> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.choosealifeyou.love/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # I Love The Story Of Driven - URL: https://www.choosealifeyou.love/i-love-the-story-of-driven/ - Published: 2025-10-16T19:35:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-10T01:09:39.000Z - Author: Nina - Tags: Creative Activities, Car, Choose A Life You Love, Experiences DRIVEN\_BOOK ONE EPILOGUE It started with the Sunday drives. Dom’s idea, which meant it arrived the way Dom’s ideas always arrived…. not announced….. just present one morning over stovetop coffee……What do you think? Do you want to drive somewhere? The kids are at your mum’s…… We’ve got the afternoon…. Cara considered it….she really did. Then she looked up from her laptop and thought the laptop can wait…..the laptop should wait. They had been doing it for three Sundays now….. no particular destination….. just driving enveloped in the embrace of the car with the Peninsula unfolding around them….. the Frankston strip giving way to the vineyards….. and then to the coast road….. and then to whatever the afternoon decided should come next. Dom drove and she loved it when he did that…it seemed like such a small thing because it allowed her to sit with her feet on the dashboard with the window down and the spring air coming through…. and sometimes she talked…. and sometimes she didn’t….. and Dom was always comfortable with both….. which was one of the things she loved most about him….it was one of the things she \*\*\*still\*\*\* loved about him. On the fourth Sunday drive…. Dom drove them to Boneo Road first. There was thirteen acres. The Bass Strait unfolding below like She stood at the boundary and looked at the ocean and let herself want it. The space. The ocean. The breadth and depth of the land that was specific to this particular terrain. Not desperately… but it did allow for honesty…and maybe that was what she wanted the most…. anyway… ….someday, she thought. Not now. Not today. But someday. “Too much,” she said, wincing her words with the pain of truth. “Mmmmm,” Dom replied. “Beautiful though.” “Yes It’s stunningly beautiful…..” “as are you…” Dom trailed off and Cara smiled shyly as they stood with the air of sexual tension of a married couple still in love. “There’s another one…..” Dom said….. “On the way back….. it’s Inland…..still here….still the same town…just a different kind of country.” Cara looked at him and giggled. “Dom,” she said teasingly…. “Have you been researching properties?” He turned to her with the smile she loved. “Maybe,” he said with a cheeky grin. “Just for Sundays.” \~ \~ The road bent inland and the country changed around them. The vineyards fell away. The tree ferns appeared at the verges. The light shifted and became warmer….. more contained. The air through the window changed, and she could feel the change…in the temperature…the weather…the environment and the land…. Dom turned onto a smaller road. She saw the gate and beside it was an old timber, weathered, kind of post that had been there for decades…and from it was a sign with simple lettering. Domcara Road. Their surname. She thought she had misread it. She looked at the sign and read it again. Domcara Road? “Dom?” she said. “I know,” he replied “Babe….. Our… our…..our…name is on the gate.” “I know.” \~ \~ \~ Domcara road was a little over thirty-nine acres with two protected creeks. The tree ferns gave way to open land and at the boundary was a conservation reserve with seventy-four acres of protected bush that nobody would ever build on. That protection, meant nothing would ever change what was visible from here. Dom stopped the car. Cara looked at the land. Not with the ache of wanting Boneo Road…..not with the ache of someday. Instead it was an ache of something different. Something that was strong and settled, and knowing? Yes….a knowing in her belly….she was home. They were home. It wasn’t…and yet it was….and it couldn’t be….and yet it was. \~ \~ \~ She walked the land in the late afternoon with Dom beside her and felt the land stirring something inside her. Something old. And quiet. A feeling of standing on ground that was always yours. No sign needed, because the human heart always knows where it belongs. Not legally. No. Not yet. But in a different way…..a way of this was always where you were going……you just didn’t know what to call it yet. \~ \~ \~ Dom came and stood beside her at the boundary of the conservation reserve. “There’s a young jacaranda,” he said. “Down near the southern boundary. I saw it on the listing photos.” She looked at him and laughed. “How long have you been looking at this listing Dom?” she teased him whilst being secretly delighted. “Since January,” he said flatly. Since January she thought….. the same month she ran the 10km. The same month she submitted the app. Dom had been quietly looking at this land since January, the way he’d been quietly arranging Red Hill when he saw she was tired, the way he always did things: before she knew she needed them….. with attention….. without drama….without gushes of appreciation and thanks. “So clever….and so sweet” she thought. I love that about him. He reached into his pocket. He had the agent’s card. “How long have you had that?” she laughed “Since January,” he said. She shook her head and took the card. 2 Domcara Road, Flinders. Their name. On the gate. She put the card in her pocket. “Come on,” she said. “We need to get back….. I