Men who believed that taking care of their families meant controlling the conditions in which their families lived. Men who genuinely could not understand why their children didn't feel grateful. Men who'd worked so hard building something that they'd forgotten to ask whether the people they were building it for actually wanted what they were building. He'd watched it from the outside for 12 years in the logistics industry. Owners and managers who managed people, the way they managed fleets efficiently, according to plan, with very little interest in what the individual units actually needed.
He'd never been in a position to say any of that out loud to someone connected to that world. Can I say something that might be out of line? He said, "You've already driven me to a diner instead of taking me home. " Lauren said, "I think we're past that point. Your father called me because he trusts me. And part of why he trusts me is because I stay in my lane.
I do my job. I don't get involved in things that aren't my business. " He paused. So, what I'm about to say, I need you to understand. It's not me getting involved. I'm just saying what I see.
Okay. Your father loves you. I've worked for him 6 years. I've never once heard him talk about the business without mentioning you somewhere in it. Not as a piece of the business as the reason for it.
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.