TULUM — Marketing director Greg Halverston, 41, confirmed Wednesday that the relaxed pace of his weeklong wellness retreat has finally given him the mental clarity necessary to put the finishing touches on a ransom note he has been struggling with since March.
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The note, he said, has been giving him trouble. He has rewritten the opening eleven times. He has agonized over the tone. He has gone back and forth on whether to include the phrase please advise, which his wife Brenda — who does not know about the note, the project, or any part of his expanding second life — has told him he overuses at work.
The solution came to him in a hammock on day three. He had done the breathwork. He had eaten the ceviche. He had wept, briefly and privately, during a cacao ceremony with a man named Inti. And then, in the gold of the late afternoon, with the cucumber water sweating gently in his hand, the note opened up.
“You can’t force these things,” Halverston said. “I tried, in Connecticut, to force it. I tried writing it in the car. That was insane. I was too in my head. I was too in Greg’s head. I needed to get out of Greg.”
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The ransom project, he said, began roughly fourteen months ago after he read a book that encouraged him to ask what he would do if no one was watching. The author, Halverston acknowledged, had probably meant something else. He had taken what he took.
“The kidnapping is logistics,” he said, waving a hand. “Anybody can do logistics. I run a team of seven. I can plan a kidnapping in my sleep. The note, though. The note is the work. The note is where you reveal yourself. The note has to sing.”
What had unlocked it, he said, was finally figuring out who he was writing to. He had been writing to the family. The wife. The kids. The lawyer they’d hand it to. But that’s not who reads a ransom note. The reader is the man paying the money. He had been pointing the whole document in the wrong direction.
He took a long, satisfied sip of cucumber water.
“It’s going to be a really good note,” he said.
He is not, sources confirmed, the only one. A man two villas down, Halverston said, is allegedly writing a memoir, but the focus is too sharp, the notebook is too well-worn, and there is a nod they exchange over breakfast that says everything. Halverston believes the memoir is cover. He suspects roughly a third of the resort is cover. He suspects this is, in fact, what the resorts are for.
“The wellness is the wellness,” he said. “But the wellness is also, secretly, cover. Once you understand that, you understand the whole thing.”
Halverston returns to Connecticut on Friday. He will go to his son’s lacrosse game on Saturday. He will resume his job on Monday. And he will, he said, need one more solo retreat — Costa Rica in the spring, maybe Big Sur — to finalize the dollar figure, which he wants to feel rather than calculate.
The figure, he believes, lives somewhere in the low-to-mid seven figures.
He intends, he said, to make it count.