want to call Margot.” \~ \~ \~ Cara called Margot the next morning and said yes. Not a tentative yes…. not a careful yes…..The full omfg yes!!!!!!! And that “yes” set things in motion….. Contracts. Meetings. Numbers. Decisions. And then? Three days later….. Margot called again. “There is one more thing,” she said. “There is always one more thing” laughed Cara. “The publishers want to know what comes next.” Cara looked at the cup beside the laptop. “Nothing,” she said. Margot was quiet. “Nothing comes next?” “Well it’s not nothing….Cara said. “It’s more like truthfully?" I don’t know what comes next.” She stood and carried her cup to the sink. The house was quiet in the middle of the day. \~ \~ \~ Dom was out. The kids were where they needed to be. The wattlebird was making its usual case to the lemon tree. “I’ve written about the drip,” Cara said. “About invisible labour. About Reclamation. About the Housing Crisis. About Charity. About Worth. About shoe shops and business closure and all the ways women pour and pour and call it love because nobody offered them another word for it.” She felt the weight of her words fill her chest with heaviness, and Margot allowed them space to land, before reaching in deeply and replying: “Those stories matter Cara.” “I know they matter Margot…..I truly do….but I don’t know how to say this, other than I just don’t want to live in those kinds of stories anymore.” The words surprised her with the certainty and conviction they were delivered with.. “Well….. what do you want to write then?” Margot asked genuinely curious to know the answer. Cara looked through the window. “I want to write about Love,” she said. “Love?” Margot questioned. “Love stories? Romance?” “No…. not like that….. moreso things I love….. Places I love….. Books I love….. Music. Cars. Houses. Clothes. Food. The things people love because they want to choose a life they love.” She thought about the woman she had seen that morning carrying a very expensive handbag. A lovely-looking woman. Warm face. Beautifully dressed. Cara had asked who owned the brand because she had been genuinely curious. The woman had not known. She knew the name on the bag. She did not know who she had chosen when giving them her money. “People don’t always know what they’re choosing when they choose a life they love” Cara said. “They know the logo. They know the story they’ve been sold. But rarely do they know who owns it…. who made it…. where the money goes…. what it supports. Sometimes they don’t even know whether they love the thing they’re actually wanting so bad.... or whether they have simply been taught to love it.” “Well that sure sounds like a story” said Margot and Cara replied: “It probably sounds more like a question, now I’m thinking it out loud.” “Most stories do sound like at that at the beginning…..” Margot trailed off again leaving a gap for Cara to discern for herself. Cara dried the cup and placed it beside the sink. “I don’t know how to write such things anyway…..” said Cara. “It’s not my “normal” kind of thing…. “Then don’t,” Margot said. “Don’t write it.... Well not yet anyway…. Maybe the best thing you could do instead? Is simply pay attention to how you feel.” Cara furrowed her brow in thought, and then nodded silently. \~ \~ The invitation came the following Thursday. Not an international call. Not a courier carrying a contract. An actual email asking whether Cara and her husband would come to Melbourne the next morning for a private meeting with a car company whose name she recognised before she reached the end of the first line. She read it twice. Then forwarded it to Margot with one question. Is this real? Margot replied four minutes later. OMG Yes…. And OMG Girl….. Go. Go. Go. Go. \* \* \* The dealership did not look like a dealership. There were no flags on the footpath, no rows of cars angled toward traffic and no fluorescent numbers promising a weekly repayment. Dom looked at the single polished door. “Ready?” Cara had worn the white suit. She had bought it because she loved it, then saved it because ordinary life had never seemed important enough to wear it Anyway.... nothing about the outfit made her richer, better informed or more qualified to enter the building. Yet it did make her feel as though she had somewhere to go. Dom reached for the door. “Are you ready?” Cara looked at her reflection in the glass. For one second she saw the woman with four hundred dollars in her account standing over the shoulder of the woman in the white suit. Both of them were frightened. “No,” she laughed. Dom opened the door anyway. \~ \~ \~ Inside, the dealership smelled faintly of leather, coffee and something clean Cara could not name. A woman met them immediately. “Cara Malone?” “Yes.” “Amélie Varenne. Thank you for coming.” She was perhaps ten years younger than Cara, composed without appearing arranged… wearing a navy suit and shoes low enough to suggest she expected to move during the day. She greeted Dom by name, not as an attachment and then led them past the cars to a glass room overlooking the showroom. A man was waiting inside. Silver at the temples. No tie. A contained stillness of somebody accustomed to other people arriving prepared. “My father, Laurent,” Amélie said. “He founded Valère.” Laurent stood and offered Cara his hand. “We have been reading your work” he smiled warmly. “Its….. …it’s unexpected Cara…I’ll be truthful. It was an unusual point of view, and not something I had