Read Chapter 17: The Game

The takeaway bags were already leaking grease onto the counter when Tom walked in from his run, sweaty and blinking at the spread like he’d stumbled into a surprise party.

“Thai?” he said.

“Green curry, pad see ew, and those dumplings you pretend you don’t love.” Jazz held up the bottle of red wine like a trophy. “And this. The good stuff. Well, the five-pound stuff that pretends to be the good stuff.”

Tom pulled his running shirt off over his head and she looked away too late, catching a flash of lean muscle before she found the ceiling very interesting. “What’s the occasion?”

“We’ve been living like monks for four days.” She gestured at the sticky notes still plastered along the kitchen cabinets—the system they’d slipped back into when the tension got too thick to talk through. “And we have a patent to save and a pivot to build and a boiler that’s dying on Friday. I thought we could…” She shrugged. “Not think about that for one night.”

Tom’s mouth did something complicated, half-grateful, half-wary. “You want to have a nice evening. With me. Voluntarily.”

“Don’t make it weird.”

“I’m just savoring the moment.”

But he went and showered, and when he came back in sweatpants and a faded band tee, she’d cleared the coffee table and laid out the only physical games the flat possessed: a battered edition of Monopoly and a chess set her dad had brought over from Lagos. Tom looked at the Monopoly board like it had personally offended him.

“Absolutely not. You’re too competitive and I’m too sore a loser. We’d end up flipping the board.”

“Fair.” Jazz pushed the chess set forward. “I’ll beat you at this instead.”

“Oh, you think so?”

“I know so. My brother taught me when I was nine. I’ve got a natural gift for war.”

Tom pulled the wine cork with a pop and poured two glasses. He slid one across the board, and she caught it, their fingers nearly brushing before she pulled hers back too fast.

“Fine,” he said. “But I’m playing black. I like the underdog energy.”

They played two games. Jazz won the first in twenty-three moves. Tom won the second because Jazz got distracted explaining—at length—why the Thai restaurant’s dumpling sauce was clearly a front for something illegal, and when she looked back at the board she was two pieces down with no recovery.

“That was tactical distraction,” she accused.

“That was you monologuing about fish sauce.” He took a long sip of wine, smug. “Best strategy I’ve seen all quarter.”

She pointed her fork at him. “Rematch. Best of three.”

“You want to keep losing to me? Fine. But I’m running low on concentration. My brain’s gone fuzzy from the good five-pound stuff.”

He was loosened too; she could tell by the way he sprawled onto the floor cushions when he reset the board, crossing his long legs like he was settling in for a long conversation instead of a quick game of checkmate.

The wine had warmed her chest and loosened something in her spine. She should keep this light. This was supposed to be a ceasefire, not a confessional.

But the room was quiet except for the low hum of the fridge and the occasional rattle of a bus passing outside, and somehow the silence felt less like a trap than it had all week.

“Why do you always play to win?” she asked, without meaning to.

Tom looked up, one eyebrow raised. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“No.” She ran her thumb along the edge of her empty plate. “Some people play to not lose. There’s a difference.”

He studied her for a long moment, and she watched the calculation happen behind his eyes—whether to deflect, to make a joke, to retreat into the easy banter that had carried them through the past weeks.

He didn't.

“My old man,” he said finally, “was a district judge. Very respected. Very strict. Every school report card had to get his approval. Every rugby match, he was on the sidelines with a stopwatch, timing my runs, telling me where I lost a second.” He shrugged, but there was an old ache in the gesture. “Nothing I did was ever good enough on its own. It was always about the comparison. The benchmark. Where I stood against the other kids.”

Jazz stayed quiet.

“So I guess I learned early that winning wasn’t optional. It was the only thing that made me real to him.” He picked up his knight and rolled it between his fingers. “I’ve spent a long time unlearning that. Having mixed results.”

“And starting a company with your rival,” Jazz said softly. “That’s not rebellion at all.”

Tom barked a laugh. “Not even a little bit. My father wanted me to go into law. I told him I was going to code for a living and live in a rented flat in East London with a Nigerian woman who mocks my chess strategy. He nearly had a stroke.”

“You told him about me?”

“I told him about the startup. Who I was working with came up.” Tom’s gaze flickered to hers, and there was something unguarded in it. “He asked if you were a ‘proper business partner’ or a ‘distraction.’ I told him you were both, depending on the hour.”

Jazz laughed despite herself, but the words settled in her chest like a warm stone. She looked down at the chessboard, at her pieces poised in defensive formation.

“My parents,” she said, slowly, “they didn’t come to England for opportunity. They came because of the war. Because my father’s shop got burned down in riots and there was nothing left.” She remembered the story in fragments, the way her mother told it—sharp pieces of a life she’d only visited in photographs. “They lost everything. Twice, maybe three times. They started over in London with nothing but each other and two suitcases. My mother worked night shifts at a hospital. My father drove cabs. They put me and my brother through school and never once complained.”

Tom’s face had gone still.

“So when I say I’m scared of failing,” Jazz said, “it’s not about me. It’s about what their sacrifice bought. The only thing they asked of me was to make it count. And every time I don’t—” She swallowed. “Every time I fall short, it feels like I’m spitting on the life they built for me.”

The words hung in the air between them.

Tom set down his wine glass. Slowly, deliberately, he reached across the board and placed his hand over hers. The contact was warm, settled, steady. Not a grab or a claim—just an anchor.

“You haven’t,” he said quietly. “You aren’t. Jazz, some of us start out trying to win because our fathers made us feel small. But you? You started out trying to make your family proud.” He squeezed her fingers once. “That’s not a weakness. That’s a compass.”

Her throat tightened. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

The moment stretched, thick with something neither of them named. Tom’s thumb traced a slow arc across her knuckles, and she felt her pulse pick up outside the bounds of the game.

His phone buzzed on the table, loud and jarring.

Tom blinked, pulled his hand back, and grabbed it. The spell fractured. She hated the buzzer for a moment, then hated herself for that.

“It’s Marcus,” Tom said, reading the screen. Skin draining. “He says he wants to schedule a video call tomorrow. Something about ‘noticing a mismatch in our reported metrics.’” He looked up, pale. “Jazz. He’s onto the pricing.”

Her stomach dropped, the warm ease replaced by cold clarity. “Tomorrow? We’re not ready. We don’t have the pivot built. We don’t have any answer for him.”

“We have tonight,” Tom said, and for the first time the game was over.