Read Chapter 22: The Slip

The drinks were warm and the canapés looked like they'd been sitting out since the Thatcher era, but the room was packed with the kind of people who could write cheques or introduce you to people who could. Jazz tugged at the sleeve of her blazer, the one good professional thing she owned, and scanned the crowd for Tom.

He was across the room, locked in conversation with a woman from a seed fund who kept touching his forearm. Jazz watched him nod along, offer that easy smile, and something twisted in her chest that she refused to name. Jealousy was an inefficient emotion. She'd read that somewhere. Probably on LinkedIn.

She was reaching for a glass of something bubbly when the voice came from behind her.

"Jazz?"

She knew it before she turned. That particular timbre, that half-ironic drawl that had once made her feel special and now just made her feel stupid.

Daniel.

He looked good, which was irritating. Same dark curls, same crooked grin, same expensive watch he'd bought with his father's money and pretended he'd earned. He was holding a drink and standing too close, and beside him was a blonde woman with a bored expression who was clearly his latest project.

"Wow," he said, his eyes travelling over her in a way that made her want to cross her arms. "You look—you look great. Really. London suits you."

"I live here, Daniel." Her voice came out sharper than she'd intended. "I've lived here for three years."

"Right, right." He laughed, a little too loudly. "Still doing that startup thing? The—what was it—the productivity app?"

"The AI-powered specification tool," she corrected, then immediately wished she hadn't. She didn't need to justify herself to him. She didn't need to explain anything to a man who had once told her that her ambition was "cute" right before he'd slept with her friend Sophie at a house party.

"Right, that." He took a sip of his drink. "How's that going? Raising a round?"

"I'm sorry," Jazz said, forcing a smile so tight her jaw ached. "I'm going to grab—"

"Jazz, wait." He put a hand on her arm, and the contact was electric in the worst way. A reminder of every time she'd trusted his touch. "I've actually been meaning to reach out. I heard about you and Marcus—sorry, that came out wrong. I heard about what happened with your company stuff, and I just wanted to say that if you ever need—"

"I don't."

"—a friendly ear. Or, you know, someone to talk to. Sophie and I ended things, in case you were wondering."

"I wasn't."

"She talked about you a lot, actually. Said she felt terrible about how everything went down. We all make mistakes, you know? Life's too short to hold grudges."

Jazz felt the heat rise from her chest to her face. Her hands were shaking. She was a competent, intelligent woman who had built a product from nothing and was navigating a hostile takeover from a shadowy investor, and yet this man—this mediocre, charming, emotionally stunted man—could still make her feel like the girl who hadn't been enough.

"I don't hold grudges," she said, and her voice cracked on the last word. "I just have standards."

She turned and walked toward the exit, her heels clicking too fast on the floor, her vision blurring at the edges. She made it to the corridor, found a corner near the cloakroom, and pressed her back against the wall, breathing hard.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She'd spent years building herself into someone who didn't get rattled, someone who ran board meetings and negotiated term sheets, and one conversation with Daniel Finch and she was twenty-one again, alone in a crowd, wondering why she wasn't enough.

She heard footsteps approach and braced herself for Daniel's voice.

Instead, Tom appeared, slightly out of breath, his tie slightly askew. He took one look at her face and stopped.

"Jazz."

"Don't." She held up a hand. "I'm fine. I just needed air."

"You're not fine." He said it without judgment, just a statement of fact. He took off his jacket and held it out to her. "You're shaking."

She looked down at her hands, still trembling, and hated herself for it. She took the jacket because it was warm and smelled like him—sandalwood and something clean, like rain on pavement—and wrapped it around her shoulders.

"That was your ex?" Tom asked, and his voice was carefully neutral.

"How did you know?"

"Because you went pale the moment he walked in. And because I saw him look at you the way people look at something they regret losing."

Jazz laughed, a hollow sound. "He didn't lose me. He traded me in. I was just an upgrade he hadn't finished installing."

Tom tilted his head. "That's a very specific metaphor."

"He cheated on me." The words came out flat, clinical, like she was reading from a list of product requirements. "With my friend. At a party. I walked in on them in the guest bedroom. His idea of an apology was a bouquet of wilted lilies and a lecture about how I'd been too focused on my career to meet his emotional needs."

She heard the bitterness in her own voice and hated it. She'd worked so hard to bury this. To fold it up and put it away in a drawer labelled "lessons learned, don't repeat."

"That's—" Tom started, then stopped. He ran a hand through his hair, which she'd noticed he did when he was trying to find the right words. "That's not about you, Jazz. You know that, right? People who cheat aren't choosing someone else. They're choosing the easier path."

She looked at him, really looked at him. His brow was furrowed with concern, his jaw tight with what looked like genuine anger on her behalf. This was the same Tom who had shown up at her flat in last week's downpour with a backup laptop because her charger had died right before a deadline. The same Tom who had silently slipped her grandmother's necklace back into her jewellery box when he found it lost beneath the sofa, instead of teasing her about it like she'd expected.

"I know it's not about me," she said quietly. "I know that logically. But there's a version of me that still thinks if I'd just been better—prettier, less focused, more fun—

"That version is wrong," Tom interrupted. His voice was firm, almost fierce. "That version is wrong, and I need you to hear that. You're the most capable, most driven, most genuinely brilliant person I've ever worked with. Anyone who can't see that is an idiot. And I say that as someone who's spent years calling you 'the enemy'."

Jazz laughed again, but this time it was softer, warmer, real.

"Thanks, Beaumont."

"The jacket's not a gift," he said quickly, but his eyes were soft. "I need it back before the event ends. It's my only suit jacket that fits properly."

"Your priorities are baffling."

"I'm a man of contradictions."

They stood there in the corridor, close enough that she could see the faint freckles across his nose that she'd only noticed in the past two weeks. He didn't look away, and neither did she. For a moment, the noise of the event faded to a distant hum.

"You should come back inside," he said quietly. "There's a fintech guy I want you to meet. He had a similar partnership dispute with his co-founder. His advice was—"

"Psychotic?" Jazz offered.

"Psychotic," Tom confirmed with a grin.

She pulled his jacket tighter around her shoulders and felt something loosen in her chest. A knot she'd been carrying since Oxford, or maybe longer.

"Okay," she said. "But if Daniel comes near me again, I'm delegating the confrontation to you."

"Finally, a use for my negotiation skills."

They walked back toward the ballroom, and Tom's hand brushed against hers. Neither of them pulled away.

Inside, the noise hit them like a wave. Tom steered her toward a tall man with glasses and a benign smile, and Jazz let herself be steered. She was back in the game. She was fine.

But when she glanced over her shoulder, she saw Daniel watching her from across the room. And she saw his eyes flick from her to Tom and back again. His expression was impossible to read.

Then he pulled out his phone.

Jazz turned back to Tom and forced herself to focus. But the prickle at the back of her neck wouldn't go away. Daniel knew something. Daniel always knew something.

And whatever it was, it was about to come for her.