Read Chapter 10: The Kettle Incident

The smoke detector chose that moment to die. Not with a beep, not with a warning chirp—just a flat, final silence, as if it had simply given up on this flat, this partnership, this entire doomed enterprise.

Jazz stared at the ceiling, tea bag in hand, and decided it was an omen.

“You had the last one yesterday,” she said, voice flat.

Tom didn’t look up from the kettle. “It was a different box.”

“It was the same box. You bought it, I bought it, it’s the same Earl Grey we’ve been drinking since October.”

“This one’s got a different wrapper.”

“They’re all the same wrapper!” Jazz slapped the tea bag onto the counter. “That’s the last one, and I’m having it.”

Tom’s jaw tightened. She’d seen that expression before—the one where he decided he was being reasonable and she was being unreasonable, and he was going to win by sheer force of patience. It made her want to throw something.

“Fine,” he said, too calmly. “Take it. I’ll have coffee.”

“You don’t drink coffee.”

“I do now.”

He reached into the cupboard, grabbed the jar of instant coffee—the cheap one she’d bought as an emergency backup two months ago and never touched—and unscrewed the lid like he was opening a challenge. The gesture was theatrical, ridiculous. Jazz should have laughed. Instead, she felt something snap cleanly in two.

“You don’t get to be magnanimous about this,” she said. “You’ve had three decent nights of sleep because of that bug fix, and I’ve been up cataloging feature gaps for Marcus’s update, and I just want one cup of tea before I face the fact that we’re lying to investors, our demo is held together with hope, and there’s a dead pigeon or something behind the radiator that’s been smelling worse every day.”

Tom paused, jar in hand. “There’s no dead pigeon behind the radiator.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I looked. Last week. It’s a mouse.”

Jazz stared at him. The absurdity of the moment—the mouse, the tea bag, the two of them standing in a kitchen that smelled faintly of scorched metal and desperation—pressed against her chest like a hand. She wanted to laugh. She wanted to cry. She did neither.

She just reached for the kettle.

“What are you doing?” Tom asked.

“Making tea.”

“With the last bag?”

“Yes.”

“But you just—you said I don’t get to be magnanimous, and then you’re taking the tea anyway, which is exactly the kind of—“

“It’s my tea, Tom. I bought it. You used my shampoo this morning and didn’t say anything, you’ve eaten the last of my yogurt three times this week, and I’m taking the tea. That’s not unreasonable. That’s survival.”

He made a sound—half laugh, half exasperation—and stepped closer, reaching for the tea bag at the same moment she pulled it back. Their hands tangled. The kettle shook. Water sloshed. And then, with the kind of timing that made Jazz believe in malevolent deities, the kettle let out a high whine and died.

Not the click of a finished boil. Not a quiet switch-off. A death rattle.

White smoke began to curl from the base.

“Shit,” Tom said.

The smoke thickened. Jazz dropped the tea bag. Tom grabbed the kettle by the handle, yelped, and flung it onto the counter, where it landed with a crack and spat sparks onto the dish rack.

The dish towel caught first.

Jazz had never seen a fire start before—not a real one, not up close. She’d imagined it would be dramatic, with flames leaping and grand gestures required. Instead, the towel simply darkened, then bloomed orange along its edge, spreading with a hungry silence that was somehow worse than any crackle.

Tom was already moving. He yanked the tap on, filled the sink, and grabbed the burning towel with his bare hands, dunking it underwater. Steam hissed up, acrid and bitter. He held it under for a long moment, shoulders heaving, then pulled it out—a blackened, sodden rag that dripped water onto the floor.

The kitchen fell quiet.

Jazz became aware of the smoke, thick and gray, curling toward the ceiling. Her eyes were stinging. Her chest felt tight. She stood there, frozen, while Tom turned off the tap and looked at his hands. His palms were red, the skin already puckering at the edges.

“Tom,” she said. Her voice came out small. “Your hands.”

He looked at them, then at her. “It’s fine.”

