Read Chapter 26: Aftermath

The flat felt smaller than it had yesterday. Smaller and colder, as if the argument had sucked the warmth out of the radiators and left the walls humming with static. Jazz stood at the kitchen counter, staring at the mug of tea she hadn't touched for twenty minutes. The tea had gone grey.

She heard Tom in his room. The occasional creak of floorboards. The soft clack of his keyboard pausing, starting, pausing again. He hadn't come out since their fight, and she hadn't gone to find him. The kitchen was hers. The bathroom was neutral territory. The living room belonged to no one now.

The 48-hour deadline ticked in her head like a clock she couldn't turn off. She'd checked her phone a dozen times. Nothing from the incubator. Nothing from Miles. Nothing from anyone except her mother, asking how the 'young man' from the dinner was doing. Jazz had swiped the notification away without replying.

Her laptop sat open on the counter, the screen dark. She hadn't opened it since she'd slammed it shut. Every time she thought about the startup—their startup—her chest tightened. Why her name was on that patent with a lie. Why she'd known. Why she'd *covered* for it.

She pulled her hand through her hair and turned to the stack of mail by the door. Junk mostly. Electric bills. A flyer from a local Thai place. And then—Priya's name.

The envelope was plain, thick paper, addressed to Priya Sharma in careful handwriting. Jazz picked it up. It had been sitting there for two weeks, maybe three. She'd never opened it, never even thought about it beyond the occasional glance. Priya had been gone before Jazz had even arrived. The third co-founder. The one who'd walked away six months ago without a word.

Jazz turned the envelope over. No return address.

She remembered Tom's version: Priya had gotten cold feet. She remembered the company documents: Priya's signature on the original incorporation papers, before she'd vanished. Before the startup had become two people pretending to be a team.

Her phone buzzed. A text from Tom.

*I ordered food. It's your favourite. Please eat something.*

Jazz stared at the message until the screen dimmed. Then she put the phone face-down and picked up the envelope again. She ran her thumb along the edge, feeling the weight of it.

If Priya had walked away, maybe she'd know something. Maybe she'd know what made someone believe in this enough to start it and then leave it behind. Maybe she'd know how to walk away too.

---

The knock on her door came twenty minutes later. Jazz didn't answer. The knock came again.

"Jazz." Tom's voice was low, careful, the way you talk to someone who's holding a glass near the edge of a table. "I got the Thai place. The one with the green curry you like. And those prawn crackers you always order."

She stayed on her bed, cross-legged, the envelope still in her hands.

"I'll leave it here," he said. "On the table. Just—you should eat. We have forty hours and a lawyer call at three."

The lawyer call. Elijah Crane. The one Tom had hired that morning without asking her. When she'd found out—because he'd mentioned it in the same argument, as if it were a casual update—the air had turned nuclear.

"*You hired a lawyer without consulting me?*"

"*We don't have time to consult. We have forty-eight hours.*"

"*That's not how this works, Tom. That's not how anything works. You don't get to make decisions for both of us.*"

"*I'm trying to save us.*"

"*You're trying to save yourself.*"

The words had hung in the air, ugly and raw. She'd seen the flicker in his eyes, the hurt he'd tried to hide behind a defensive shrug. She'd wanted to take it back. She hadn't.

Now she heard him set something down on the table—the rustle of plastic bags, the clink of containers. He paused. She thought he might say something else. The floorboards creaked as he walked away.

She waited until his door closed. Then she stood, went to the door, and opened it.

The takeaway was there. Two bags, the steam curling against the plastic, the smell of coconut and lemongrass filling the hallway. She looked at it for a long moment. Her favourite. He knew what she ordered even before she'd told him them. That was the problem, wasn't it? He noticed things. He remembered.

She took the bags to the kitchen counter, unpacked them slowly. Green curry. Rice. Prawn crackers. She put everything out on two plates. One for her. One for him.

She knocked on his door.

