“And smug. I hate it when they’re smug.”
The food arrives. I nudge the pancakes toward Destiny and she holds the maple syrup over the plate and pours for what feels like an entire minute.
“How’s it going?” I ask.
Immediately, she spears a pancake, shoves it into her mouth, and begins to cry. “Disaster,” she says. She looks so sad I can almost feel the tears running down her cheeks.
“Look,” I tell her. “Don’t make me hire one of those people on the shortlist Jules made for me.” I pull out my phone. “Instagram influencer since the age of eight. Two hundred thousand followers.” I turn the phone toward her. “I mean, look at this girl’s fingernails.”
“I think fake nails are the modern equivalent of foot binding. That and Botox.”
“At least with Botox you can still wipe your ass.”
“Yeah, but can you smile?” I’m relieved to see her cracking a smile herself.
“We sound like we’re a hundred years old.”
“This thing is aging me faster than a nicotine habit.”
“So will you do it?”
“I don’t want to be a pity hire.”
I swirl my coffee and down the last few drops. I can’t lie to her. “I’m having a hard time watching you struggle to get funding for what we both know is a killer idea.”
“Is it, though?”
“Of course it is. Who doesn’t want safer sex?”
“Apparently, everybody.” I see her eyes start to water again.
“Just do it for a few months. You can still put out some feelers for Consentify, and if you get funded, you can abandon me to my toddler brigade, okay?”
She straightens up, wiping her face. “Okay,” she says, nodding, and we stand up and hug over the mini pancakes floating in their sticky amber lake.
* * *
Gaby has implemented an executive team meeting every afternoon, which means that at three p.m., Cyrus, Jules, Gaby, and I go down to the café and talk about what we’re doing that day. We have four months till launch.
It’s my turn to start. “I’ve got the wireframes.” I show them my screen. Cyrus leans down and scans the page. The logo he’d drawn all those months ago is blue, and the circles are interconnected. The home page has three panels: one where you can scroll through the rituals created for others, another that invites you to create your own after answering eight questions （we did the user testing, Ren has told me, and ten is too many, and five is too few; plus, Cyrus says, eight is a lucky number in China）， and the third, where you can post messages to your community—the people who asked for the same rituals—sort of like a bulletin board in your favorite café. Or church, for that matter.
Cyrus isn’t sure about the logo.
“But it’s the one you sketched,” I tell him.
“Yeah, but the colors.”
Jules glances at the screen. “I think it’s fine.”
“Can you ask Ren to send me a few options?”
“Okay. But what do you think of the layout?”
Cyrus gets a notebook out and starts to sketch. “What if we put the messaging at the bottom, sort of like a ticker tape?”
“Sure.” I sigh. “We can try that.”
“Sorry to break up the party, but we need to talk about finances,” Gaby says. “We’ve had some unforeseen expenditures, which means we now have six months of runway, not eight.”
“I thought we had ten,” Cyrus says.
“Yeah,” I say, “that’s what I thought.”
“You guys don’t read a single thing I send you, do you?” Gaby says.
I pretend not to hear him.
“Our overheads are higher than we forecasted,” Jules explains. “And we have to spend on customer acquisition right off the bat—ads are getting more expensive.”
Cyrus turns to me. “How long till you can get a beta out, Asha?”
I do some calculations in my head. “I could squeeze something out in three months.”
We look through the glass at the twelve people all plugged into their headphones. “I’ll do my best,” I say. “Oh, and by the way, Destiny is our new head of marketing.” I say a number. “Gaby, you have to pay her. She can’t make her rent this month.”
* * *
After that, Ren and I work around the clock. We hire two other designers and a front-end developer. Ren drives them all hard, using little other than his own example and the occasional sidelong glance. We’re mainlining the ginseng-doused cold brew that Rory has cooked up in his lab, and I’m up so many hours that I don’t even notice the jitters. I crawl into bed （a mattress on the floor which is lucky if it sees a pillowcase）， spooning myself around a sleeping Cyrus, waking up around noon, and rolling up to the office with a Ziploc of Cheerios and a single-serve pack of peanut butter.