Chapter 2 – The Rides That Kept Happening

Elias found himself, over the following weeks, accepting an unusual number of ride requests from Willow’s specific pickup location, a coincidence he told himself was simply a matter of the app’s routing algorithm rather than any deliberate choice on his part, though he suspected, somewhere beneath the rationalization, that wasn’t entirely true.

Their conversations grew steadily more comfortable with each ride — Willow’s frustrations with an underpaying design job she nonetheless genuinely loved, Elias’s careful, deliberately vague answers about his own “consulting work,” a phrase general enough to avoid outright lying while still keeping his actual identity safely concealed.

“You’re a good listener, for a rideshare driver,” Willow told him once, during a particularly long ride home after a difficult client call. “Most drivers just nod along. You actually ask follow-up questions.”

“I find people interesting,” Elias said, which was, he realized with some surprise, entirely true, a fact that felt considerably more significant than it probably should have, given how rarely his actual professional life offered him the chance to simply find someone interesting without an underlying transaction attached.

He began looking forward to her rides with an anticipation he hadn’t felt about anything in months, possibly years, the ordinary, unguarded rhythm of their conversations offering him something his hedge fund’s endless deal-making never had.

He also began, with increasing discomfort, recognizing that whatever this was becoming, it was built entirely on a foundation of concealment he’d have to eventually address, one way or another.