He opened it fast—too fast, like he'd been waiting by it. His eyes went from her face to the two plates in her hands, and something shifted in his expression. Relief, maybe. Or wariness. It was hard to tell.

"I can't eat alone right now," she said. "It feels too much like a decision."

He stepped aside, letting her through.

---

They sat on opposite ends of his bed, plates balanced on their knees. He'd cleared his desk of papers to make room, but the room still looked like a war room—sticky notes on the walls, a whiteboard covered in diagrams she recognized as their voice-spec architecture. She hadn't been in his room since the night they'd built QuickSpec together. It felt like years ago, not days.

"This is weird," she said.

"Yeah." He picked at his rice. "I know."

"I meant the silence. The—whatever that was."

"I got that."

They ate in silence for a moment. The green curry was good. It was always good. He knew that too.

"Tom." She set her plate down, her appetite already fading. "Why didn't you tell me about the lawyer?"

He set his own plate down, wiped his mouth with a napkin, took a breath. A pause too long. A hesitation she'd come to read as him deciding which truth to offer.

"Because I knew you'd say we should handle it ourselves," he said. "Or that we should think about it. And I didn't want to give you the chance to talk me out of the only option we have."

"Handling it ourselves wasn't going to work."

"No."

"So why—"

"Because you said 'we'. You said *we* don't get to make decisions. But I've been making them alone since Priya left." He looked at her. "Not because I wanted to. Because there was no one else. And then you came, and I—" He stopped, shook his head. "I don't know what I thought. That you'd be on board. That we'd be a team. But I didn't start acting like one. I just kept making decisions the same way I always had."

Jazz looked down at her hands. "You could have told me. About the patent. About any of it. I'm not Priya, Tom. I didn't disappear."

"No. You stayed. You stayed when I didn't deserve you staying." He looked at the ceiling, swallowed. "I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm asking you not to leave before we've fixed it."

There was a lump in her throat. She pressed her fingers to her eyes, hard, until the pressure pushed the feeling back. "I looked at Priya's mail today."

Tom blinked. "What?"

"There's an envelope for her. Has been for weeks. I sat there holding it, wondering if she left because she knew how deep it goes. The lying. The scrambling. Waiting for everything to fall apart."

"And what did you decide?"

She looked up. "I decided I'm not her. I don't know if I'm staying because I believe in this or because I'm too stubborn to quit. But I'm not her."

He let out a breath, something loosening in his shoulders. "That's—that's not nothing."

"It's not everything either."

"I know." He picked his plate back up. "I know."

---

They finished eating without talking. It wasn't comfortable, but it wasn't the war zone it had been that morning. She thought about the next denarii—the forty hours, the lawyer, the financial review hanging over Wednesday like a knife. She thought about Daniel's father's law firm filing that claim, about the journalist Eleanor Vance waiting with her notebook. There were too many threats, and none of them had a simple answer.

She took her empty plate to the kitchen. On the counter, she saw her phone. Her mother's text still sat unanswered. She opened it, typed a quick reply, then paused.

Behind her, she heard Tom in the living room, moving papers. The sound of him trying to be quiet, trying not to push her.

So the patent was a lie. The company was built on an unstable foundation. And she'd known, and she'd stayed. That part was her choice. She hadn't made it fearfully or blindly. She'd made it because she saw something in the work that mattered more than the mess around it.

She picked up Priya's envelope and carried it to the kitchen bin. She dropped it in, closed the lid.

Then she walked into the living room where Tom was hunched over the coffee table, spreadsheets glowing on his laptop. He looked up as she entered.

"The lawyer at three," she said. "I'll be on the call."

He nodded. A pause hung between them like unsaid words.

"I'm still angry," she added. "That doesn't go away overnight. But I'm not going anywhere."

He held her gaze, and something passed between them—tired, raw, tentative, but there. "That's enough," he said. "For now."

She sat down across from him, opened her own laptop, and started looking at the claim documents. The clock on their deadline kept ticking. But for the first time today, she wasn't trying to count the seconds.