Breathe Through It
The driver had left him at a wooden gate covered in frangipani carvings, said something encouraging in a mix of Bahasa and TripAdvisor English, and driven away before Callum could ask if this was actually the right place. A hand-painted sign read TIRTA SARI RETREAT — ARRIVE AS YOU ARE. Beneath it, someone had hung a smaller sign: SHOES OPTIONAL BEYOND THIS POINT.
Callum kept his shoes on. They were Common Projects he'd bought during a funding round that now felt like it had happened to someone else. He wheeled his carry-on down a stone path through a garden that was aggressively serene — every fern placed with intention, every water feature trickling at exactly the volume that said you're safe now. A infinity pool overlooked a river gorge. The main pavilion was open-air, all reclaimed teak and cushions the color of things you'd find in a naturopath's waiting room.
He was still standing like a man in an airport, weight forward, ready to move to the next gate.
A man appeared from behind the fountain. Mid-fifties, compact, wearing a white linen shirt that had never once been stressed about Series A funding.
"Callum. Welcome. You found us."
Callum shook his hand. Firm grip, dry palm. The man's stillness had a weight to it, like gravity worked slightly differently in his immediate vicinity.
Wayan didn't laugh. He also didn't not laugh. He simply held Callum's gaze for a beat longer than felt transactional, then picked up the carry-on as if it weighed nothing and started walking.
"Your villa is this way. We do an opening circle at five. Until then, rest. Unpack. Let the travel leave your body."
Callum followed him down another stone path, past a yoga shala where someone was already in a headstand with the casual ease of a person who'd never had to explain a burn rate to an angel investor.
Wayan glanced back over his shoulder.
He said it the way you'd say the pool closes at nine. Then he kept walking.
The villa was beautiful in a way that felt like a rebuke. Open-air bathroom, outdoor shower surrounded by tropical plants, a bed draped in white linen with a single orchid on the pillow. No television. No desk. A small card on the nightstand read: WE INVITE YOU TO SURRENDER YOUR DEVICES DURING YOUR STAY. THIS IS AN INVITATION, NOT A REQUIREMENT. WE TRUST YOU TO KNOW WHAT YOU NEED.
Callum sat on the edge of the bed and pulled out his phone. Eleven Slack notifications. Three from Jem, escalating in punctuation — the first had a period, the second had two question marks, the third was just his name in capitals. Below that, an email from their accountant with the subject line "Urgent — revised projections" that he could see the first line of without opening: Hi Callum, Following our conversation last week I've re-run the numbers and. He locked the screen.
He placed the phone face-down on the nightstand, next to the card about surrendering devices. It sat there like a heart he'd removed from his own chest — still beating, muffled against teak.
Outside, a woman was crossing the garden below his villa. She was barefoot, carrying a ceramic mug in both hands like it was something worth protecting. Her hair was wet and she walked without looking at anything in particular, which somehow meant she was looking at everything. She noticed him on the terrace and offered a smile that had no agenda in it whatsoever. Callum's hand went up in a wave that felt, even as he was doing it, like something from a corporate retreat icebreaker.
She waved back — loose-wristed, easy — and kept walking. She hadn't sped up or slowed down. She'd just included him in whatever she was already doing, and moved on.
Callum sat back down on the bed. In Melbourne it was — he did the math without wanting to — quarter past eleven at night. Jem would still be at her desk. She was always at her desk. That had been the deal: he was the vision guy who talked to investors and she was the one who made sure the vision didn't collapse into a pile of unpaid invoices and broken Jira tickets. Except now the vision guy was sitting on an orchid-decorated bed in Bali, and the invoices were still very much unpaid.
He'd told the board it was a strategic reset. Told Jem he needed seventy-two hours offline to come back with a plan. Told himself it was both of those things. The retreat was seven days.
From somewhere in the garden, a gong sounded — low and long, the kind of sound that wanted you to close your eyes. Callum closed his eyes. Behind them, the first line of the accountant's email was still there, a cursor blinking at the end of and.
The gong faded. The accountant's email didn't. Callum sat on the bed with his phone in his hand, composing the board update in his head before he'd even unlocked the screen — already editing, already choosing which version of the truth was shaped most like optimism.
