Read Chapter 15: The Meeting

The morning of the demo day arrived with the particular grey dampness London reserves for days when you have somewhere important to be. Jazz stood in front of the bathroom mirror, applying a third layer of concealer under her eyes, trying to convince herself she looked like someone who had slept, rather than someone who had spent the night rehearsing answers to questions about their retention model.

She could hear Tom clattering in the kitchen, the sound of him trying to make tea with one hand and failing. The bandage on his right hand had become a permanent fixture, and with it, a permanent source of tension. Every time he fumbled with the kettle or swore at the laptop keyboard, Jazz felt a small spike of guilt that had nothing to do with the burns themselves and everything to do with what they represented.

“Coffee or tea?” Tom called out, his voice carrying that edge of false cheerfulness they had both adopted since the sticky-note treaty.

“Coffee. Strong.”

She heard him grunt in acknowledgment. Three weeks of truce, and they had settled into something that almost resembled partnership. Almost. There were still moments, usually in the quiet hours between midnight and three a.m. when they were both still working, when the words they hadn’t said sat between them like a third person in the room. But they had a demo day to survive, and that was enough.

The incubator’s demo space was a converted warehouse in Shoreditch, all exposed brick and Edison bulbs suspended from high ceilings. The kind of place that charged startups three thousand pounds a month for the privilege of calling themselves disruptors. Jazz had been here before, for other pitches, other founders, and she knew the drill: sign-in, name badge, feigned enthusiasm, networking hell.

“Okafor and Chen,” Tom said to the woman at the registration desk, pushing both their names forward with his good hand. “Flatmates & Founders. We’re presenting in the second block.”

The woman scanned the list, nodded, and handed over two laminated badges with their company name written in a sans-serif font that made it look more legitimate than it felt. Jazz pinned hers to her blazer, the one she reserved for occasions that required her to look older and more established than she was.

“Nervous?” Tom asked, falling into step beside her as they moved toward the main hall.

“I’m always nervous before these things. That’s what makes me good at them.”

He laughed, a real laugh, and Jazz caught herself almost smiling before she remembered that they were colleagues now, partners, and that the lines had been drawn with the precision of a legal contract.

The hall was already half-full, a mixture of founders in various states of preparedness and investors doing their best to look disinterested. Jazz scanned the room out of habit, cataloguing faces, estimating the collected net worth, calculating odds. That was when she saw him.

Professor Alistair Reed was standing by the coffee station, a paper cup in hand, talking to someone she didn’t recognize. He was older than she remembered, greyer, but the sharp eyes behind his thick-rimmed glasses were unchanged. He had a way of looking at people like they were problems to be solved, and Jazz had spent four years of her life being evaluated by that gaze.

“Oh no.”

“What?” Tom followed her line of sight and went still. “Is that—Reed?”

“I didn’t think he came to these anymore. He always said incubators were for people who couldn’t raise institutional funding.” She could hear the bitterness in her own voice, try as she might to keep it out. “He’s going to see our pitch. He’s going to tear it apart.”

“Jazz. We’re good. Our numbers are good. Our demo works. We’ve got a paying beta user, which is more than most of these people can show.” Tom’s voice was steady, and Jazz remembered, friction be damned, that he was good at this part. The steady hand in the storm. The flip side of his ambition was a capacity for calm that she had never quite mastered. “We’ve got this.”

She took a breath. Released it. Nodded.

The pitch itself went better than she had expected. Tom handled the technical architecture with the fluency of someone who had built it in his sleep, and Jazz delivered the market analysis with the confidence of someone who had once been told by this same room’s type that she wasn’t ruthless enough to succeed. They took questions, deflected the difficult ones, landed three follow-up conversations, and by the time they stepped off the small stage, Jazz felt something dangerous and unfamiliar blooming in her chest.

Hope.

“That was—” she started.

“Don’t say it,” Tom warned, but he was grinning.

“Fine. It was acceptable.”

“High praise from the woman who critiqued my toast four different ways this morning.”

They were still laughing, riding that particular high, when a familiar voice cut through the noise.

“Jasmine. Thomas.”

Reed had materialized beside them, his paper cup still in hand, that analytical look fixed squarely on their faces. Jazz straightened her spine without thinking.

“Professor Reed,” she said. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“I’m on the advisory board now. They dragged me out of retirement with the promise of interesting problems.” His eyes flicked to the badges on their chests. “Flatmates & Founders. Ambitious name.”

“It reflects our living situation as much as our professional one,” Tom said, extending his good hand. “Tom Chen. I don’t think we ever met properly. I was in the engineering department.”

Reed shook his hand, appraisingly. “I know who you are. That database project you did in your final year—the one that outperformed the professor’s own system—that created quite a stir in the faculty lounge. Some felt it was disrespectful. I felt it was inevitable.”

Tom’s smile became, for just a moment, a shade tighter. “I like to think I was just thorough.”

“Thorough. Yes.” Reed turned his attention back to Jazz. “Your retention numbers in that pitch were impressive. Convincing. Though I notice your product is still quite early-stage. Must make those projections feel like ambitions more than certainties.”

