by Kelly Rimmer
“Jess really doesn’t want to push the release back,” Audrey blurts. “She and Marcus met on the weekend, and Marcus is worried that we’re going to freak out the corporate clients if we don’t have a reliable release schedule.”
I turn toward the hall to Jess’s office, but Audrey has already started walking back toward the bull pen where our team works.
“Where are you going?” she groans, impatient and frustrated.
“Let’s go see Jess,” I call back, still walking away from her.
“But you haven’t even reviewed the job log! You don’t know what—”
“I don’t need to!” I call after her.
“But—”
“Audrey, if you couldn’t get it done, it can’t be done.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Isabel
THE FIRST THING on my to-do list today was apparently to break my own heart. I got that done in record time, which brought me to my next pressing task.
Crying. Hysterically.
I cried as I texted Paul a final goodbye. I cried as I walked back to my sun chair. I cried when I realized that the box of Kleenex he fetched for me Saturday night was still sitting on the deck beside the chair, and I cried even harder when I picked that box up and remembered how it felt when Paul comforted me. I cried until my throat was parched and my nose was red. I cried until my vision was blurry. I cried until I almost ran out of self-pity, and I do seem to have more than my share of that emotion in general, so that took quite a while.
When I was at last in the nest of used Kleenex I was planning to build when I decided to come to Greenport last week, and my tear ducts seemed to have run out of moisture, I reluctantly dragged myself back into the house for some water and, perhaps equally as vital after the crying jag, some strong coffee. The sight of the carton of half-and-half in the fridge set off a fresh round of weeping, but I managed to make my coffee and pour my water in between sobs.
It was only as I was walking to sit at the dining room table that I saw that fucking laptop, still sitting under Darby’s tulips.
Now I’m sitting at the table, nursing the coffee, staring at the laptop and at last, doing a spot of dry-eyed thinking.
On Friday, this stupid little computer seemed to be a symbol of everything that had gone wrong between Paul and me. It represented all of those hours where his business was his priority, and I felt forgotten...ignored...unimportant.
Today, the sight of this broken laptop has entirely lost its sting. It’s just an object again, and a pretty sad one at that. This computer is just a tool the man I love has used to build a career he’s proud of. It’s just a tool the man I love forgot or ignored this morning, maybe because he was genuinely upset that I was abruptly ending things with him for the second time in a year.
I made a mistake this weekend, but I didn’t make it this morning. I made my mistake last night, when Paul and I kissed each other in that bar, and I felt like everything between us was fixed in an instant. Relationships don’t get broken or fixed in a single minute, especially when they’re as complex as the one Paul and I share.
No, relationships get broken or fixed because of the pattern of the decisions we make. Decisions to feel sorry for ourselves instead of changing our circumstances. Decisions to refrain from sharing our truths, openly and honestly. Decisions to hide in our work.
Or...
Decisions to forgive. Decisions to talk. Decisions to share ourselves. Decisions to change. Decisions to ask for what we fucking need, and decisions to trust in each other to meet those needs.
That’s why now, I need to make the first of a new series of decisions. This time, I’m making the decision to swallow my pride and apologize. The decision to take responsibility for where I went wrong. The decision to belatedly share with Paul exactly what I needed from him this morning and why and even why I didn’t feel like I could say those words directly.
And maybe most important, I’m making the decision to be the first one to extend the olive branch, but I’m making that particular decision for me. I’ll be the first to reach out this time around, because I don’t want to find myself sitting stagnant and sulking about how things turned out in another ten months.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Paul
“OUR VIP CUSTOMERS are counting on this release. If we’re really going to delay it, we need to find some way to put a positive spin on it,” Marcus says slowly.
We’re all seated around Jess’s desk—me and Audrey, who is stuffing Twizzlers into her mouth so fast I’m scared she’s going to choke herself, and Jess and Marcus. Marcus looks tired and a little anxious. Jess is tapping her bloodred talons on her desk in a fashion that can only be described as menacing.
I feel terrible to have let my team down, but I feel positively sick that I’ve let Jess and Marcus down. I simply couldn’t have built this company alone. None of what I’ve achieved in the past thirteen years would have been possible without their faith in me, and I can’t remember another time when I didn’t meet or even exceed their expectations. I’ve been distracted, and I’ve dropped the ball.
“Paul?” Jess asks. “Any ideas?”
“You know why I was such a miserable failure of a development manager this year?” I say thoughtfully. Even I can’t miss the nervous look Jess and Marcus exchange, so I address my comments to Audrey, who stuffs yet another Twizzler in her mouth and shakes her head. “Distraction, Audrey. It’s pretty much impossible for most people to multitask. The more they try to do, the less they achieve. What I was missing was clarity, and clarity only comes with focus.”
I scan my gaze around the little circle of my colleagues and find that everyone is staring at me blankly. But the idea is picking up steam now, and so I stand and walk to the whiteboard on Jess’s wall to scribble out the beginnings of a design spec. After a few minutes, Audrey catches on and shoots to her feet.