He opened his email, thumbed past the accountant's subject line the way you step over a crack in the footpath — not because you believe, but because it costs nothing — and started a new draft.
To: Board Distribution List From: Callum Subject: Strategic Reset — Day 1 Update
Hi all,
Quick note from Ubud. Landed safely and already deep into the program (he was sitting on a bed). Day one has been focused on strategic frameworks around resilience and adaptive leadership (there wasn't a day one yet) with some genuinely sharp facilitators (he'd met one man who'd carried his bag). Looking forward to bringing some of this thinking back to the roadmap conversation.
Jem's across everything operationally — she and I synced before I went offline (they hadn't) and she's well-positioned to hold the fort through the week (she'd been holding the fort for months, and the fort was on fire).
More soon. Reception's patchy so I may be slow to respond — take that as a feature, not a bug.
Best, Callum
He read it twice. Changed 'genuinely sharp' to 'world-class.' Changed it back. Hit send. Then sat there with the sent-message confirmation on screen, the way you'd watch an ambulance pull away from someone else's house.
Below the board email, Jem's text sat in its notification band. He opened it.
Jem: Accountant called. Runway is 11 weeks not 14. I need you to look at the projections. I know you said 72 hours. I'm asking for 20 minutes.
No escalating punctuation. Every sentence a flat, tired period. Callum typed: "I'll look tonight." Deleted it. Typed: "On it first thing tomorrow, promise." Deleted it. Typed: "Jem" — and stared at his own name for her, the two consonants and a vowel that used to mean I've got this, which now meant nothing he could back up.
He closed the thread without replying. Put the phone in the nightstand drawer. Left the drawer open an inch.
A knock on the villa's wooden frame — not the door, because there was no door, just a carved archway with a curtain he hadn't figured out yet. Wayan stood on the other side holding a small tray with a glass of something the color of radioactive celery.
Wayan held out the tray with both hands, a formality that made the drink seem like it might be important.
Callum took the glass. It was warm.
Wayan didn't answer that one. He glanced — briefly, without comment — at the nightstand drawer and its inch of light. Then he stepped inside and sat on the rattan chair by the window, uninvited, with the ease of a man in his own house. Which, Callum supposed, it was.
"You know, when I first built this place, I put a desk in every villa. Beautiful desks — teak, hand-carved, the kind of thing you'd see in a magazine. I thought people would want to journal. Reflect. Write letters to themselves."
"Let me guess. They opened their laptops."
Wayan tilted his head, conceding the point but not the whole argument.
"The floors?"
Wayan's mouth moved in a way that might have been amusement. He went still for a moment — not pausing, but arriving at that total calm, the kind where even the air around him seemed to hold its breath. Then it passed, and he was just a man in a chair again.
"I stopped trying to remove things. I started asking better questions instead. That's what the week is for."
He stood and moved toward the archway, then stopped. He turned back, and for a second something crossed his face that wasn't the serene host — something more like a man remembering his own version of an email he couldn't bring himself to open.
"The opening circle is at five. I'd like you there. Not because it will fix anything. But because eating dinner alone in here tonight will make tomorrow harder."
He left. Callum drank the jamu. It tasted like dirt and conviction.
Outside, the garden had shifted into late-afternoon gold, the kind of light Melbourne only managed for ten minutes in March. Somewhere below, the woman with the ceramic mug was laughing at something — not loudly, just the tail end of it carrying up through the frangipani. In his drawer, the phone buzzed once. He didn't check it. He knew the sound of Jem's patience running out the way a sailor knows weather — not the specific front, just the pressure drop.
He had three hours and forty minutes until the opening circle. In Melbourne, it was nearly midnight, and his co-founder was sitting alone with numbers that said eleven weeks, waiting for a reply from a man who was holding an empty glass in a villa with no doors, trying to remember if he'd ever once in his adult life sat somewhere beautiful and not immediately started calculating what it cost.