considered until I encountered your work.” Cara sat opposite him wondering what to make of it all. Dom took the chair beside her. “Which work?” “The Water Bearer.” he replied. And Calculate Your Worth. And the piece about the man in the car outside.” I read all of it.” Cara glanced at Dom. “My husband is the man in the car outside….” she felt she needed to say for no idea why. “Yes,” Laurent said. “The old Hilux...” Cara kept going.. “Yes..they’re a great car…near on indestructible…” “It’s true” said Dom” Laurent leaned back in his chair. Amélie smiled. Laurent did not, but something shifted near his eyes. Coffee arrived in cups too small to hold with both hands and Cara placed hers on the table so as not to spill it on her white suit, then looked at Laurent with genuine curiosity and asked: “Why is a car company reading The Water Bearer?” “Because we have a problem.” Laurent volleyed back. “What kind of problem?” Cara pushed. Laurent looked through the glass at the cars below. “Women rarely choose us” he said honestly. “And yet we have the projections and data….the banks have already shared it…Close to $100 trillion is expected to pass through women’s hands in the upcoming next years.. And unless we change our ways….our company will get none of it.” “$100 trillion?” asked Cara. “ $100 trillion” answered Laurent. “And so you want me to tell them to…….. ” asked Cara “We don’t want you to tell them anything.” The answer was immediate and firm. “We know what men purchase,” Amélie continued. “We know what they click, what they configure, which colour they choose and how long they stay on a page. We know how the cars perform at speeds most people will never legally reach. We have more data than we know what to do with.” “What we do not know,” Laurent said, “is what women love.” Cara looked from the father to the daughter. “Women are not one person” she stated “Exactly.” “And I cannot tell you what all women love.” “We are not asking you to.” Amélie folded her hands on the table. “Your husband asked you to choose a life you love. It occurred to us that we have spent years asking women to choose our cars without ever asking what they love. We do not need another campaign telling women what they should want from us. We want somebody who will tell us the truth about meeting what we have made.” “So what are you asking? What exactly do you want from me?” Laurent answered. “We want you.” The words were so simple that Cara almost missed them. She waited for the qualification. It did not come. Amélie opened a slim folder. “We would like to offer you a freelance role. One car. One month. You live with it. Drive it when you want to drive it. Leave it at home when you don’t. At the end of each week, tell us what you loved.” “A review?” asked Cara “No. We already know what the car can do. We want to know what you notice.” “And if I don’t love it?” “Tell us that too.” “Publicly?” “Only if you choose to,” Amélie said. “We are not buying posts. We are not buying praise. We are paying for your time, your attention and your honesty. Your words remain yours. Anything we wish to publish would require a separate agreement.” Cara looked at the folder but did not touch it. “You read The Water Bearer.” “Carefully,” Laurent said. “We know what it would mean if we asked you to pour for us for free.” Something in her chest moved. Not broke. Not opened. Made room. “How much?” she asked. There was a small pause. “We also read Calculate Your Worth.” “Oh.” “You calculated the value of a woman’s day at five hundred dollars.” “As a starting point.” “We would like to multiply it by ten.” Cara said nothing. “Five thousand dollars per day,” Amélie said. “Thirty days. The car, insurance, fuel, security, support, accommodation and assignment expenses are ours. The one hundred and fifty thousand dollars is yours.” Cara calculated it again even though Amélie had already done the calculation. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars. “Every day?” “Every day.” “Even if I don’t drive it?” “Especially then. If the car sits in your garage and you choose not to drive it, we need to know why.” Cara put her hand flat against the table. “There is something else you should know,” Laurent said. “The car is valued at just over four million dollars.” Her hand remained where it was. “You know I live in Frankston right.” “We do.” “And you are sending a four-million-dollar car to my house?” Laurent’s face remained entirely serious. “We understand you were recently valued at somewhere between forty and eighty million dollars. We think you’re good for it.” Cara laughed. A real one. The same deep place as Red Hill and the agent’s card and Dom saying maybe, just for Sundays. “That is the theoretical value of my intellectual property. It is not money sitting in my bank account.” “We know.” “I still check my balance before I buy groceries.” “We know that too.” “You have done a disturbing amount of research.” Amélie turned one page in the folder. “The car is fully insured.” “You might have opened with that.” “We wanted to know what you would say,” Laurent replied. “And?” “You noticed the risk before the status.” The room was very quiet. Below them, a man in black gloves moved around one of the cars with a cloth. He examined the paint after every pass, searching for a mark nobody else could see. “Where would I keep it?” Cara asked. “At home.” “In Frankston?” “If that is where you live.” “And that makes no difference to you?” Amélie met her eyes. “We