“Of course! I love this,” she exclaims.
“I’m sure I will, too,” Jess says abruptly. “If someone could just explain it to me.”
“We live in the age of distraction, Jessica.” I continue to scrawl on the whiteboard. “And the internet is one of the biggest causes of our malaise. Like it or not, our browser is part of the problem, so let’s do something none of our competitors have done. Let’s give our users a solution.”
“Bucking the trend of doing more, faster,” Marcus says slowly, and then he stands, too, approaching the whiteboard, no doubt so he can come closer to read my god-awful handwriting. “I like where you’re going with this.”
“There are third-party apps that offer the ability to lock out certain websites,” Audrey explains to Jess. “Hell, I use one myself, but it’s clunky. And there are ways to limit corporate traffic—web filtering, proxy servers, group policy. But all of those components meant one more thing to set up, one more thing to administer for the IT team. We’d make our functionality organic. Simple. User-friendly. And integrated. But best of all, the administrator could set company-wide or role-based limits, but if they don’t go far enough, the end user could set up their own rules. I mean, say you’re allowed to use Facebook at work, but you’ve gotten into the habit of looking at it unthinkingly. Or say you’ve developed a habit of lurking on Twitter as a way to procrastinate when you’re stuck on an arduous task. Well, with just a few mouse clicks, you could tell Brainwave that during office hours, it needs to block that request or redirect it back to your company website.”
“We could even give users the ability to limit themselves to one tab during certain windows of the week,” Marcus adds, with growing enthusiasm. He thumps me on the back. “Paul, this kind of brilliance is why we put up with you. How difficult will this be to build?”
“It’s easy,” Audrey and I say simultaneously. I glance at her, and she’s texting on her phone.
“I’ll get the UI team on it right now,” she says, w
ithout looking up. “The key is making this super intuitive, so we’ll figure out the workflow and run some mockups by you all later today or tomorrow.”
“Jess?” Marcus prompts. “What do you think?”
“I love it,” she announces. “We’re swimming upstream. But everyone else is complaining about how downstream is too fucking busy and distracting, so this gives us a positive point of difference. You’re sure this is easy, Paul?”
“Audrey could code this in her sleep,” I assure her. “We’ll get it spec’ed up, put a few developers on it and have the rest of the team focus on the outstanding issues. We can sell this as a whizbang new feature, but it’ll take no time at all, it just gives us cover to catch up properly with what our customers are actually expecting. How soon can we be ready for testing, Audrey?”
“I...” She flushes, flicking her gaze from the screen of her phone, back to me, Jess and Marcus. “I really don’t know... It’s...”
“You’ve got this, Audrey,” I say quietly. “Take a look at the project management app there on your phone and tell me how soon the team can be finished.”
She looks down, scrolls around for a few minutes, then raises her gaze confidently to me.
“The original release date was next month. We got a lot done this weekend, but we rushed, and I’m expecting a lot of rework. If this additional functionality means the pressure is off, I’d like to propose you push the go-live back by a whole month so we can do a thorough job.”
“Make it happen,” Jess says, then she claps. “Great work, everyone.”
“I’ll get my team onto comms, announcing this new, cutting-edge productivity feature that’s ‘almost ready’ so we’re going to delay the major release by a few weeks to include it,” Marcus announces, already heading for the door. I hear the snap of Audrey’s phone camera as she captures my notes from the whiteboard, and then she’s also walking out the door, already emailing our team.
“Paul,” Jess calls as I move to follow them. I glance back at her. “Welcome back.”
“Thanks.”
“That was some of your best work, you know.”
I glance at the whiteboard and shrug. “Not really. It’s hardly technically complex—”
“I meant with Audrey,” she interrupts me, and I blink at her. “I didn’t sign on to work with you all of those years ago because you were a great coder. I signed on to work with you because you were a visionary, but you can’t be a visionary and the guy who personally oversees every tiny decision that needs to be made at the application level. You need to set strategy and lead, but to lead, you have to be able to connect...encourage...delegate.” She leans back in her chair, then gives me a satisfied nod. “You’re getting there, Paul.”
I nod curtly. “Thanks.” I rap on the doorframe as I step through it.
“Are you ever going to tell me what happened out there?” Jess calls.
“Maybe on your lunch break,” I say, shooting her a look through her glass wall. “Remember what I just said about multitasking and productivity? Don’t you have work to do?”
Her laughter follows me down the hall as I head back to my office.
* * *
AUDREY AND I hunker down in my office with the senior development staff to come up with a plan to address the outstanding work tasks from the weekend, as well as the new functionality we now need to design and incorporate. I keep my phone on the desk, but I know it’s on, and I know it will sound when Isabel replies or calls me.
Except that she doesn’t.
Several hours pass, and I’m engrossed in work, which is probably for the best because every now and again I have a fleeting awareness that sooner or later, that silence is going to sting like a bitch.
But then my office door flies open, and I glance up to tell whoever has rudely interrupted us that we’re busy, and the words die on my lips because it’s not Jess or some rude junior programmer but Isabel and she’s flustered and she’s in my doorway and she doesn’t seem at all fazed by the fact that eight of my team members are staring up at her in bewilderment.