Callum left the villa without a destination, which was itself a kind of emergency. He couldn't remember the last time he'd walked somewhere without knowing where it was or what he needed from it. The stone path forked almost immediately — left toward the pool, right into what the welcome card had called a 'contemplative garden' and what was, in reality, a stretch of jungle that someone had convinced to behave. He went right, because left was where people might be.
The path dropped steeply through terraced gardens and past a rice paddy that belonged to someone who wasn't the retreat. A farmer was burning something at the far edge — a thin line of smoke that bent once in the wind and held. The air was heavy, the particular weight of four degrees south of the equator at three in the afternoon, and Callum's shirt was already sticking to his back in a way that felt like the climate making a point.
His mind was composing Slack messages. It did this automatically, the way other people hummed songs — little fragments of operational language surfacing without permission. Can we push the Xero sync to next sprint. Has anyone followed up with the Canva lead. Jem, can you check if. He could feel the shape of each message, the specific number of keystrokes, the muscle memory of thumbs on glass. His phone was in a drawer four hundred metres uphill and his thumbs were twitching anyway.
The path levelled out near a small stone shrine tucked into the base of a banyan tree. Someone had left offerings — rice on a banana leaf, a stick of incense burned to a perfect cylinder of ash, marigolds going brown at the edges. A gecko watched him from the shrine's ledge with the unblinking focus of a board member who's read the financials.
He stood there longer than made sense. Something about the incense ash holding its shape — the fact that it had burned completely and still looked like itself — sat in his chest in a way he didn't want to examine. He kept walking.
The path curved back toward the main pavilion, and that's where he found Wayan — not arranging anything, for once, but sitting cross-legged on the pavilion floor with a cushion in his lap and a needle and thread, repairing a seam. Several other cushions were stacked beside him in no particular order. One had fallen off the pile. He hadn't picked it up.
Callum stopped at the edge of the pavilion, hands in his pockets. He should have turned around. He didn't.
Wayan didn't look up from the needle.
Callum almost had something for that — could feel the shape of a deflection forming — but it dissolved before it reached his mouth. He stepped up onto the pavilion and sat on the floor a few metres from Wayan, back against a post, legs stretched out. The teak was warm from the day.
"How many of these do you need to fix?"
Wayan held up the cushion, inspected the seam, bit the thread.
He tossed a cushion and a needle across the floor toward Callum without asking if he could sew. Callum picked it up. He could not, in fact, sew. But the cushion had a split seam along one edge and a needle already threaded, and the alternative was sitting here with nothing in his hands while his brain drafted emails to people who weren't in the room.
They worked in silence for a while. Callum's stitches were uneven and too far apart — the kind of repair that would hold for exactly one session before splitting again. Wayan's were invisible. Neither of them mentioned the difference.
"There was a man here last year. From Singapore. Ran a fintech company — forty employees, Series B, the whole thing."
Callum's needle stopped.
"He sat in every session. Did the breathwork, the journaling, the cold plunge. Said the right things in circle. Cried on day four — really cried, the kind where your whole body does it. Everyone thought he'd broken through."
"But?"
Wayan pulled a new cushion from the pile. Turned it over, found the split, started stitching. The fallen cushion was still on the floor beside him.
"He went home. Fired twelve people on the Monday. Company's doing fine now, I think. I don't actually know. He never wrote back."
The story just sat there. No kicker. No lesson rising from it like steam from a cup of something ceremonial. Callum waited for the turn — the part where Wayan said but the real question is or what I learned from that was — and it didn't come. Wayan just kept sewing.
"So what's the moral?"
Wayan looked up for the first time. Not still, not performing calm — just a man with a needle in one hand and a cushion in the other, looking slightly tired.
The honesty of it landed harder than any parable would have. Callum looked down at his own cushion, at the crooked seam he'd made, and for a moment the operational noise in his head went quiet — not peaceful, just quiet, the way a room goes quiet when someone says something that changes the temperature.
From the rice paddy, the farmer's smoke was gone. The shadow of the pavilion roof had moved a full plank's width across the floor since he'd sat down. Somewhere in his villa, his phone was accumulating the weight of decisions he wasn't making — but down here, his hands smelled like cotton and his back was warm against the post, and Wayan was sewing beside him with the unhurried rhythm of a man who had stopped trying to remove the desks.
