Page 3 of The Centaur’s Impulse

I felt my jaw tighten. “Kavi, I appreciate what you’re saying, but you don’t understand the position we’re in right now. The Q4 projections alone⁠—”

“I understand perfectly,” he said, his voice steady but firm. “I understand that you’ve built something incredible. And I understand that you’re going to lose it all if you keep going like this because you won’t be alive to run it.”

The words hung between us like smoke. We walked in silence for a moment, the only sound was our footsteps on the cart path and the distant crack of a club hitting a ball somewhere behind us.

“So what do you want me to do?” I asked finally. “Just disappear for a week? Tell everyone I’m out of office?”

“Yes,” Kavi said. “That’s exactly what I want you to do.”

“That’s not realistic.”

“Neither is working yourself to death at thirty-nine,” he replied. He stopped walking and turned to face me fully. “Look, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told you before. Something I don’t talk about with anyone, actually.”

I waited. Something in his tone had shifted. This was different now.

“I used to be like you,” Kavi continued. “Worse, probably. Fourteen-hour days, weekends in the office, checking emails at three in the morning. My wife would beg me to take a break and I’d tell her next quarter, next year, once we hit this milestone.” He looked away toward the tree line. “One day I had a panic attack so severe I thought I was having a heart attack. They took me to the hospital. Ran every test. My heart was fine. My mind, though...” He trailed off, shaking his head. “That was the wake-up call.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Kavi had always seemed so put together, so balanced. I figured he’d been through stuff in his life, that he’d been through struggle. We all had. But the look in his eyes… It was more intense than I expected.

“After that,” he said, “I found this place. A bathhouse, actually, in the warehouse district.” He turned his head toward the sky, taking a deep breath. “It’s just... it’s quiet. There’s water, heat, and relaxation. You can stay there for hours and not think about anything in the outside world. There I can just… exist.” He looked at me. “I go there when I need to remember how to breathe. How to be a human being instead of a machine.”

“A bathhouse,” I repeated. “Like a hot tub place or something?”

“They have those too,” he nodded. “It’s about forty minutes from here. I think you should go. Tell them I sent you. Spend a day there and just let go for once. They’ll take care of you.”

“And if I hate this place?” I said. “If it does nothing for me? What then?”

“Then I don’t know how to help you.”

I looked at him for a long moment, trying to gauge whether he was serious or if this was some kind of elaborate joke. But Kavi’s face was set in that determined expression I’d learned to recognize over the years. It was the one that meant he wasn’t going to back down.

“A bathhouse,” I said again, testing the words out like they might taste bad. “You’re telling me your solution to my burnout is a bathhouse?”

“I’m telling you it saved my life,” Kavi replied evenly. “And I think you need saving.”

There was something about the way he said it that made me want to argue, to throw up all the reasons why this was impractical, why I couldn’t just disappear, why the company needed me. But I was tired. So fucking tired. And maybe that’s why I didn’t immediately shut him down.

“What’s it called?” I asked.

“It’s just the bathhouse,” he said. “The place keeps everything very anonymous. There’s no names shared, no questions asked, and it's very private.”

We reached my ball in the rough. I looked down at it, half-buried in the thick grass, and decided I didn’t care enough to hit it. I picked it up instead and dropped it in my pocket.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Don’t think about it,” Kavi said. “Do it. Today. Before you change your mind and convince yourself you have some crisis that can’t wait.”

I knew he was right. I also knew that the second we got back to the clubhouse, I’d check my phone and find some reason why I couldn’t go. Some email, some call, some board member who needed something from me. That’s how it always worked.

But as we walked back toward the cart in the fading October light, something in me shifted. Maybe it was desperation. Maybe it was the fact that Kavi had actually scared me a little bit back there. Not with his words, but with the intensity behind them. A man like Kavi didn’t exaggerate. A man like him didn’t issue warnings unless he meant them.

“Okay,” I said quietly. “I’ll go tonight.”

“Thank you,” Kavi nodded, satisfied. “And there’s only one stipulation to all of this.”

“What’s that?”

“You can’t tell anyone about it,” he said. “Not Chidi, not Nadia, and definitely not my wife.”