Read Chapter 1: Two Turntables

The polished boardroom table smelled of lemon-scented polish and desperation. Jazz had been holding her breath for the last forty-five seconds, watching Marcus Chen flip through their deck with the enthusiasm of a man reading a tax form. Beside her, Tom’s knee was bouncing at a frequency that made the water glasses tremble.

“So,” Marcus said, finally closing the binder. His voice carried the particular boredom of someone who had seen a thousand pitches and remembered none of them. “A marketplace for short-term workspace rentals. In London. Where there are, and I’m checking my figures here, approximately eight hundred coworking spaces already.”

“Not like this.” Tom’s knee stopped. His charm offensive switched on like a floodlight. “We’re not renting desks, we’re curating micro-spaces. Cafe corners during off-peak hours, artist studios between exhibitions, unused shop fronts. PopWork gives freelancers a place to plug in for three hours without a membership, and gives hosts revenue for space they’re already paying for.”

Marcus held up a hand. “I can read the deck, Tom. I’ve read the deck.” He looked between them. “What I’m less clear on is you two.”

Jazz felt her spine stiffen. “I’m sorry?”

“You.” Marcus pointed at her with the cap of his pen. “Product designer, former finalist in the Barclays innovation challenge, a portfolio of clean, user-focused mobile experiences. And you.” The pen shifted to Tom. “Two-time founder, one exit, pitch-perfect sales patter, but notoriously allergic to sitting in the same room as anyone who disagrees with him.”

Tom’s smile tightened by a millimeter. Jazz saw it. They had been rivals since first-year entrepreneurship seminar, where she had pointed out a hole in his business model that sent him back to the drawing board, and he had responded by winning the pitch competition that she’d been favourite for. Three years of sniping at demo days, of nodding through each other’s beta launches, of professional courtesy stretched thin as cling film over a wound.

“And yet here you are,” Marcus continued, “co-founding a venture together. Which makes me wonder if you’ve buried the hatchet, or if you’re just waiting to use it on each other.”

Jazz opened her mouth. Tom opened his. They both closed them.

“The product’s solid,” Marcus said, and Jazz felt a flicker of hope before he continued. “The execution timeline is fantasy. You’re asking for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds to build an app and scale a host network across three boroughs. In six months. With two of you running the whole show from a coffee shop because you can’t afford an office.”

“We have a record of—” Tom started.

“You have a record of one guy with an exit that barely broke even and one designer who’s never shipped a product under her own name.” Marcus stood up. The meeting was over; they just hadn’t been told yet. “I’ll be honest. I like the concept. I don’t like the odds. And I *really* don’t like that you two flinched when I called out the obvious tension.”

He walked them to the door. Jazz noticed he didn’t offer to shake hands.

“Here’s what I’ll do,” Marcus said, pausing in the doorway of his glass-walled office. The London skyline behind him was doing its grey October best. “You have thirty days. Show me traction—two hundred active hosts, one thousand completed bookings, and a demo that doesn’t crash when I breathe on it. Plus”—he looked at them like they were misbehaving students—“prove to me you can work together without wanting to set each other on fire. If you do that, I’ll consider a follow-up round. If you don’t, I take a meeting with your competitors next week.”

“Thirty days is—” Jazz began.

“Twenty-nine now.” Marcus waved them off. “Good luck. You’ll need it.”

The lift doors closed. Jazz turned to Tom. He looked back. For a moment, neither spoke.

“Well,” Tom said.

“Well,” Jazz echoed.

The lift descended. Tom adjusted his blazer. Jazz checked her phone. Then they both started at once.

“I told you we should have prepared the burn-rate projection for–”

“You talked over me in there twice. Twice. When I was explaining the host retention model–”

“Because you kept getting the numbers wrong. It’s twelve percent churn, not eight. Marcus’s own fund backed a similar platform last year. If you’d done the research–”

“I *did* the research. But when I tried to bring it up, you were busy-impressed with how many times you could say ‘curated’ in one sentence.”

The lift doors opened onto the lobby. A woman with a pram was trying to get in. They stepped aside, still glaring.

“We have twenty-nine days,” Jazz said, keeping her voice low, “to hit metrics that usually take a team of eight six months. We have no office. We’re living in separate flats across the city because neither of us can afford the rent in Zone 2 alone. And our only potential investor just told us we argue like children.”

