Jordan Bennett
There is a version of Jordan's life where the music takes over and everything else falls away. Clean. Simple. He makes it, it does well, he walks away from the other thing and nobody gets hurt.
I used to think that version was possible. I am still not sure.
* * *
I was at my PC when the Spotify numbers updated.
Two hundred thousand monthly listeners. I looked at it for a second, then opened the YouTube analytics. The car videos were averaging fifty thousand views. The music posts were doing their own thing on top of that. I pulled up my bank app and looked at the deposit that had come in earlier that week.
Ten thousand dollars. Across everything. Streaming, YouTube, a few sync placements that came through a couple weeks back.
I sat back in my chair.
I did not need Zen anymore. Not financially. I had been circling that truth for a few weeks without saying it directly. The Z was paid off. I had money saved. The music was growing fast enough that I could see exactly where it was going if I kept working. The jobs were not necessary.
Zen had told me once, early on, that I could leave whenever I wanted. That it was always my choice. He said it the way people say things they want you to believe. Casual. Unbothered. Like it was obvious, like there was nothing behind it. I had filed it away and not thought about it much since because I had not needed to.
Now I was thinking about it.
The question was whether I believed him.
Not whether he meant it when he said it. Whether it was actually still true. Whether the version of leaving he described, clean, no friction, just done, was real or whether it was the kind of thing you say to someone before they are useful to you and the terms quietly shift once they are.
The problem was I had no way to check.
That is the thing about how Zen runs it. Nobody knows who anyone else is. I do not know the names of the people I have done jobs alongside. I do not know where they live or how long they have been in or what their arrangement looks like. The whole operation is built so that no single person has enough information to be a real problem if something goes wrong. Which is smart. And which meant I had nobody to ask.
I could not find someone who had been through it and get their read. I could not ask around carefully the way you can in situations where the people involved actually know each other. There was just me and what Zen told me and my own read on who he is, which I trusted up to a point and was not sure I trusted past it.
I had never seen anyone walk away. But I also would not have seen it if they had. That was the whole design.
I was still sitting with that when the burner went off.
* * *
Job. Thirteen thousand. Pick someone up and drop them off.
I stared at the message.
Then I went.
I know how that looks. I had just done the math and determined I did not need this and then I got the message and I went anyway. The honest version is that I had not told Zen anything yet, so as far as he was concerned I was still in, and turning down a job with no explanation was its own kind of statement. A statement I was not ready to make without something behind it. So I went. And I told myself it was the last one while I drove.
* * *
I picked her up from the location on the burner. She got in the back without a word. I pulled out and headed toward the drop.
Three minutes in I noticed the Honda.
Black. Staying about four car lengths back. Too consistent. I made two unnecessary turns and it made both of them. I kept my speed normal, face forward, and started thinking through my options.
I got on the freeway.
The Honda came up fast as soon as I merged. I moved right, it moved right. Left, it moved left. I gave it a few seconds to see if it was going to do something or just stay on me. It just stayed.
I pushed the Charger up to ninety and started moving through traffic. Not panicking. Just moving. The Honda tried to keep up but it did not have the car for it. I put three lanes and eight vehicles between us in about forty seconds, took an exit it did not see coming, and doubled back through side streets.
By the time I reached the drop location I had not seen it in eleven minutes.
The woman in the back had not said one word the entire drive.
* * *
The drop was a regular house on a regular block. I had expected a parking lot or a side street. Instead it was a neighborhood, quiet, nothing unusual about it from the outside.
An old woman came out when I pulled up. Small, gray hair, moved slow. She came to my window and handed me an envelope without saying anything. I checked it. The money was there. I nodded.
The woman from the back seat got out. The old lady walked her inside. The door closed.
I sat there for a second looking at that door.
I had been telling myself for months that I was just driving. Just a service. Whatever the thing was, I was adjacent to it, not in it. But sitting outside that house watching a door close on something I had just delivered, that separation felt thinner than it used to.
I pulled out and drove home.
* * *
I got back, changed, sat down at my desk.
The Spotify numbers were still open on the other monitor. Two hundred thousand. Ten thousand dollars. Things I built.
I sat there thinking about Zen's voice when he said it. You can leave whenever you want. The way it came out easy. Like he was doing me a favor by saying it.
Do I believe him.
Part of me said yes. Zen is practical. He does not do things that do not serve him and keeping someone around who wants out is a liability. Easier to let people go clean than to have someone working jobs who is distracted or sloppy or looking for an exit at the wrong moment.
But another part of me remembered the Honda tonight. Remembered the way that door closed. Remembered that I had no way of knowing whether anyone had ever actually left because the whole setup was designed so I would never know. And I thought about the difference between Zen meaning what he said and Zen having said it before he knew how useful I would turn out to be.
I could not ask anyone. There was no one to ask. That was the whole point.
All I had was my read on him. And my read said he was a man of his word up to a certain point, and I did not know where that point was, and I was not sure I wanted to find out the hard way.
I opened my browser and typed in criminal defense attorney East Highland.
Not because I was in trouble right now. Because I wanted to understand my position before I had a conversation I could not take back. Because the difference between a good outcome and a bad one is usually whether you had a plan before things went sideways or whether you were building one after.
I looked through a few names. Read some reviews. Saved two numbers.
Then I closed the laptop and looked at the numbers one more time.
Two hundred thousand people listening to something I made.
I went to bed.
Tomorrow I was taking Maddy somewhere. I had already decided that. Whatever else was going on, that part was undecided.