Dallas

Before I take you to the night my father died, I want you to meet my grandson.

His name is Dallas Kevin Bagley-Slone. He was born on October 19, 2025.

My father, Kevin Michael Bagley, died on October 6, 2019.

They missed each other by six years and thirteen days.

That is the calendar I live on now. Every October, for the rest of my life, I will mourn one Kevin and celebrate another inside the same two-week window. The death anniversary and the birthday are roommates in my year. There is no separating them. There is no carrying one of them through October without also carrying the other. October is, for me, a single complicated month — grief and joy stitched together, the way two members of a family are stitched together when one of them carries the other one’s name.

And there is a third date in my mother’s October that I have to tell you about, because she has been carrying it alone for six years.

My parents’ wedding anniversary is October 14.

My father died on the sixth. They missed their forty-seventh anniversary by eight days.

They had already started planning the fiftieth.

My parents had put a deposit down on a small-ship cruise to the Galápagos Islands — two hundred passengers, the kind of trip you book years in advance because you want to be in a specific place on a specific date with the right people. The right date was October 14, 2022. The right people were my father and my mother. And it was not just the two of them. Michael and I were going too. The four of us were going to be on that boat together — my parents celebrating fifty years of marriage, my husband and I along for the ride, all of us in one of the most remote and singular places on the planet.

The cancer arrived. The trip became impossible. My mother canceled the cruise after he died and got the refund. Some of the most quietly heartbreaking phone calls a widow has to make are the calls that cancel the future she had already paid a deposit on. My mother made those calls. Alone.

And then, six years later, in a text message she sent me while I was working on this book, she told me, in her own words:

“One day I’ll take the cruise for him.”

That sentence may be the most powerful thing my mother has ever said about my father. It is also the most powerful thing she has ever said about herself. She is not done with the cruise. She has been carrying it for six years. Some part of her has been on that boat the whole time, waiting for the rest of her to catch up. One day she is going to go. She is going to look at finches that should not exist on islands that should not have produced them, in a part of the world my father read about and never got to see, and she is going to take the trip the four of us were supposed to take.

I will tell you when she does. It will be in a future edition of this letter.

Because Dallas does carry his name.

Dallas Kevin Bagley-Slone.

Kevin in the middle. Right where he belongs.

My son and his wife could have given my grandson any middle name in the world. They chose my father’s. They chose it without ceremony, without making a big speech about it, in the same matter-of-fact way that real love makes its largest decisions. They chose it because it was the right name. They chose it because the line had to keep going. They chose it because the man who did not get to meet this baby should at least get to live, in writing, on every government document the baby would ever fill out for the rest of his life.

My grandson will know his great-grandfather’s name before he can read it. He will sign it on every form he ever signs. He will hear teachers call it on the first day of every school year. He will, if he is lucky, write it on the love letters he sends to whoever he ends up loving. The name is going to outlive me too. Whatever else happens to this family in the decades after I am gone, the name Kevin is going to keep walking around in the world, attached to a person, doing what names do.

I want you to meet Dallas now, before the rest of the book happens, because everything that comes after this depends on knowing he exists.

He is, at the time of this writing, six months old. He has blue eyes, blond hair that grows into a natural mohawk, and a laugh that comes out of his entire small body the way it comes out of every six-month-old who has figured out that laughing is a thing you can do on purpose. He has my son’s mouth. He has, depending on the angle, my mother’s expression or my father’s. He has, on the better days, both.

I want you to meet Dallas now, before the rest of the book happens, because everything that comes after this depends on knowing he exists.

He has been on this earth for less than a year, and the world he is going to grow up in has already rearranged itself around technologies that did not exist when he was born. The artificial intelligence revolution that is the engine of the rest of this book is, for Dallas, simply the air. He will not remember a time before agents could answer questions. He will not remember a time before models could write code. He will not remember the world I grew up in, the world where my father showed me Saturn through a telescope in our garage and that was the most advanced piece of personal technology in our neighborhood.

Dallas is going to grow up inside a different one.

So this book is, in part, my attempt to leave him a record of where the previous one ended and where the new one began — told by his grandmother, who was inside the change in real time, who watched it happen from the rooms where it was being built, and who refuses to pretend she had it figured out.

