I was filling up my Harley on a chilly evening when I heard a young woman’s voice break into panic.
“Please, sir… please don’t. He’ll be furious if he thinks someone helped me.”
She couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty. Blonde hair in a messy ponytail, tear-stained cheeks, hands shaking as she counted a few dollars in coins. Her old Honda sat beside her, the tank bone-dry.
I’d already tapped my card on her pump before I walked over.
“It’s already running,” I told her gently. “No stopping it now.”
But instead of relief, fear washed over her face.
“You don’t understand,” she whispered. “My boyfriend… he hates when anyone helps me. He’s inside right now. Please—he’ll be out any second.”
That fear hit me hard. A fear no young woman should ever carry. She told me she normally only bought half a gallon at a time—whatever her coins could cover—to get her home, forty miles away.
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