The Unbearable Lightness of Winning

The glass walls of the corner office reflected a man David barely recognized. At forty-three, he'd become what his younger self would have called a zombie—moving through board meetings and merger negotiations with a hunger that could never be satisfied. The downtown skyline spread before him like a carcass picked clean.

"You going to the game tonight?" Elena asked, leaning against his doorframe. She was the only person in the firm who still saw him as human.

"Baseball?" David rubbed his temples. "I promised Jamie I'd take him. His father died last month."

"That's decent of you."

"Is it?" He laughed bitterly. "I haven't seen my own son in six months. But I'm running around playing the bereaved godfather because I need his father's voting shares."

Elena didn't flinch. She'd seen the fox in him—calculating, opportunistic—when they'd started as associates fifteen years ago. She'd watched him climb over bodies to reach this office, wearing ambition like a second skin.

"You know what I keep thinking about?" David said suddenly. "That camping trip in '97. My dad and I in Yellowstone. We saw a grizzly bear fishing in the river. My father, this man who'd never shown me affection, put his arm around my shoulders. He said, 'Son, there are things in this world that will tear you apart if you let them.'"

He swallowed. "Two weeks later, he cleaned out his desk and disappeared. Started a new family in Oregon."

"And you became him," Elena said softly.

"No. I became the thing he warned me about." David stood up, the weight of twenty years of wrong choices pressing down on him. "Jamie deserves better than a godfather who's only there because of proxy statements."

He picked up his phone. "I'm going to call him. Tell him I can't make it. Then I'm calling my son."

"The zombie awakens?" Elena's smile was gentle.

"Something like that."

Outside, the city hummed its endless song of ambition and regret. But inside that glass office, for the first time in years, David felt something like hope begin to stir.