There is something else I want to tell you about Dallas, and about how I carry him.

I have his name on my arm.

And I have his face. And my son’s face. Together. Permanent. On my back.

I am not a person who does decoration.

If something goes on my body, it is because I am willing to carry it for the rest of my life, in public, on every day I wake up, in every room I enter, in every meeting I take, in every keynote I give. The tattoos are the most visible commitments I have ever made. They are also, I now realize, the ink-and-skin version of the throughline of this book. The line runs through Kevin, through me, through Torel, through Dallas. The line is on my back. The line is on my arm. The line is the reason this book exists.

My father will never meet my grandson.

I have written that sentence three times in the last week, trying to find a way to make it sound less stark than it actually is. There is no way. The two Kevins missed each other by six years and thirteen days, and the only way they will ever meet is in the pages of a book like this one.

This book is, in part, that meeting.

If you are reading this, you are an adult. Dallas is a baby. The book is, by design, a long letter that he will not be able to read for at least another fifteen years. By the time he can read it, the world it describes will already feel like ancient history to him. The agents I am building right now will be obsolete. The models that are state-of-the-art at the time of this writing will be relics. CI Web Group will have evolved into a different company, or possibly into something that is no longer recognizable as a company at all. The trades industry that is my home and my obsession will look like something he has to study in a textbook, not something he can ride along with on a Saturday morning the way I did with my father.

Here is what else I believe will be true by the time he reads this, because I make my predictions in public and a letter to my grandson is no exception. Robots will be a natural part of his everyday life — on roofs, inside walls, in the houses on his street — as unremarkable to him as a dishwasher was to me. He will never type a search into a box; he will ask the air, and the air will know him. He will never call a company. His agent will talk to their agents, and the phone call — the thing my entire first business was built on answering — will be something he watches people do in old movies.

The houses he lives in will call for their own repairs before anything breaks, and the service call my industry spent a century perfecting will have happened, invisibly, while his family slept. His first job does not exist yet. Nobody has invented it. Whatever it turns out to be, he will spend less of himself doing the work and more of himself directing the machines that do it — which means the most important thing I can leave him is not a tool. Tools expire. It is the posture: curiosity over certainty. Hands up over gripping the bar.

I believe the families on his street will own their own handyman robot — trained on every system in the house, handling most of the maintenance and the majority of the fixes without anyone picking up a phone. And I believe the companies from my industry still standing in his world will be the ones that were on the front line while that future was being trained: technicians wearing the devices that taught the AI and the robots the craft, companies owning the machines themselves and deploying them to the homes they serve — for sale, for rent, for the data. First in line to collect it. Building the deepest knowledge bases in their markets. Presenting themselves with the most advanced technology anyone had ever seen a contractor carry. First to raise their hands — because raising your hand first is how you end up with the best data, the best-trained technicians, and a lead nobody behind you can close.

And his name — like every business I have ever built — will carry a file that the machines read before any human meets him. His reputation will be structured data. I am writing parts of that file right now, in this book, whether either of us likes it or not. I have tried to write it the way I would want it read.

But the line will still be there.

The line is the part that does not change. The line runs through whatever generation it is currently passing through, and it does not care what year it is, what technology is in fashion, what industry is in or out, what the news cycle is doing. The line is who came before you, and who is coming after you, and the small and specific work you are supposed to do while the baton is in your hands.

My father did his part. He built a telescope and a ladder. He shipped nine pieces of software. He turned down Bill Gates and Paul Allen and went home to the woman he was already in a band with. He raised a daughter who, decades later, would be sitting at a keyboard writing this paragraph.

I am doing my part. This book is part of it. CI Web Group is part of it. JustStartAI is part of it. The Catalyst for the Trades Podcast is part of it. Every late-night decision since the launch of ChatGPT to now, 2026, about what to build, what to refuse to build, who to keep, who to let go, what to share, what to hold back — all of it is part of it.

Dallas, when his hands are old enough to grip the bar, is going to do his part too.

I do not yet know what his part will be. Nobody does. But I know it will be his, the way mine is mine, the way my father’s was his. The line keeps moving. It is not my job to know what he will build. It is my job to make sure he inherits the materials he needs to build it.

That is the actual purpose of this book.

Now, with all of that in your hands, we can go to the night my father died.