It wasn’t grief that haunted Aditya the most—it was stillness.

  The kind of stillness that filled rooms after funerals, after layoffs, after one-sided conversations. The kind of stillness he had learned to fear, because it meant he had time to think. And thinking, in the aftermath of his cousin’s death, came with consequences.

  So when he quit his job at Lynxbyte Systems without a new offer in hand, he didn’t feel brave. He felt trapped between his ambition and his fear of becoming stagnant. Every hour that passed in idleness scraped against the inside of his head like nails.

  His family, full of business owners and risk-takers, never said anything. No pressure. No guilt-trips. His parents only wanted him to succeed, whatever that meant for him. But that made it worse somehow. It made the weight entirely his.

  Aditya wasn’t here to chase a dream. He was here to drown the silence.

  Two offers came.

  One was from a fintech startup. Good salary, quick onboarding, a clean ladder to climb.

  The other was from Velaris Tech—a startup so amorphous it barely had a website. The CTO, a guy named Sameer, had interviewed him while also holding down a job at the fintech company. That alone should’ve been a red flag. But Aditya couldn’t stop thinking about the guy.

  Sameer had a kind of broken brilliance. Sharp-eyed. Disheveled. Like a man who either knew too much or cared too little. He offered Aditya a junior position with less money, less prestige, and zero clarity.

  And Aditya said yes.

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  The HR from the fintech company called the next day.

  “You’re rejecting our offer?” Meghna’s voice was cool, clipped.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “For… a junior role at a company you know nothing about?”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t bother explaining. There wasn’t a good explanation. The offer from Velaris came in first, and something about it felt like a door he wasn’t supposed to open—so of course, he opened it.

  He joined the following Monday. Remote. Quiet.

  The first message came from Rajat, a developer who had half-grilled him in his technical round.

  “Hey, welcome aboard,” Rajat typed. “I’ll be your point of contact for now.”

  They had a quick call. Rajat’s voice was calmer than it had been in the interview. He told Aditya to settle in—no task today. Just join the 1:30 PM daily scrum.

  “There’s this legacy project we’re wrapping up,” he explained. “Orion Core. Sameer’s running that. You’ll probably be staffed on the new one—FlashCart. It’s an e-commerce acceleration platform.”

  Aditya tried to sound confident. “Cool.”

  “You’ll catch on. They’ll loop you in.”

  The 1:30 call was nothing like he expected.

  No greetings. No team bonding. Just silent tiles on a Zoom call, a project manager mumbling about build delays, and Sameer—half on camera, looking like he hadn’t slept in a week.

  Sameer scratched his temple and muttered, “Push the deploy to Friday. It’s not ready.”

  Silence.

  He looked up. “That’s it.”

  And the call ended.

  Six minutes.

  Aditya stared at his screen.

  No Jira access. No onboarding checklist. No emails. Just a calendar entry that said “Daily Scrum” and a CTO who seemed allergic to structure.

  It should’ve felt like chaos. But weirdly, it felt like home.