Chapter 1 – Driving to Stay Busy

Elias Marsh started driving for a rideshare app eight months after his divorce finalized, not out of any financial necessity — his hedge fund’s returns had made that particular concern irrelevant decades earlier — but out of a restlessness that had settled over him since his ex-wife, Vivian, had left, taking with her not just their marriage but, Elias increasingly suspected, any genuine belief he’d once had that people could actually love him rather than his considerable net worth.

Vivian had known about the money from the start, had in fact been drawn to it as openly as she’d eventually grown bored of the man attached to it, a pattern that had left Elias, at fifty-two, deeply uncertain whether any relationship in his adult life had ever been built on something more substantial than his bank balance.

Driving anonymously, late into the evenings, gave him something his hedge fund never could — ordinary, unguarded conversations with strangers who had no idea they were sharing a car with a man worth several billion dollars, conversations that felt, increasingly, like the only genuine human connection left in his life.

He picked up Willow Sinclair on a rainy Tuesday evening, a graphic designer heading home from a long shift at a small firm, exhausted and easily, unguardedly chatty in the way of someone simply glad for a quiet ride after a difficult day.

“Rough one,” Elias asked, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.

“You have no idea,” Willow said, laughing despite her exhaustion. “Client wanted an entire rebrand redone in two days. For free, apparently, since nobody bothered to mention the budget got cut before they told me to start.”