Page 51 of The Hard Launch

“It sucked.”

“Right. And the more time goes by, the more lying we’re going to have to do. This makes it easier.”

Except Lacey’s become my favorite thing about working at Lettercat. I’m going to lose one of the best people on my team because I couldn’t keep it in my pants.

I know that’s a dumb way to look at it. I know she’s talented and I want her to have all of the success she deserves; I just selfishly want her to have it with me.

I walk Lacey to the door of her building and tell her not to worry, we’re all good.

“We’re going to survive tomorrow, we’re going to release on Monday, and we’ll figure everything out after that,” I tell her.

Only two of those turn out to be true.

When I get back to my apartment, I log in and jump on a few bugs that were added to the tiger team queue. Ingrid’s wrestling with a tough one, so I’m helping swat anything else that comes up. The finish line is so close, but it’s bittersweet knowing that once we cross it I’m back to decks and spreadsheets.

Ella arrives home but between my focus and my headphones, I don’t notice until she puts a brown paper bag on my desk. It smells delicious.

“I brought you some Thai food,” she says. “How was your day with Lacey? Did she like your shirt?”

I blink at her. I’m too tired to pretend she’s not right. So I thank her for dinner and then just unload all of it on her, Edmund and Lacey and how much she means to me and to Lettercat. How I can’t talk to Trevor about it because he works with Lacey, how my founder friends said dating interns is a better strategy than dating employees, because they cycle themselves out.

“I don’t know what to do,” I tell her.

“First, please stop hanging out with your creepy founder friends. But I think you already did the right thing with Lacey,” she says, giving me a hug. “You’re being supportive and letting her make the decision. Stop overthinking it.”

“But it’s my superpower.”

“Maybe try underthinking. If it makes you happy to be around her, just be around her. Less about what you think and more about what you want.”

She makes it sound so simple. I picture tomorrow, when we’re putting in a Sunday shift in the office. I’ll see Lacey there all day, but I want her to pick up sushi and walk home with me after, I want her to tease me about my bleak gray apartment, I want to fall asleep with her in my arms and wake up like that, too.

I text her and ask if she thinks she could bring an overnight bag to work tomorrow. She says yes.

That was easy. Unlike getting Ella out of here for the night will be.

“I’m at the point where I shouldn’t be looking for bugs anymore,” Lacey says, “because the truth is, I really don’t want to find one.”

There’s a group of us in the conference room, where we gathered to look over a fix we put into place that didn’t entirely resolve an issue, but made it less noticeable. That huddle ended but we’re all sitting here together, working.

“How do you feel about the release?” I ask Lacey, not QA, because those guys never like anything. Everyone in the room looks at her, waiting to see what she thinks. She takes a moment to consider.

“I won’t say that it’s great and I love it. The performance issues are still there. But it’s a soft launch, so that should give us some time and cover to resolve things.”

“It’s messy,” Dave offers. “Having this much code written this quickly, with so many people contributing, it’s hard. AI makes it faster, but unspooling some of this to find the problems is not going to be a quick thing.”

I sigh. Not because I’m surprised, but because I agree.

“Did we hit fast and cheap but miss out on good?” I ask, even though it wasn’t all that cheap.

“No,” Lacey says. “I think we’re being hard on it. We’ve been looking at it so much that all we see are the problems. Our customers are going to be pumped about this. The Colony responded well to the beta. At the end of the day it’s something that works, and something that will make their lives easier. It might be an ugly baby, but it’s ours.”

“I love our ugly baby,” Ingrid says solemnly. “It’s going to grow up and be spectacular.”

We turn our attention back to the baby itself for a few minutes, until Trevor pops in.

“You guys. Have you seen the Tooity post?”

We shake our heads; all I’ve seen for the last one hundred years are Cursor and GitHub.