I Broke My Friend's Confidence and Lost Something Precious

I've been working on this big project with my friend Sarah for months now. She's a really good programmer and always comes up with brilliant solutions to the tricky bugs we encounter, even when I'm stumped. I respect her so much but there was one moment recently where I really let myself down. We were collaborating remotely, which has been going okay but is still frustrating sometimes because of the lag in communication. One day she sent me a link to some code snippets for an algorithm that we both knew would help us make significant progress on our project. The problem was, I couldn't access it at work due to company restrictions. So I did what any good software engineer would do and told her I needed more time to look into it but then immediately copied the code onto my personal laptop after hours. It wasn't about the code, though. When Sarah followed up a few days later asking how things were going, I had no excuse to give because I had already figured out an alternative solution using different resources. But I couldn't tell her that; she'd think less of me for not checking out the links she sent over and would have been disappointed in my work ethic. I ended up fabricating a story about how some external factor prevented access, but it didn't sit well with me at all. It felt like I was lying to one of my closest friends just because I didn’t want to admit to a small slip-up that really meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. She never found out what happened since she moved on from the code link without much fanfare, but knowing that I held back the truth still feels heavy. Now when we talk about work, especially recent events, there's always this little part of me second-guessing whether it was just the project or if my honesty is truly compromised. It's made us drift apart a bit since our bond was built so much on trust and open communication in our collaboration. I wish things could go back to how they were before, but part of me wonders if that ship has sailed.