Ice Cream

October 5, 2019. The night before.

My father was my best friend.

I am an only child. I do not have siblings to compare notes with, to share the weight with, to call when something is wrong and find that somebody else in the world is feeling exactly what I am feeling. I never had that. I have had, my entire life, a small and specific cast of people who matter to me — and at the center of that cast, from the day I was old enough to register people as people, was my father.

If you are an only child, you already know what I mean. The relationship between an only child and the parent who chooses to be your friend — not just your parent, your friend — is a relationship of singular gravity. There is no spare. There is no backup. There is no cousin-in-the-same-house who is going to step in if the friendship falters. The whole architecture of your inner life rests on that one connection. When it works, it is the most stable thing in your entire world. When it ends, the architecture comes down.

My father chose, from the very beginning, to be my friend. He was not the kind of father who held himself at a distance and waited for me to grow up enough to be worth talking to. He talked to me like I was a person, in full, from the time I was old enough to talk back. He took my opinions seriously. He laughed at my jokes — the actually-funny ones and the ones a child tells that are not yet funny but contain the seed of becoming funny. He shared what he was working on. He showed me Saturn through the telescope he built in our garage when I was eight. He brought me into the dark room when he was processing his own photographs, and into the office when he was deep in code, and into the conversation no matter what the conversation was about. He was, my entire childhood, the person I would rather talk to than anybody else.

That did not change when I grew up. It got more so.

By the time I had my own company and my own son and my own life and my own travel schedule and my own crowded inner world, my father was still the person I called first. He was the audience for every idea before it became a strategy. He was the one I texted from the back of the room at conferences when something interesting was about to happen on stage. He was the one I called from hotel rooms in cities he had never been to. He was the one I asked, when the world was confusing, what he thought.

He was my best friend.

I want you to hold that fact in your hands while you read everything that follows in this Prologue, because what is about to happen in these pages is not the loss of a parent in the abstract. It is the loss of the person at the center of one only child’s entire world. There is no comparable seat at my dinner table. There is not, and there will not be.

With that in your hands, here is what we already knew.

My parents had told me about my father’s cancer about sixty days earlier.

The diagnosis itself was older than that. He had been diagnosed with Stage IV renal cell carcinoma in mid-to-late July of 2019, and Linda has the original hand-drawn sketch from the doctor to prove it — a diagram of his kidneys and adrenal glands and where the cancer was located, the kind of artifact that comes out of a real conversation with a real physician on a real piece of paper, drawn in real time. My parents kept the news between themselves for a window of time before they brought me in. They waited until August. They wanted, I think, to absorb it themselves before they handed it to their daughter. By the time they told me, the diagnosis had already been settled, the staging had already been done, the trial enrollment was already in motion. The clock the rest of this Prologue is keeping is the clock of my own knowing. The medical chapter at the end of this book keeps the medical clock. They are not the same clock. The Prologue keeps mine.

Sixty days. I want you to sit with that number for a moment, because it is the number that, more than any other, governs what this Prologue is actually about. Sixty days is not a long time. Sixty days is two months. Sixty days is the difference between Labor Day and Halloween. Sixty days is not enough time to read the scientific literature on every available treatment option. It is not enough time to get every second opinion. It is not enough time, frankly, for a daughter to absorb what her parents have just told her, let alone to evaluate the protocol her father is about to enroll in, let alone to fly to Seattle and sit in the consultations with the trial team and ask the questions that need asking. Sixty days is the speed at which a family’s entire orientation gets reorganized when a cancer diagnosis arrives in the middle of an ordinary summer.

In those sixty days, my father was already deep into what the doctors had laid out for him — enrolled in an experimental immunotherapy protocol, a combination of two drugs called Keytruda and Interleukin. Keytruda is a checkpoint inhibitor. Interleukin is a cytokine therapy. Together, in the dose he was receiving, they were among the most aggressive cancer treatments medicine had to offer in 2019, and they were experimental in the literal sense — he was in a trial. He was data.

By the night of October 5, 2019, when my mother called me in Las Vegas, he had completed round one and was scheduled to go in for round two on October 7. The first ten days of round one had been spent in the ICU because his heart rate would not settle. My mother had been at his side every one of those ten days. She had not left. He had been released a few weeks before, with the trial team telling my mother that they had “run the algorithms” and his heart rate was at “a manageable level.”

We knew the treatment was hard. We did not yet know it was killing him.

