Read Chapter 16: The Escalation

Jazz’s phone buzzed against the stack of printed user-testing sheets, and she ignored it the way she’d been ignoring everything that wasn’t the widget prototype on her screen. Tom grunted from the kitchen, where he was wrestling a mug with his non-bandaged hand, and she heard the telltale crunch of ceramic meeting counter too hard.

“You’re going to lose a deposit on top of everything else,” she said without looking up.

“I’ve already lost sleep, dignity, and the ability to open a jar,” Tom said. “What’s one more deposit?”

Her phone buzzed again. Then again. Three in a row meant either her sister had sent another unsolicited LinkedIn article or something was actually wrong. She grabbed it. The first message was from Marcus. The second from their beta user, the shop owner who’d been so encouraging just a week ago. The third was an alert she’d set up weeks ago for competitor tracking.

That one stopped her cold.

“Tom,” she said, her voice flat. “Come here.”

He ambled over, still cradling his injured hand, and leaned over her shoulder. She clicked the alert. A sleek landing page filled her screen, clean gradients and bold sans-serif type, the kind of polish that cost money they didn’t have. The product was called “Shelfwise,” and the tagline read: *The inventory brain your small business deserves.*

Four features. Four more than their prototype currently had in production. Real-time stock alerts. Supplier matching. Integrated invoicing with three major payment platforms. And—she scrolled down, cold spreading in her chest—automated reordering based on sales trends, which was literally the feature she’d been sketching out in her notebook since Tuesday.

“Who released this?” Tom asked, his voice quiet in a way she’d learned meant he was holding something back.

“Shelfwise. Founded by—” she clicked through, heart hammering. “Priya Sharma.”

Tom went very still. The mug he’d been holding finally cracked, a single hairline fracture running down its side. He didn’t seem to notice.

“She didn’t just file a patent,” Jazz said, the words tasting like bile. “She built it. It’s live. It’s—” she scrolled through the pricing page. “It’s got two hundred and seven reviews.”

“How does a VC analyst in New York launch a product in—” he checked his watch. “Three hours?”

Jazz didn’t have an answer. She had a pricking sensation on the back of her neck, that feeling she’d had when she’d spotted the red coat girl outside the letting agent’s office—like the world was rearranging itself just outside her peripheral vision. She’d dismissed it then. She couldn’t dismiss this.

“Marcus’s update is in four days,” she said. “If he sees this before we have something to show for the pivot, we’re done.”

“The pivot,” Tom repeated, and there was an edge to it. “What pivot?”

“This one. Right now. Clearly. We don’t have the luxury of a slow crawl to market anymore.”

He stared at her. “Jazz, our whole architecture is built on the AI-first relational database. We can’t just bolt on their feature set overnight.”

“So we lean into the relational piece. That’s our advantage. They have features, we have depth. We make the supplier-to-supplier knowledge sharing the headline.”

“That’s a footnote, not a headline. Investors want features. Users want features.”

“And they already have features, Tom! From a woman who may have stolen our IP before we even wrote a line of it down on paper! We can’t out-feature her, so we have to out-think her.”

He laughed, a single dry bark. “Out-think her. Great. Meanwhile she’s got a two-hundred-review head start and we can’t even get our code repository to stop throwing merge conflicts because I can’t type with one hand.”

The comment landed harder than he probably intended. Jazz felt her jaw tighten. He noticed and dropped the broken mug onto the counter with a clatter.

“That came out wrong,” he said.

“Did it?”

“I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming the universe, and me, and—” he gestured vaguely with his bandaged hand. “Everything. We were finally working together. For the first time since we started, I actually thought we might pull it off.”

She didn’t have a response to that. It was too honest. She channeled the energy into opening a new document and typing furiously.

“Fine,” she said. “We pivot. I’m building the roadmap. You research competitors. Meet back in two hours, we compare notes, and we don’t sleep until we’ve got a version one that does one thing Shelfwise doesn’t do.”

He didn’t argue. That was probably the scariest part. He just nodded once, dropped onto the sofa with his laptop balanced on his knees, and for an hour the only sounds in the flat were rapid-fire clicking and the occasional muttered curse.

---

The hours blurred. The takeaway they ordered at nine became tubs of congealed noodles by eleven. At midnight, Jazz had amassed forty-two pages of research and a headache pulsing behind her right eye. Tom had consumed three cups of instant coffee and started mumbling to himself.

“She doesn’t have supplier chat,” he said abruptly.

Jazz looked up from her screen. “What?”

“Shelfwise. No real-time supplier messaging. Straight from their feature list, the closest thing is an email digest that updates weekly.”

Jazz blinked. “We had that on our whiteboard in week one.”

“I know. We deprioritized it for the AI engine, remember?”

She stood up, grabbed her notebook from under a stack of bills, and flipped to the dog-eared page where she’d sketched out the chat interface. The drawings were crude, ballpoint pen and impatient arrows, but the logic was solid. A direct line between shopkeeper and supplier, bypassing the order-paper chaos.

“That’s our wedge,” she said. “It’s not glamorous, it’s not AI-fancy, but it solves exactly the problem our beta user complained about last week. Remember? Mr. Chen spent three hours chasing a stock update by phone.”

Tom’s eyes lit up. It was the first genuine spark she’d seen from him since the demo day. “And we can build it. Not the full version, but enough. We strip out the AI engine until after launch, put the relational data storage aside, and ship a focused MVP around messaging.”

“Exactly. Slow and ugly but working.”

“Stop eating so deeply into their lunch,” he said, a half-smile crossing his face. “Only one of us is allowed to sound like a VC at a time.”

She laughed. It surprised her. In the dark of the flat, with neon from a nearby takeaway sign bleeding through the curtains, it sounded almost conspiratorial.

They spent another hour on the whiteboard. Tom penciled diagrams with his left hand, a clumsy but determined scrawl that somehow made him look more human than the polished pitch-deck version of himself. Jazz found herself drifting closer to study his arrows, close enough to smell the faint, lingering traces of his coffee and the citrus detergent the landlord had let them keep from the boiler inspection.

At some point, the ease slid between them. He stopped exaggerating his gestures and started actually listening. She stopped interrupting and started finishing his sentences. When she realized what she was doing, she went quiet.

He looked up from the whiteboard. “Don’t stop now. We’re onto something.”

“We’re onto something,” she repeated, and it came out softer than she intended.

He turned to face her, marker still in hand, his left hand and the bandaged right doing something awkward in between. His eyes dropped from hers to her lips and then back up again. Hesitation, calculation, and something else entirely, banked but burning.

She could have said something. Should have said something. Instead she stepped closer.

The marker hit the floor. His hand moved to her arm, and for a heartbeat—one drawn, dangerous heartbeat—they were a breath apart, and all the friction and fighting and near-miss moments of the last three months collapsed into a single point.

Then Tom pulled back. He cleared his throat, stepped away, and grabbed at his computer like it was a life raft.

“That’s a bad idea,” he muttered. “We’re business partners. We’re in the middle of a crisis.”

Jazz stood very still, waiting for her heartbeat to slow down. When it didn’t, she nodded once and picked up the marker.

“Right,” she said. “Crisis.”

He didn’t meet her eye. She didn’t meet his. The whiteboard stared back at them, half-sketched, ambitious, unfinished. In the corner, Tom’s phone buzzed with an incoming email from his old IP office classmate—the subject line read: *Your patent application was filed two weeks ago. Who else is on this?*

Neither of them touched it.