"The circle is in ninety minutes. You don't have to share anything. But when someone else shares, try to listen without planning what you'll say after. That's the hard part for people like you."
"People like me."
Wayan picked up the fallen cushion. Finally.
Callum opened his mouth. Closed it. He'd been about to say something about active listening being a core competency, and the fact that he'd been about to say it proved the point so completely that the silence after felt like walking into a glass door.
He tied off his thread — badly — and set the cushion on the pile. Wayan took it, examined the seam without comment, and placed it with the others. Whether it would end up in the circle tonight or be quietly re-stitched later was a question Callum decided not to ask.
He found her on the lower terrace, the one that jutted out over the gorge like an afterthought someone had bolted to the hillside. She was sitting on the stone ledge with her legs folded under her, no mug, no book, no prop of any kind — just a woman with her hands in her lap watching the river do something unhurried sixty metres below. Callum had rehearsed an opening line on the walk down. Two, actually. He'd discarded the first for being too casual and the second for being too honest, and now he was standing at the top of the terrace steps with nothing prepared, which was a condition he hadn't experienced since approximately 2016.
Saskia looked up. No surprise in it. She shifted slightly to the left, making room on the ledge that already had plenty of room, and the gesture was so simple it made him aware of how many of his own gestures weren't.
He sat. The stone was cool in the shade, and the gorge exhaled something green and damp that settled on his forearms.
"It's a sharing circle, not a concert."
"Same skill set. Read the room, perform accordingly, get out before the encore."
She didn't laugh. She did something worse — she considered it, as though deciding whether the joke was protecting something worth asking about. Then she let it go. The river filled the pause, and Callum became aware that he was sitting next to someone who could tolerate silence the way he tolerated quarterly reviews: with practiced, bone-deep endurance.
"How long are you here for?"
"Seven days. You?"
"This is my third week."
Three weeks. He tried to imagine telling Jem he'd be offline for three weeks and the image short-circuited somewhere around the part where she reached through the phone and physically killed him.
"Three weeks. That's — what do you do with three weeks?"
She said it like it was obvious. Like the question itself was the problem.
A bird crossed the gorge below them — white, long-tailed, unhurried. They both watched it without deciding to. When it disappeared into the canopy on the far side, Callum felt the absence of it like the end of a screen-saver, his brain immediately reaching for the next input.
"So what were you before? Before the three weeks of decreasing activity."
Her thumb moved to her own wrist and traced a line along the bone.
"And you left."
A beat. The thumb stopped.
She said the whole thing evenly, the way you read directions aloud. No performance of bravery. No tremor positioned for him to notice and admire. Just the facts laid flat on the stone between them. Callum felt something shift in his chest — not sympathy, exactly, but the discomfort of being near someone who had stopped curating, when he was still mid-edit on every sentence that left his mouth.
"I run a startup. Melbourne. We make — it doesn't matter what we make. We're about eleven weeks from not making it anymore."
He hadn't planned to say that. The number had just walked out of him, the way a dog slips through a gate left open. Eleven weeks. He'd said it to no one — not the board, not Jem in those terms, not himself in any sentence that wasn't buffered by words like runway and projections and revised. Eleven weeks. On this stone ledge it sounded like what it was: a countdown.
Saskia looked at him. Not with pity. With recognition.
"I'm here."
"Doing what, exactly?"
The question was so clean it left him nowhere. He couldn't dress it up. Strategic reset was a phrase that belonged in an email to people who didn't know him, and Saskia — who he'd known for approximately six minutes — was not those people. She was sitting there with her hands open in her lap and no story between herself and the air, and the gap between that and what he was doing felt like vertigo.
"I don't know."
Three words. No deflection trailing behind them, no qualifier, no joke to sand the edges. They just hung in the gorge air with the river noise and the fading call of whatever bird had crossed below them. Saskia nodded once, slowly, the way you'd acknowledge someone putting down something heavy.
"That's a better answer than most people manage in their first week. Some of them never get there. They just keep saying they're here for the journey."
He almost laughed.
Now she laughed — short, real, startled out of her.
