Chapter Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Seven
I don’t see Shannon again all weekend. I have no idea what they did, or when they left, or what she told Dan about what happened at the dress shop.
I barely remember the walk home. There was so much adrenaline coursing through my system, I blindly marched a full eight blocks past the apartment before I noticed and turned back around.
It couldn’t last, of course. My agitation eventually gave way to a weighty despair.
I hadn’t been the bigger person, like I promised Connor I would be.
I don’t think I really even tried. Nor did I do anything to convince Shannon to shake off Demon Dan.
I didn’t even show her New York City. There’s not a single measure by which her visit could be considered a success.
It was a huge waste of time. And air miles.
I told Connor I’d text him updates about the rest of the weekend, but I don’t. Typing out that you had a showdown for the ages feels even more hideous than saying it.
When I get to work on Monday morning, he’s already there and waiting with an easy smile. Tears sting the back of my eyes the second I see him.
“How was the rest of the weekend?” he asks, his chair creaking on the recline.
I shuck off my jean jacket, avoiding his eye.
“Good.”
“Did you manage to get through it without killing Dan?”
His voice is light, and teasing. I’m sure if I looked there’d be a twinkle in his eye.
“I did.”
I sit, rolling forward to tuck myself in under my desk, finally looking at Connor, trying to project a sense of calm I don’t remotely feel.
His smile is frozen, a frown building between his eyes. “Everything OK?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Uh, I don’t know.” His tone changes from playful to uncertain.
I can’t do this right now.
“I’m going to get some breakfast,” I say, pushing back from my desk. “Want anything?”
He scratches his neck. “I’m good.”
“Cool,” I say, already turning away.
I know I’m being weird, but I can’t help it.
Connor will see right through me with even ten seconds of interrogation, and I’m still too keyed up to even attempt to discuss what happened with Shannon without opening the floodgates on a messy, ugly cry.
I don’t want to have to admit that I’m the one who started it.
I’m already buried under the weight of my own shame.
—
I’m peeling off the wrapper of my second blueberry muffin of the day when I hear a familiar voice.
“Would you look who it is,” Carrie says, wandering over from the direction of the espresso bar.
“Hey,” I say. Pathetically.
She slides into the chair across from me. “Someone’s cheerful this morning.”
That someone would be Carrie. She looks positively glowing, especially when you factor in it’s a Monday. I feel like a shriveled raisin.
“Where have you been? I phoned you Saturday.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” she says, blowing on her mug. “I had a…date. Sort of.”
“Oh?”
Could it be…Ben?
I wait for her to tell me more, but she offers nothing.
She sips on her coffee. “How was the weekend?”
“I slept with Connor and my sister told me she hated me,” I say flatly.
Carrie chokes her coffee back out.
“I’m sorry, what?”
I shrug. “That. On Friday night I had sex with Connor, and then on Saturday my sister and I had a huge fight while trying on wedding dresses and I’m pretty sure she’s never going to talk to me again.”
Carrie’s eyes are bugging out. It must be a full minute before she finishes processing the information.
“Start with Shannon.”
I do. I tell her about Dan crashing the weekend.
“Asshole,” she declares.
How they showed up at the office unannounced.
“The ONE day I’m not here,” she seethes.
Me inviting Connor to dinner.
“Rogue move, even for you.”
I tell her about the Palomas, the comedy tickets, Shannon’s shitty dinner comments, the bad energy in the air, Shannon’s joyless bridal appointment and her insistence that she wanted to buy a dress she clearly didn’t like, and, finally, the argument that roared up out of nowhere.
Carrie makes me recount every word Shannon and I exchanged with precision. I give her as much detail as I can remember, but a lot of it is clouded by the mists of my rage.
The part I recall perfectly, of course—a crystal-clear memory in high definition—is the moment she told me she hated me.
Carrie dismisses this immediately. “She was being extremely dramatic. Let it settle. Then you two can talk.”
Considering Shannon’s last cooling-off period lasted over two years, this doesn’t fill me with hope.
“Now,” she says, “on to the good stuff. Namely, you fucking your boss.”
“Can you not say it like that,” I say, bristling. “Especially here, where anyone can overhear you.”
She makes an exaggerated point of looking over her shoulders in both directions. “I think we’re good, babe.”
She is technically correct. There is no one around.
I start telling her what happened after Shannon and Dan left the bar, then realize I don’t want to. What happened between Connor and me feels like it’s just ours.
Instead, I sketch out the simplest version of events; him inviting me back to his place, sleeping together, staying the night. I withhold all the small, incendiary details—the dozens of tiny precious moments that make my stomach flip over just thinking about them.
She whistles. “So will this be a recurring event, or was it a one-time thing?”
I hesitate. “I’m not sure,” I admit. “We didn’t discuss it. Or make plans again.”
“Time will tell, I guess,” she shrugs.
Doubt worms through me. I think of when he kissed me in the office last week, him worrying I was going to blow up his life.
Surely that means it’s not casual for him?
Hot on the heels of that thought is another: maybe that was him trying to tell me that’s all it could be.
I can’t imagine Connor being like Andy, pretending nothing happened.
If he did, I’d be crushed. I have no idea how we’d work together.
But then again, isn’t it just as complicated now?
My eyes wander down to my phone, and I check it absently, the display lighting up. “Shit,” I say, pushing back immediately. “I have to go. Our weekly catch-up started a minute ago.”
