The access door gave its familiar click and the office inhaled the street. Honks layered over “chai, chai!” and a man arguing about a cracked screen somewhere below. Raghav slipped in on that breath like it could keep him upright, badge still swinging on his chest, the taste of too-strong coffee already sitting bitter at the back of his throat.
Morning light skimmed the glass partitions and turned every smudge into an accusation. The open-plan looked temporarily innocent: whiteboards wiped almost clean, chairs tucked in, the little festival shelf still holding yesterday’s half-burnt agarbatti. Someone had left a marigold strand drooping like it had also pulled an all-nighter.
At the pantry, the kettle rattled as it came to boil again. “Filter coffee khatam?” one of the engineers muttered, more to the universe than to anyone in particular, rummaging through tiffin boxes for a packet of sugar.
Raghav’s phone vibrated, Slack, then a calendar reminder, then a missed call from Amma he didn’t let himself register fully. He kept walking, because stopping meant thinking.
The mounted screen in the pitch corner blinked to life with a cheerful chime that felt personally insulting. The dashboard loaded: green, amber, red: metrics arranged with the calm cruelty of truth. Tickets open. Response times slipping. A churn graph that dipped just enough to make his scalp tighten.
“Good morning, guys,” he said, voice clipped, already too loud in the quiet. A couple of heads lifted, eyes rimmed with tiredness. Someone’s laugh started and died quickly.
Kavi’s camera sat on a desk near the window like a small witness; she wasn’t here yet, but her presence lingered in the clutter of sticky notes and an off-kilter desk lamp. Raghav caught himself looking for her and hated the reflex.
From somewhere near the backend pod, a whisper: “Bhai, I’m crashing.” The words slid under everything. Under the kettle’s hiss, under the traffic, under the chime of the screen.
Raghav’s fingers curled around his phone until the edges bit. He forced his gaze away from the red bars and into the room, as if by scanning faces he could keep the whole system from tipping.
Raghav moved through the aisle like it was a deadline he could physically cross. Sleeves rolled, collar open, the muscle in his jaw ticking as if it had its own sprint plan. Slack lit his screen in staccato bursts: client escalations, a late-night deploy note, a single-line “pls confirm” from someone who’d stopped trusting silence. He flicked it away, thumb already on Jira, because numbers were easier than tone.
He reached the pitch corner and dropped his laptop on the table a little too hard. The thud made two people look up, then look down again, pretending it hadn’t landed in their ribs. He didn’t sit. Sitting meant the room could trap him in small talk, in concern, in the softness that leaked time.
His eyes ran over the desks. Hydration bottles untouched, dark circles, one person’s hands shaking slightly over a trackpad. Someone avoided his gaze with the devotion of self-preservation. Another offered a smile that didn’t reach anywhere.
Raghav swallowed, throat raw from coffee and unslept nights, and forced his shoulders into place. Drift was a luxury they couldn’t afford. He’d promised them one more sprint. He just had to make it true.
“Okay, quick: blockers,” Raghav said, the words coming out in practiced Hinglish like muscle memory. He planted himself at the edge of the pitch table, laptop open, eyes flicking between faces and the Jira board as if both were equally solvable.
“API rate limits?” he snapped, then softened it half a degree. “Haan, tell.”
Responses came in fragments (“waiting on QA,” “client wants it today,” “I didn’t get the creds”) each one a small confession in an office that didn’t know how to whisper. Raghav translated every hesitation into a task: assign, tag, set an owner. “You take this. You pair with him. Timeline. Cut it to EOD.”
A chair creaked. Someone exhaled hard. The open-plan magnified it all, and he pretended it didn’t.
A teammate leaned in, voice softer than the fan’s lazy chop. “Bhai, I’m crashing.” For half a beat Raghav’s gaze caught, on the slack shoulders, the trembling fingers, guilt flaring beneath the clean comfort of metrics. He nodded too quickly, like agreement could replace sleep. “Haan, after this deploy, five minutes. Tea break.” And he kept the stand-up rolling.
Near the prayer shelf, the diya’s flame quivered inside its steel cup, throwing thin light over marigolds that had started to brown at the edges. Opposite, the KPI board sat in thick marker like a verdict. Raghav reached out and tapped one number then rolled straight into the next update. “Next. Payments flow: status?” He didn’t look up.
Raghav took the call standing because if he sat, he might feel how bad his head hurt. One palm flattened on the desk edge, knuckles whitening against the laminate, he angled his body away from the open-plan so his face didn’t become a company-wide broadcast. The mounted screen reflected a version of him he couldn’t afford to be (slumped, blinking too slowly) so he kept his gaze on a neutral point: the window latch, a smear of dust, anything that wasn’t the burn-rate sheet lying half-hidden under a tiffin lid.
“Good afternoon, sir. Yes, I’m on,” he said, voice level, the kind that made clients relax and teams wonder why he didn’t speak to them like that.
A chorus of distant keyboard taps and the chai vendor’s shout from downstairs leaked into the silence between sentences. He paced half a step, then stopped, as if the floor itself had boundaries.
The client came in sharp. “Your demo looked fine, but live support is messy. Our ticket spikes are unpredictable. What happens when it breaks at 11 p.m.?”
Raghav didn’t reach for the notes Kavi had stuck to his monitor with neon tape because he didn’t need them. He threaded through the objection the way he threaded through traffic on Old Airport Road: eyes forward, decisions made before the horn. “For your current volume, roughly eight to nine thousand tickets a day, peaking at twelve on sale days, we’ll keep response-time under thirty seconds for first touch on WhatsApp and under ninety for email. That’s with your existing agent count. If you scale agents, we scale throughput; it’s linear, not magical.”
“Pricing?” the client cut in.
“Three tiers,” Raghav said smoothly. “Base covers omnichannel and analytics. Growth adds integrations and custom workflows. Enterprise is dedicated infra and SLA-backed uptime. Given your volume, Growth makes sense; anything else is either waste or optics.”
A pause. A different voice, legal or procurement, cool as an invoice. “And data?”
“India region, encrypted at rest and transit. Access logs, role-based permissions, and we can do a VAPT report before go-live,” he replied, as if compliance was as simple as a checkbox.
He muted for a second, pressed two fingers to his temple when the pain pulsed, then unmuted before anyone could notice the gap. “If you want, we’ll start with one queue first prove the delta, then expand. No disruption.” His tone didn’t change even as his stomach tightened around the word prove.
“Rollout risk,” the client said, and the word landed like a stone on glass. “If your bot misroutes even ten percent, my agents will riot. What’s your plan when it goes sideways?”
Raghav didn’t flinch. He was already running numbers behind his eyes. “We don’t flip a switch for the whole org,” he said, voice calm enough to sound bored. “Week one: shadow mode. We ingest tickets, generate suggested replies, but your agents stay in control. We measure deflection, escalation, and CSAT impact. Daily.”
“And integration?” Procurement again, sharp.
“Two paths,” Raghav replied. “If you’re on Freshdesk/Zendesk, it’s plug-in level. Two to three days plus security review. If it’s custom, we use webhooks and a queue mirror; that’s ten working days, including UAT.”
The client pushed. “How many people on your side?”
“Two backend, one ML, one QA. On your side, one tech POC and one ops lead,” he said, quick as a status update. “Week two: pilot one queue, capped, say, 15 agents, five thousand tickets. If misroute exceeds two percent, we throttle and retrain. Week three: double the agents. Week four: full rollout.”
The call finally drops, and the silence hits like a delayed slap. Raghav’s thumb still finds the mute button, muscle memory from a hundred performances, then he realises there’s no one left to impress. His shoulders sag a fraction, the crisp shirt pulling tight across his back as if even fabric is judging him. The headache he’d been keeping at arm’s length rushes in, hot and insistent, and he pinches the bridge of his nose, eyes shut, bargaining with his own body the way he bargains with vendors: just give me twenty minutes, I’ll fix the rest. In the open-plan, someone laughs too loudly at a meme, and the sound drills straight through him. He swallows, jaw clenched, and forces his posture back into place.
He strode to the pantry like it could offer answers, snatched the steel tumbler off the counter, and drank the last of the filter coffee cold. It hit his tongue like punishment, bitter, metallic, over-brewed, yet he swallowed fast, throat working as if caffeine was medicine and not a choice. Eyes half-closed, he breathed through his nose, willing the ache to back off.
The burn-rate sheet sat open behind his inbox tab, a silent accusation. He let his eyes lock on the runway number, weeks, not months, until the digits blurred and his pulse decided to match them. No scrolling, no calculations, just a hard stare like denial could buy time. Then he twitched the cursor, straightened his shoulders, and arranged his face into something unreadable before anyone could look up.
By noon, exhaustion had stopped being a mood and become a measurable defect.
Raghav watched the CI dashboard like it owed him money. Green ticks lined up obediently, then a warning flickered. One test suite skipped. He clicked through the logs, fingers moving fast, mind faster. A retry. Another green. The kind of pass that wasn’t a pass, just a temporary ceasefire.
“Who touched the refund flow?” he asked, keeping his voice neutral on purpose.
A couple of heads lifted, then dropped again. Chairs creaked. Somebody’s phone buzzed and was silenced with the reflex of guilt.
Nikhil, usually too eager, cleared his throat. “I did a small patch, bhai. Only the regex. It was failing for… you know, UPI IDs with dots.”
“Did you add a test?” Raghav asked.
Nikhil blinked, slow, like the question itself was an extra sprint. “I… I ran it locally. It passed.”
That sentence landed with a dull thud in Raghav’s chest. Passed. Like that was a guarantee, like their product lived in a clean little laptop universe and not in the mess of merchants and edge-cases and angry WhatsApp screenshots.
Kavi, slumped sideways in her chair with her camera strap looped around a wrist, murmured, “Our favourite word. ‘Passed.’” Her eyes met his for a second: half teasing, half alarmed.
From the other end of the pod, Ayesha didn’t look up from her screen. “We’ll write tests after the demo, na? We just need it not to crash today.”
Raghav opened his mouth, ready to lecture about debt and discipline, and felt the headache pulse like an argument of its own. He swallowed it down. “No,” he said, quieter. “We write tests before it crashes in staging and takes the demo with it.”
A pause. Not defiance: just depletion. The kind that made everyone stare at their monitors as if the pixels could absorb blame.
Then the alert came. Staging error rate spiked, a red line climbing with the confidence he wished his pitch deck had. Raghav’s chair scraped back. “Okay,” he said, voice tightening. “Everyone on this. Now.”
Near the whiteboard, the argument stayed polite the way exhaustion made everything polite: soft voices, clipped sentences, eyes fixed anywhere but each other.
“We can’t keep adding flows,” Ayesha said, marker tapping the same box again and again. “Scope is swallowing stability.”
Nikhil’s laugh was mostly air. “And stability won’t save us if the partner thinks we’re basic. They want the full stack, refunds, multilingual, WhatsApp handoff. Otherwise why will they pick us?”
Kavi, perched on the edge of a desk, muttered, “They’ll pick whoever doesn’t crash on stage.”
Raghav heard it all before he saw it. The tone carried, Indiranagar traffic, chai-vessel clinks, and under it, the thin thread of his team fraying. He stepped out of the glass cabin and the conversation snapped shut mid-breath, like someone had hit mute.
He didn’t ask what they were fighting about. He could list it himself: every feature a bet, every bug a betrayal. He walked up to the board anyway, shoulders set, eyes scanning lines and sticky notes for slack. Anything he could cut without cutting hope.
“No drama,” he said, voice even. “Tell me what breaks first.”
A shadow stalled at the edge of the glass, hesitant enough that Raghav noticed it even through three overlapping dashboards. Sahil, new joiner, still with that campus neatness, held his laptop like a shield, a draft email open, subject line screaming in polite caps: Leave Request.
Raghav didn’t invite him in; the cabin wasn’t really a room, just a display. “Haan, bolo.”