For a moment they were just two people who'd spent years in rooms where language was a tool for avoiding meaning, and the shared recognition of it was funnier than any joke he could have constructed. The laugh faded. The river kept going. Somewhere up the hill, Wayan was arranging cushions in a circle — including, presumably, the one Callum had stitched badly — and in fifty minutes they'd both be sitting in that circle being invited to share something true with strangers.
Saskia stood, brushing stone dust from her knees. She paused at the top of the steps.
She left. Callum stayed on the ledge. The shadow of the terrace railing had moved across his knees while they'd been talking, and he watched it now — a slow dark line crossing his legs like the hand of a clock he couldn't read. Up in his villa, his phone was in a drawer, and Jem was on the other side of it, and eleven weeks was ten hours shorter than it had been this morning. He could feel the shape of a reply forming — not the words yet, just the weight of it, the thing he'd eventually have to say to someone who deserved more than silence. But not now. Now his hands smelled like cotton and stone, and the gorge was turning gold from the bottom up, and he sat with the not-knowing the way you'd sit with a new bruise — aware of it every time he moved, not yet sure what he'd hit.
The steps up from the terrace were uneven — hand-cut stone, each one a slightly different height, so his body couldn't find a rhythm. It kept having to adjust.
By the time he reached the villa, the light had gone flat. Not gold, not amber, just the ordinary color of a day finishing without anyone's permission. The curtain over the archway moved once in a breeze that didn't reach him.
He sat on the bed and opened the nightstand drawer. The phone was where he'd left it, screen dark, but the notification count had climbed to a number he could feel in his jaw. He picked it up. Didn't check the notifications. Opened a new message to Jem instead.
He typed: I'm not at a strategy thing. I'm at a wellness retreat in Bali. It's seven days not 72 hours. I don't have a plan. The company card will probably show a charge from a place called Tirta Sari which is where I am right now sitting on a bed that costs more per night than we pay our junior dev and I'm sorry. I know that's not enough. I looked at the runway numbers and I don't know what to do about them which is the actual reason I'm here except I didn't know that was the reason until about an hour ago. I should have told you. I should have told you a lot of things.
He sent it before he could rewrite it. The swoosh sound was obscenely cheerful. He put the phone face-up on the nightstand — not in the drawer, not face-down — and pressed both hands into his eyes until he saw the static patterns that meant his optic nerves were lodging a complaint.
He sat like that for a while, in the dark behind his own palms. A cracked sound came out of him that might have been a laugh if it had committed. When he took his hands away, the room was the same room. The orchid on the pillow had wilted slightly since the morning, its edges browning inward.
His phone buzzed. Then buzzed again. Then nothing for thirty seconds. Then three buzzes in quick succession — the particular rhythm of Jem typing, deleting, retyping, sending in fragments. He picked it up.
Jem: I've known since Tuesday. Your company card flagged a charge from something called Tirta Sari and I googled it and the website has a photo of a man holding a singing bowl so yeah, I put it together.
Jem: I was waiting for you to tell me.
Jem: The projections are bad. You know they're bad. I can walk you through them tomorrow or I can make the calls myself but I need to know which one.
Jem: Also the singing bowl guy is listed as the founder and his bio says he "holds space for transformation" which, Callum. Come on.
The laugh that came out of him this time was real — short, wet, directed at the ceiling. He could see Jem at her desk in the Cremorne office, the desk with the monitor riser made of old textbooks, the mug that said WORLD'S MOST ADEQUATE CO-FOUNDER that he'd bought her as a joke and she'd kept as a threat. She'd known since Tuesday. She'd sat through two days of his silence already knowing it was a lie, and she'd waited, and that patience was worse than any version of her anger because it meant she'd been deciding whether to still trust him.
He typed back: The singing bowl guy is actually alright. He told me a story about a desk that I'm still thinking about. I'll call you tomorrow. Actual tomorrow. I will actually call.
Jem: Call me tomorrow. Actual tomorrow.
Jem: I'm going to handle the Xero sync and the Canva lead and the thing with the API that broke on Wednesday that you don't even know about because you were already gone. And then I'm going to sleep. And you're going to go sit in your circle and hold your space or whatever and then tomorrow you're going to be my co-founder again for twenty minutes.
