Page 2 of The Centaur’s Impulse

“AJ. That was four and a half years ago.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

We walked. Our shoes crunched on the path. Somewhere over the fairway another group was laughing about something. They were boisterous and loud, clearly having the time of their lives. I hadn’t laughed like that in years.

“I want to say something to you,” Kavi said.

“Uh-oh.”

“Just hear me out,” he replied, cutting me off before I could make a sarcastic remark. “I’ve been thinking about how to say it for probably a year at this point.”

I stopped walking. He stopped a few steps ahead and turned around, hands in his pockets, doing that thing his face did when he was going to say something that would cost him.

“You are killing yourself,” he said. “And I’ve decided I’m not going to sit and watch you do it anymore.”

I opened my mouth.

He held up a hand.

“I’m not saying this as your board member. Not as an investor. I’m not filing a report with the comp committee. I’m saying it as a guy who’s known you for years and loves you like a brother. You are killing yourself. Slowly. Carefully. You’ve been doing it for at least two years. I’ve watched you do it and I haven’t said anything because I figured it wasn’t my place. Today I decided it was. Because if I don’t say it, who will?”

I stood there with my driver in my hand feeling like I’d been punched in the gut.

He was right about the last part. Nobody else was going to say it.

Not Chidi. Chidi worked for me. Not Nadia, that’s for sure. She was my head of product, my fae ex, and the person I’d spent eight months carefully not saying anything real to. My mother would have spoken out, but she was in a dementia-care facility outside of town now and hadn’t recognized me the last three times I’d visited. My brother in Atlanta and I saw each other twice a year on holidays and had never, in thirty-nine years, talked about anything that mattered. My old teammates might’ve said something too. But I hadn’t gone to the hockey arena in years. I didn’t even know if they were there anymore.

Kavi was the only person I had left.

“I hear you,” I said.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t do the corporate I-hear-you bullshit. Don’t handle me like I’m an HR liability. I’ve been in hundreds of meetings with you, AJ. I know how you work.”

I laughed. It came out short and dry. “Okay.”

“I’m not joking, AJ,” he said, not breaking eye contact. “This is serious.”

I looked at him. The sun was low and lit up half his face, and for a second I didn’t recognize him. This wasn’t my serious colleague that got things done, or even the guy who let loose at company Christmas parties. The Kavi standing in front of me right now had worry in his eyes and all of it was directed at me.

“Fine,” I said. “I’m listening.”

He nodded. Then he turned and started walking again, and I fell in beside him, and he told me the rest of it.

“I need you to take a vacation,” he said simply. “A real one. Get the hell out of here for at least a week, if not more.”

“Maybe in a couple months I could find the time⁠—”

“No,” Kavi said, cutting me off. “Now. Today. Not a couple months from now.”

“But there’s that big⁠—”

“I don’t care, AJ,” he barked. “We can take care of it. Everyone at the company will survive for a week or two without you. It’s not going to go under, it’s not going to catch on fire, and it’s not going to fall apart.” He paused, giving me a good once over. “But you are going to fucking die on the job if you don’t do something. No amount of assistants, calendars, or therapy is going to replace actual rest.”