Sahil’s throat worked. “I… I need leave next week, sir.” His eyes stayed glued to the floor tiles, like they could absorb the disappointment first.
Raghav exhaled through his nose. Weeks. Cliff. Demo. “How many days?”
“Two,” Sahil said quickly, still not looking up. Then, softer, pre-emptive. “If it’s not possible, I’ll manage.”
Slack pings kept breeding. He fired back replies on autopilot, brisk and sharp, trimming context like fat. Mid-sentence he paused, thumb hovering, noticing how keyboards stilled: how the whole floor learned to breathe quietly after him.
His phone buzzed again, Maa lighting up the screen like an accusation. He didn’t open the message. Just turned it face-down, as if contact with the glass could mute obligation. The missed call didn’t vanish; it pooled in the room, dense and personal, tightening his jaw. He flexed his fingers once, then forced them back to the trackpad, eyes refusing to look away.
Inside the cabin, the glass gives him back a version of himself he doesn’t have time to be. Cheekbones sharper, eyes ringed in a purplish half-moon, collar still crisp only because he’s stopped noticing when sweat dries. The reflection floats over his laptop like an unwanted watermark.
Two tabs sit pinned at the top of his browser, immovable. Partnership. Make or break in a Trello board he’s turned into a shrine: columns titled Legal, Pilot, Decision Maker, Risks, each card a small, quiet demand. Beside it, Gmail: a thread with an investor whose subject lines have started to sound like condolences.
“Let’s reconnect after Q4.”
“Appreciate the progress. Send an updated deck.”
“Aligning internally; will revert.”
Revert. As if his entire life is a code branch they can discard.
He drags the cursor to his calendar and the month view pops up, a grid of meetings stacked on meetings, demo rehearsal, compliance call, hiring screen, “Founders’ Gala, Bengaluru” sitting there in bold like a dare. He clicks into the week and counts days the way he counts cash burn: one, two, three. His mind automatically converting hours into payroll into the last line of their bank statement.
The number lands anyway. It thuds behind his ribs, heavy and mathematical.
He flicks away from the calendar too fast, like the act of looking could summon an invoice. His hand goes to his temple, presses, releases. The tension headache feels like a small, stubborn screw he can’t loosen.
Outside, the office noise is filtered by glass: muffled laughter, a chair scraping, the chai vendor’s call from downstairs bleeding up through the building. Somewhere on the floor, someone is explaining a bug in Hindi, the kind of patient voice Raghav hasn’t used in weeks.
He opens the partnership doc again and types a note to himself in the margins: Need decision maker’s direct number. Stop routing through procurement. Then he deletes “Stop,” rewrites it as “Try,” and hates himself for the softening.
His phone lights up once more. No name this time: just a preview of Maa’s message. Beta, call when free. Important. The glass reflects his thumb hovering, not touching, as if denial is a feature he can ship.
A Slack ping blooms in the corner of his screen like a rash. Arjun, Sales: “New inbound. Wants 30% off. Says competitor is cheaper. What do I tell him?”
Raghav doesn’t even exhale. His fingers are already moving, assembling a sentence the way he assembles demos. “We don’t compete on price. We compete on outcomes. Offer pilot with clear ROI, not discount. Position value: reduced ticket time, happier customers, less churn.”
He hits send before the doubt can catch up, the little green checkmark arriving like applause.
Then he reads it again.
We don’t compete on price.
As if they have the luxury to be principled. As if runway is an optional feature. The words sit there, crisp and upright, pretending his chest isn’t tight with the maths of payroll. In text, confidence has no tone. Only posture. And his posture, he realises, is starting to look like arrogance.
Outside the cabin, someone laughs too loudly, as if trying to prove they’re not scared. Raghav flexes his jaw, stares at the message thread, and waits for Arjun’s reply like it can decide whether he’s a founder or a fraud.
LinkedIn opens like a reflex, blue icon, endless scroll, while his dashboard wheel keeps spinning. A competitor’s post takes over the screen with practiced brightness: a grinning team in matching tees, confetti somewhere just out of frame, and a big-client logo dropped like a mic. AI support for Indian SMBs, at scale, the caption says, neat and smug in its simplicity.
Raghav’s thumb jerks upward, too fast, as if speed can scrub the words off his retina. For a second he swears he can smell that kind of success. Fresh paint, new furniture, money that isn’t nervous. He catches himself hovering back, wanting to reread, to dissect the claim like a bug report. His pulse ticks higher. He locks the phone, hard, and the dark screen throws his own tired eyes back at him.
He yanks up their dashboard, fingers sure even as his stomach isn’t. Median first-response time: down. Resolution rate: up. A neat green arrow on “retention,” because “stable” is what you call churn when you can’t afford honesty. The lines look clean, almost triumphant, but he can feel how thin they are, one client escalation, one slipped SLA, one delayed signature, and the whole narrative flips.
He pushed out of the glass cabin and into the open-plan hum, wearing briskness like armour. Phones rang, keyboards clacked; someone’s tiffin smell cut through burnt coffee. “Quick sync on tonight’s sprint,” he said, projecting calm, not waiting for consent. He kept moving, steering them toward the stairs, because if he paused, the fear would catch up.
On the terrace the air had that Bengaluru midnight bite: cool enough to wake you up, polluted enough to keep you honest. Raghav drags the whiteboard closer with his foot; the plastic legs scrape against concrete and someone winces like it’s a personal insult. He uncaps the marker. It squeaks, a thin protest, then dies halfway through the first line.
“Of course,” he mutters, shaking it hard, as if force is a substitute for ink. His knuckles are stained faint grey from the last sprint, the one he’d also called “last.”
Below them the street is still alive: chai stall laughter, a bike revving, a song leaking tinny from a shop that refuses to sleep. Up here, the city feels like it’s partying in another timeline.
He draws the burn-down chart anyway, pressing until the tip bites. The line on the board looks decisive; his body doesn’t. The curve should be dropping faster. It isn’t. His eyes flick from the chart to his team. “Okay,” Raghav says, voice brisk by habit, “we’re not far. Two stories. The WhatsApp onboarding flow and the invoice-trigger integration. If we ship these, we can demo properly at the founders’ gala.” The word gala lands strange in his mouth, like something rich people eat with forks.
Someone clears their throat. It’s not defiance; it’s fatigue trying to become language.
“Raghav,” Sahana says carefully, “the QA cycle. “I know. But if we show stability, the partnership moves. We buy runway. We stop… living like this.”
His phone vibrates in his pocket, once, twice, an insistence he doesn’t check because he already knows the shape of that call: his mother’s warmth edged with worry, introductions dressed up as concern.
He forces a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, marker still in his hand like a conductor’s baton. “Just… tell me what blocks you. We’ll un-block. Fast.”
“Bas ek aur sprint,” Raghav says, and hears how it lands: like a slogan he’s said too many times, a bridge built from words over a gap that’s getting wider. He spreads his hands anyway, palms up, the universal gesture of see, I’m being reasonable, as if openness can substitute for sleep and overtime pay and the quiet terror sitting under everyone’s ribs.
His gaze does a quick sweep: faces lit by terrace spill-light and phone screens, eyes glassy with too much caffeine, shoulders rounded like they’re bracing for impact. He keeps his voice even, managerial-soft. “After this, we stabilise. Properly. We’ll rotate on-call. We’ll… breathe.” The last word comes out awkward, like a feature request.
Kavi leans on the parapet, camera strap digging into her wrist, watching him like she’s framing the moment for later. Sahana’s mouth tightens; Ankit stares past the city lights, jaw working. Nobody interrupts, and that scares him more than an argument.
He flashes the smallest smile, trying to sell hope. Inside, he counts hours, dependencies, and the exact amount of faith he has left to spend.
No one argues. It’s not loyalty so much as surrender dressed up as professionalism. A couple of heads dip in sync, slow nods that don’t meet his eyes, and the agreement lands in Raghav’s chest with the weight of a deadline. He watches them process it. “Okay,” he says, too quickly, filling the gap before it turns into a question he can’t answer. “We’ll split. Frontend. Backend. Invoice trigger. QA parallel.”
No one asks when do we stop? They’ve done the math. So has he. And still he lets them pretend this is choice.
Kavi raises her camera by instinct, finger hovering over the shutter like muscle memory, then thinks better of it and lets it drop against her chest. The quiet stretches until it starts collecting sounds: Ankit’s yawn bitten back, Sahana’s bangles clicking once as she shifts, a Slack notification chiming and getting smothered, a scooter tearing past and dissolving into the night.
From the street, a burst of laughter rises. Someone teasing the chaiwala, coins clinking, a bike horn answering like a joke. It climbs the building and lands on the terrace like warm air he can’t keep. Raghav stares at the blurred necklace of traffic lights, listening to that easy life running alongside his. Close enough to hear. Too costly, right now, to step into.
At 4:[^47] a.m., the terrace wind sharpens, slicing through the thin cotton on his forearms as if the city has decided he’s had enough warmth for one night. Raghav tucks his elbows in, shoulders creeping up to his ears. The skyline is a smudged gradient and his head pulses in time with the caffeine he’s been pretending is sleep.
His phone buzzes once.
Not a call. Not a barrage. A single, clean vibration, precise, urgent in its restraint.
He’s holding it before he’s consciously reached for it, thumb already swiping, the same reflex he has with dashboards: refresh, scan, interpret, brace. Somewhere in the office below, the team has finally gone quiet, laptops asleep or still open in surrender, but he can’t let himself believe the night is over. Nights don’t end. They just hand off to mornings.
The screen burns his eyes. He squints, blinks hard. Gmail. One new message. For half a second, he imagines it’s a client escalation: some angry all-caps, some screenshot proving their bot said something stupid at 3 a.m. Or his mother, forwarded WhatsApp screenshots turned into an email because she’s learned that’s the only way he replies.
Instead, the sender name makes his throat tighten: an assistant he’s seen CC’d on investor threads. A domain that smells like money and gatekeeping.
Kavi’s footsteps scrape lightly behind him, soft as an apology. “You okay?” she asks, voice low, like the terrace has ears.
“I’m fine,” he lies automatically, the way he lies to himself. He angles the phone away from her out of habit (information is leverage, information is risk) then hates himself for it. She’s family in the only way the startup has managed to manufacture.
Another gust lifts the edge of the marigold garland someone taped near the stairwell door. The petals shiver, almost comic in their persistence.
Raghav’s thumb hovers. His heart does that stupid thing: hope disguised as dread.
He taps.
The subject line is almost comically neat: Bengaluru Founders’ Gala , Invitation. No exclamation marks, no desperate marketing fluff: just authority dressed as brevity. He opens it and the copy unfurls in bulletproof corporate English: We are delighted to extend… an evening of innovation and capital stewardship… The kind of words that pretend money is a virtue.
His gaze flicks past the niceties to the specifics like he’s scanning a term sheet. Venue: a members-only heritage property he’s only ever heard referenced in founder circles with the same reverence as “Sequoia partner meeting.” Date. Dress code. Security protocol. A line about select media presence that makes his stomach tighten; optics aren’t a side dish here, they’re the main course.
Then the RSVP line lands, blunt as a deadline: Please confirm attendance by 7:[^00] p.m. today. No exceptions due to limited capacity.
End of day. Of course. As if his calendar isn’t already a controlled burn.
He scrolls once, looking for the hook, and finds it tucked in polite italics. One sentence that reads like a test he hasn’t studied for.
His eyes snag on the detail that matters more than the gold-lettered header: limited plus-ones. Not a warning. An instruction. A gate with velvet rope energy, filtering for people who already belong, or who can convincingly borrow belonging for one evening.
He rereads the line, jaw tightening, doing the mental math he hates. If he goes alone, he’s “scrappy founder” in a room full of legacy surnames and polished couples. If he brings someone, it’s a signal, stability, seriousness, a life that isn’t just burn rate and midnight deploys.
Kavi shifts beside him. “Plus-one? Like… date-date?”