She’s also holding my laptop.
Our eyes meet and lock. Isabel looks like she’s about to burst into tears, and I stand so fast my chair flies back and collides with a bookshelf.
“Out. Everyone out,” I say. My voice breaks, and everyone stares at me for a second, so I raise my hand and point to the door, which breaks the stunned moment of silence.
Audrey panics and leads the stampede for the door, and Isabel shifts into the hallway to make room for the horde of programmers, but by the time they’ve cleared the room, she’s charging in and she’s at my desk.
“You brought my laptop,” I say unthinkingly, apparently deciding to open the conversation with stating the fucking obvious. In my defense, my heart is racing so hard I’m actually feeling light-headed.
“I also drowned it,” she says, but before I can figure out what that means, she adds, “You didn’t look at it all weekend, did you?”
“Of course I didn’t.” I frown.
“I accidentally spilled water on it on Friday afternoon. I thought you’d be furious and I was nervous to tell you and then I forgot to tell you because I got so caught up in what was happening between us. But you didn’t even notice.”
“This weekend wasn’t ever about work,” I say softly. “I just took the laptop with me because I had to send some emails in the car on my way out there.”
Isabel inhales, then exhales, and then she places the laptop on the couch under the window and pushes her hands into her hair. She takes a step toward me, then stops and our eyes lock again.
“I needed you to stay this morning,” Isabel blurts. Her eyes are red and puffy, and her cheeks are flushed. “I wanted you just once to choose me over Brainway. I know you love your work, but I do need to know that when it counts, I’m going to be your priority. I completely overreacted this morning, and I’m sorry about that. This is going to be a sore point for me for a long time, and we’re going to need to communicate to overcome it. But if you still want to be with me, I promise you, Paul. I’ll work on it. I want to work on it with you.”
I step to her, entwine her hand with mine and tug her to the doorway.
“Where are we—” she starts to say, but I glance back at her and shake my head.
“I want to show you something before we talk.”
I lead the way to Jess’s office and find her assistant Gina chatting animatedly on the phone, but I’m in a hurry, so I reach down and press the disconnect button. Gina scowls at me, and I ask her, “Where is Jessica?”
“She’s in the small boardroom with Marcus working on the comms for the updated release schedule—”
“Thanks,” I say, and I pull Isabel down another hallway. When we reach the boardroom, I push the doors open and Jess and Marcus look up at us in surprise. I watch Jess’s face visibly brighten as she sees that I’m holding Isabel’s hand, and I don’t need a guide to body language to recognize that emotion as triumph. It doesn’t last long, though, because I greet her with a cheery, “Hi, guys. I’m leaving. You need to buy me out.”
Jess and Marcus gape at me. There’s a long, stiff moment of silence.
“Ah...what the actual fuck, Paul?” The unflappable Jessica Cohen is, evidentially, flapped.
“Or don’t.” I shrug. “You can have my shares. Split them, I guess. Do whatever you want, I quit. I don’t even give a fuck. Do whatever you have to do.”
I turn back toward the door, gently guiding Isabel along behind me, but she plants her feet into the carpet and refuses to budge.
“Paul!” Isabel chokes. “No, you didn’t understand me. You don’t have to do—”
“I know I don’t have to, but I will. I’ll walk away from this place altogether. We can start afresh—go live in a fucking cardboard box in a forest somewhere if that’s what you want. H
onestly, Isabel, I mean it. I’ll do this, if that’s what you want.”
“I know you love your work. I wasn’t hinting at this. I really wasn’t.”
“But that’s kind of the point, honey,” I say, very gently. “I don’t know what you’re hinting at. I never did. But there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you—nothing.” I release her hand, but only so I can cup her face in my palms so that she has no choice but to stare right into my eyes as I whisper, “I would get the fucking moon for you, if you wanted it.” Her eyes are shining, and then she’s fighting a smile as I add, “You know I’m smart. I’d find a way.”
“You’re only smart at, like, three things,” she whispers. I laugh.
“Now you’re getting it. Maybe we were made for each other—but our flaws do not line up, and they never did. A guy who can’t read subtext and a girl who can’t ask for what she needs are doomed to fail unless they are determined to make it work. And I promise you, if you give me another chance, I will put everything I have into this thing between us.”
Isabel’s gaze keeps flicking over my shoulder, and now she leans close to me and she whispers urgently,
“Yes, we’ll work on it. Together. But, Paul, seriously. You don’t have to leave Brainway, and you need to tell Jess you’re staying, because I think she’s stopped breathing.”
“Okay, you heard the woman. Apparently, I’m staying.” I glance over my shoulder just in time to see Jess relax and Marcus wink at me.
“We’ll give you some privacy,” he says, and he pushes back his chair as if to stand.
“Like fuck we will,” Jess snorts, and she leans back in her chair. “It took a lot of effort for me to engineer this reunion. Witnessing it is my karmic reward.”