want you. We don’t care where you live. We are interested in where you are going, not where you have come from.” Cara looked at Dom. He did not nod for her. He did not answer with his face. He had asked her to choose a life she loved, not to choose the life he indicated from the chair beside her. “What do I have to do?” “Say yes,” Amélie said. “We will handle everything else. Our security team will inspect your garage this afternoon. The car will arrive tomorrow morning in an enclosed transporter. A specialist will give you a full orientation. You will not be personally liable for four million dollars.” “Good.” “Is that a yes?” Cara thought about Margot asking what came next. She thought about the woman with the handbag who knew the brand and not the owner. She thought about Dom in the car outside asking only one thing. Cara said. “ Yes. Oh my goodness..YES!!!!!!!!!” Amélie closed the folder. “Excellent. Your first assignment is tomorrow. Drive to Sorrento. We have booked you a room at the InterContinental and dinner for two tomorrow evening.” “Two?” “We thought the man in the car outside should come.” Cara smiled. “You drive,” Laurent said. “He takes the passenger seat. Tell us what you loved about leaving, driving, arriving and returning. Anything else you love is yours to find.” Dom turned to Cara. “I’ll move the Hilux.” She laughed again. “That’s all you have to say?” “No.” He reached beneath the table and took her hand. “I’m proud of you.” “For agreeing to drive a car?” “For finally letting somebody pour something into your cup.” \~ \~ \~ Amélie asked whether Cara would like to see the car. It waited behind a wall she had assumed was permanent until the glass divided silently and moved aside leaving a void she couldn’t yet see. The room beyond was darker than the showroom. Light gathered over the car and nowhere else. When she finally saw it, she noticed the red. Not polite red. Not careful red. A deep, impossible red that caught the light and held it. The body sat low to the floor, every line gathered toward motion. It did not appear parked. It appeared paused. Cara stopped at the edge of the light. She had seen photographs of cars like it. Photographs had failed to explain the scale of the thing. Failed to explain how low it sat, how wide it seemed from the front, how the paint moved from red to black and back again when she changed position. Laurent touched a control. The doors lifted. They did not open in the ordinary way. They rose from the roof and turned outward, two red wings making space around a cockpit Cara could not imagine entering gracefully. For one clean second, she forgot the contract, the insurer, the money and every reason she had prepared not to be impressed. “Oh,” she said. It was not a sophisticated response. It was the true one. Amélie watched her rather than the car. “What do you love?” Cara stepped closer. The seat had been stitched by hand. The small metal controls had been milled, polished and fitted individually. Beneath the rear cover was the name of the technician who had assembled the engine. The car had taken eleven months to complete. Four million dollars was a number too large to hold. Eleven months she could hold. One person signing the work they had made, she could hold. “I love that somebody can point to one part and say, I made this,” she said. Laurent nodded once. “That is why you are here.” A photographer entered from a side door carrying a camera and an apology. “Only if you are comfortable,” Amélie said. “We document every handover. The photographs may remain private.” Cara looked down at the white suit. At the black heels she had chosen for a meeting, not for the floor of a room containing a car she was somehow expected to take home tomorrow. “All right.” Someone else lowered the door. Someone else moved the car half a metre so the light sat correctly across the bonnet. The photographer asked Cara to stand beside it, then nearer, then beneath the raised door. He told her where to place her hand and when to turn her face. She followed every instruction. The white suit caught the warm light. Her dark ponytail fell over one shoulder. The red car waited beside her, immaculate and still. Dom stood beyond the camera watching the woman he had first seen across a crowded room and the woman she had become occupy the same body. From a distance, Cara looked exactly like somebody who had always belonged there. Nobody saw the four hundred dollars. Nobody saw the grocery balance. Nobody saw her as a mum from Frankston, writing at her kitchen table. The photographer lowered the camera. “Beautiful,” he said. Cara removed her hand from the car. The door remained raised. The keys remained with Laurent. The engine remained silent. No-one asked her to start it. No-one asked her to find first gear, reverse down a suburban driveway or understand what four million dollars felt like moving beneath her hands. Not yet. She turned from the car and crossed the floor in the white suit and black heels, her shoulders back, her dark hair swinging behind her. The glass doors opened before she reached them. She walked out of the dealership effortlessly. Wondering what would happen tomorrow when a 4 million dollar car arrived at her home....waiting to be driven. \~ \~ \~ T H E \~ E N D Book One: DRIVEN ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0e/77/0e77a451-73f7-4ccf-a65b-4fe71738d4ed/content/images/2026/09/I-love-the-story-of-driven-choose-a-life-you-love-1.jpg)