Raghav exhales through his nose. “Apparently, investors also want proof you’re a functioning adult,” he says, and hears the edge in his own voice.
A line about curated introductions and select partnership conversations sits in the email like a thumb on his pulse. Raghav’s chest tightens, not from fear (he tells himself that) but from calculation. Names flicker behind his eyes: who controls the cheque, who controls the narrative. One handshake becomes runway, one staged photo becomes credibility. He refuses to count the weeks aloud, as if naming them makes them fewer.
He hovers over Accept, cursor blinking like it’s counting down his runway. His thumb jerks, too much coffee, too little sleep, and he hits Save, then opens the mail again as if it might change its mind. Plus-one. Seven p.m. He closes it, reopens it, saves it again. Not an invitation, he thinks. More like a valve on a pressurised system he’s been pretending isn’t about to burst.
Devanshpratap didn’t so much arrive as assemble out of the room’s sheen. One moment Raghav had a sliver of space between himself and the semicircle of donors, the next there was a shoulder beside his, a laugh threaded into the group’s rhythm like it had always been there.
A hand settled at the small of Raghav’s back.
Not a shove. Not a squeeze. A light, proprietary placement that made Raghav’s spine go rigid anyway, because he hadn’t given permission and because pulling away would look, to the wrong eyes, like discomfort. At a gala, discomfort was a confession.
Raghav kept his glass steady. He tilted his head just enough to register Dev in his peripheral: mid-30s polish, the kind of easy smile that made people lean in. Dev’s cufflinks caught the chandelier and threw back a tiny flare. Of course he was perfectly lit.
“Dev,” someone in the circle said, delighted, as if they’d been waiting for him to complete the picture.
Devanshpratap’s gaze met Raghav’s for half a beat (warm, amused) and then slid outward to include the others. “Sorry, I’m late. I got waylaid by your founder,” he said, like Raghav was a shared joke.
Raghav’s jaw tightened. Founder. Not CEO. Not by name. A label, convenient and portable.
“What are you drinking?” Dev asked, already half-turning toward a server, already performing care.
“I’m fine,” Raghav said, too quickly, then moderated his tone because the circle was listening. “Just… catching my breath.”
Dev’s hand didn’t move, but the pressure changed, infinitesimal. A reminder. Stay. Play along.
Raghav could feel the room’s eyes sliding over them, curious, approving, hungry for narrative. He hated that his body knew how to smile while his mind calculated exits.
Then Dev leaned in the way friends did, the way lovers could, voice lowered but not private. “You look like you’ve been running on filter coffee and spite,” he murmured, affectionate enough to draw a chuckle from the nearest donor.
Raghav’s pulse spiked. Dev was too close; Dev knew too much; Dev had timed it so there would be witnesses.
“Neon Nukkad has made Indiranagar look very smart lately,” he says, voice pitched for the people nearest to hear, and the compliment is so smooth it takes a second to feel the edge: Dev isn’t admiring the work; he’s placing a hand on it.
“Neon Nukkad has made Indiranagar look very smart lately,” Devanshpratap said, voice pitched at that precise, performative volume: loud enough for the nearest ears, soft enough to feel like he’d chosen intimacy. The compliment landed cleanly, even charming, and for a heartbeat Raghav let himself register the relief on a donor’s face: ah, founders, innovation, Bengaluru, a neat story.
Then the edge surfaced.
Dev wasn’t praising. He was claiming proximity. The phrasing had ownership stitched into it and his palm at Raghav’s back translated it into a physical fact.
Raghav’s smile stayed in place while his mind ran a quick audit. Who was watching? Two angel investors, one family-office heir, a journalist pretending not to listen. Every glance was a ledger entry. If he shrugged Dev off, it would read like drama. If he leaned in, it would read like consent.
“You’ve been… busy,” Dev added, eyes crinkling as if it was admiration. The pause before busy was surgical.
Raghav tasted metal at the back of his throat. Busy was what people called you when they’d already counted your hours for you.
Dev guided him. Not with force, with choreography. A slight turn of Dev’s shoulder, a soft laugh aimed at the circle, and suddenly Raghav found himself half a step off the toast’s axis, angled just enough that their faces could look like a private moment while still being framed by everyone’s peripheral vision.
Dev’s smile didn’t change. His fingers stayed light at Raghav’s back, as if they were only there to steady him.
“You keep telling people ‘a few months’,” Dev said, voice lazy, almost teasing. “But it’s, what: seven weeks? Eight, if receivables land on time.”
Raghav’s throat tightened. Dev said it the way you read the weather. Not as gossip. As data.
“And you know how donors hear ‘few’,” Dev added, pleasant. “They hear denial.”
Before Raghav could smooth his expression into something harmless, Dev let the next fact slip out: an investor’s name, the boardroom at Koramangala where the air had gone flat, the exact line that had iced the conversation: “We love the product, but we’re not sure about execution risk.” Dev said it like trivia, like everybody knew. Like Raghav’s closed doors were just glass.
Dev’s gaze stayed easy, almost affectionate, but it pinned the room into place. Who was leaning closer, who was pretending not to listen, which photographer had angled for their “candid”. His thumb brushed Raghav’s spine like reassurance, and the message underneath was blunt: I can make this look like partnership or panic. Raghav held his champagne flute too carefully, suddenly aware it could be photographed as proof of anything.
Between handshakes and practiced smiles, the phone vibrated again, tight, insistent, against the sweat-slick edge of Raghav’s palm. He kept his face arranged in the polite half-smile he’d perfected for rooms like this, chin tilted just enough to look attentive, while his thumb slid the screen awake behind the safety of his blazer.
Kavi’s name sat at the top like a flare.
“Call me after your speech, important, I think I remem, ”
The message ended mid-word, cut so abruptly it felt physical, like someone had snatched the sentence out of her mouth. No follow-up. No “sorry, network” or one of her chaotic voice notes with background traffic and a laugh that didn’t match the panic.
Raghav’s pulse ticked up, sharp and stupid. He tried to rationalise: she loses train of thought, she drops her phone, she gets distracted by a camera angle and forgets she was typing. Except Kavi didn’t usually forget to compensate. Kavi wrote herself breadcrumbs; she didn’t leave cliffs.
A man with a silk pocket square said something about “the Indiranagar vibe,” and Raghav gave a reflexive chuckle, nodding like he’d heard. His thumb hovered over the call icon, then stalled. Not now. Not in a room full of eyes that turned any deviation into a story. Not with Dev’s hand still a ghost at his back, guiding his posture.
He flicked into the thread details. Last seen: a time stamp that was already wrong by minutes. Her location pin, she’d shared it earlier, casually, like a joke, sat on a bland stretch of map, the kind that could be anywhere. No live movement. No blue dot drifting.
His stomach tightened. He typed, Kavi? You okay? Call me NOW. Deleted it. Retyped: Where are you? Sent that before he could overthink.
Onstage, someone tested the mic; the speakers gave a brief squeal that made a few people wince and laugh. Raghav laughed too, because that was what you did. Because if his face changed, Dev would notice. Because if Dev noticed, Dev would know exactly where to press.
The screen stayed blank, his own message delivered but unread, and he closed his fingers around the phone like he could keep it from slipping away.
Raghav’s thumb hovered over the chat window like it could summon her back into motion. No typing dots. No blue pulse. Just that stubborn, static pin sitting on some anonymous road. Grey buildings, a shuttered shopfront, the kind of Street View that looked identical across half of Bengaluru. The timestamp under her last message stayed fixed, refusing to roll forward, as if time itself had stalled there with her.
Another vibration hit his palm, short, sharp, then the screen went eerily quiet. No new text. No missed call. Not even the petty indignity of “Message not delivered.” It was worse: the illusion of connection without proof of life.
He tried calling. One ring. Two. Then it slid into silence, not voicemail, not a busy tone. Just the call timer ticking while nothing answered on the other end. His throat tightened.
Beside him, someone asked, “Raghav, all good? You’re up in five.”
“Yeah,” he heard himself say, too quick. He refreshed the location again. The pin didn’t move. His pulse did.
Raghav stitched himself back into the donor circle like a man returning to a play mid-scene: smile on, shoulders square, laughter arriving half a second after everyone else’s. Someone mentioned “impact metrics” and he nodded too vigorously, hearing only fragments while his brain ran a brutal, efficient checklist. Migraine, Kavi sometimes went quiet and then resurfaced with a voice note and a joke. Panic: she could bolt, get overwhelmed, forget to ping the one person she’d promised to. The accident. Metal on asphalt, the way she’d once stared at a harmless scratch on a car door like it was a wound. He sipped champagne he didn’t taste.
“Everything okay, Raghav?” a founder asked.
“Ha, yeah: just juggling,” he said, and it sounded like a lie even to him.
Another vibration, harsher. His ops lead’s name lit the screen with a screenshot and a line that made Raghav’s scalp prickle: Shared drive access revoked by admin. Whole team locked out. No one touched permissions. Audit log shows a change just now. The timestamp was current. The admin ID wasn’t his. For a second the gala’s music thinned, replaced by the click of someone else’s cursor.
Raghav’s fingers clamp around the champagne flute until the stem bites his skin. He thumbs into the admin panel again. Spinning wheel, blank white, a polite refusal that feels personal. On mobile, the access controls won’t even render, just a half-loaded skeleton of menus. The email summary in his notifications is worse: too neat, too curated, like someone edited the panic out and left a trap.
Raghav moved along the gala’s periphery as if he’d rehearsed disappearing: one step behind the sponsor wall, another past a semicircle of founders whose laughter rose and fell like a stock chart. He kept his smile in place for anyone who glanced his way, a polite curve that asked for no follow-up, and let the crowd swallow the rest of him.
The corridor beyond was quieter, the carpet thick enough to mute footsteps. The air changed too. Less perfume and prosecco, more jasmine from some hotel diffuser battling the sharp, clinical bite of disinfectant. It reminded him of hospitals and boardrooms in equal measure. A place where people waited for verdicts.
He angled his body toward a framed abstract painting as if admiring it and brought his phone closer. The admin panel spinner turned, turned, turned. His thumb hovered, then jabbed refresh again. Nothing. A blank white refusal with a greyed-out menu that wouldn’t populate.
“Come on,” he muttered under his breath, soft enough to be swallowed by the distant bass. He tried switching from Wi-Fi to mobile data. The signal bars mocked him while the page sat there, skeletal and useless.
His mind sprinted ahead anyway. If someone had admin access, they could do more than lock a shared drive. They could export customer logs, pull training data, plant a compliance nightmare right before a partner meeting. They could make Neon Nukkad look sloppy in a way no pitch deck could fix.
He opened the audit log link his ops lead had sent. The file wouldn’t load. He toggled the VPN. He closed apps, reopened. Each action felt smaller than the consequences, like rearranging chairs while the building quietly filled with smoke.
A service staffer rolled a trolley past and gave him a quick, apologetic nod. Raghav stepped aside automatically, then realised he’d clenched his jaw so hard his temples throbbed. He forced a slow breath through his nose, as if oxygen could buy him time.
In the glass of a framed photo, he caught his own reflection: crisp shirt, rolled sleeves, eyes too sharp for a celebration. He looked like a man trying to debug his life in a hallway.
The phone buzzed again: another message pending, another warning he couldn’t afford to read in public. Raghav’s fingers tightened around the device, knuckles whitening, as he took two more steps into the corridor’s shadow and tried the admin panel one last time.
Devanshpratap Malhotra was already in the corridor, half in shadow near a decorative alcove, as if he’d stepped out for air and simply stayed. The gala’s noise died around him; what remained was the soft hum of the HVAC and the sense of being watched.
He straightened when Raghav approached, not hurried, not surprised. Loose posture, open palms: polite theatre. “Raghav,” he said, voice low enough to feel private. “You vanished.”