—
Connor is noticeably irritated by my tardiness when I slip into the meeting, though things have barely kicked off. He glares at me from across the room. Not a great start.
Worse is to come. Connor has just started talking when Brad sails into the meeting room, along with two of his cronies I recognize by face but not by name.
I don’t think their visit was planned. Formally, we’re here to discuss some dashboard upgrades with Sven and a few of his software engineers.
Not the sort of thing Brad would usually interest himself in. It has all the air of an ambush.
“How are my favorite data dweebs?” Brad says, clapping Ben on the back as he moves past, nodding toward the rest of us in turn.
“What do you want?” Connor asks, his eyes hard. He’s standing at the front of the room, poised to kick off the meeting.
“We won’t take up much of your time,” Brad insists, sounding like a slimeball. “I thought we could have a quick chat about Jotter’s integrated templates ahead of Thursday. Oh good, Sven, you’re here too. Perfect timing.”
Sven grumbles something under his breath about his workload.
Brad laughs. “Always so funny, buddy. Now,” he says, calling us all to attention with a clap. “Connor, Josh and Aiden here were really interested in your observations on the project’s viability. I think you’re right. We should kill it.”
I sit up straighter, on high alert. Andy and his team have been pitching the next version of the template library for months; they’ve been working on this since even before the merger.
Integrated templates would offer a much more personal experience—the idea is we’d use machine learning to predict and pre-populate boards based on what users have done before.
If a social media manager plans a content calendar every month, and always schedules a blog post on a Monday, integrated templates would automatically set out that format every time you went to create a new board, saving the user time and energy.
It’s complicated and ambitious, but if they succeed, it would give Taskio a real edge against its competitors. I didn’t even know Connor was looking into it. What hasn’t he told me?
“I didn’t say we should kill it,” Connor says. His tension is apparent even from here. He’s holding himself so rigidly it’s like you could snap him in half.
“Not in those words,” Brad concedes. “But let’s cut to the chase here. If it’s not going to be compatible with the free tier ad features, and we want to roll out Version 3.0 by September, it makes more sense to kill it.”
Sven blinks. “3.0 won’t be ready by September.”
“It has to be,” Brad says simply. “We promised Paul it would roll out in time for the float.”
The float. Oh my god. Taskio is planning to go public. Are they insane?
I instinctively look to Connor, expecting him to look as shocked as I feel.
But he isn’t. He knows about this, I realize. My mind is working quickly now, piecing the details together while the others go back and forth.
Brad, the layoffs, the secrecy—it all makes sense, suddenly.
Taskio is preparing for an IPO. These are the mysterious conversations Connor’s been having behind closed doors.
He’s been advising Brad which features should stay and go for Version 3.
0; where the product department should focus its resources.
And he wants to kill Andy’s template library.
True to his word, Brad only stays for another couple of minutes, but the damage is done.
The guys spend the rest of the time bitching about Version 3.
0 and what it would take to have it ready by the fall, and Sven calls the meeting to a close, wearily saying that if they need to accelerate the timeline the dashboard updates will have to wait.
“Oh god,” John says. His elbows are resting on the table, and he slides his hands up to his eyes, rubbing at them from behind his wireframe glasses with the palm of his hands. “This is a disaster waiting to happen.”
I clear my throat. “What did Brad mean about killing the integrated templates?”
I can feel all the guys eyeing me cautiously, Connor most of all. When no one says anything, I ask again.
“Connor. Did you recommend they kill that project?”
He looks at me directly now. “No.”
“Really? Because Brad there seems to think you did.”
“He asked if it was ready and would be compatible with 3.0. All I told him was the truth.”
I scoff. “As you see it.”
“As everyone sees it, Annie. Integrated templates are still a long way off.”
“Not if more people were working on it.”
He starts to shake his head.
“It’s a good idea,” I insist. “If they kill that project now, all those people will end up losing their jobs.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Oh, wake up,” I say. “They will, they so will. They’re the last Jotter product squad left. If you make the recommendation to kill off integrated templates now, they’ll all lose their jobs—just in time for Taskio to go public!”
Connor and I are standing at opposite ends of the conference room table, Martin’s and John’s heads bobbing back and forth, watching the action like a tennis match.
He softens. “I understand that these are your friends. It’s not that it’s a bad idea. But it doesn’t fit with the direction Brad is moving in.”
“That feature has huge potential to be a game-changer for the platform,” I argue with him. “Ben says—”
“It’s not Ben’s call to make,” he interrupts. “It’s mine. And I’m telling you, it’s not going to work.”
Ben whistles under his breath.
“At least let me talk to them,” I reason. “There might be a way to salvage this.”
“No.” His tone is firm, final. “I warned you when you joined this team our conversations were confidential, and I meant it. All we do is make the recommendations, answer the questions we’re asked. We don’t control the outcome.”
“Bullshit,” I argue. “We all know Brad will go with whatever you tell him. You’re the one who told him about the integrated templates in the first place. And you only got that inside information from me.”
The next review is on Thursday, the big all-hands meeting where product owners pitch ideas and share progress updates of what they’re working on.
I see the scene play out in front of me. Brad asking Andy’s team to give an update of where they’re at, blissfully unaware that they’re sitting ducks.
“…Which is why it’s important that none of this leaves this room…” Connor, it turns out, was still talking. “Annie. Do you understand?”
Standing there, he feels like a stranger.
“Yes, boss,” I practically spit at him. “I understand.”