Read Chapter 3: Cufflink

The key stuck in the lock like it always did on first tries, and Jazz had to jiggle it twice before the door finally groaned open. A wave of stale air and paint fumes hit them. The flat was exactly as they'd left it that afternoon: boxes stacked against the living room wall, airbeds still wrapped in plastic, and a kitchen that looked like it had been furnished from a skip. The only window in the main room faced a brick wall three feet away.

Jazz dropped her duffel bag by the door and surveyed the space. "I'll take the room on the left."

"Wait, what?" Tom pushed past her, already walking toward the bedrooms. "We agreed in the ad—both rooms are identical. You can't just call the left one."

"I called it first. That's how it works."

"That's not how anything works." He stopped in the doorway of the left bedroom. It was smaller than he'd remembered. Much smaller. "There's no way my desk fits in here."

"Then you put your desk in the living room like a normal person."

"I'm not working in the living room. Client calls, remember? I need somewhere professional." He leaned against the doorframe, crossing his arms. "You can work anywhere. You just need a laptop and a sketchpad."

Jazz stood in the hallway, her bag still on her shoulder. She could feel the heat building behind her ears, that familiar rush of indignation that Tom had always triggered, even back when they were both hiding in disused seminar rooms to avoid each other. "I need more space than you do. My materials—"

"You and your materials." He laughed, but it wasn't funny. Neither of them thought it was funny. "You've got, what, three boxes of fabric swatches? I've got a standing desk, a monitor setup, and a filing cabinet coming tomorrow."

"Then you should've checked the measurements before you signed the lease."

"I didn't sign the lease alone." He pointed at her. "You were there. You saw the state of this place. You still pushed for it."

"Because my rent was going up a hundred and fifty quid a week next month and I literally cannot afford—" She stopped herself. The words were out before she could pull them back, hot and desperate. She turned away, focusing on the peeling wallpaper by the light switch.

Tom was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice had lost some of its edge. "Look, I'm not saying—"

"I know what you're saying." Jazz rubbed her face. "You're saying you need the bigger room. Fine. Take it. I'll make do."

"That's not what I was going to say."

"Then what?"

He opened his mouth, then closed it. For a moment he looked almost lost, and Jazz remembered that beneath all the bluster, Tom had never been particularly good at apologizing, or even at knowing when he should. It was one of the things that infuriated her about him—right up there with his habit of taking up too much space in every conversation, every meeting, every argument.

"Forget it," he said finally. "We'll sort it out in the morning. I need to unpack."

They moved around each other like boxers in the cramped hallway, each retreating to their respective corners. Jazz took the left room. She felt a small, petty victory about that, even if the room turned out to have a radiator that clanked every time the boiler kicked in, and a mark on the wall that looked disturbingly like a fist print.

She set up her airbed and was just arranging her sketchbooks on a shelf made of reclaimed timber and cinderblocks when she heard it. A sharp, frustrated noise, then the sound of something being thrown into a cardboard box.

"Everything okay in there?" she called, not entirely wanting to know.

"Fine." A pause. "No. My cufflink's gone."

Jazz set down her pencil and walked to his door. Tom was standing amid a scattered pile of clothes and toiletries, patting down his coat pockets with increasing urgency. His hair was standing up on one side, as if he'd run his hand through it repeatedly.

"Cufflink?" she said. "You wear cufflinks?"

"My father's." He said it shortly, almost defensively. "Gold. With a little ruby in it. He wore it to every pitch meeting he ever had. It's my lucky charm."

Jazz leaned against the doorframe. "You're being serious? A successful tech entrepreneur is telling me he believes in lucky charms?"

"It's not a charm, okay? It's—" He shook his head and dug his hand into another pocket. "It's a thing. It was his. I've had it for nine years and I've never lost it before."

"Maybe the move. It's probably in a box somewhere."

"None of my boxes are unpacked yet. I kept it in my coat pocket like I always do." He pulled the coat off the hanger and shook it. Nothing. He started checking the pockets again, his movements growing more frantic.

