Page 60 of The Hard Launch

“I’m not really sure yet. It depends, but Edmund says they’re motivated to get it done quickly. All our books are clean and the board’s enthusiastic, so who knows. Maybe a month or two?”

“What about the team?” Lacey asks. “How do they fit into this?”

“Everyone comes along. I heard consistently from the CF team that they want us all to keep building.”

“For now, sure. But what about once the integration’s done? When they’re all in New York and we’re out here.”

“I don’t know,” I admit.

“Yes, you do. We all know how things work at Corday Ford.”

I tell her I’m doing my best here, but I don’t really have a lot of options. I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything I can do, but the board seems to have made up their minds.

“But Lacey,” I say. “You have to see that this is better than running out of funding. Sure, they might do layoffs down the road, I don’t know. But at least Corday Ford will give people severance. If this deal doesn’t go through, we’re out of money in a few months. And that’s it, we’re all unemployed.”

“Shit,” Trevor says.

I thought this might soften her, but it hasn’t. If anything, she looks more betrayed than before.

“There’s another option, Jude. You helped build the model, so don’t act like you don’t know what the data says. If these investors can’t see it, find some who can. Or you can just do what you’re told, since that’s easier.”

The better move would probably be to yell at her, or ask her to leave my office. But instead I stand up, give her a hard look and say, “Why do you even care? You’re the one who has a great new job lined up.”

“Woah,” says Trevor.

Those might be tears in her eyes, but I keep going. “Edmund told me how well your meeting went. How passionate you are about their product.”

“That’s out of bounds,” she says. “I’m not doing this right now.”

And she gets up, grabs her bag, and leaves. Not just the room. She leaves the office.

“I’m confused,” Trevor says, pointing to where Lacey was on the couch. “Are you hitting that?”

I don’t have time to chase after her. Trevor and I put a list of engineers together and I send it off to get their NDAs out and signed in time for the kickoff meeting. Then I have IT get the camera ready in the conference room, and tell them to please leave it up for the foreseeable future.

The new project team files into the conference room, but there’s no friendly chitchat before the meeting starts. I’ll have a half-hour to break the news and answer questions before the team in New York logs in.

Lacey walks in just as I’m about to begin and sees the only chair open is next to mine. She walks over, looks me in the eye, and drags the chair to the back of the room.

I see how this is going to go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

LACEY

“So how was your cloak and dagger meeting?” Kate asks me. She’s perched on my desk when I walk back to the product pod.

I roll my eyes because I’m being petulant and toxic today.

“Just living the dream,” I tell her, sitting down in my chair and giving myself a nice long spin.

“Are you really not going to tell me what it was about?” she asks.

I tilt back and look at the ceiling. “Just tell Jude you want to know. He’ll get you an NDA to sign and give you all the bad news. Then you can be just as happy as I am.”

“You guys talking about Corday Ford?” Trevor says, sitting down in his cube.

“I knew it,” Kate says, getting up. “Trevor, you’re such a dipshit.”