Chapter 11
AURORA
I felt great.
Like, better than I had in a long while.
Maybe the massage plus dinner duo I’d hit up with Sierra, which led to a sleepover at her house while we cackled—and cried—and caught up over bottles of wine.
Yes, bottles.
The fact that I wasn’t still burrowed under the covers in the dark was a testament to just how freaking great I felt.
The nasty-ass hangover cure smoothie she’d forced me to drink probably had something to do with it.
And… Tatum.
Definitely Tatum.
I was walking into my office—determined to make it a whole week that I actually stayed there instead of cutting out early for personal shit—when my phone buzzed.
I knew it was him before I even looked at the screen, which of course put a smile on my face before I could even get my hand in the front pocket of my hoodie to fish it out.
Which of course, set off my constantly-running mental reminder to check myself.
While we’d come to an understanding a month ago about how we were supposedly just “vibing”… fooling around with Tatum wasn’t anywhere on the list of things I should be doing for myself after the long-term breakup of a serious relationship.
Free agent shit.
His words that I reminded myself of often, in some attempt to maintain my common sense around… all of this.
And if I was following that thread, it wasn’t good for an undrafted player to be this thirsty about a team getting in contact.
But like… this was a very, very attractive “team”.
A very charming “team”.
So my situation was a little different.
How was I supposed to not get butterflies when the “team” looked like, talked like, fucked like Tatum Wilder? I may as well have a fucking pen in my hand, ready to sign on the dotted line.
Especially once I opened the message from Tatum to find a picture of his breakfast—oatmeal, eggs, sausage, fruit, nicely plated honestly—paired with the caption, Boooooorrrriiinnnggg.
Immediately, heat rushed to my face, and I closed the door behind me as if anybody else could see the message. And even if they could… who would even know what he was referencing out of context?
And yet… I was blushing.
I dropped my laptop bag and coffee on my desk, putting a hand to my ribs to compose myself like it would do anything about the butterflies I had going on.
“Chill, chill, chill,” I verbally urged… as if that would do anything either.
It was… hard.
After dealing with Monty, only Monty, for more of my life than not, I actually had no threshold for a healthy level of… whatever this was.
Vibing, my ass.
My whole adult life, I’d been in love.
So really, I wasn’t even sure if the warm feeling in my chest was too much, and Tatum wasn’t helping, at all.
I’d served him pussy for breakfast three mornings in a row.
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, actually.
No wonder my body was humming at just the thought of him.
Just a few days ago, he had his hand clamped over my mouth in this very office while I was bent over this desk, taking stroke, after stroke, after stroke, after stroke, after stroke, after?—
Yeah…
Vibing.
More like cultivating an unhealthy obsession.
Looks very nutritious, I texted back, then put the phone face down on my desk so I could at least attempt to focus while I set up for the morning. We were on the tail end of another update, one that implemented new features versus the usual bug fixes and security improvements. It was part of why I was dressed down—hoodie, leggings, sneakers—instead of my usual slacks or dress and heels.
Update days usually involved lots of pacing, and I needed to be comfortable for that.
When my phone buzzed again, I put off looking at it immediately, already knowing it was a response from Tatum.
And then when I did…
It’s missing the vitamin P. For pus?—
“Rori!”
My head popped up to see where Shan was standing at my doorway.
Without knocking.
Looking panicked.
Shit.
“What happened?” I asked, putting the phone down to give her my full attention.
She blew out a long breath, shaking her head. “A huge influx of one-star reviews, customer service chats, complaint emails, calls…everybody is booted out of their account. The login system isn’t working.”
“Everybody?” I questioned, and she nodded.
“Everybody. Even us. Even the admin accounts,” she explained. “We’re getting constant timeout errors, and nobody can figure out what’s going on.”
I just looked at her.
Blinked.
Blinked again.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
“All this, and y’all waited until just now to tell me?”
“It just happened, like, within a half hour. I didn’t want to trouble you with it while you were on the road trying to get in, and… I thought it was something we’d be able to patch to at least have minimal customer impact. We haven’t been able to figure it out.”
“Shit,” I groaned, feeling a sinking feeling in my stomach. “A half hour, and we’re already using the word influx,” I grunted, standing up. “Fuck!”
“Correct,” Shan said. “We’ve checked all the obvious things.”
“So nobody pushed the update too soon?”
She shook her head. “Only your credentials and mine have the authority to initiate an update,” Shan reminded me. “I can assure you that it wasn’t me, and I have no doubt that it wasn’t you either.”
“Right. Uh… Did a test environment get pushed out?” I questioned, running through everything I could bring to mind.
“As wild as that would be, I did think of that too, and I checked for it already. Nothing changed on our end.”