Raghav didn’t bother with pleasantries. His phone was still in his hand like a weapon that had failed to fire. Dev’s gaze flicked there, brief, precise, before it lifted to Raghav’s face with practiced warmth. It was the kind of look that said: I know exactly what you’re holding and why.
“Network issues?” Dev asked, as if commenting on traffic.
Raghav felt his skin tighten at the casualness. “Something’s wrong with our access.”
Dev’s expression didn’t change, but the corridor suddenly felt narrower. He took a small step closer, close enough that the scent of his cologne cut through the hotel’s jasmine diffuser. “Then you should see what I saw,” he murmured, and reached into his jacket with unhurried confidence, already in control of the next beat.
Dev didn’t waste time. He angled his phone between them, screen brightness dipped like he’d rehearsed the secrecy, and flicked his thumb once. A screenshot snapped into focus: Closed-door Partner Meeting: the kind of subject line that never hit a public calendar. Raghav’s throat tightened as he read the slot: the exact forty minutes he’d been told were “tentative”, sitting there like a booked verdict.
Below it, a neat agenda table. Vendor Evaluation. Risk Review. Data Security Q&A. And then the names. People who could say yes, and people whose “concerns” could kill the deal politely.
“You recognise them,” Dev said softly, not a question.
Raghav’s grip on his own phone went numb. “Where did you get this?”
Dev swiped again. A deck cover filled the screen: too clean, too familiar. The title was a near-mirror of Neon Nukkad’s name, the same clipped cadence, even the same smug, modern font his designer had fought for. Under it, the subtitle: “AI-first support for Indian SMBs.” Word for word. Weeks of late-night polishing, lifted and repackaged like it was always theirs.
The last image hits him harder than the deck. A candid shot (someone inside Neon Nukkad) caught through the founder-cabin glass, aimed at the demo corner like a sniper’s view: the mounted screen, the same scuffed test device, even the angle of the chair. Taken from the hallway, quick and illicit. Raghav’s mind supplies the rest: that week’s warm lighting, the marigold garland drooping by the shelf. Recent. Close. Personal.
Dev didn’t lean in. He didn’t need to. His voice travelled the small distance between them like it belonged there: an overlay on the gala’s music, smoother than the strings, quieter than the laughter.
“You’re looking at it like someone built a copy,” he said, eyes on Raghav’s face instead of the phone. “That’s the obvious part. The real fight happens before anyone even opens a deck.”
Raghav held the screen steady, as if the images might shift again and reveal a simpler explanation. His pulse kept time against his jaw. “What fight.”
Dev’s mouth curved into something that passed for sympathy. “Narrative,” he said, as if it were a compliance term. “The story that makes people nod along to the outcome they already want.”
A waiter brushed past with champagne; Dev didn’t flinch. He waited until the footsteps faded, then continued, still polite, still careful.
“Picture this,” he murmured. “You walk into a partner meeting. Everyone smiles. Everyone says they’re excited. And yet, they’ve already decided you’re… complicated. High maintenance. Risky. So every question becomes proof.”
Raghav swallowed. The office photo flashed behind his eyes: glass-walled cabin, his own reflection blurred over someone else’s angle. Someone had been inside his life.
Dev’s gaze softened, just enough to feel practiced. “A rival product can be out-built,” he said. “But if the room believes you’re unsafe? That you’re unstable? Then you can demo perfection and still lose.”
“You’re saying someone’s poisoning them,” Raghav said, keeping his voice level by force. His fingers tightened around his phone until the edges bit. “On what basis?”
Dev lifted a shoulder, a graceful shrug that implied he was only the messenger. “Basis is optional,” he replied. “What matters is repetition. Familiarity. A few ‘concerns’ mentioned over coffee, a casual ‘I heard’ in the right ear, and suddenly your name carries weight in the wrong direction.”
Raghav felt the old, ugly heat of it (working twelve-hour days, missing calls from home, promising his team one more sprint) only for someone to turn exhaustion into a character flaw.
“And you,” he said, voice clipped, “are telling me this because?”
Dev’s smile didn’t widen. It sharpened. “Because I can redirect a story,” he said, almost tender. “Or I can watch it settle.”
Dev spoke like he was reading from a neatly curated clip file, each line delivered with that same calm, almost affectionate precision. “They’ll say you’re… casual with data,” he murmured, as if it were a minor styling issue. “That your logging isn’t airtight. That you move fast and tidy up later.”
Raghav’s stomach tightened. He could already hear the way it would travel. Concern dressed up as care.
“And then,” Dev continued, eyes steady on Raghav’s, “the back-channel version. That a client’s transcripts ‘showed up’ where they shouldn’t have. Nothing provable. Just enough for someone to lower their voice and say, ‘I’m only telling you because I like you.’”
Raghav’s mind flicked through access permissions, Slack threads, the hurried approvals he’d signed at 2 a.m. The photo on the phone pulsed like an accusation.
Dev’s tone shifted, softer, more intimate. “The final one is about you,” he said. “Brilliant, yes. But erratic. Temper. Unpredictable under pressure.” He let the word hang, almost kind. “The sort of founder people don’t want to bet their brand on.”
Dev didn’t have to say the name of the circle; Raghav could see it. In those rooms, perception outran paperwork. A tag, a whisper, a “we should be careful” floated into the air and became fact by the time anyone bothered to ask for logs.
Raghav’s throat went dry. Due diligence was supposed to be his refuge, metrics, audits, clean trails. But Dev was talking about a different ledger: who returned calls, who delayed calendars, who suddenly “had to reschedule.”
“If they decide you’re trouble,” Dev said quietly, “they won’t debate it. They’ll avoid it.”
And the copycat, mediocre, slower, safer, would win by default, not for being better, but for promising less drama than Raghav’s ambition.
Dev let a beat pass, as if giving Raghav space to resist, then offered himself with the ease of a man presenting a menu. Not a saviour: never that. A lever. “I can make calls,” he said softly. “Place you at the right tables. Seed reassurance before you enter the room.” Doubt, he implied, could be spun into jealousy; Neon Nukkad, into inevitability.
Then, without lifting his voice, Dev let the alternative sit between them. He could simply step aside. No calls, no gentle “actually” in the right ears, no smoothing over. Just silence while the story found purchase, hardened into polite hesitations, missed replies, “we’ll circle back” that never circled. A whisper didn’t need proof to become policy.
Raghav heard his own voice cut through the soft jazz and the low, lacquered murmurs around them, and he hated that he couldn’t pull it back once it was out.
“That’s… come on,” he said, a laugh that didn’t land. Too sharp. Too loud for a room that smelled like oud and money and patience. “This is gala theatrics, Dev. Whisper networks and champagne threats.”
A couple standing near the canapés flicked their eyes over, then away, pretending they’d only noticed the art on the wall. Raghav lowered his chin, tried to recalibrate, but his pulse refused to cooperate. His body was still in the office, whiteboards, deadlines, call recordings, where volume meant conviction.
He forced his tone down a notch. “Partners don’t sign because someone ‘seeded reassurance.’ They sign because we execute. Because we can show the numbers, the SLA, the tickets closed, the retention. You think a serious decision-maker is going to pick a mediocre clone because some founder got labelled ‘dramatic’ at a fundraiser?”
He realised, mid-sentence, that he was arguing with a story rather than a person. That was the trap. Stories didn’t need data. Stories just needed repetition.
Dev’s smile stayed put, like it was pinned. Raghav felt the itch of it, pleasant, patient, indulgent, and it made him push harder, as if force could turn discomfort into certainty.
“And for the record,” Raghav added, too quickly, “if someone’s pitching a lookalike product, good luck to them. Let them try. We’re not competing on gossip. We’re competing on product truth.”
Product truth. As if it was a universal language, as if it couldn’t be mistranslated on purpose.
He took a sip from his glass, expecting the burn to steady him. The drink was colder than he thought, a clean sting. His mouth stayed dry anyway.
He held Dev’s gaze, daring him to contradict. Daring him to admit it was all theatre.
It should have felt righteous. Instead, it felt like stepping onto a stage he hadn’t agreed to, lights already hot on his face.
Dev didn’t rise to the bait. He didn’t defend himself, didn’t counter with a clever line. He simply looked at Raghav the way some people looked at presentations. Waiting for the slide that would reveal the real point.
Raghav’s certainty, spoken so neatly, started to feel like a jacket that didn’t fit. The air in the room was conditioned, expensive-cold, yet his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He swallowed and tasted nothing but alcohol and nerves.
His fingers tightened around the stem of the glass until the chill bit into his skin. Anchor, he thought, absurdly. As if holding something could keep him from drifting into a narrative he hadn’t written. Around them, laughter rose and fell; someone clinked a spoon against crystal. The gala kept moving, indifferent.
Dev’s gaze flicked. Not to Raghav’s face, but to his hand. The smallest acknowledgement of strain. No triumph, just attention. Like he’d been waiting for that exact curl of knuckles.
Raghav hated that his body was betraying him before his words could. He forced a breath in through his nose, shoulders locked, jaw set: an entrepreneur’s posture in a room built for soft power.
Dev tilted his head, as if indulging Raghav’s little burst of idealism, and let a new name fall into the space between them. “Also,” he said, swirling his drink with two fingers, “you’ll want to remember it’s not the CEO who signs off. It’s Meera Kulkarni.”
Raghav’s stomach dropped. The name didn’t live on LinkedIn posts or glossy partner decks; it lived in forwarded calendar invites and the kind of internal org charts people guarded like passwords.
Dev’s voice stayed easy. “She hates surprises,” he added, eyes soft, almost kind. “And she loves clean narratives. No drama, no last-minute pivots. Give her a story she can repeat upstairs without blushing.”
Raghav’s laugh tried again, thinner this time. “How do you even know that?” he asked, keeping his voice level because the room demanded it, because his pride did too. Dev’s eyes didn’t blink. He leaned in just enough and, softly, repeated a sentence Raghav had said once on a closed investor call. Same awkward metaphor, same clipped cadence. Raghav felt the words hit like a fingerprint.
Denial leaked out of him, leaving a colder maths behind. Raghav’s gaze skated past Dev’s shoulder, towards the bar, the balcony doors, the ring of laughing donors, anywhere a plan could hide. Dev stood unhurried, perfectly placed, like he’d rehearsed the room. That line hadn’t been public. It hadn’t even been team. Which meant someone had listened inside channels Raghav had sworn were sealed.
Dev’s gaze dipped to his wrist (smooth, almost apologetic) like he was checking the time for Raghav’s benefit. “Just so you can plan,” he said, voice low enough to feel private in a room that gave nobody true privacy. “Ten days.”
Raghav didn’t answer. He felt the number land behind his ribs, slotting itself into the calendar grid already crowded with sprints and investor calls and his mother’s missed calls. Ten days wasn’t time. Ten days was a countdown.
Dev kept going, gentle as a concierge. “They’re meeting you on the twentieth. The other founder, your… mirror image, has a slot on the seventeenth.” He took a sip, unhurried, as if dates were just party trivia. “First pitch has the advantage of becoming the default. After that, everything you say sounds like a response.”
Raghav’s fingers tightened around his glass. In his head, he was already dragging tasks between columns: fix the onboarding drop-off, stabilise the new model, draft the data policy addendum, rehearse the demo without the feature that still threw hallucinations. He could hear his team’s laughter from last night, brittle with exhaustion. He could see the Slack thread where someone had typed “sprint 9???” with three question marks and no one had replied.
Dev’s eyes stayed on him, warm, patient. “And look,” he added, like he was doing Raghav a favour by naming the ugliness plainly. “It won’t be a direct attack. Nobody says, ‘Neon Nukkad is dying.’ They’ll just ask one question.” His mouth curved, sympathetic. “Something about your runway. Or your key-client dependency. Or leadership bandwidth. It’ll be phrased like concern. Like they’re protecting Meera from risk.”
Raghav swallowed, throat dry. “We’re not, ” he started, then stopped. Not dying. Not unstable. Not about to blink out. The words sounded naive even inside his own skull.
