Her expression softened. “Just this. You being here.” She turned back to the stove. “Tell me about the run. Not the logistics—I know you can’t share details. But how are you feeling about it?”
“Prepared. Paranoid. The usual.”
“Those aren’t feelings, Holden. Those are states of readiness.”
“Fine.” I blew out a breath, trying to translate the knot in my chest into words she’d understand. “Anxious. Like something’s off but I can’t identify what. And frustrated because I’ve checked everything three times and there’s nothing wrong.”
She was quiet for a moment, plating the food with careful movements. “Have you considered that the anxiety might not be about the run itself?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you’ve been doing this for years. You’re good at it—the best, from what I hear, although my opinion might be biased. Your anxiety doesn’t usually spike like this unless…” She set a plate in front of me and settled into the chair across the table. “Is there something else going on? Something you’re not telling me?”
I looked at her—at the concern in her eyes, the way she leaned forward like she had all the time in the world for whatever I was about to say. We’d only been together a short time, but she’d known me for years. She’d seen me at my worst and my best, long before we were even friends.
“The route’s solid,” I said. “Three options, fallbacks for all of them. I’ve checked it.”
She waited.
“Glitch and I are running through comms tomorrow. Everything’s covered.” I moved my fork across the plate.
“That’s not what I asked.”
I set down the fork. “There’s a prospect on this run. Danny. I’ve been working with him for months — he’s good, smart, steady. Nineteen.”
“The one who’s been doing the tire changes.”
“Yeah.” I looked at the table. “He looks at me like I’ve got all the answers. Like if he just follows my lead, nothing bad can touch him.”
Bea reached across the table and took my hand. She didn’t say anything.
“I remember being that age,” I said, after a moment. “Thinking I was invincible. That bad things only happened to people who weren’t careful enough.”
“Like you were before your father died.”
The words hit me like they always did—a dull ache in my chest, the echo of grief that never fully faded. “I wasn’t there when it happened. I was at a party, getting drunk with my friends, while my dad was bleeding out on I-84 because some dispatcher pushed a driver past his limits and nobody planned the route well enough to know the timeline was impossible.”
“You were sixteen. You couldn’t have known.”
“I know that. Logically, I know that.” I turned my hand over, lacing my fingers through hers. “But I keep thinking about all the ways this could go wrong. All the ways I could fail him.”
“You’re putting yourself in your father’s position,” she said quietly. “And Danny in yours.”
“Is that your professional opinion?”
“It’s my girlfriend opinion, which is just as valid.” She squeezed my hand. “Holden, you can’t control everything. You can plan and prepare and run through every scenario, but at the end of the day, some things are out of your hands.”
“I know.”
“Nope.” There was something gentle in it. “You’re trying to control the entire universe through sheer force of will. You have been since you were sixteen.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. “I can be a little intense sometimes,” I finally said.
“A little?” She smiled. “You’ve been ‘a little’ intense since the day we met. I’ve had years to study your particular brand of obsessive planning. It’s part of your charm.”
“Is that what you tell your clients? That obsessive planning is charming?”
“I tell my clients that their coping mechanisms developed for good reasons, even if they’re not always serving them anymore.” She stood and came around the table, sliding onto my lap. “I tell my boyfriend that he’s allowed to worry, but he also has to trust that he’s done everything he can. And then he has to eat dinner and get some sleep.”
