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?
I don't know yet. That's the part he won't give me space to figure out. She picked up her. He schedules every hour. He calls three times a day.
Every person I meet is someone he's vetted. Every event I attend is on his calendar first. She paused. I know that sounds ungrateful. It doesn't a lot of people would trade places with me.
I know, but wanting your own life isn't the same as being ungrateful for what someone gave you. Daniel set down his fork and looked at her directly. No, he said, "It's not something settled between them. Not romance. Not the beginning of anything dangerous.
Just the particular piece of two people who'd both been carrying something heavy in completely different ways and had accidentally found themselves in the same small diner at 10:00 on a Friday night being honest with each other. He thought about his own life. I thought about the way he'd reorganized every single thing after the divorce around the single goal of being stable, reliable, present, and safe, which was the right thing, which was what Amara needed. But somewhere in the process of becoming the man Amara needed him to be, he'd quietly stopped asking himself what Daniel Brooks needed. Not in a dramatic way, not in a way he could point to, just a slow incremental putting away of everything that might cost something emotionally because he couldn't afford to lose anything else.
He didn't say any of that. This wasn't the moment, and she wasn't the person. And he was, after all, still the fleet supervisor sitting across from his employer's daughter in a diner he'd chosen specifically because nobody would recognize either of them. But he heard it in himself for the first time in a while. At 10:15, Lauren looked at her phone and then at him.