Sixty days from diagnosis. One round of an experimental combination. Ten days of cardiac instability in the ICU. A release based on an algorithm. A daughter on a stage in Las Vegas. A father at home on a paddlewheeler, tired, out of breath, asking for ice cream.

That was where we were.

So when my mother called me in Las Vegas on the night of October 5, 2019, the part of me that had been refusing to wait knew exactly what was happening. The phone vibrated and the silence around my own ribs arrived a half-second before the screen lit up. I picked up. She said Dad wasn’t feeling well. She handed him the phone.

He sounded tired. He sounded out of breath. He sounded — this is the part I keep replaying — like a man who was already halfway gone, even though we did not yet know that he was. But he was also, as he had always been, completely engaged.

He wanted to know what I was going to talk about from the stage the next day. He wanted to know if I was nervous. He wanted to know how the room had looked when I walked through it. We had this conversation hundreds of times over the years. He had been my first audience for every keynote I had ever given. He was the audience that mattered.

I asked him, near the end, the question I always asked him when he was not feeling well.

I asked him if ice cream would make him feel better.

It was an old joke and an older ritual. My father and I had shared ice cream the way some families share religion. It was our thing. It had been our thing since I was small. It would always be our thing. Ice cream was not a dessert in our family. It was a love language.

He laughed, which I now realize was the last time I heard him laugh. He told me he did not have any. He told me there was no way to get any. By that point, he and my mother were living on a three-story paddlewheeler docked on Lake Union in Seattle — yes, you read that correctly, a paddlewheeler, my parents being who they were — about a hundred yards down the dock from shore. Getting ice cream was not a five-minute errand. It was an expedition. And he did not have an expedition in him.

I called an Uber.

I gave the driver the address of the marina. I told them they were going to need to walk a hundred yards down a dock with their hands full. I tipped them in advance. I asked them to grab multiple flavors so my father could pick. I told them to make sure the chocolate was there, because my father’s favorite was always chocolate, and if I was going to have an Uber driver walk a hundred yards down a dock at night, the man at the end of the dock was going to get exactly what he wanted.

The Uber driver did it. Bless every Uber driver who has ever done a thing like this for a stranger they never met, for a daughter they will never meet.

Twenty minutes later, my father sent me a picture.

He was in his leather recliner. He was holding the cup of ice cream and a spoon. The chocolate one, of course. He was smiling.

That picture is the last picture he ever sent me.

I look at it more than I should. I will not pretend otherwise. There is a particular pain in possessing the last picture someone ever sent you, and there is also a particular gift, because the last picture he ever sent me is of him smiling, in his chair, holding ice cream that his daughter had just sent him from a hotel room in Las Vegas, the night before everything ended.

I want to remember that. I want you to remember that.

The man you are about to lose in this book is the man who was happy in that picture.

The next morning, I went to my keynote.

The man you are about to lose in this book is the man who was happy in that picture.

The lights were the kind of lights you get used to if you do this work long enough — bright, warm, slightly off-center, hot enough on your face that you stop noticing them after the first five minutes. I had a hand mic. The screen behind me had a single line of black text on a white background, the way I always preferred it. I do not believe in slides as wallpaper. I believe in them as punctuation.

There were maybe four hundred contractors in the room. HVAC, plumbing, electrical, garage door. Owners. Operators. A few of their kids. The crowd I had been speaking to for twenty years and still the crowd I would rather speak to than any other.

I was about thirty minutes in. I remember the section. I was talking about the gap between marketing for trades businesses and what the market was about to become. Mobile-first. Voice search. The early stirrings of something called generative AI that nobody in that room had heard of yet.

I was saying things like, the businesses that get serious now will own the next decade. I was saying things like, I am telling you this as a warning and as a gift.

My phone vibrated in my back pocket.

I knew without looking. You know without looking. There is a particular silence that happens around your own ribs when the wrong call is coming in.

I kept talking. I stayed on the rhythm. I finished the thought I was on, the way you finish a sentence in a language you have spoken your whole life. The phone went still. Then it vibrated again.

I told the audience I was sorry, that I needed to step off for a moment. They thought it was something with the tech. I walked offstage to the side curtain — the velvet panel that smells like dust in every conference center on earth — and I looked at the screen.

It was my mother.

I do not remember the exact words she said. I remember the shape of them. Your dad. Emergency room. They cannot get his heart rate to settle. Come home.

Less than twenty-four hours had passed since the ice cream.

