Page 66 of The Hard Launch

“No,” I say.

I promise him I’m not having a mental health crisis. I promise him I’ll sleep on it.

The first one is true. The second one is not.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

LACEY

No one wants to be the asshole who tells the customer success and sales teams that they’re going to lose their jobs, so we all behave like people who respect NDAs for once, and keep our mouths shut. And since everyone’s used to seeing the Project Z team walk out of Gutenberg like our souls were being stomped on for the past hour, no one questions our sad faces and generally haunted demeanors.

“Are you telling Kate?” Trevor whisper-asks me when we’re back at our desks. “You need to tell Kate.”

“Absolutely not,” I say. “That’s Jude’s job, remember? It’s his company.”

I don’t mean to be smug. And I saw his face in that meeting, I know he’s freaking out right now. But his inability to do the right thing doesn’t mean that I need to step in.

I open up my laptop and look over the bug queue. The bug queue that hasn’t mattered in days, that literally does not matter at all now. Still, I add impact scores to the newly filed issues, change the severity on most of them because those QA guys think everything is the end of the world.

I prioritize things for ten minutes and then I stand up. Ugh.

“You telling Kate?” Trevor asks.

“No,” I say, and I march down to Jude’s office to remind him that senior leaders in his organization are going to find out, through gossip, that their departments are being eliminated, and maybe if he could get his head out of his own ass for a minute and behave like an actual leader, he might get ahead of it and let them know properly.

“He left,” Jonnie tells me.

“Of course he did.”

“You can be mad at him,” she tells me, “but don’t be mean to him. He doesn’t deserve that.”

I roll my eyes.

An hour later, I’m over with QA, bickering with them about the priority of a bug no one cares about, just for something to do. And because I’m right.

I look up as I see Jude walking across the office, the resigned slump banished from his shoulders. He’s got purpose in his walk. I assume he’s finally heading to Kate’s desk, that he’ll bring her into a conference room and tell her the bad news. But he keeps walking, all the way to the QA pod where I’m sitting.

“Hey,” he says quietly. Not sadly, not morosely. Almost… conspiratorially? And he’s not talking to me, he’s talking to my contentious friends here in QA.

“Question for you: do we have a green light on the release?”

“What release? We pushed three production bug fixes this morning.”

“No. The Roar release. Is it ready to go?”

“Mmmm. Could probably stand another round of testing, given the changes we’ve pushed over the last week.”

“Hmm,” Jude says.

I don’t know why he’s asking, and I’m still upset with him, but I stand up against tyranny when I see it happening.

“No,” I tell the QA guy who never wants us to push anything, ever. “That’s not true. Roar’s all fresh code, it’s not touching anything we’ve fixed recently.”

“We should at least put eyes on it,” he tuts.

“How long would you need?” Jude asks.

“Probably at least two hours.”