Dev tilted his head. “I know you’re capable,” he said, softly. “But rooms like that don’t reward capability. They reward the story that feels safest to repeat.” He glanced at his watch again, a second too long this time. Courtesy, still. Threat, all the same.
Raghav’s jaw locked so hard it ached. Burn, runway, payroll. Numbers flickered behind his eyes like a bad dashboard refresh. Ninety-ish days, if collections didn’t slip. Less, if the next sprint shipped late and churn spiked the way the last cohort had. He could almost hear his team’s tired jokes turning into resignation.
Dev, meanwhile, stayed beautifully calm. His smile didn’t falter; it simply adjusted, as if he were offering a menu. “You don’t need to fight shadows, Raghav,” he said, voice pleasant, a shade intimate. “People like Meera’s team… they hear one worry and it becomes the headline. I can make sure it doesn’t.”
Raghav’s fingers flexed around the stem of his glass. “By doing what?” The question came out flat, careful.
Dev’s eyes softened at the edges: practised empathy. “By being in the right rooms, saying the right line first.” He angled his body, shielding the conversation from passing ears without looking like he was doing it. “A call here. A reassurance there. A nudge so their ‘concerns’ stay questions, not conclusions.”
It sounded like help. It also sounded like a hand settling, proprietary, on the back of his neck.
Dev shifted half a step closer (still gala-appropriate, still smiling for any camera that might sweep past) and lowered his voice like he was sharing a harmless secret. “It’s never just the product,” he said. “It’s whether they can trust the person holding it.”
Raghav felt his shoulders go rigid under his blazer. The room kept glittering around them, oblivious.
Dev’s gaze flicked, quick and assessing, to the knot of investors near the stage. “Partners like continuity,” he continued, tone mild. “Maturity. A founder who looks… settled.” The pause was deliberate, the word dressed up as advice.
Settled. As in: not a headline. Not a liability. Not a man whose personal life looked like a missing slide in a deck.
“And that,” Dev added, almost kindly, “is an optics problem you can solve.”
As if the gala had ears, Raghav’s phone buzzed against his palm: one sharp insistence that cut through the music. He glanced down. The event app glowed: RSVP CONFIRMED. Plus-one details due by midnight. Heat crawled up his neck. Midnight wasn’t a time; it was a trap disguised as a form field. His thumb hovered, suddenly unsure whether to dismiss the notification or answer it.
Dev’s eyes dipped to the RSVP glow and returned to Raghav with a smile meant for photographers, soft, approving, while the meaning underneath stayed lethal. “Midnight is generous,” he murmured, like he was discussing dessert. “Ten days is even more generous.” His thumb brushed the air near the phone, not touching. “Plenty of time to decide what story follows you into that meeting… and who gets to narrate it.”
Raghav didn’t so much choose work as he climbed inside it and pulled the lid shut. Neon Nukkad’s open-plan office was still half-lit, the street outside still coughing up scooter horns and pressure-cooker whistles, but his world narrowed to the glow of a spreadsheet and the thin blue line of a churn graph that refused to behave.
He dragged cohorts into cleaner segments, renamed columns like renaming could tame them, and rebuilt the retention slide three times: once for honesty, once for optimism, once for a version of reality investors could swallow without tasting blood. If the numbers looked inevitable, he told himself, then he would become inevitable too. Unquestionable. Too busy to be interrogated.
“Raghav, you’ve been staring at Week-4 retention like it insulted your mother,” Kavi said from the pantry doorway, camera strap hanging off one shoulder. Her hair was in a messy knot, and she looked like she’d just walked in from a different life where people slept.
“It did,” he said without looking up. “It’s personal.”
“You’re polishing the deck like it’s going to hug you back.” She came closer, peered at his screen. “Is this about the partnership call or… the other circus?”
“There is no other circus,” he said, too fast, fingers still moving. He aligned logos, adjusted margins, added a single word, ‘predictable’, and felt a small, pathetic relief.
Kavi’s silence pressed against the glass walls. In the background, someone’s late-night stand-up started; Hindi and English bounced off partitions, a tired comedy of execution.
Raghav’s phone buzzed. A notification he didn’t open. Then another. He kept typing like the keyboard could drown out whatever was happening outside the metrics.
“Just tell me one thing,” Kavi said, soft now. “Are you busy because you’re busy, or because you’re scared?”
He finally looked up, eyes gritty. “I don’t have time to be scared.”
Kavi held his gaze as if she could photograph the lie. “Okay,” she said. “But your phone is doing that possessed-vibrator thing. It’s either a Sev1 or someone flirting with your public image.”
Raghav swallowed, jaw tight, and flipped his phone face-down on the desk like that could make the world stop talking.
The outside world refused to stay outside. A Telegram investor gossip thread, one of those grey-market “Bangalore SaaS” channels that pretended to be about deal flow, blinked on his screen with a winking: Heard Raghav’s finally settled 😉 The message sat between memes about term sheets and a screenshot of someone’s cap table, like his life was just another datapoint.
He clicked in, thumb hovering. No names, only handles. Two people he recognised by their profile photos: one angel who’d ghosted his last follow-up, another who’d once asked, casually, if his “personal stability” matched his burn rate. Replies stacked up fast. Good for him yaar. About time. Who’s the girl/boy?
Then LinkedIn. A partner’s spouse had commented under a bland post about “founder resilience”: So happy to see you thriving personally too, Raghav! with a heart emoji that felt like a threat.
His mother called. Twice. In one day. When he finally picked up, her voice was too bright, too arranged. “Beta, bas aise hi… how are you? Eating properly? And, ” a pause, theatrical, “everything is going well na?”
He opened a Notes doc and titled it, without irony, **SETTLED NARRATIVE. The phrase sat there like an incident ticket, severity unknowable, impact already spreading. Who first used it? Where? He pulled up call logs, WhatsApp timestamps, LinkedIn notifications, even his Uber receipts: anything with time baked into it. Monday: his mother’s “bas aise hi” call. Tuesday: that partner’s spouse comment. Wednesday: the gossip thread spike.
He built a crude graph in his head: nodes as people, edges as introductions, weighted by how fast gossip travelled in each circle. His calendar became a timeline of contagion. Somewhere between a client demo and a late-night sprint review, the story had deployed: without a rollback plan.
The leads didn’t spread out; they folded inward, like someone had planned the geometry. A Soho House-ish club in Koramangala where a “mutual” smiled too quickly. A PR manager who spoke to him like they’d already aligned talking points. An investor’s EA on WhatsApp: Sir, heard you’re seeing someone: congrats. Every path had the same unseen hinge: Devanshpratap Malhotra, never quoted, always present.
By evening the deck was razor-clean but his hands wouldn’t steady. He kept flexing his fingers under the table, as if shaking off an electric current. In Notes, the list of names grew into a map. This wasn’t organic buzz. It had cadence. Touchpoints timed to calls, comments, chance “congrats.” And wherever the narrative started, Dev’s shadow sat at the origin.
Dev didn’t so much sit as arrange himself: ankle over knee, jacket still on, the kind of ease that was clearly practiced. The glass-walled cabin threw back their reflections: Raghav’s rolled sleeves, Dev’s cufflinks, both of them framed like a pitch deck slide titled Stability.
He placed his phone face-down on the table, as if that gesture could make the room private. “Think of it like a clean trade,” Dev said. “Minimal scope. Maximum effect.”
Raghav kept his own phone in his hand, thumb hovering over a thread marked Seen 2:[^14] PM by an investor who usually replied in minutes. He forced his gaze up. “Spell it out.”
Dev’s smile softened, almost apologetic, like he was offering a favour instead of a lever. “A few appearances. A few photos. You look settled.” He paused, letting the word settle like dust on a surface. “I look… connected.”
“Connected to what?” Raghav heard the edge in his voice and hated it. He tightened his grip until the phone bit into his palm. Outside, the office hummed: someone laughing too loudly, the printer coughing paper, the street below exhaling horns and chai-seller calls.
Dev’s eyes flicked, just once, to the mounted screen where Raghav’s partnership deck sat open in presentation mode. “To the right people,” he said. “The ones who pretend they don’t care about personal life and then ask their EA to Google you.”
Raghav exhaled through his nose. “So you want me to be… what. A prop?”
“A narrative,” Dev corrected gently. “One you can live with. Dinner at a place that photographs well. A couple of events where your mother’s circle can ‘happen’ to see you.” He tilted his head. “Nothing messy. Nothing intimate you don’t agree to.”
Raghav’s laugh came out flat. “And in return?”
Dev’s warmth didn’t change, but something in the cadence sharpened. “In return, your meeting doesn’t get pushed to ‘next quarter’. The partnership conversation happens now. I can nudge it.” He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “Ten days is a long time to be misread, Raghav. Especially when everyone’s already reading you.”
Raghav forced his voice into the same register he used with vendors and VCs. “Fine. Define deliverables.” He tapped the table once, as if making a point on a slide. “Which meeting moves, whose calendar, and by when?”
Dev didn’t answer immediately. That pause, confident, controlled, made Raghav’s jaw tighten. His eyes betrayed him anyway, slipping to his phone. Three unread pings from the product lead. Two seen messages to an investor who never left him on read. His calendar widget sat on the lock screen: Partnership, Day 10. The number looked less like a date and more like a countdown timer.
He tried to breathe through the tension headache blooming behind his eyes. Transactional, he reminded himself. Optics in exchange for access. Nothing more.
“Timeline?” he pressed, sharper than he intended. “I’m not signing up for an open-ended… whatever this is.”
His thumb hovered over the investor thread, wanting to type Just checking in and hating himself for it.
Across the table, Dev’s gaze didn’t waver. “You’ll get movement,” he said, softly. “Not next month. Not ‘after holidays’. This week.”
Dev never said I guarantee. He didn’t need to. He let the idea hang between them like a clause everyone pretended not to notice.
“Some people,” Dev said, voice mild, almost sympathetic, “just need reassurance.” His fingers made a small, neat gesture. Like underlining. “Family, capital… same ecosystem, yaar. Different faces.”
Raghav’s throat tightened. He knew this script; he’d watched investors pretend to be product-first and then ask about founders’ “stability” over coffee.
Dev continued, casual as if discussing weather. “Conservative money spooks at chaos. If you look untethered, they assume your company is untethered. If your life looks unfinished, they start imagining exits: yours included.”
He smiled, not cruel. Just certain. “Give them a completed picture.”
The leverage didn’t need a name to tighten around his ribs: ten days, one partnership, zero bandwidth for gossip. Dev could tilt a few conversations and have Raghav filed under erratic founder. Raghav’s pride flared, then recalculated into something colder. Cost. Benefit. Runway. What did dignity matter if payroll didn’t clear?
Raghav leaned back, letting the chair creak like punctuation. “Ground rules,” he said. “No private expectations. No showing up at my office. And we keep the story boring, simple, clean, minimal.” He held Dev’s gaze, daring him to bargain. Dev’s nod came too smooth, too immediate. “Done.” Raghav’s assent followed, clipped. “Okay. We proceed.” It sounded like a signature he could pretend was choice.
Dev’s text lands while Raghav is mid-scroll through a burn-rate sheet, thumb smearing numbers into meaninglessness. The phone vibrates once (tight, decisive) as if it’s interrupting on purpose. Unknown thrillers and investor pings have trained him to ignore anything that isn’t urgent, but Dev’s name sits there like a meeting invite you didn’t accept and still can’t decline.
Saturday? You free for a bit. Low-key.
A second line arrives immediately, engineered to look casual.
Attaching the guest list so you don’t walk in blind.
Raghav exhales through his nose, already annoyed at the assumption. He taps.
A PDF opens. Clean formatting, Dev’s usual aesthetic. No messy forwards, no “pls see attached,” no accidental desperation. Raghav’s eyes skim, then snag hard.