The next hour did not collapse. The next hour was the longest hour of my life.

Michael did not wait. Michael does not wait. He had me out of that hotel and into a rental car before I had registered that we were leaving. He started driving north out of Las Vegas — toward Washington, toward Seattle, toward my father — because some part of him, the part that does not talk, knew that the right answer when somebody you love is dying is to start moving in their direction immediately and figure out the logistics on the way.

I was in the passenger seat with my phone trying to find a flight. He was driving. We were on a highway in the Nevada desert, the kind of highway where the only thing on either side is tumbleweed and signage and the occasional gas station, and we were heading north.

My son called.

Torel does not get dramatic. Torel does not panic. Torel said, Mom. You need to get home now.

That was the moment I understood that the hours my husband was about to drive were hours I did not have.

Michael cut the wheel and turned us around in the middle of that tumbleweed highway and we drove back to the Las Vegas airport. I was on the phone the whole way trying to buy any seat on any flight, and the seats I could find were not for the next hour. They were for the next day.

So Michael did what Michael does.

He pulled cash out and walked into the terminal and started looking for somebody who was already booked on a flight to Seattle that afternoon. He found a couple. He talked to the husband about him and his wife giving up their seats. He offered them a thousand dollars in cash. They agreed, both of them, to his enormous and lasting credit and to theirs. I do not know that couple’s names. I never will. Wherever they are right now, reading or not reading this book, they should know that they made it possible for me to be in the air on the way to my father instead of stranded in Las Vegas trying to refresh an airline app. They bought me hours. They did not have to. They did anyway.

I got on the plane.

I cried the entire way. The whole flight. Without stopping. The flight attendants knew. The man in the seat next to me knew. Michael, in the seat next to me, knew. Everybody on that plane who could see my face knew. I was not trying to hide it and I was not trying to compose myself. I was trying to get home.

My father passed before we landed.

That is the sentence I have not been able to type for six years. I am typing it now.

My father passed before we landed.

By the time the wheels touched the runway in Seattle, the gravitational center of my entire life was already gone, and I had not been there. The couple in the airport who gave up their seats for a thousand dollars in cash had not been able to buy me enough time. Michael, who had started driving the second the call came in, had not been able to drive me there fast enough. Torel, who had told me to get home now, had been right — he just had not been able to make the air move faster than it moves.

None of us could. The plane could not. The schedule could not. Cash could not.

I want to put that on the page because the rest of this book is about the things that AI and modern technology and an extra hour of speed can in fact change — about decisions, deployments, agentic workflows, the speed of business, the speed of adoption, the speed of everything. I have made my career on speed. I have built an agency around it. I am, by professional reputation, a person obsessed with making things go faster.

None of it could have moved my plane any faster on October 6, 2019.

I want to be honest about that, because I do not want any reader of this book to think that the woman who is about to spend the next two hundred pages telling them how to move faster believes that speed is the answer to every kind of loss. It is not. Some losses, you do not catch up to. Some calls, you do not get there in time for. The fastest plane in the world would not have been fast enough that day.

What I did not know yet, walking off that jet bridge in Seattle to a husband who had not slept and a son who was already at the hospital and a mother who was already a widow, was the rest of it.

I did not know that the cancer had not killed him.

I did not know that the Keytruda and Interleukin combination had.

I did not know that the experimental protocol, the one he had agreed to with characteristic Kevin Bagley clarity, the one that was supposed to save him, had induced a fatal cardiac inflammation in a man who had warned the trial team, on intake, about his prior cardiac history.

I did not know that an algorithm — a phrase the discharge team would actually use, out loud, to my mother — had cleared him for release after ten days of cardiac instability in the ICU, on the grounds that his heart rate was, in their phrase, “at a manageable level.”

I did not know that the autopsy would find no cancer in his other kidney and no cancer in his adrenal glands. None.

I did not know that a doctor we trusted would invite us to dinner and tell us, gently, that the trial team had killed him.

I did not know that this moment would split my career into a before and an after, and that the after would become the work I have given the rest of my life to.

I knew, walking off that plane, only one thing: my father was the gravitational center of my entire world, and the world had just lost him.

His name was Kevin Michael Bagley.

He was sixty-five years old.

He was about to leave me, and his wife, and our family, twenty years before he should have.

This book is about everything that has happened since.

But it begins, like everything that matters, much earlier than that.

It begins in a garage. With a telescope. With a man who was not afraid of hard things, and a daughter who was watching.