite of pie.
The cherry was probably fine, but the strawberry rhubarb was genuinely excellent, and he made a note to come back here on a day that had nothing complicated attached to it. "I'm not going to marry Evan Hartley," Lauren said. "That's your business. I'm also not going to pretend I don't know this is happening. I've been doing that for 2 years with every decision my father has made about my future. " She looked at Daniel.
I graduated with a master's in business administration. I had three job offers from companies that had nothing to do with my father. I turned them down because he asked me to come work for him. He said he needed someone he could trust. I thought that meant he respected my judgment.
Doesn't it? It means he wants my name on the letter head and my face at the events and my signature on documents he's already decided to sign. Her voice was steady, controlled, but something underneath it was not. I've been at Whitmore Logistics for four years. I have never once been asked for my opinion on a major decision before it was made.
I'm asked to ratify things to appear to represent. She put down her fork. I'm the decoration Daniel. I'm the evidence that he built something worth inheriting. And I genuinely don't know if he sees the difference between that and actually including me.
The diner was quiet around them. Gloria had gone back to the counter. The two men had left. The old couple in the back was still there, still sharing a companionable silence that suddenly felt like something Daniel hadn't been close to in a very long time. "What do you want? " he asked.
She looked at him like it was a strange question, and he realized as she sat with it for a moment that maybe it was. Maybe nobody asked her that in those plain terms very often. "I want to build something," she said. Not inherit something, not represent something, build something that I chose, something that started with my idea instead of his. What kind of thing?