Jem: Twenty minutes, Callum. That's it. Then you can go back to finding yourself.
He put the phone down. The screen dimmed, then went dark, and in its black mirror he caught his own face — older than he expected, or maybe just more tired, the kind of face that had been held in a particular expression for so long that releasing it felt like a physical event. A kettle was whistling somewhere in the staff kitchen below. He listened to it build, peak, and cut off when someone lifted it from the heat.
Twenty minutes. She'd asked for twenty minutes three days ago and he'd treated it like an ambush. Now it sounded like what it was: a co-founder who needed him to show up for the length of a lunch break. He could do twenty minutes. He could do that much.
Outside, the sound of people moving through the garden — footsteps on stone, a low murmur, someone laughing the way you laugh when you're nervous about what comes next. The circle was forming. Wayan would be arranging cushions, seven of them, one stitched badly. Saskia would be there, hands in her lap, ready to sit with whatever walked into the room.
Callum stood. His legs had stiffened from the terrace ledge and the uneven stairs, and for a moment he just stood there in the villa, aware of the specific weight of his body in a way he usually wasn't — feet on tile, breath in his chest, the faint ache in his lower back from a year of twelve-hour desk days. The orchid on the pillow was definitely wilting. He left it where it was.
He walked out through the archway and down the path toward the pavilion. The air had cooled just enough to notice. Somewhere in Melbourne, Jem was closing her laptop, and somewhere in this garden, a circle of cushions was waiting to be sat in harder than anyone intended, and he was walking toward it with nothing prepared — no strategic framework, no adaptive leadership, no version of himself buffed to presentation quality. Just a man with bad stitching and a phone call to make tomorrow, heading downhill because the path went that way.
The pavilion was fuller than he'd expected. Nine cushions arranged in a rough circle on the teak floor, seven of them occupied. Callum recognized nobody except Saskia, who sat with her back straight and her hands resting on her knees — no mug, no glass, nothing to run her thumb along. A woman beside her was crying quietly, not from anything that had happened in the circle but from whatever she'd carried in with her, and Saskia was murmuring something low and close that Callum couldn't hear.
Wayan stood at the edge of the circle adjusting a candle that didn't need adjusting. When he saw Callum, he nodded toward an empty cushion — the one with the crooked seam. Callum sat. The seam held under his weight.
The circle itself was simple and longer than it needed to be and shorter than Callum feared. Wayan opened with a minute of silence that lasted approximately one geological era. Then people spoke. A retired teacher from Perth talked about her husband's diagnosis. A couple from Berlin described a miscarriage in language so careful it sounded rehearsed until the woman stopped mid-sentence and her partner finished it, and the seam between their voices was the realest thing Callum had heard all day. A young guy with a neck tattoo and the physique of someone who'd replaced one addiction with another said he was grateful to be here, and meant it, and Callum felt the specific shame of having ever been cynical about anything.
When it came to him, he said his name. Said he was from Melbourne. Said he was glad to be here, which wasn't true yet but wasn't as false as it would have been this morning. Wayan watched him the way you'd watch a pot you suspected was closer to boiling than it looked. Callum didn't elaborate. Nobody pressed. The circle moved on, and the absence of pressure was so unfamiliar it almost felt aggressive.
Afterward, people drifted toward a long table where someone had laid out food — rice, tempeh, things in banana leaves, a soup that smelled like coconut and galangal. Callum filled a plate without deciding to. He ate standing up near the railing, looking out at the gorge, which had gone dark except for the sound of the river asserting that it was still down there.
Wayan appeared beside him holding his own plate, which contained almost nothing — a scoop of rice, a single piece of tempeh. He ate the way he did everything else: without hurry, without performance. They stood at the railing in the kind of silence that was either comfortable or simply hadn't decided what it was yet.
Callum said it before he'd planned to, the way he'd said eleven weeks to Saskia — the gate left open, the dog already through.
Wayan set his fork down. He looked at Callum directly, a look stripped of the host's calibration — just one face turned toward another, waiting.