“That’s accurate,” Tom admitted.

“It’s a disaster.” Jazz felt the familiar weight settle on her chest—the one that had been there since she’d left her stable job at a fintech unicorn to do this, the one that whispered at 3am that she was one mistake away from being a cautionary tale in a group chat of ex-colleagues. She was not going to be that story. She could not be that story.

Tom’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it, then did a double take. “The lease on our workshop space just came through. The landlord says we have forty-eight hours to complete the paperwork or the deposit goes to another tenant.”

“The workshop we don’t need because we don’t have funding to build the prototype, much less hire out a space to build it in?”

“The flat, Jazz. The flat. The one I said we should get as a shared base. Zone 3, two bedrooms, cheap because it’s got some, ah, character.” He showed her the phone. The listing photo showed what might charitably be called a fixer-upper: lime green walls, a kitchen that appeared to have one working appliance, and a window that looked out onto a brick wall.

“We’re not living together.”

“We’re not *choosing* to live together. We’re co-locating. It’s what startups do. WeWork before they had WeWork.”

“Tom, we can’t stand being in the same meeting room for an hour. You want us to share a bathroom?”

“It’s got two bathrooms.” He sounded wounded. “I checked.”

Jazz pinched the bridge of her nose. The buzzing of her own phone joined in: a message from her landlord confirming she needed to renew her lease in six weeks, at a rent increase that would eat a third of her runway. She did the math in her head. Then she did it again.

“What’s the rent?” she asked.

Tom told her. She blinked.

“That includes utilities?”

“And council tax. The landlady is desperate. Her daughter moved to Bristol and she doesn’t want to sell in a falling market.”

Jazz looked at the photo again. Lime green walls. A sofa that appeared to be held together with duct tape and hope. But the numbers worked. The numbers *barely* worked, if they split it, if they put the prototype in the second bedroom, if they didn’t have to pay for a coworking membership on top of two separate rents that were strangling them individually.

There was a version of this that made sense. There was a version of this that didn’t end with her packing her bags and moving back to her mum’s house in Peckham at thirty-one, three years after her university rivals had written her off.

She hated that Tom was her only option. She hated that the idea had come from him. She hated most of all that he was looking at her with that patient, slightly smug expression that said he knew she was doing the maths and knew what she would decide.

“Forty-eight hours,” she said. “We go look at it. We set ground rules. We stop speaking over each other in investor meetings.”

“Agreed on all counts.” Tom’s smugness flickered into something almost genuine. “For what it’s worth, you were right about the churn rate. I pulled up the data in the lift.”

Jazz stared at him. “You did?”

“I always check after you correct me. It’s how I know you’re never wrong about numbers.” He shrugged. “It’s also why I hate pitching with you. You make me look like I haven’t done my homework.”

“You haven’t.”

“Exactly.”

The absurdity of it—two people who couldn’t compliment each other without wrapping it in a jab, about to sign a lease together, in a flat with lime green walls, with twenty-nine days to save everything they had—pushed a laugh halfway up Jazz’s throat. She swallowed it down.

“Text the agent,” she said. “Tomorrow. Nine AM. I’m bringing a tape measure and a list of rules.”

“I’ll bring coffee,” Tom offered.

“That’s your contribution?”

“I make very good coffee.” He grinned. It was the same grin that had won him the pitch competition in second year, the one she had wanted to wipe off his face with a folder. “We’re going to need it.”

He called the agent without waiting for her reply. Jazz watched him walk out of the lobby into the grey London drizzle, phone pressed to his ear, and felt her chest tighten again. Not the fear this time. Something else. Something that felt dangerously like the beginning of a plan.

She pulled out her own phone. Opened her notes. At the top, she wrote a single word: **RULES**. Below it, she started a list:

1. No talking over each other in meetings. 2. No passive aggressive post-it notes.

She paused, thumb hovering over the screen. Then she added a third line, and didn’t quite know why she wrote it:

3. Do not fall for him again.

The elevator dinged behind her. A porter was wheeling a trolley of folded chairs. “Oi, love, you moving in or out?” he asked.

“Neither,” Jazz said, pocketing her phone. She didn’t know if the rule was a safeguard against a past she and Tom never talked about, or a warning to herself about a future she wasn’t ready to imagine.

Either way, she had twenty-nine days to figure it out. And now, apparently, a flatmate to do it with.