Chapter 37
THIRTY-SEVEN
A radical thing called boundaries
Georgie
Two days after Jake left, Craig called.
“Patrick wants a healthy team rotation,” Craig barked down the phone. “You’ve done your stint in Skye; now you can finish IRIS in London. Perhaps you’ll find it easier to focus on the technical work here, rather than whatever extracurricular activities were keeping you so busy up there.”
My stomach dropped.
Craig’s got an even bigger chip on his shoulder about me now. He won’t say it outright, but there’ve been rumors floating around since the intercom incident. Everyone’s whispering about it, but nobody can confirm it outright.
Roy says people don’t believe it was me with Patrick. That makes sense. Silly Georgie Button from IT and the CEO does not compute.
“No offense, love,” he’d said, “but they think you’re too wholesome for that sort of carry-on.”
Apparently, I give off the sexual energy of a Sunday school teacher.
But Craig might know more or at least suspect. He knows we went to dinner together. He’s probably put two and two together and come up with “that mousy IT girl is trying to sleep her way up the ladder” because that’s the sort of thing Craig would think.
So that was it. Patrick tidied me out of his life as neatly as rescheduling a flight. He arranged a helicopter back with another pilot. Professional boundaries maintained right to the bitter end.
The night before Jake left, we had dinner in town.
We performed an impressive dance around the Patrick-shaped elephant, talking about literally everything else: work, London, Mum, his plans, my favorite spots in Skye.
The conversation was easy enough, but I could see the sadness in his eyes.
They’d been mates for years, and now Jake could hardly look at him. All because of me.
Even with that weight between us, Jake kept trying. He cracked jokes, asked me about work, pushed chips onto my plate when I wasn’t eating much. Before the night was over, he told me he was shelving his next expedition and heading back to London for a while to spend more time with me.
“You don’t have to babysit me,” I’d protested.
“Not babysitting. Just... being around. If you’ll have me cluttering up your space.”
The old Georgie would’ve disappeared into work. Would’ve coded until my eyes crossed and tried to bury heartbreak under layers of Java. But I’m trying not to be her anymore.
So, when I get back to London, instead of doing my usual thing of becoming one with my laptop, I do something revolutionary: I book a wellness retreat in the Cotswolds that Fee mentioned.
One with pottery classes and sunrise yoga.
“It’s about reconnecting with yourself,” she’d said. Just a weekend, two weeks from now.
My weekend time is my own, and I’m going to treat it like the sacred thing that it is.
I’m back in London for a whole two weeks, and being back in the office feels surreal.
Everything looks the same, but I’m not. I left for Scotland as one version of myself and came back as someone else entirely.
Except this new version of me doesn’t feel stronger.
She just feels lonelier. Like I left the best parts of myself on that island.
Everyone asks about Skye, and I’ve perfected my response: “Beautiful scenery. Challenging project but really rewarding.” All true, just missing the footnote where I fell catastrophically in love and got my heart handed back to me in pieces. I deliver it with a smile that makes my face ache.
Mostly, I’m just sad. Every night, I cry myself to sleep, probably freaking out Riri’s ghost.
I hate that I miss him so much. That I wonder what he’s doing and what he’s feeling. And I need to move on, especially since it feels like he peeled me open, looked at everything raw inside me, and then decided it wasn’t worth keeping.
I still work on IRIS—I’m professional, even heartbroken—but I’ve started this radical thing called boundaries: leaving at 5:30, taking lunch breaks. Roy nearly called an ambulance when he saw me packing up at a normal hour on Tuesday.
“Who are you and what have you done with Georgie?” he asked.
“Trying this thing called work-life balance,” I told him. “Apparently it’s all the rage.”
I told Roy everything, and he’s been lovely. He didn’t make me feel stupid for falling for someone so obviously wrong for me. Instead, he’s been dragging me to the park at lunch, forcing sandwiches on me, and occasionally hauling me to the pub.
“You can be sad,” he said yesterday, “but you’re not allowed to disappear.”
The retreat is this weekend. Two days of making pottery and journaling about feelings with strangers. The old Georgie would have spent the whole time anxiously checking her phone. The new Georgie is going to try to make a decent bowl and not think about Patrick for five bloody minutes.
Maybe I’ll even do the sunrise yoga, though let’s be honest, I’ll probably watch from my window with tea, applauding everyone else’s flexibility.