Founders he’s been watching from a distance, the kind who post “closing thoughts” threads after fundraising rounds and never reply to cold emails. A banker whose assistant once asked him to “reconnect in Q4” like Raghav was a newsletter. A partner from the VC that’s been ghosting him since the demo went too well, the one who had smiled too much and promised, We’ll circle back next week.
And then, in the middle, like someone has dropped a match into dry grass: the CEO of a client company he’s been chasing for ten minutes of attention for months. Months of polite follow-ups, mutuals, “quick call?” messages that died in limbo.
His stomach tightens, involuntary, like his body understands leverage faster than his mind wants to.
He scrolls again, slower this time, hunting for the catch. Private club? Family function? Some “philanthropy gala” where the real deals happen in the smoking area and the public talk is about “impact”? Dev hasn’t said venue, hasn’t said dress code, hasn’t said why.
Raghav’s fingers hover over the keyboard. He starts to type *How did you. That question gives Dev the pleasure of explaining.
Another ping. Dev, again, perfectly timed: like he’s watching the typing bubble. Raghav doesn’t need to open it to feel the shape of what’s coming.
Before he could decide whether to be impressed or insulted, Dev’s next message slid in. Too tidy to be accidental.
Half the room is adjacent to Manjushree’s people.
Raghav stared at the line until it stopped being text and became geometry. Not a threat, not a request. A coordinate dropped on a map he hadn’t agreed to open. Manju’s world, old surnames, quiet power, the kind of influence that didn’t need LinkedIn, was being presented to him like a shortcut.
His jaw tightened. Dev had said “low-key” the way founders said “small change,” meaning it would still cost you three days and a piece of pride.
He typed, Why is Manju relevant? then deleted it. If he asked, Dev would explain. If Dev explained, it would become normal.
Raghav’s thumb hovered again. He wanted to push back, to set this boundary right here. No overlap, no contamination of the one relationship he hadn’t fully ruined. But the guest list sat open like an invoice he couldn’t ignore.
“Adjacent,” he muttered, tasting the word. It sounded harmless. It wasn’t.
Raghav scrolls, then scrolls again, slower, as if speed might make him miss the fine print hidden in plain sight. Surnames slot into his mental Rolodex. The uncle on a hospital board, the cousin who sits on a seed fund, the husband-wife duo who can freeze a deal with one “concern” over dessert. He’s been knocking on these doors for months with polite decks and carefully timed follow-ups, getting silence or soft refusals dressed up as calendar congestion. Now the same doors are lined up like a corridor Dev has casually unlocked.
His throat goes dry with something that isn’t gratitude. It’s the weight of obligation arriving early.
“Simple arrangement,” he’d called it. But this. This feels like a toll booth you don’t see until you’re already in the lane.
A calendar invite dropped in before he could form a reply: already drafted, already titled Saturday: easy things, time slotted like Raghav’s week was a shared resource. Location field filled, dress code hinted, even a neat “caption option” tucked into the notes: something soft, couple-coded, harmless. Dev hadn’t asked if Raghav was free. He’d designed the shape of his compliance.
Raghav’s first instinct was to snap the thread back into his control: spell out terms, dates, boundaries. His fingers even hovered over the keyboard. But the guest list glowed like leverage without fingerprints: people he’d been cold-emailing for months now one “casual” Saturday away. Dev hadn’t pushed a door open; he’d rearranged the room. And the terrifying part was how the yes Raghav had given was already walking ahead of him.
Raghav opened a fresh mail draft to Sahana Rao. Her name sat in his inbox like a tool he could still reach for.
Subject line: Quick ask : reputation management? He deleted the question mark, added it back, deleted it again.
He wrote, then rewrote, until every sentence sounded like it belonged in a pitch deck.
Hi Sahana, hope you’re well. I wanted to get your quick guidance on managing some public-facing perception risks. There’s a situation developing in a few investor/family circles and I want to stay ahead of any narrative drift. Nothing illegal, nothing to do with the company’s product or clients, but it could spill over and become a distraction. Can we do a 15-min call today? I’m looking for a clean, low-noise approach.
He hovered over the word personal and replaced it with public-facing. He avoided the obvious nouns, the ones that would make it real: boyfriend, partner, relationship. He didn’t type Dev’s name at all, as if omission could protect him from being trapped inside it.
Send.
The reply came fast enough to feel automated. He watched the three dots appear on his phone, vanish, then reappear, his pulse syncing to a stranger’s typing cadence.
Hi Raghav, it began, warm, professional, useless.
Happy to hear from you. Given what you’ve described, I need to be careful. We can support with corporate communications and crisis response tied directly to company operations. For “private matters” involving individuals and social perception, we generally don’t advise unless it’s routed through legal and a formal engagement, because of potential conflicts with other clients in the same ecosystem. Hope you understand. If you want, I can share a couple of names of personal image consultants outside my network.
Private matters. Same ecosystem. Conflicts.
Raghav stared at those words until they blurred into a single message: Everyone knows everyone. And nobody wants to be seen choosing your side.
He typed back a clipped Understood, thanks and didn’t ask for the names. The email thread sat there, neat and bloodless, like a door closed with soft hands.
Raghav dialled Arvind Shetty because Arvind had once talked him off a ledge during a down-round. Voice like dry cement, steady when everything else crumbled. The call connected on the second ring.
“What’s up, Raghav? You sound… caffeinated.”
“It’s not product,” Raghav said, already hating how defensive he sounded. “It’s: optics. Personal, but it’ll touch the cap table if it turns ugly.”
Arvind didn’t laugh. He didn’t ask for gossip. There was a small pause, the kind that meant Arvind was deciding whether to get involved.
Then, two questions, clean as a term sheet. “Is there a post already?” And, “Are you fighting it publicly?”
Raghav’s throat tightened. “Yes. And I haven’t, I mean, not yet.”
“Good,” Arvind said, as if that was the only correct answer. “Listen. Consistency is currency. Don’t create a gap people can fill with whatever story suits them. If you deny today and soften tomorrow, you’ve gifted someone a headline. Keep it boring. Keep it aligned. No sudden statements. No emotional comments.”
“And my boundaries?” Raghav asked, voice dropping.
“Set them privately,” Arvind replied. “Publicly, you don’t bleed.”
Raghav tried his team next because teams, in his head, were solvable systems. He found Kavi in the pantry, barefoot in paint-stained sneakers, aggressively stirring sugar into filter coffee like it had personally offended her.
“Two minutes,” he said, and shoved his phone across the counter.
She skimmed Dev’s post. Her face did the opposite of her usual theatrics; it went still. “Yaar,” she said softly, “don’t ask me to certify what’s real and what’s performance.”
“Kavi. “Because if the performance gets good, it won’t stop at Instagram. It’ll eat your calendar, your guilt, your whole personality.” She slid the phone back. “Write what you want. Like a spec. Boundaries, deliverables, non-negotiables. If you can’t document it, you can’t defend it.”
He pulled his ops lead, Neha, into a “quick sync” near the glass cabin: two minutes, he promised, like everything could be compressed. “There’s… optics,” he began. Neha’s smile tightened. “Raghav, I’m not putting anything on Slack, not even a thumbs-up. If this touches investors, we keep it bland. No drama. Whatever keeps them calm till Friday.”
When Raghav finally looks at his own phone, it’s not the notifications that make his stomach drop. It’s the pattern. Every number he could call routes back into the same Bengaluru circuit Dev already owns: founders, angels, “family friends” who smile and forward screenshots. Advice arrives in polished euphemisms: stay consistent, don’t react, don’t feed the market. Help, apparently, is either leverage or absence.
Raghav stared at Dev’s latest photo until the faces blurred into pixels and his own pulse. Calling would be cleaner, faster. Also deniable. A call could be twisted into tone, into “you sounded upset,” into plausible misunderstanding. Text sat there like a paper trail. Proof. Something he could point to when this inevitably tried to spill into his office, his runway, his already-fraying life.
He opened a blank chat and typed, deleted, retyped. His thumb hovered over the send arrow like it was a launch button.
Dev. Keeping this simple. Ground rules, non-negotiable.
He forced himself to write it the way he wrote specs. 1) No posts/stories/reposts about “us” without my explicit approval beforehand. Approval means I say “OK” in writing on that exact content.
The “exact content” mattered. He could already hear Dev’s loopholes: a different crop, a different caption, “I thought you meant the photo, not the story.”
2) No mention of Manjushree. No tags, hints, inside jokes, initials, location pins that point to her events or her people. Don’t pull her into this narrative.
His jaw clenched on her name. He hadn’t spoken it to Dev; he’d managed to keep that door shut. This was the lock.
3) Absolutely no surprise appearances at Neon Nukkad Labs. Not the office, not the terrace, not “just dropping by” with coffee. If you need to meet, it’s scheduled, outside, and I confirm time + place.
The office wasn’t just a place. It was a pressure cooker with glass walls and exhausted engineers who could smell drama like smoke.
He added, because his brain couldn’t stop threat-modelling:
4) No contacting my team. No DMs to investors/clients in my pipeline using this as context. If something needs to be communicated, it goes through me.
He read it once, twice. It sounded paranoid. It sounded like him.
Then he attached nothing and sent.
The message sat there, a grey bubble in the blue light. Raghav kept the screen on, watching the timestamp like it could change the terms of the deal. He didn’t breathe properly until the two ticks appeared, and even then his chest stayed tight, as if the very act of setting boundaries had cost him something he didn’t have to spend.
Dev replied before Raghav could lock his phone and pretend he hadn’t cared.
Love the clarity. Seriously. This is why this works.
The cheerfulness sat wrong in Raghav’s chest, like a laugh in a hospital corridor.
All of this is mutual protection, Raghav. Of course no surprises at your office. Of course no dragging third parties into it. We’re aligned.
Aligned. The word did a lot of lifting.
Then the message kept going, smooth as a pitch deck.
Only thing. If we’re doing this, we should do it properly. “Approval” is fine, but we need a turnaround time. If you go dark for 6 hours, that’s basically a no by default and it makes us look weird. Let’s set a window.
Raghav’s eyes narrowed. His own rule, already being sanded down.
Also: rollout. We can’t do random bursts. Narrative consistency matters. Two touchpoints a week, minimum: one story, one post. If it’s too clinical, people smell it.
And then, like a casual afterthought:
Believability needs some spontaneity. Not chaos: just… room. I’ll send a shared doc? Easier than playing screenshot tennis.
They moved it to a shared doc like it was a term sheet, neat headings and numbered clauses, Dev’s cursor gliding in with that calm, corporate confidence. Raghav typed Approval means I write OK and, before he could even sip his cooling coffee, the line softened into: No objections raised within a reasonable window. Reasonable. To whom.
He added No mention of Manjushree; Dev adjusted it to No direct tags, no identifiable references, as if reputations couldn’t be implied with a venue pin and a “special night” caption. No office drop-ins became No unannounced visits during client meetings: like Neon Nukkad Labs existed only when outsiders were watching. The doc filled with footnotes and “for avoidance of doubt,” each one making the cage look contractual, not personal.
Raghav tightened clauses like he tightened budgets, shorter, harder, less room to breathe. But he was doing it one-handed, thumb flicking between Dev’s edits and Slack: prod down?, client wants an ETA, can we ship tonight? His mind kept rerunning the runway math, three months collapsing into weeks. Each time he pushed back, Dev returned with calmer, cleaner language, and the control started masquerading as competence.
Dev’s cursor made a small, decisive loop, then the doc vanished. We’re aligned; I’ll handle the optics responsibly, he typed, as if tucking a file into a drawer. Raghav stared at the line until it blurred with fatigue, and finally sent a curt Fine. There was no one to delegate this discomfort to. He let the “responsibly” stand, missing, in Dev’s silence, the shape of a decision already made.
Raghav’s phone buzzed as he crossed the narrow strip of floor between the pantry and the glass cabin, balancing a paper cup of filter coffee like it was a stabiliser for his shaking hand. The vibration felt wrong: too insistent for Slack, too sharp for a calendar reminder. He glanced down mid-stride, expecting a build alert.