"I'm calling her tomorrow. Twenty minutes. She's been covering things I didn't even know were breaking."
"Good."
Callum had expected more. A parable. A question designed to sit in his chest like a stone. But Wayan just picked up his fork again and ate a piece of tempeh, and the plainness of good did something that wisdom wouldn't have.
"That's it? Good?"
Wayan's eyebrows lifted — the first time Callum had seen his face do something quick and unguarded, a flicker of something that might have been impatience or might have been affection, gone before it settled.
"Honestly, yeah. I'd prepped a rebuttal and everything."
Wayan set his plate on the railing. Below them, the river was invisible but constant — the sound of water finding the fastest way downhill.
A gecko clicked somewhere in the rafters — two sharp sounds, then silence. Callum thought about the Singapore founder. The crying on day four, the twelve firings on Monday. He almost asked about him, then didn't. The story had done what it was going to do.
"The guy from Singapore. You said he never wrote back."
Wayan went still. Not the controlled stillness Callum had seen before — the host's trick, the held breath that made a room lean in. This was different. This was a man caught.
"He wrote once. Three months later. One line. 'I think about the river.' I don't know what it meant. I told you he never wrote back because it's a better story — the man who cried and disappeared. Cleaner."
"You edit your own stories."
The words landed between them with a weight that surprised Callum, because he hadn't meant it as an accusation. But Wayan heard it — heard the mirror in it — and for a moment his face did something Callum had never seen on it: it looked tired. Not serene-tired, not wise-tired. Just the ordinary exhaustion of a man who'd been holding space for other people's crises long enough to have developed his own.
"Everyone here edits their stories. The woman from Perth didn't mention that her husband asked her to leave before the diagnosis. The couple from Berlin have done three rounds of IVF, not one. You told the circle you were glad to be here."
"You told me a parable about desks and let me think you'd figured something out."
Wayan picked up his plate again. Looked at the last piece of tempeh on it as though it might contain an answer. It didn't. He ate it anyway.
Down in the circle, someone had started clearing cushions. Saskia was helping, stacking them against the pavilion post with the efficiency of a woman who'd spent a decade organizing conference rooms and couldn't entirely switch it off. She caught Callum's eye across the space and raised one hand — the same loose-wristed wave from the garden that afternoon, or yesterday, or whenever it was. Time at Tirta Sari moved like the river: you couldn't see it but it had definitely gone somewhere.
"Tomorrow. After your call. Come find me. Not for a session. I need help fixing the irrigation line on the east terrace. It's genuinely broken and I'm genuinely bad at plumbing."
"I can't sew and you can't do plumbing. What kind of retreat is this."
Wayan's face creased — a real smile, sudden and crooked, nothing held back in it. It lasted two seconds and rearranged everything Callum thought he knew about the man. Then it was gone, and Wayan was collecting plates, and the evening was folding itself into the particular quiet that Ubud made after dark: insects, water, the faint percussion of a ceremony somewhere across the valley.
Callum walked back to his villa alone. The path was lit by low solar lamps that cast circles on the stone, each one just bright enough to reach the next. In his pocket, his phone — he'd brought it to dinner without thinking, the way you'd bring your wallet — sat dark and silent. Jem was asleep by now. Melbourne was hours ahead, already living in the tomorrow where he'd promised to call. He'd call. He'd sit through twenty minutes of numbers that described the shape of an ending, and he'd do it without a script, and it would be terrible, and Jem would be there on the other end with her textbooks under her monitor and her patience that he'd done nothing to earn.
He reached the villa. The curtain over the archway was still. The orchid on the pillow had folded in on itself completely, petals closed like a fist. He undressed, brushed his teeth in the outdoor bathroom while a moth the size of his palm orbited the light above the mirror, and lay down in the white linen bed without checking his phone. He could hear his own breathing. He could hear the river. He couldn't tell which was louder, and for once he didn't try to measure it.
He woke to roosters and the sound of water moving through pipes that weren't working properly. The villa was grey with pre-dawn, the orchid on the pillow finally beyond salvage. He showered, dressed, and picked up his phone. Seven-twelve AM. In Melbourne it was already mid-morning. He dialled before he could compose an opening line.