“They’re not fine. You burned yourself because I was being an idiot about a tea bag.”

“You weren’t being an idiot about a tea bag. You were being—you were being right, actually. It was your tea.”

The honesty of it hit her harder than the smoke. She crossed the kitchen, grabbed his wrist, and turned his palms to the light. Blisters were already forming on his knuckles. Seeing them made her stomach flip.

“Sit down,” she said. “I’ll get the first aid kit.”

“We don’t have a first aid kit.”

“We have a box of plasters and a tube of antiseptic that’s older than the startup.”

“Same thing.”

She guided him to the kitchen chair and knelt beside him with the sad little box of supplies. The smoke alarm was still silent. Above them, the ceiling had a grey bloom spreading across the white paint, and the entire flat smelled like a barbecue gone wrong.

She didn’t know how long they sat there. Long enough for Tom’s shaking hands to still. Long enough for her to wrap his palms in gauze with a steadiness she didn’t feel. Long enough for the smoke to thin and the morning light to sharpen.

When she was done, she sat back on her heels and looked at him. He looked back. For the first time in weeks, neither of them had anything to prove.

“We can’t go on like this,” she said.

“I know.”

“We almost burned down the flat because of a tea bag.”

“I know.”

“We’re not going to survive 26 more days if we keep—if we keep being two people who can only communicate by throwing things at each other.”

Tom was quiet for a moment. His voice, when it came, was hoarse. “I don’t know how to be someone who doesn’t fight with you.”

Something in Jazz’s chest twisted. “That’s not a compliment, is it?”

“It’s not an insult, either.” He held her gaze. “I think it might be the most honest thing I’ve said in weeks.”

The kettle lay broken on the counter. The charred towel sat in the sink, dripping. The whole flat—their startup, their future, their shared mess of borrowed money and invented patents and dead mice—hung in the smoke-thinned air above them.

Jazz took a breath. She was done with fury. Done with the jagged edges they kept sharpening against each other.

“Truce,” she said. “Not friendship. Not feelings. A working arrangement.”

Tom raised an eyebrow. “Define it.”

She thought fast. “Rule one: no stealing the other person’s supplies. I’ll buy my own tea, you buy your own yogurt, we label everything.”

“Fine.”

“Rule two: disagreements go in writing. A shared doc, one page, both sides get to state their case. At the end of each day, if we still disagree, we escalate to a five-minute face-to-face where neither of us can interrupt. Then we move on. No stewing.”

“That’s painfully reasonable.”

“Kind of the point.” She pressed on. “Rule three: we don’t lie to each other about money, time, or capability. I’m not hiding my bank statements anymore, and you’re not pretending the Miles loan doesn’t exist. When we bend the truth for investors, it’s a strategy we agree on first. But between us, it’s real.”

Tom let out a long breath. “And the kettle?”

“I’ll get a new one. Or we go without, and we’re truly a no-hot-water household.”

“I think I’m done with hot water for today.”

A laugh bubbled up from somewhere Jazz hadn’t known was still intact. It was startling, raw, and it made Tom smile—a real smile, tired and crooked, nothing like the forced enthusiasm he’d worn for Alex.

“Deal,” he said.

He held out a gauze-wrapped hand. Jazz took it, careful, deliberate. His palm was warm through the bandages. For three seconds, five, they stood there in the ruined kitchen, holding the agreement and each other.

Then the smoke alarm chose that moment to resurrect itself, screaming a high, piercing wail that made them both jump apart.

The front door opened. Davis stood in the hallway, face scrolling from surprise to alarm to something approaching despair while his eyes tracked the smoke and the charred towel and the two of them standing in the wreckage with bandaged hands and guilty faces.

His voice was flat. “Do you want to reschedule?”

Tom’s gaze met Jazz’s. She saw something dangerous in it—a spark of the same idea taking shape in her own mind.

“No,” Tom said, and his voice held no hesitation. “We don’t need to reschedule. Actually, Davis—we need to show you something that changes everything.