Instagram.
Devanshpratap Malhotra posted.
For half a second his brain refused to assemble the image into meaning. Golden-hour light, honeyed and cinematic, as if they’d planned a shoot instead of a hurried, “optics-only” meet. A too-close crop: Dev’s shoulder, the edge of his jaw, Raghav’s own profile caught in a laugh he didn’t remember giving that freely. Their sleeves, Raghav’s rolled like always, Dev’s cuff immaculate, brushed in a way that looked intentional. The kind of proximity that told a story without needing a single line of text.
And the caption did the rest.
Turns out I’m not as hard to impress as I pretend. Some people just… feel like home. A winking emoji at the end, like it was harmless, like it gave plausible deniability. But the words sat heavy, warm in a way Raghav hadn’t agreed to. A promise disguised as a joke, the easiest kind to defend if challenged.
His thumb hovered over the tags. Dev had placed them like chess pieces: Raghav tagged, of course, no “direct tags” clause could hide that, but also the location, a tasteful restaurant in Sadashivanagar that screamed old money without naming any family. Two investors Raghav had met once at a panel were tagged in the background as “with,” as if they’d been part of an intimate evening. And a benign-looking charity handle Manju’s circle followed obsessively. Close enough to be seen, far enough to deny intent.
Heat rushed up Raghav’s neck. He could already see the screenshot travelling faster than a clarification.
He tapped Dev’s name, hit call.
Ringing.
Again.
Straight to voicemail.
The coffee in his hand sloshed over the rim, scalding his thumb. He didn’t feel it. All he could see was that soft, curated frame (Dev’s idea of “responsible”) and the way it had moved the timeline up without asking.
By the time Raghav reached his desk, his phone had turned into a small, relentless machine. Notifications stacked faster than he could clear them: double taps, heart-eyes, fire, the same stale startup-flirt humour dressed up as congratulations. A founder he’d met twice at some Koramangala mixer sent a DM: Brooo power couple energy. Someone from an angel network reacted with a single word, Nice, as if stability had just been verified in public.
Then the ones that mattered slid in like knives wrapped in silk.
A comment from an account he recognised from Manju’s orbit, one of those surnames that showed up on plaques and school trustee lists, landed with cheerful certainty: Finally! No question mark. No careful distance. As if they’d all been waiting for him to stop pretending. As if Dev had just provided missing context to a story they already felt entitled to narrate.
Raghav opened the thread and watched it build itself into fact: You two look so right. Knew it. When’s the official announcement? The “arrangement” wasn’t a draft anymore. It was public memory, forming in real time.
Raghav hit call so hard his thumbpad burned, as if force could drag Dev’s voice through the air. The ring tone pulsed in his ear, once, twice, long enough for hope to form, then it collapsed into the cold cheeriness of voicemail. He hung up before the beep, jaw clenched, and tried again. Same clean drop, same refusal dressed as bad network.
On the third attempt he switched to WhatsApp, watched the call icon spin, watched it fail. No busy, no can’t talk text. Just absence. His stomach tightened with a clarity that felt like insult. This wasn’t Dev being careless. This was Dev choosing the moment, letting the silence do its work while the post gathered likes and certainty like interest.
He taps into the insights and his throat goes dry. The post isn’t just posted. It’s routed. Dev has nudged it through specific follows, boosted it via a story repost timed for peak scroll, and slipped it into the exact feeds that treat “settled” like a moral metric. The photo reads intimate, yes, but sanitised. Respectable enough that any denial would look like guilty backpedalling.
In the open-plan hush, the AC’s whirr suddenly too loud, Raghav’s jaw locks as he watches the narrative harden without him. He types: Take it down. Deletes. Tries: This wasn’t the agreement. Deletes. A third draft turns polite, then pathetic, and he kills that too: because any correction, anywhere, will read like panic. The near-miss lands like a bruise: the story now runs at Dev’s pace, not his consent.
Dev’s message came in like a confetti pop: an unsolicited screenshot, cropped tight around an investor’s DM.
Saw you two. Congrats. Let’s catch up this week.
Below it, Dev added: See? Momentum.
Raghav stared at the blue ticks, the little proof-of-life that made his chest unclench for half a second. Their runway was a countdown app running in his head; any “let’s catch up” felt like oxygen. He should have been looking at the churn cohort he’d pulled up on his second monitor. Instead he was watching Dev type.
Another bubble appeared, too long to be spontaneous.
Quick housekeeping. Nothing dramatic. Just to keep the story clean.
A list followed, numbered like sprint tasks:
Raghav’s jaw tightened. “Housekeeping,” Dev called it, like this was wiping a whiteboard. He typed, Why 8:12? then deleted it. The question sounded childish, like he didn’t understand the game.
Dev sent a voice note instead, warm, amused, the tone he used when he was being generous and dangerous at the same time. “Because people are idiots about patterns, Raghav. Eight-twelve hits the commute scroll. Trust me. Also. Don’t feed the churn thread. We don’t want technical comments under a soft post.”
Soft post. As if their survival was foam.
Raghav glanced at the open Slack window: demo deck needs final numbers, partner team wants compliance note. He could almost hear Kavi in his head. If what? If the pilot was one fragile client. If data policy limitations made half the demo a careful dance.
Dev’s next text arrived before Raghav could finish his thought.
Do this. Calls keep coming. Don’t do it… and they’ll assume you’re hiding something. Which, no offence, you kind of are.
Raghav told himself it was easy to partition. Optics belonged to Dev: a photo, a caption, a couple of liked comments. The company belonged to him: clean numbers, clean policies, clean sleep-deprived conscience. He could do both. He’d done worse.
But the “tiny” instructions didn’t behave like tiny things. They came with timing, with tone, with that invisible addendum Dev never typed: and if you don’t, watch what happens.
In the Monday stand-up, Raghav heard his own voice talking velocity and blockers while his thumb slid under the table, refreshing mentions like it was another KPI. A notification spiked his pulse more than the sprint burndown. He hated that. He hated how quickly his body learned the reward loop.
A teammate asked for clarity on the compliance note for the partner demo. Raghav said, “We’ll align today,” and made it sound like a promise instead of a prayer.
Kavi caught his eye from the pantry, mid-sip of filter coffee, eyebrow lifting in silent accusation: Since when are you on your phone during stand-up?
Raghav swallowed. He’d missed Dev’s last “housekeeping” by seven minutes. The calls hadn’t stopped, yet. Still, the dread sat there, heavy and obedient, as if the world had a switch Dev could flip.
The asks stopped being about captions and started sounding like product strategy delivered through a selfie lens. Dev called it “tightening,” like he was adjusting a tie before a board meeting. “Don’t say ‘pilot’,” he messaged. “It screams tentative. Say ‘rollout’.” A second text followed before Raghav could blink: “And please: don’t keep mentioning that one anchor client. People hear dependency, not traction.”
Raghav stared at the word please and felt nothing polite about it. In his head, compliance notes and data policy caveats lined up like warnings he’d written for a reason. Dev wanted them blurred into something shinier: constraints framed as “already solved,” limitations renamed as “phase two”.
“It protects your team,” Dev added, as if scrutiny was a storm only he could steer them around. To Raghav, it landed like a hand at the back of his neck: guiding his jaw, choosing which truths were allowed out.
When Raghav’s thumbs stall over the keyboard, Dev doesn’t argue: he documents. A scroll of an investor thread: Love the positioning, Let’s meet, timestamps clustered right after their last “spontaneous” photo. Then a screenshot from a “friendly” partner contact: Can you hop on a quick call today? Dev’s next line lands almost tender. “No one funds honesty that sounds like doubt.” Raghav feels the cliff edge in his ribs.
Under the fluorescent steadiness of Neon Nukkad, Raghav opened Slack and typed like it was harmless: Align language across decks, avoid “pilot”, use “rollout”. He added a smiley he didn’t feel. Then he pasted Dev’s suggested phrasing into an email and forwarded a draft caption. Approve?* His finger hovered, then clicked. Something in his chest went quiet, like a lock turning.
Monday’s all-hands began like they always did now: half the room clutching steel tumblers, the other half pretending they hadn’t slept in the office chairs. Raghav stood near the screen, a marker in his hand for no reason, nodding at stand-up updates that blurred into one anxious hum.
Then Priya spoke.
She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t even look like she wanted to. She just angled her laptop so the front row could see and said, “Quick clarification, Raghav. The partner deck (this version that went out yesterday) who approved the wording change on slide eight?”
His throat tightened before his mind caught up. Slide eight. Data. The one slide he’d rewritten a dozen times to be technically true and still sellable.
Priya scrolled and the sentence sat there in crisp sans-serif, too clean to be an accident: supports broad data workflows.
Raghav felt heat rise under his collar. He knew what it used to say. He’d argued for that line because it kept them safe: limited to pre-approved data types. A constraint, not a confession. A boundary.
Priya’s eyes flicked from the screen to him, not accusing: measuring. “I’m asking because our compliance note in the appendix still talks about pre-approved data types,” she continued, choosing every word like it had to survive legal. “So… are we changing the product scope, or just the language?”
Behind her, someone coughed. A chair creaked. In the back, an engineer’s jaw flexed; Raghav could almost hear the unspoken: Not again.
He heard his own Slack message in her tone, align language across decks, as if she’d swallowed it and was now returning it intact, minus the smiley.
Raghav’s gaze slid to the faces: Sales, waiting for permission to promise; Product, waiting for reality; the interns, waiting to learn what “ethics” meant on a bad runway.
“It’s… positioning,” he said, and hated how small it sounded in the mic. “No scope change.”
Priya nodded once. “Okay. Then we should revert it. Because ‘broad workflows’ is a claim.”
Her calm landed harder than anger. Raghav opened his mouth to defend, to explain, to buy time. And found himself counting how many people had already downloaded the deck.
By lunch, the office had that brittle, hungry quiet where everyone chews fast and listens for bad news. Raghav was half-standing at his desk, poking at a cold idli, when the Sales corner erupted in low voices.
Arjun’s chair rolled back hard enough to graze someone’s bag. He held his phone out like it was contagious. “Raghav, client’s on line two. He’s. He’s quoting our Insta caption.”
Raghav’s stomach tightened. He walked over, pretending calm, and Arjun mouthed the words as if rehearsing damage control: compliant end-to-end. On the speaker, a cheerful baritone said, “So you’re compliant end-to-end, right? Means we can plug all our data, no approvals drama?”
Raghav watched Arjun’s eyes flick to him, please, give me something I can say.
Slack began to fill before he could answer. Priya dropped a screenshot of the caption with the exact line highlighted. Someone else pasted a WhatsApp forward from a founder group: These guys solved compliance. A third message: Can we share this with Legal? The hype had turned into a promise while he was asleep, or pretending he didn’t need sleep.
Arjun muted. “What do I tell him?” he whispered.
In the pantry, the filter coffee smell turned sour in Raghav’s mouth. Sandeep waited till the others drifted out, then stepped in front of the fridge like a gate. His ears were red but his voice was level. “Last time, we did this and you remember what happened. Weekend hotfixes, client escalation, Priya almost quitting.”
Raghav tried to soften it. “We’re not changing scope. It’s just, ”
“Language becomes scope,” Sandeep cut in, eyes steady. He tapped the printout in his hand. “I won’t ship a build that implies policies we don’t have. I won’t.”
He inhaled, then said it like an HR form. “If this is the direction, I’ll resign.”
The pantry went quiet. Even the spoon clink stopped. Raghav felt the silence swivel toward him, and realised everyone had heard.
Sprint planning curdled into a risk tribunal. Product wanted a hard freeze. No more outward claims till Legal blessed every verb. Marketing pushed back, voice tight: “We can’t drop momentum now, yaar.” Support stared at their queue and asked, almost pleading, “What do we tell customers who quote our deck like scripture?” Nothing moved forward; they rewrote docs, clipped demo lines, and chased approvals that kept disappearing.
