Chapter Fourteen
JUDE
My internal alarm goes off at five o’clock. I wake up next to Lacey and my first thought is, what have I done?
And then I look at her, sleeping in the dim light with her lips parted and her hair spilled all over her pillow.
I see the curve of her hip, the small of her back, and I find myself thinking quite literally about what I’ve done.
And how I’d very much like to do more of it.
Except she’s asleep and it’s time for me to start my workday.
I try to think if Lacey’s ever said anything about what time she wakes up, because what I can’t do is sit here quietly until seven a.m. while she sleeps adorably and I’m without my laptop, and my phone is who knows where and probably dead.
I consider my alternatives. I could sneak out and leave a note, or I could wake her to tell her I’m going.
I just know that I can’t wake her up accidentally while I’m sneaking out but before I leave the note, because I’ll just look like a creep who’s trying to disappear on her. But what would I even say in the note?
“Did you know your intrusive thoughts are loud enough to wake other people?” Lacey asks me sleepily. While I’m wondering how I’m supposed to navigate all the lines we crossed last night—a good morning kiss? a fist bump?—she stretches and yawns, then burrows in close to me.
“Don’t worry,” she says, sounding very cozy. “You can go do your morning cold plunge protein shake CEO thing. I won’t be offended.”
I sit up a little and lean back against her headboard while I assure her that I do both of those things in the evening.
My mornings are for work. And as much as I want to sink back into Lacey’s bed with her, my company’s still at risk and I probably have six requests from Edmund after last night’s dinner.
I sling my legs over the side of her bed and locate my boxer briefs. Lacey snaps a light on to help me.
“What are you smiling at?” she asks as I pull them on, noticing her small kitchen at the other end of the room.
“Your toaster,” I say.
“Weirdo.”
She watches me intently as pick up my rumpled clothes from her floor.
“What?” I ask her.
“I’m just confused about this whole situation you have going here,” she says. “This isn’t the body of a man who sits at a desk all day.”
“I have a standing desk,” I remind her. She throws a pillow at me.
I put my pants on and go sit next to her while I button my shirt.
“It’s soccer,” I say. “I used to play a lot more than I do now. But it’s the one thing I make time for outside of work.”
“That would be cute if it wasn’t kind of sad,” she says. “Or if I could think of a thing I make time for outside of work.”
I brush the hair out her eyes.
“You don’t know how I started Lettercat?” I ask her. “Maybe only Trev and Ella do. I joined a league when I first moved here, and it was my job to send out the team newsletter. All the options sucked, so I built my own.”
“You’re not kidding,” she says.
“Nope. My team was the Wildcats.”
“And here I thought you were a businessman and cat lover.”
I kiss her on the forehead and say goodbye. I turn the light off.
“See you in approximately three hours!” she calls from her bed as I open the door to go.
“How about you make it more like two and a half?” I ask.
As expected, Edmund has a lot of feedback for me. Mostly he introduces me to something called a nine-box grid, and then tells me I need to rate each of the core team’s performance and potential using the grid. We’ll review it next week.
“And don’t tell me everyone’s a high performer, Jude,” he says.
The most regrettable thing about the business lessons Edmund teaches me is that even when they do have value—looking at you, low-potential low-performer Keith—I feel like being honest with Edmund will just bite me in the ass.
I’m incentivized to do it in bad faith, because telling him that I hired a bowl of oatmeal as a CTO will only cause problems for me.
Edmund also has a list of other reports he wants, data on active users and attrition from the past two years.
I plan to ask Lacey to pull them for me, but before I have a chance to, Amber comes in my office.
She’s only part-time so she frequently forgets I don’t have a door; she’s always crabby about this when she tries to close it.
“Walk or whisper?” I offer.
“I was copied on the reporting requests from Edmund,” she whispers.
“Yeah, I saw.”
“And he copied you on all the reports he’s requesting from me.”
I nod and she sighs.
“Jude, this is the information people look at during due diligence. As in, before an acquisition.”
“I’m aware,” I tell her. “But I think it’s just in case. There’s not a deal on the table or anything.”
I can’t tell if she thinks I’m inspiring or delusional, but she offers to slow-walk her reports to see just how antsy Edmund gets about them.
I thank her, though I’m not sure I want to know the results of her little experiment.
I decide to pull all my reports myself, to avoid any questions from Lacey.
I meet with Keith, Dave, and Ingrid, where I ask them to bring on two or three contractors, then suggest Ingrid might take over some of my work on the tiger team.
This is not at Edmund’s behest; this is a place where I realize he has a point.
If I’m coding instead of CEOing, I’m failing.
Plus I’ve already set all the patterns and worked through the riskiest bits.
It shouldn’t be too difficult a transition if we can get smart people on it.
Keith decides to take this opportunity to speak for fifteen minutes about the Mythical Man Month and his mixed experiences with offshore developers.
I should have interrupted him when he began, but I didn’t think he’d go on for this long.
