I tried to leave.
* * *
The only other time in my life I’d been near a gun was when Logan wanted to go to a shooting range for her birthday. Those were the early days, when we were still fighting for brand recognition, getting rejected for loans, and I spent every waking moment either arguing with Logan, having sex with Logan—sometimes both, simultaneously—or pushing protein bars on athletes like a drug dealer offering free samples. She sprung the idea when we were on the road somewhere, passing a billboard advertising a shooting range, and we spent an afternoon firing holes in paper people, black silhouettes with targets drawn on their chests. I went for the body. Logan aimed exclusively for the head.
Logan didn’t do cake or candles and most years she ignored her birthday completely. (“What, your only accomplishment is that you didn’t die?”) When she did mark them, as with the shooting range, it tended to be with some sort of challenge. She ran a marathon for her thirtieth and took a polar plunge into Lake Minnetonka a decade later. In the back of my head, as her fiftieth birthday approached, I’d been expecting another Herculean idea. Chin-ups from the wing of an airplane. The Iditarod, maybe. You never knew with Logan and you couldn’t compare yourself to her like she was a normal human.
I celebrate my birthday the same way every year, with a scotch and a quiet end seat at the bar while listening to jazz at the Dakota. Never a headliner night. Just a few guys making music on an unassuming Tuesday. I have one drink, jot two or three cocktail napkins’ worth of ideas—some personal, some Strike—then I head home, toss the napkins into the fireplace, and start another year. Some of the managers would call it a rebirth ritual, which is why I don’t tell anyone about it.
Logan’s occasional celebrations, on the other hand, have become marketing gold. We started a Strike marathon team the year she ran, right as the company itself was being born. Her dive into the lake, where they’d chipped a hole through the foot-thick ice, got over ten million views on YouTube and raised thousands of dollars for athletic programs at local schools. I didn’t know what she’d planned for fifty, but I’d thought I was prepared for anything and I hoped, whatever it was, we could find a tie-in to Strike Down.
Then, during an early tournament planning session, she announced she was going to spend her semicentennial on the beach.
“I want to get away. Fifty fucking years and I’ve never cheated winter by taking a vacation. It’s time.”
Agreement and chatter flooded the room, with more than one question directed at me. “So, where are you going?”
As if we’d discussed it beforehand, like a married couple or even business partners. I didn’t know if I was invited, or whether Logan was planning to take Aaden instead. She smiled at me across the table, though, and leaned back in her chair like she was practicing her beach lounge.
“We were thinking The Bahamas.”
I booked it, of course, and made all the arrangements. A private, ocean-front villa. Our own butler. Twenty-four-hour room service with high-protein meals, no refined carbs. An endless stretch of white sand and bubbling surf. And Logan didn’t have the first clue what to do with herself. It was almost worth the insane cost, just to watch her try to relax and do nothing. While I read competitor data and skimmed construction site proposals, she tossed and turned on a beach lounger, picked at plates of fruit, tried to read a novel, and got up every few minutes to stretch and plod restlessly around the sand. She swam until she tired herself out—in the ocean, not our private pool because that would have been too easy—with the butler anxiously hovering and watching the black dot of her head recede further and further into the waves.
It was a three-bedroom villa, and we didn’t go through the pretense of discussing sleeping arrangements. We each took our own rooms and staggered our daily jogs on the beach. We ate together, but when the butler set up a candlelit table on the beach, Logan laughed and made him bring the whole thing back up to the terrace.
By the second day she was already admitting defeat.
“It’s too warm here. My brain is melting.”
I went through my emails and pulled up a link for a conference call. “This was your idea.”
“I thought it would be