Should I[27M] protect my grieving colleague[27F] who just lost her mother after she made a mistake at work?

My colleague, Lucy, and I are manager-in-training. We are responsible for a team of programmers. Our current workflow is that the team completes a task. I would check through their work, then Lucy double-confirms it before submitting it to another dept. Lucy is the final check because she's more experienced than me

This entire week, Lucy has been on leave as her mother fell ill. Unfortunately, word just came out that her mother passed away days ago

On Fri, the other dept called me (usually they would call Lucy but again she's on leave). They were in the midst of integration when they realized they were seeing far too many bugs in the project build. I was confused as I had personally checked and ensured these bugs were fixed

When I headed to the other dept, I realized they were integrating an old build v 5.0. However, I was adamant that the version I passed to Lucy was v 5.1. I do not even have v 5.0 on my PC anymore so I couldn't possibly have passed it to Lucy.

I logged into Lucy's PC and checked (we can use each other's PC on a need-to basis). It turns out she had both v 5.0 and v 5.1 on the same folder (something she's NOT supposed to do). Chances was that she had sent the wrong version to the other dept. The other dept do not use the same version control as us so they couldn't possibly have known they should be using v 5.1 instead of v 5.0. As said, Lucy's role as the final check is to ensure the other team receives the proper version from our dept

The other dept stayed 3 hours overtime to patch and re-integrate the correct version v 5.1. To sum things up, they are pissed off as hell and they intend to escalate this matter. They do not yet know it was Lucy who made the mistake

Should I protect Lucy? I cannot possibly throw anyone else under the bus, so the only thing I can do is to lie that I sent Lucy the wrong version. Doing so would obviously have nasty repercussions for me. On the other hand, Lucy has been through a lot, and being told that she's responsible for this mess is going to hurt her even more

Is there any way I can spin this in a way that doesn't point blame to anyone?

TLDR: Lucy is the most experienced programmer in my dept, and thus she is the final check for builds we send to another dept. She recently made a terrible mistake and sent the wrong build to another dept. The entire other dept spent 3 hrs overtime fixing her mistake and intend to escalate this matter, but they do not yet know Lucy is the one responsible. Lucy's mother recently passed away and she's in depression. I do not want to add to her sorrow but I can see no way of averting it unless I lie and take the fall for her

Submitted October 24, 2020 at 08:48PM by Eriflee https://ift.tt/31IKTBU