Jazz watched him for a moment. She'd never seen Tom frazzled like this. In every pitch meeting, every investor call she'd watched from the other side of the table, he'd been a rock. Confident. Unshakeable. Arrogant, even. This version of him—pale and skittish, repeating the same motions in a hopeless loop—was someone she didn't recognize.

"Let me help," she said, stepping into the room.

"I don't need—"

"Well, you're not doing a very good job alone, are you?"

They searched together for twenty minutes. Jazz checked the hallway, the bathroom, the kitchen counters—systematic, methodical, lifting every object. Tom tore through his bags, his clothes, the folds of his coat. No cufflink.

"It's not here," Tom said finally. He was sitting on the edge of his airbed, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. "It's just gone."

Jazz leaned against the doorframe. She should probably say something comforting. About how things turn up in moves, how he'd find it in a week, how losing one lucky cufflink didn't mean anything. But Tom had called her six times that afternoon when the demo dashboard had run slow on his laptop, and the words caught in her throat.

Maybe it's a sign, she thought, and then immediately felt guilty for it.

"It'll turn up," she said instead. It sounded hollow, and neither of them believed it.

Tom shook his head slowly. He was looking at something Jazz couldn't see—something a long way off. "My dad wore this cufflink the day he closed his first big contract. And then on the day I got into uni. And when I quit my last job to start the company." He laughed, a hollow sound. "I've never made a big decision without it. Not one."

Jazz had a sharp memory of Tom Brown from their university days, always at the front of the class, always with an answer ready. She'd hated him for that easiness. But this—the flicker of genuine fear in his eyes at the thought of making decisions alone—was something else entirely.

"It's just a cufflink," she said gently.

"It's not." He looked up at her, and for the first time since she'd known him, he dropped his guard completely. "My mum gave it to me at the funeral. Told me that if I ever felt stuck, I should hold it and remember that Dad trusted me to figure things out." He swallowed. "We've got twenty-six days left until Marcus's deadline, and I'm stuck. I'm more than stuck. I'm running on borrowed runway and pure luck, and I just lost the last piece of it."

Jazz didn't know what to say to that. She stood in the doorway of their new shared flat, surrounded by boxes and dust and the weight of two careers spiraling at the edge of failure, and she felt her carefully maintained irritation with Tom crack like ice in warm water. This wasn't the smug, insufferable Tom who talked over her in meetings and dismissed her design instincts in favor of "user metrics." This was just a man, afraid, clutching at the memory of his father.

The radiator clanked. She shivered in the cold.

"Okay," she said. "We'll find it tomorrow. We'll unpack everything and we'll find it. But right now, we need food and we need sleep. And in the morning, you can tell me about your dad's cufflink like a normal person, and I'll help you look for it properly."

Tom looked at her, surprise flickering across his face. "Why are you being nice to me?"

"I'm not nice," she said. "I'm pragmatic. If your luck's broken, we're both in trouble. I need you functioning by nine a.m. tomorrow, because we've got a demo to fix and a hundred and ninety-three hosts to chase before the deadline."

He almost smiled at that—a genuine smile, not one of his slick investor-facing ones. It changed his face, made him look younger, less polished.

"Alright," he said. "Pragmatic. Got it."

She turned to leave, then paused. "And Tom?"

"Yeah?"

"If we find it, I'm telling everyone at the next pitch that you're secretly a superstitious old man."

"Whatever gets you through the day, Jazz." He was still almost smiling as she closed the door behind her.

In her room, Jazz sat on her airbed and stared at the fist-shaped mark on the wall. Twenty-six days. Two hundred hosts to reach. And a partner who believed his entire fortune was sewn into a cufflink, somewhere in the chaos of boxes and dust and the wreckage of their fresh start.

She pulled out her notebook and wrote down three things:

1. Find the cufflink. 2. Fix the onboarding flow. 3. Do not fall for him again.

She underlined the third one. Twice.