“So then what the hell?” I groaned, massaging my temples with my palms. “Oh my god. All these stressed out people relying on this app for stuff with their kids… this is going to ruin us.”
“No, absolutely not. We’ll figure it out,” Shan assured. “It’s only been thirty minutes. Well, forty now.”
“Which is probably an eternity to some of these people if they’re trying to keep up with sleep logs, or feeding journals or?—”
“Yes,” Shan interrupted, giving me her standard soothing hand raise. “It’s important. Very important. But we will get it figured out. I’ve got the customer service team drafting a statement we can put out to let people know that we’re aware of the issue, and working on it. That should stem the flow of contacts. We’ll put it out across social media, and Hollis is working on pushing a pre-login message in the app. Okay? It’s gonna be okay.”
She was right.
Probably.
Actually, no, I was sure she was right.
We would figure it out and it would be okay.
But right now?
Fuuuuuck.
I should’ve known things were going a little too well for me.
Of course some shit like this had gone wrong.
“Who the fuck pushes out an authenticator update on a Friday, without testing! Without notification!” Shan fussed, taking a moment to toss up her hands in frustration.
We were up to our eyeballs in tasks, retooling our app to work with a completely different login authenticator from the one that had caused the outage.
Sixteen hours’ worth of outage, at this point.
For some, it would have made more sense to simply wait on the developers to issue a bug fix, since not only had they pushed an unannounced update, the update wasn’t actually working.
For anyone!
But for whatever reason, they didn’t seem to be in that big of a hurry to fix it.
And worst of all the irritants they seemed to be heaping on today?
They had the nerve to be rude when we realized the problem wasn’t on our end at all and contacted them to see what was going on.
We paid them upwards of a hundred thousand dollars a year to use their service.
Rude was unacceptable.
The only reason we hadn’t gone through the steps of creating our own was because it was too burdensome to do at the outset, and app security wasn’t something to breeze past. It was expensive, and a cost that grew as you gained users, but it was worth it.
When it was working.
And I wasn’t being treated like my business didn’t mean shit to them.
As soon as I got off the call, I headed straight to the Hive to see who was at their desks. I had three people with cyber security experience, one of whom had been head of secure development at a major social media company.
Those three I pulled aside, and put a bonus check in each of their hands; their share of what I would’ve paid the company I was going to tell to kiss my ass at some point in the very near future.
Between them, me, Hollis and Shan… we were just going to build our own shit.
I was neither amused, nor the one for those kinda games, so while they were blowing up my phone and email trying to get me on the line with a rep once they realized I was serious, we were coding.
Their competition was on the phone.
It was me.
I was their competition.
“Don’t sweat it, Shan,” I told her, trying to give her back some of the same reassurance she’d given me earlier.
As stressful as this was, it was also… exhilarating.
I hadn’t been locked in like this in a very long time. Most of my coding these days was focused on updates to the innovation we’d already created. No big undertaking, like this, that held real weight.
So in a way, I guess I was kinda grateful.
Or would be, once this was over.
Again… it took sixteen hours. Which was actually insanely fast for a project of this size and heft, but the others had found those bonus checks very motivational. And now… it was time to put it to a real test.
Our last step test environment.
The one that was technically available for anyone to access if they knew how to get there. We needed the true user experience, so it had to be this way.
It was just scary.
If it went wrong, this was the kind of mistake that was hard to bounce back from.
I waited, chest tight, next breath lodged in my throat, as my development team ran the process one more time. Prayers up, fingers and toes crossed, whatever little edge I could get in my favor, down to wishing on the sun—the most readily available star—that it would complete without a hitch.
“Come on…” I muttered, not daring to take my eyes away from the screens in front of me.
On one, line after line of what would appear to be an endless keyboard smash to the untrained eye generated, deployed with a single click of a button. Beside it was the customized monitor, a large screen depicting an oversized phone screen, currently displaying the user-interface powered by the running code.
Correctly displaying it.
But that wasn’t enough.
As slow as it felt watching it happen, the load time for the app was less than a second, instantaneous, or as close as we could get it for the user, thanks to detailed coding prowess. I would’ve preferred we get it fast enough to go back in time and open a full second before our customers decided to tap our icon, but I was managing my expectations.
For now.
I stepped closer to the display, tapping the designated sign in button.
The thing that had been giving us, and the nearly one million monthly users we’d amassed, the blues. My hands shook as I typed in the admin email we used in our test environment. I had to backspace a couple of times as my clumsy fingers plodded over the keys, hitting the wrong things.
No one said a word.
Finally, I managed to get the proper credentials keyed in, but I hesitated after, reluctant to hit submit.