Jem picked up on the first ring. There was a pause — not awkward, just the two of them arriving at the same conversation from different hemispheres.
"Right. Projections. You ready?"
She walked him through it. The numbers were worse than the email had suggested — the Canva lead had gone cold, the API fix had cost them a contractor they couldn't afford, and the Xero sync was held together with what Jem described as 'duct tape and denial.' She didn't editorialize. She just laid figures on the line between them the way a surgeon lays out instruments: in order, by severity. Callum listened. The silence on his end, where he'd normally be interrupting with solutions or spin, seemed to surprise her. She kept going. Twenty-three minutes. He let it run over without mentioning it, and she didn't either.
"I can make three calls this week. The investor in Singapore, the Canva re-engagement, and the contractor rate. Everything else — you decide. I trust you to decide."
"You trust me to decide, or you don't want to be the one who decides?"
The question sat on the line for a long three seconds. He could hear her breathing, the ambient hum of the Cremorne office, a tram bell somewhere on Church Street.
"Both. Honestly, both."
"Alright. Both I can work with. Call me Thursday."
She hung up. He sat with the dead phone against his ear for a moment longer than made sense, then put it in the nightstand drawer and closed it. All the way, this time.
He found Wayan on the east terrace standing over a trench that had been dug with more enthusiasm than precision. Mud. Exposed PVC pipe with a crack running along a joint. A toolbox that looked like it had been inherited from someone who'd also been bad at plumbing. Saskia was already there, barefoot at the edge of the trench, holding a length of pipe coupling like someone assessing a deliverable.
"I haven't consulted in eighteen months. But I can hold a pipe."
"Good. Hold this one. Callum — there's a wrench in the box that I think is the right size. I've been wrong before."
They worked for an hour. Wayan was, as advertised, genuinely bad at plumbing — he cross-threaded a coupling, dropped the sealant tape in the mud, and at one point connected a section backwards, which Saskia identified with the diplomatic precision of someone who'd spent a decade telling partners their strategy was wrong without using the word 'wrong.' Callum's hands were in the trench, mud to the wrists, feeling for the crack in the pipe by touch because the angle was wrong for seeing. His phone was in a closed drawer four hundred metres uphill. His hands were finding the shape of something broken by feel, and that was all they were doing.
"How'd the call go, if you're asking."
Wayan was wrapping tape around a joint, concentrating on it the way he concentrated on everything — completely, as though the tape were the only thing in the world. But his hands were slightly off. The tape was bunching.
"Twenty-three minutes. We went over. The numbers are bad. I made three decisions and gave her the rest."
"And?"
"And she asked if I was trusting her or avoiding it, and I said both, and she said she could work with both. So."
Wayan looked up from the tape. That tired face again — the one from last night, the one that lived behind the host. He nodded once and went back to the pipe. The tape was still bunching. Saskia reached over and held the end flat without being asked, and Wayan let her, and the three of them worked in the trench with the morning sun on their backs and the sound of water not yet running through the line they were trying to fix.
They got it connected by nine. Wayan turned the valve. Water moved through the repaired joint — slowly, testing it, finding the new shape of the path. A small leak wept from the coupling Wayan had cross-threaded. He pressed his thumb over it and looked at Callum with an expression that dared him to find a metaphor.
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to."
"You were absolutely going to."
Wayan's thumb stayed on the leak. Water ran past it, downhill, toward the terraced gardens and the rice paddies and the river below that didn't care about any of them. Saskia wiped her hands on her shorts and stood, mud drying on her feet. She looked out at the valley for a moment — the green of it, the ordinary green that wasn't trying to be anything — and then walked back toward the pavilion without saying goodbye, because she'd stopped performing exits the way she'd stopped performing everything else.
Callum stayed in the trench. He had six days left. He had a phone call on Thursday and a company that might not survive the quarter and mud drying on his hands in the sun. Somewhere below, the water they'd just reconnected was reaching the garden beds, finding roots, doing the unseen thing it was supposed to do. He could hear it. He couldn't see it. He stayed where he was and listened.