Read Chapter 21: The Countdown

The calendar on the fridge had three red circles left before the lease expired, and Jazz had started crossing off days with a violence that felt almost personal. She stood in front of it now, marker in hand, and drew a thick line through Thursday.

Two weeks until they had to impress a bigger fish. Two weeks until Alex's conditional offer either became real money or dissolved into another round of clever investor phrases that meant *no*. Two weeks until the boiler guy came on Friday and turned their living room into a construction site.

"You're going to give yourself carpal tunnel," Tom said from the kitchen counter, where he was nursing a coffee the color of motor oil. His hair stuck up in three different directions, and Jazz noted with distant satisfaction that his "I woke up at five to code" look was not, in fact, attractive. It was rumpled and tired and somehow still made her stomach flip when he smiled at her.

She capped the marker. "We need one hundred beta users before Friday's pitch deck goes out. We have forty-three."

"Forty-four. Leo signed up at 3 a.m."

"Leo's your cousin."

"Leo's a supplier who uses chat for everything. That counts."

Jazz opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. They'd been circling each other for three days now—since Miles's little bombshell, since Jazz had demanded every file from Tom's father, since they'd both gone quiet in a way that wasn't restful but was at least productive. The startup stuff they could do. The other stuff, the *them* stuff, they'd shoved into a corner of the flat like the pile of Tom's laundry that lived permanently on the armchair.

She joined him at the counter. "I have an idea."

Tom raised an eyebrow. "You always have an idea. That's your thing."

"My thing is product design. This is a feature." She pulled up a wireframe on her laptop, turning it toward him. "I've been working on it in the margins. It's a voice-note capture system for supplier chats. Instead of typing out specs or scrolling through old messages, suppliers can leave a voice note attached to a specific SKU, and it auto-transcribes into the order history with time stamps."

Tom leaned in. He smelled like coffee and the faint musk of having slept in his clothes. Jazz ignored that. She pointed at the screen.

"It solves the biggest complaint from our beta users—that typing specs takes too long and gets lost. Voice notes are native to how suppliers actually work. They're on the floor, hands full, they don't want to type."

Tom was quiet for a long moment. Jazz watched his face shift from polite interest to genuine focus, his eyes tracking the wireframes, his fingers tapping the table as he worked through the logic.

"Auto-transcribes," he repeated. "With what engine?"

"The lightweight NLP one we built for the AI concept. It's already trained on industry jargon. We're not launching the full assistant, but this—this is just a wrapper on existing tech."

"You want to strip a piece of the AI engine into the MVP."

"I want to *use* the thing we already built and almost lost. Alex said no AI engine. But this isn't a decision engine. It's a transcription utility. It's a feature, not a product."

Tom's silence went on long enough that Jazz felt her pulse pick up. She'd been working on this in secret for two nights, sketching while he coded, testing the transcriptions on her own voice notes while pretending to read. If he said no—if he said it was too risky, too close to the promise they'd made Alex—she didn't know what she'd do with the hours she'd already sunk.

Then Tom exhaled, low and slow, and a grin spread across his face.

"That's brilliant."

Jazz blinked. "I'm sorry, could you repeat that? I want to record it for posterity."

"I said it's brilliant. Don't let it go to your head." He pulled the laptop closer, scrolling through her notes. "The transcription accuracy on the jargon—how'd you train it?"

"I fed it auction catalogs and logistics manifests. Three thousand hours of data we already had from the pilot."

"Three thousand hours." He looked up at her, and there was something new in his eyes. Not the competitive spark she usually saw, not the wary respect they'd earned from each other. This was admiration. Plain and unguarded. "You did all this in the margins?"

"Some of us don't sleep, either. We just use the time differently."

Tom laughed—a real one, not the tight chuckle he'd been rationing out since Miles's call. He pushed the laptop back toward her. "Okay. We ship it. But we're calling it QuickSpec, and I'm writing the transcription engine integration tonight."

"QuickSpec's a terrible name."

"QuickSpec's a *great* name. It's functional. It tells you exactly what it does. Unlike your name."

"I didn't have a name. I had a feature."

"Which is why you need me."

Jazz opened her mouth to fire back, but the words died in her throat. Because Tom was looking at her like she'd just handed him a winning lottery ticket, and the warmth in his expression made the flat feel smaller, hotter, more full of him than it had any right to be.

She looked away. "We need to test it with the existing beta users before Friday. Get feedback, iterate."

"I'll tag five suppliers tonight. You handle the UX copy and the onboarding flow. If we get QuickSpec in front of the remaining fifty-seven users we need, we hit one hundred by Thursday."

"Thursday's optimistic."

"Thursday's *necessary*." Tom stood, already reaching for his laptop. "I'll wire up the voice capture UI. You handle the transcription threading."

They fell into the rhythm they'd built over the last three months—Jazz at the kitchen table with her design tools, Tom sprawled on the couch with his code, their backs to each other but their work interlocking like puzzle pieces. She'd draft a screen, he'd integrate it. He'd hit an error, she'd talk him through the logic. They traded coffee refills without asking, and at some point Jazz realized the boiler repair scheduled for Friday had become a non-issue because they'd stopped thinking about the flat entirely and started thinking about the product.

By midnight, they had a working prototype.

Jazz leaned back in her chair, stretching her neck until it cracked. Tom was still typing, his face lit by the blue glow of his screen, and she found herself watching the way his fingers moved, quick and sure, the way his brow furrowed when he hit a snag.

"I'm thinking," she said, "that this might actually work."

Tom didn't look up. "The feature or us?"

The question hung in the air between them, heavier than either of them intended. Jazz opened her mouth to deflect, to make a joke, to say something safe and neutral.

Then Tom's phone buzzed.

He glanced at it, and his face went white.

"What?" Jazz said.

Tom turned the phone toward her. It was an email—from Marcus, with the subject line: *Re: Your Questions About the Metrics.*

Jazz's stomach dropped. The video call they'd been avoiding, the one about the false pricing metrics that had nearly tanked their demo. Marcus had finally responded.

"You told me you handled this," she said, her voice thin.

"I told you I was working on it."

"Tom—"

"It's fine." He was already opening the email, his jaw tight. "It's probably just him confirming the meeting time. We're fine."

But the email wasn't a meeting confirmation. It was a detailed breakdown—a spreadsheet attached, a list of every transaction where their pricing data had been wrong, and a closing line that made Jazz's blood run cold.

*Given the extent of the discrepancies, I'll need to discuss this with the other stakeholders. Including Miles.*

Jazz looked at Tom. The admiration from an hour ago was gone, replaced by something harder, more desperate.

"Friday," she said. "The boiler. The one thing we can control—and we can't even control that."

Tom ran a hand through his hair. "We'll figure it out. We always do."

But for the first time, Jazz wasn't sure she believed him.