Who would I tell everyone in my life is connected to my father's company? If I bring an idea to the table at Whitmore, he absorbs it. It becomes a Whitmore initiative. It becomes his. Her voice was even, but something underneath it was sharp.
I've watched him do that with three different people in four years. Take someone's idea, thank them for the contribution, and make it the company's asset. He doesn't even know he's doing it. He thinks that's how it's supposed to work. Daniel leaned forward.
Lauren. Yeah, that's a real business. She looked at him. The notebook book, he said. That's not a dream.
That's not an escape fantasy. If you've spent 18 months on operational modeling for a small business training program, that's a real business. She opened her mouth, closed it. He could see her working through something. The gap between the way she'd been holding this thing privately, protectively, like something fragile, and the way he'd just said it back to her like it was solid.
"It's not funded," she said. "Not yet. I don't have a team. You don't need one yet. " "My father would. " "What your father would do is a separate problem," Daniel said. "I'm talking about the idea.
The idea is real. What you described is real. " She looked at him for a long moment. Something was moving across her face that she wasn't trying to hide and wasn't trying to show. Just something happening. You sound very sure, she said.
I've been in logistics for 12 years. I know what a real operational gap looks like, and I know what it costs small operators who don't have people like your father to call. What you're describing is the thing that doesn't exist and should. She looked down at her coffee, then back up. You're the first person who said that to me," she said quietly.
"That it's real, that it's worth something. " He didn't know what to say to that, so he said, "The true thing. It is. " They sat there for a moment in the narrow coffee shop with the construction workers moving around them and the sound of the espresso machine going and the ordinary Tuesday morning city noise outside and something between them that neither of them was naming yet, because naming it would mean deciding what to do about it, and they weren't there. But it was there. He noticed it. She noticed it.
They both chose separately and simultaneously to leave it alone. I have to get back, he said. Me, too. Are you? He stopped.
What? Are you going to be okay with the Heartley thing? Your father? She looked at him. Probably not immediately, but eventually.