First, I need to deal with Craig.
The resource allocation feature is nearly done, but it needs proper testing, and I can’t give it what it deserves when I’m basically a walking Taylor Swift album.
Not to mention, Craig’s deadlines are, as always, completely divorced from reality.
Ravi would’ve sat with me, worked through realistic timings, and built in buffer time for the inevitable disasters. Craig just picks dates based on whatever he’s promised Patrick, then acts shocked when code doesn’t write itself.
I hate even walking down the corridor toward his office, but I don’t see another way. By the time I knock, my stomach is a knot of nerves.
“Yeah,” Craig barks, like the word itself is an inconvenience.
The moment I step in, that familiar dread settles over me. His office hasn’t changed. His desk is buried under printouts he’ll never read, the motivational poster about Excellence hangs on for dear life, and the perpetual smell of reheated curry makes me queasy.
“Craig, I need to talk to you about the resource allocation feature.”
His eyes don’t leave the screen. Click. Scroll. Click. I’d put money on Solitaire. “What about it?”
I swallow, mouth dry. “I need more time. I haven’t been able to test it to the standard I usually do.”
Now he looks up, face already going red. “Unacceptable. You’ve had plenty of time. We’ve committed to this deadline.”
We? I didn’t commit to anything. He’s the one who stood up in front of the senior management board and promised them this because, apparently, he’ll get major brownie points for it.
“It’s too high risk without enough time for proper testing—”
Craig flicks his hand like I’m background noise. “Don’t want to hear it. The board’s breathing down my neck about deployment. We stick to the timeline.”
Ten more days. Just ten more days of this, and I can hand in my notice.
“I’m formally advising we push the deadline back. The Quality Assurance team won’t have time to properly test—”
“Deploy tonight.”
“Craig, this affects live systems. If something goes wrong during deployment, it could crash the reservation system for every hotel. We need proper QA.”
“Don’t tell me how QA works,” he explodes, shoving his chair back so hard it slams against the wall. He leans over the desk, using his height to tower over me. “I’ve been doing this since before you could spell ‘computer.’ I’ll handle QA. Deploy this evening as planned.”
My hands are shaking, but it isn’t exhaustion. It’s fury.
The bastard knows I’m good at what I do. That’s why he pushes me—he knows I’ll break myself in half to get it right.
That doesn’t mean we should go ahead with this.
“Fine,” I manage, voice tight. “But I’m documenting that I advised against this. If something goes wrong—”
His eyebrows shoot up. “Hell of an attitude, Georgie,” he sneers. “Maybe if you’d spent less time playing Highland games and more time working, you’d have confidence in what you’ve built.”
I just stand there, mouth open, staring at him. My face prickles, throat too tight to swallow.
“Just get it ready for QA,” he says, already swiveling back to his screen. “Close the door on your way out.”
Fucking idiot.
I walk back to my desk on jelly legs. Now I have to stay late again, but at least I pushed back. If he wants this deployed against my explicit professional advice, fine. But I’m creating a paper trail.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand, square my shoulders, and get to work. It won’t be on my conscience without every safeguard I can cram into the system.
I rerun every unit test, even the ones I could do in my sleep. Then I get creative, throwing the weirdest scenarios at IRIS: hotels with no rooms, infinite staff but no guests, a February with thirty days. Anything that might make it stumble.
I wrap everything in bubble wrap: error handling, extra logging.
My eyes burn and my back aches, but I keep going.
Two hours later, I’m hollow but finished. The code is as safe as I can make it with not enough time.
I write Craig the most detailed handover notes of my life. Every test I ran. Every safeguard I added. Every reason this needs proper QA, and tell him it’s ready to hand over to them.
He better have mobilized the entire QA department for this. Though knowing Craig, he probably told them they have fifteen minutes.
Four hours later, my phone rings. “It needs to go live now. Deploy ASAP.”
“QA signed off?”
“Yes! Just do it. Stop stalling. Now, Georgie.”
I hit deploy.
The confirmation window disappears. No alerts, no errors, just silence.
My heart pounds as I watch the system status dashboard. Green lights across the board. The deployment’s rolling out to each hotel, one by one. London. Edinburgh. Manchester. Each location flicks to green.
I run a test booking and create a fake reservation for the London property. It works. The system assigns the room, calculates the rate, sends the confirmation email. Everything exactly as it should.
Another test. Edinburgh this time. Perfect.