When he’s finally done, Dave tells me his friend just started at an agency we can use, and Ingrid says she’s looking forward to taking on new responsibilities. We wrap early.
I go refill my water bottle, and on my way back I stop at Lacey’s desk.
“Hey,” I say.
“Good morning,” she says. We look at each other longer than we ought to, but Trevor’s not in yet to notice.
“So my last meeting ended early. If you have time maybe we can catch up before we meet with the team?”
She picks up her laptop. “I’ll walk with you.”
I start off by telling her about the changes I’m making, how I’ll be shedding some of the tasks that have been pushing me down into the weeds. Contractors aren’t ideal, but I need to focus on big picture problems. It’s in everyone’s best interest.
“Even yours?” She frowns at me from across the table. “You’re giving away all the pieces you care about. The ones you’re best at.”
“It’s what needs to happen,” I tell her, with some finality in my voice, because I don’t have time to go back and forth about this all morning. “How about you walk me through this release.”
She blinks at me, and I can practically see the dots as she’s composing a message for me in her head.
But she doesn’t say anything, instead sets up a screencast to the big monitor and gives me a preview of what we’ll discuss in the next meeting.
Her team is preparing to push their first release to beta, where actual users—Lacey’s Colony—will start using the new platform.
As she’s walking me through the pages on the dev server, I see very quickly another downside to sleeping with one of your subordinates.
Turns out it can make it complicated when you need to give constructive criticism the next day.
“You don’t love it,” she tells me, just from the look on my face.
“I don’t need to love it.”
“Are you sure about that?”
I sigh. “Parts of it feel half-baked. A little sloppy.”
She sits back in her chair. Dave and Ingrid wander in.
“Imagine that,” Lacey says. “A thing we’re working night and day on to deliver in an absurdly short amount of time, and it isn’t the most elegant solution in the world.”
Dave pretends he forgot something at his desk. Ingrid mumbles something about going to find the QA engineers, and follows him.
“You don’t need to be combative about it,” I tell her.
She walks to the whiteboard and picks up a marker. She scrawls FAST - CHEAP - GOOD across the board.
“Remember this thing?” she asks.
“Yeah, I know: pick two,” I say, as engineers meekly return to their seats.
“Two. And you’re consistently demanding all three.” She puts the marker down and pinches the bridge of her nose. “I’ll be right back, you guys. Go ahead and get started without me.”
And she walks out.
Dave begins describing why they were forced to make some of the decisions they did, and I try my hardest to focus on what he’s saying. Things like this happen with Lacey all the time. It’s just part of the process with her. Nothing to do with how careful I haven’t been.
And then the phone she left behind starts buzzing. On the screen she’s sharing to the huge monitor in front of us, we see the unknown call coming in through her Mac, too. And then it goes to voicemail, where there’s a handy feature that transcribes the message as it’s being left.
Hi Lacey, it’s Meredith at Tooity, the screen reads. We all pretend like we’re not looking.
Just calling to follow up with you about the product role here—
Ingrid claps the laptop shut. Eyes dart around the room, but Dave valiantly carries on. He even begins sharing his own screen.
When Lacey returns, it’s with a cooler head.
She asks the engineers some challenging questions, and seems to be pushing them to find a better solution than what they’ve provided.
Normally I’d be right there with her, trying to find something that works for everyone, but not right now.
I don’t participate. I just sit here nodding like I’m listening, wondering if I’m the worst judge of character in the universe.
If someone asked me a half hour earlier to make a list of which employees I thought would leave Lettercat, Lacey would have been the last one before my own name.
Lacey, who I’d immediately nine-boxed as a high potential high performer after my call with Edmund.
I know it’s a team, not a family. I know people move on. But to Tooity?
She spent yesterday telling me I need to listen to Edmund and this morning questioning why I’m acting like the CEO of my own company. All while she’s talking to our competitor.
I’m alone in this, I realize. I want to get off the ride.
“I want to apologize,” Lacey says at the end of the meeting. “To Jude but to all of you who were here. It was uncool of me to snap like that, and I’m sorry. No excuses.”
I just nod. I don’t know what she wants from me.
“Can you hang out for a second?” she asks me as everyone leaves.
I don’t want to. I want to disappear, I don’t want to have another difficult conversation or hear all the ways I wronged her into wanting to work somewhere else.
And I don’t have to. Kate pops her head in the door.
“We gotta go, chica. Kyle from the AI chat company is meeting us in five, and it’s a ten minute walk.”
Lacey looks at me.
“I’ll skip lunch. You don’t need me on that project, and I have things I need to take care of,” she tells Kate.
“But Kyle is single and said he likes smart women,” Kate whines.
Lacey flushes. “I’m staying here. And you might want to rethink your vendor selection process.”
“No,” I tell her. “Go ahead. We’re done here.”
“Right answer!” Kate says, leaning into the room conspiratorially. “I’m doing some matchmaking.”
“Great,” I say, picking up my laptop. “Good luck, Lacey.”