Out of Office

Diana Chen hasn’t taken a real vacation in fifteen years. She hasn’t slept more than five hours in approximately six years. And she certainly hasn’t done anything that wasn’t directly related to her job as VP of Operations at a mid-sized consulting firm.
Then her company sends her on a mandatory team-building retreat.
One diverted flight. One lost luggage claim. One tiny beach town with no Wi-Fi and no way out for a week. What was supposed to be a corporate retreat becomes something far more unexpected when Diana and five colleagues find themselves stranded in Playa Quieta, Costa Rica, at a guesthouse run by an elderly man named Hector who seems to understand them better than they understand themselves.
Diana doesn’t do relaxation. She doesn’t do stillness. She thinks self-reflection is for people who don’t have seventeen active projects and a client in perpetual crisis.
But stripped of her laptop, her phone, and her carefully constructed identity, Diana begins to discover something she had forgotten existed: herself.
What follows is a story about what happens when the machine stops-when the emails go unanswered, when the calendar clears, when there is nothing to do but sit with the people around you and finally, for the first time in years, be present.
*Out of Office* is a novel about the workaholics, the overachievers, and the people who measure their worth by their productivity. It’s about the connections we avoid, the truths we hide, and the lives we’re too busy to notice we’re missing.
It’s about a woman who forgot how to be still. And the stranding that taught her how to start again.