“We’re confident in our direction,” Jazz said carefully.

“I’m sure you are. That’s part of what makes this interesting.” Reed took a sip of his coffee, and when he lowered the cup, his expression had shifted. Less professor. More something Jazz couldn’t quite name. “You know, when I saw your company name on the schedule this morning, I was skeptical. Not because of you—either of you. Because I’ve seen a version of this product before.”

Jazz felt a cold thread of tension run through her chest. “Excuse me?”

“About two years ago, I was approached by a former student. Brilliant woman. Had this exact idea—activity-based social networking, community-focused commerce, the same demographic targeting you presented. She wanted me to advise her on the business school application, but she needed funding first.” He paused. “Her name was Priya. Priya Sharma.”

The name hit Jazz like a physical blow. She felt Tom’s attention sharpen beside her, felt him go still.

“You said was,” Tom said, his voice carefully neutral. “Were you advising her?”

“For a time. We disagreed on her approach. She was convinced that speed and market capture mattered more than the foundation the product was built on. I believed the opposite. It wasn’t a pleasant conversation.” Reed’s gaze was somewhere else now, in an older memory. “She left London not long after that. Took her plans with her. I assumed she’d found someone else to fund her. But I hadn’t heard anything about a launch, and I track this space fairly closely.” He looked back at them, and there was something sharp in his eyes. “So you can imagine my surprise when I saw a nearly identical product concept being pitched in this room, by two former students I taught myself.”

Jazz’s mouth had gone dry. The background noise of the demo day, the chatter, the clinking glasses, all of it faded to a low hum. She thought of Priya Sharma’s name on the due diligence request. She thought of the unverified patent sitting in a filing cabinet in their flat, waiting to be called into question. She thought about what it meant that Priya had been ahead of them, and that she had never told them.

“Professor,” she managed, “when you last spoke with Priya—how long ago was that, exactly?”

“Eighteen months. Maybe two years.” He frowned. “I should say, I haven’t entirely lost touch. Her mother keeps in contact with my wife. Last I heard, Priya was working for a venture capital firm on the East Coast. Analysis side. Nothing hands-on.”

“But she had the plans,” Tom pressed. “The full product concept?”

“She had a thesis, Thomas. A thesis and a slide deck, and the kind of conviction that can make a person dangerous to oppose.” Reed studied them both, and Jazz felt her mask slip, just slightly, when something in his expression turned knowing. “Why do you ask? Has Priya Sharma contacted you?”

“No,” Jazz said, too quickly. “Nothing like that. We were just—surprised. The timing. That’s all.”

Reed looked at her for a long moment. He wasn’t a fool. He had never been a fool, and Jazz had always suspected that he could read lies in a student’s face the way others read headlines. She held his gaze, afraid that any movement would betray her.

“Well,” he said finally, setting his empty cup down on a nearby table. “I hope that timing works in your favor. You’ve built something solid here—your presentation, certainly. But in this world, being right isn’t always enough. Sometimes, it’s who gets there first that matters.” He nodded to them both. “Congratulations on your beta. I’ll be watching.”

He walked away, disappearing into the crowd, and Jazz realized she hadn’t been breathing. She exhaled, and the sound was shaky and loud in her own ears.

“Jazz.” Tom’s voice was low, urgent. “That patent. The one on file that we can’t verify.”

“I know.”

“If Priya had this idea first. If she built it. If she filed before we did—” He stopped. They both knew what he was asking. Whether everything they had built was standing on a foundation that someone else could pull out from under them at any moment.

“She didn’t launch,” Jazz said, as much to herself as to him. “She left. She went to an analysis firm on the East Coast. That’s not founder territory. That’s not someone who turned their thesis into a company.”

“Or it’s someone who sold it,” Tom said quietly. “Or who’s waiting for the right moment to cash in on someone else’s hard work.”

Jazz looked back at the crowd, at the founders and investors moving in the warm Edison bulb light. Somewhere out there, her sister thought she was making good decisions. Somewhere out there, Marcus Okafor was waiting for a weekly update with the false pricing structure in hand. And somewhere on the East Coast, Priya Sharma was—

She didn’t know. And that was the problem.

“We need to verify the patent,” she said. “Today. Not Monday. Not after the boiler replacement. Today.”

Tom nodded, already pulling out his phone. “I know someone who can run a search. A former classmate in the IP office. I’ll make the call now.”

“Good.” Jazz was already moving, gathering her composure, her blazer, the pieces of herself she had laid aside for the pitch. “And Tom?”

He looked up.

“Thank you. For the calm.” She said it plainly, without irony, and saw something flicker across his face—surprise, and then something warmer that he quickly banked. “We’re going to need that in the next couple of days.”

She didn’t have to explain what she meant. They both knew that the name Priya Sharma was no longer an open thread, a due diligence problem to be resolved at someone else’s pace. It was a live wire running through everything they had built. And it was only a matter of time before someone found the other end.