If this didn’t work, it meant hours—more hours—of debugging, and a waste of all the ones we’d just spent trying to correct an issue we hadn’t caused.
I couldn’t ask that of my team. Bonus check or not, we were exhausted from a marathon of coding, trying to get ahead of even more negative reviews about a flawed user experience.
Not flawed… no user experience, because they couldn’t log in, which meant they couldn’t actually access anything, which was… whew.
My head was hurting again.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I hit submit, and waited.
Not for long.
This too was lightning-fast by design, as were the instant tears that sprang to my eyes when the clean modern white, mint, and yellow interface loaded in front of me, filled with the information of our “test case”.
Relief.
A round of applause went up around the room, but my limbs were so weak with released tension I couldn’t raise my hands to join them.
Instead, I sank.
And cried like a fucking baby.
“Awww, Ri,” Hollis laughed, bending to scoop me into a half-hug, half-heft kinda move that ended with him awkwardly getting me back onto my feet. “It’s okay, my baby, we got it fixed.”
Still a mess of tears, I nodded. “Yes, yes we did. Somebody please deploy it, so we can stop getting eviscerated in reviews.”
“Already done,” Shan spoke up, from her seat a few feet away. “And I’ve already got a press release written up for you to look at.”
Another wave of tears rushed to my face, and it must’ve been obvious. Immediately, Hollis started fanning me, shaking his head. “No, none of that. Your face will be all puffy when you record this press release video, and that’s the last thing you need after?—”
“Hollis.”
Shan’s rebuke was sharp, and effective, ’cause he stopped talking and just rolled his eyes, confusing as well.
“What’s going on?” I asked, looking between them. “Did somebody get weird?”
“Yes,” Hollis answered, at the same time Shan replied, “It doesn’t matter!”
I pushed out a groan. “Just tell me. Who was it, and what did they say?”
Shan shot another glare at Hollis, rolling her eyes before she turned to me. “Monty’s whor—friend.”
“Yams?!” I exclaimed, tears immediately drying in favor of anger. “What the hell could she?—”
“Her weird ass posted a video from the hospital,” Hollis chimed in, stepping between me and Shan for my full attention. “Talking about how she’d just downloaded the app and it was already messed up, and had just stressed her out soooo bad she had to go get her baby checked on. The internet is eating it up.”
“And eating her up,” Shan added, pushing him aside a bit. “Not everybody is on her side. It’s like an even split.”
“It shouldn’t be a split at all. That bitch is dramatic and weird. Did I already say she was weird?”
“Yes,” I confirmed, nodding. “I’ll be right back. Let me clean my face and then I can do the video?”
“Uh… yeah, sure,” Shan agreed, but I was already walking off. “I told you not to tell her that bullshit right now!” she hissed behind me, at Hollis, who immediately countered.
“Keeping it from her doesn’t help anything!”
Honestly?
I saw both sides.
Mostly?
I was seeing… orange.
Not quite red, but I was definitely outside my preferred sunny yellow mood, the one I’d been in before all this started.
In my office with the door closed, I found my phone. Before I unlocked it, I took a deep breath, really considering my next actions before I took them.
I didn’t need a repeat of that birthday picture.
There were all kinds of social media notifications on my phone. I ignored them all in favor of going to my dialer app to put in a number I wasn’t sure I could forget if I tried.
He answered on the first ring.
“Rori, hey! I saw all the news about?—”
“Are you at the hospital?” I interrupted.
“Oh. Uh… nah, we’re back home. Everything is fine.”
“Great.” I nodded. “So, tell that stalker-ass, weirdo bitch of yours to keep my name and my app name, out of her mouth.”
“Rori—”
“Tell her that if she doesn’t, I will give her a good… let’s say a year postpartum. And then after that, I will beat her ass.”
“That’s not necessary, you don’t have to be like that.”
“She doesn’t have to be like that,” I countered. “She is not necessary. You are not necessary. Leave me the fuck alone. I don’t need this. You know I don’t need this.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Seriously. I?—”
I’d never know what else he had to say.
I hung up, and he couldn’t call back.
Perfect.
When I looked at my phone, I noticed that I had a missed text from Tatum, who I remembered, quite suddenly, I’d been mid-conversation with when everything went to hell.
I navigated to our text thread, seeing the messages from this morning with the addition of the new one.
Call me when you come up for air.
I really wanted to call right then, but I wasn’t quite in the clear yet. I still did have press and publicity shit to do. I cleaned myself as best as I could, grabbing a nicer shirt from the stash in my office closet before I got on camera to do that little follow-up video.
And then I did call Tatum.
As soon as he answered the phone, he said two simple sentences.
“I know you’re stressed. Come to Wildwood with me.”
I didn’t have to think very hard about my answer.
“Yes.”