The girl passed out in the back seat of his rideshare wasn’t just another drunk stranger outside a downtown bar. She was trouble in a black cocktail dress, barefoot, expensive, and too wasted to remember her own address. Ryan was a single dad with a sleeping daughter at home, medical bills stacked on his kitchen counter, and custody papers waiting in a drawer like a loaded gun.
He only wanted to get her home safely.
By sunrise, that one decent choice would threaten everything he had left.
PART 1
“If you touch me, my mother will destroy you,” the drunk girl slurred from the back seat.
Ryan Carter looked at her in the rearview mirror and tightened his hands around the steering wheel.
It was not the first ugly thing someone had said to him during a rideshare shift. It was not even the worst. But at 5:47 on a cold Friday morning, after driving overnight deliveries, eating half a gas station muffin for breakfast, and sleeping three hours on his own couch so his eight-year-old daughter could have the bedroom, he did not have much patience left.
Still, he kept his voice calm.
“I’m not touching you,” he said. “I’m trying to get you home.”