By evening, the Slack thread (“Deck language / data constraints”) had swollen into a fever chart: dozens of replies, reactions, side-quotes, none of them resolving. The sprint board looked abandoned beside it. People stopped tagging channels and started DM’ing, like the office had developed an underground. Raghav scrolled, jaw tight, understanding the real slip wasn’t dates. It was trust. Everyone assuming the truth was being negotiated elsewhere, without them.
Raghav waited until the office noise thinned into that late-evening hum, fan whirr, keyboard taps, a delivery bike revving downstairs, before he opened Dev’s chat. His thumbs hovered like they needed permission.
We need limits. He deleted it. Too soft.
He typed again, clipped, almost legal: No more commitments made on my behalf. No invites accepted as me. No “we” statements in public without checking. Also. Don’t touch product/legal language. We don’t mislead.
He hit send and felt a ridiculous flare of relief, like he’d pushed back against gravity.
The reply came before he could lock his phone. Three dots. Then a picture.
A screenshot of an Instagram post. Him and Dev at that dim-lit restaurant, Dev’s hand on his shoulder like it belonged there. A blue tick account had liked it. Partner executive. The name made Raghav’s stomach dip, the way it did when a term sheet arrived or a server crashed.
Dev: See? It’s working. Don’t get spooked now.
Another message followed, smooth as a practiced smile: You’re thinking like an engineer. Optics is a system too. We’re finally getting signal. Don’t throttle it because your team is having feelings about copy.
Raghav stared at “your team” and tasted bitterness. The Slack thread flashed in his head, Sandeep’s red ears, Priya’s flat silence, the way everyone had started speaking in DMs like conspirators. He typed, stopped, typed again.
It’s not feelings. It’s compliance. It’s trust. I will not overpromise to close a deal.
Dev replied, instantly again, like he’d been holding the phone with his thumb ready.
Raghav, listen. They don’t want a lecture on constraints. They want confidence. Stability. And yes. Continuity. A pause, then: If you pull back now, they’ll wonder what changed.
Raghav’s pulse thudded behind his eyes. He wanted to ask, What changed? You, but the truth was uglier: doors had opened. Callbacks. Warm intros. His parents’ sudden calm. And Dev knew exactly where to press, like finding the bruise without looking.
Dev: Set boundaries with me if you want. But don’t sabotage momentum. Not when we’re this close.
The next morning, Raghav’s phone buzzed before he was fully awake, the screen bleaching his already-frayed nerves. A calendar invite sat there like an order: **“Quick appearance. Today. Noon. Location pinned. Dress code. And the organiser line. His name. Accepted.
His throat went dry. In the glass of his founder-cabin door, he caught his own reflection: crisp shirt, rolled sleeves, eyes that looked like they’d been left on overnight.
He called Dev. Dev picked up on the first ring, voice warm, almost lazy. “Good morning.”
“You sent this invite from my account,” Raghav said, keeping his voice low because the open-plan carried everything. “You accepted it. I didn’t agree to this.”
A pause that felt deliberate. “I handled it,” Dev said softly. “You were spiralling yesterday. This is… easy.”
“It’s not easy. It’s control.”
Dev didn’t bite. He didn’t even sound offended. “Raghav,” he said, gentler now, “the partner’s team noticed last time you skipped a social touchpoint. They asked, casually, where you were. I’m just making sure there’s no noise.”
Dev had already commandeered the pantry corner, one hand around a paper cup. Raghav stood opposite with his own, the smell of burnt coffee rising anyway. He didn’t drink; the cup was just something to hold while his fingers trembled.
“By the way,” Dev said, like it was gossip, “dinner yesterday was… productive.” He rolled a name off his tongue, an investor Raghav had been stalking through intros for six months, then another. People who didn’t reply to cold mails; people who replied to Dev.
Raghav’s chest tightened. “You met them?”
Dev’s gaze stayed friendly. “Mm. Briefly. It’s better optics if you’re not there yet. Too soon and it looks… hungry.”
Hungry. The word hit like a verdict. Dev took a sip. “Don’t worry. I’ll bring you in when it reads stable.”
Raghav tried to keep it simple. “Dev, it’s my company. My story. I’ll say it my way.”
Dev’s smile didn’t move, but his phone did: screen sliding across the table with a Google Doc already open. “Of course. I just… polished it.”
Bullet points. Confident. Clean. Conveniently silent on the data-policy caveats, the partner’s wobbling interest, the fact that one client basically kept their lights on. “This protects you,” Dev murmured, as if rewriting the truth was kindness.
Dev set his cup down with care. “They’ve slotted you for a demo,” he said, voice still conversational. “But they also asked about… continued stability.” His eyes held Raghav’s like it was nothing personal. “Stability reads as consistency. Us. Showing up. No surprises.” He didn’t say or else. He didn’t need to. The logic landed like a hand closing.
Raghav retreated into the glass-walled cabin and shut the door, though the office noise still bled through like guilt. The deck glared at him from the mounted screen. Too many qualifiers, too many honest edges. He opened the file and started cutting as if he could excise the feeling of three months’ runway with a backspace key.
Why now? became a knife fight with language. He swapped “we’re seeing interest” for “the category is shifting.” He replaced “we need” with “we’re positioned.” Anything that smelled like please got stripped down to something that sounded like gravity doing its job. Controlled inevitability. That was the whole trick. Make it feel like the partnership was the natural next step, not a life raft they’d clawed their way onto.
Outside, someone laughed at a meme; the sound made his jaw tighten. He toggled between slides and metrics dashboards, double-checking graphs like they could reassure him. The numbers were good: good enough to be dangerous. He massaged the story around them, smoothing the spikes, moving footnotes into appendix slides no one would read unless they wanted to corner him.
At 2:[^11] a.m., Kavi’s message popped up, You alive?, and he stared at it too long, then typed Deck rewrite. Later. He didn’t send the second line that formed in his head: I don’t know how to do this without lying. He deleted it instead.
By 4:[^30], his eyes burned and his hands were steady in that numb way that came right before shaking. He rehearsed the “why us” aloud, low voice, tasting each sentence for weakness. He adjusted phrasing to match Dev’s cadence without meaning to. Just before sunrise, he packaged the talking points into a neat doc and emailed it to Dev with a subject line that pretended this was routine: Demo narrative + key answers.
His finger hovered over send for half a second, then clicked.
Approval, he told himself, was just another dependency to manage.
In parallel, Raghav runs a legal sprint like it’s another feature ship. He paces the narrow corridor outside the cabin, phone wedged to his ear, whispering into it while the office pretends not to listen.
“Can we say we’re compliant?” he asks.
There’s a pause on the other end. “You can say you’re aligned with best practices,” the lawyer replies, clipped. “Don’t say ‘compliant’ unless you’re ready for an audit trail.”
He opens a doc and starts typing in furious fragments: aligned with, in progress, designed to support, subject to client approvals. Every safe phrase feels like a concession. Every unsafe one feels like a dare.
Redlines arrive mid-call, tracked changes blooming like bruises across his carefully-clean sentences. He toggles between the contract draft and the demo script, cross-referencing clauses the way he checks logs after an outage. No guarantees on data residency. No claims of exclusivity. Don’t mention the dependency, don’t name the client, don’t imply live data access.
By the time he’s done, his notes aren’t a pitch. They’re a minefield map with flags in the ground and his throat aches from swallowing the truth into acceptable language.
By noon the office feels like a wire pulled too tight. Raghav moves through it like a patch update, quick and silent. In the pantry he corners Prateek between the filter coffee and stacked tiffins. “Five minutes,” he says, softer than he feels. “Tell me what’s blocked, no drama.” He listens, nods, and makes a note he won’t remember unless he writes it down. “I’ll take the client call,” he adds, meaning: I’ll absorb the blast.
In stand-up, he performs steadiness: voice even, jokes rationed. “We’re protecting focus,” he tells them, calling it support while his calendar quietly compresses. Later he drops into DMs: You okay? Need me to unblock? The timelines tighten anyway, just enough to keep up with the momentum Dev’s circle now expects.
When his parents called, their voices carried that dangerous softness: relief dressed up as casual. “So, now everything is stable, na?” his mother said, and his stomach tightened. He put on his CEO voice anyway. “It’s improving, Ma. Not stable yet.” He praised their patience, promised to visit soon, and sidestepped marriage talk with deadlines and “after this quarter,” extracting a ceasefire without inviting the next biodata parade.
By the time Dev’s next “couple” slot is confirmed, Raghav’s body is basically a dashboard of red warnings, caffeine, calendar pings, that thin ringing behind the eyes. He functions in bullet points and version numbers; in person he’s all edges. He answers too fast, laughs too late, keeps everyone moving with brute focus and a dread he refuses to label.
Manju doesn’t need context or gossip; she reads the room like a balance sheet, eyes moving over people the way her father used to scan quarterly reports, quietly, ruthlessly, catching what others file under “vibes.” Neon Nukkad’s pitch corner is crowded in a way the office rarely is: a couple of investors in linen shirts, two founders from some adjacent co-working floor, phones already tilted up like reflex. The mounted screen still shows the last slide. Growth curve, retention, a promise disguised as a number.
Raghav stands a little too straight, like his spine is holding the whole story together. Dev is beside him, not in his space exactly, but near enough that the closeness reads as inevitable. Manju watches Dev’s timing: half a step closer when a camera’s auto-focus hunts; a laugh delayed until the room laughs; the light hand on Raghav’s forearm that lasts long enough to be captured and short enough to be dismissed.
Raghav’s face does something small, almost private, his jaw setting, the micro-second where his eyes harden as if he’s bracing for impact, and then he supplies the grin everyone expects. The grin is technically perfect. It’s also not his. Manju has seen his real smile before: careless, crooked, the kind that used to arrive without permission. This one is assembled.
Someone, one of the junior associates, maybe, says, “Power couple, yaar,” and the room obliges with polite laughter. Raghav’s laugh arrives a beat late, like a notification he didn’t want to open. Dev’s warmth fills the gap smoothly. “We try,” Dev says, and it lands like a tagline.
Manju’s fingers tighten around her phone. Not anger, exactly. Recognition. A transaction masquerading as intimacy. She looks at Raghav again and sees the cost column he thinks no one can read: the slightly pinched inhale, the way he keeps his shoulders squared to the audience instead of turning toward the person next to him.
It’s the same old math, just dressed better. And for a moment, she can’t tell whether Dev is performing love… or performing ownership.
The applause breaks like a sudden shower. Dev moves with it. His palm lands on Raghav’s back with that polished ease that looks supportive to strangers and reads like a claim to anyone paying attention. Warm, steady, lingering. One beat too long for comfort, one beat too short for anyone to call it out.
Raghav registers it the way he registers a new Jira ticket: a spike of irritation, a quick scan of consequences, then a mute acceptance because the sprint is already on fire. He keeps his smile fixed, jaw tight under it, and lets his shoulders stay square to the room. Not yielding. Not resisting. Just… absorbing.
“Solid demo,” an investor says, stepping forward with a hand out.
Raghav’s own hand shoots forward on instinct. “Thanks, sir. We can share the deeper metrics (cohort-wise) today evening.”
Dev’s fingers press, subtle emphasis, as if reminding him to keep it clean, keep it simple, keep it sellable. Dev leans in, voice low enough to feel private. “No need to overcomplicate. Let them leave happy.”
Raghav’s laugh comes out clipped. “Right,” he says, because arguing here would take oxygen he can’t spare.
Manju tracks it like a pattern she can’t unsee. The room’s rhythm, the way Dev rides it. A laugh that arrives half a second after a joke, calibrated. A shared glance toward the phone held too steady to be casual. Dev’s “we” dropped into sentences with the confidence of a signature, as if it has always sat on Raghav’s letterhead.
Raghav doesn’t correct it. He stands there, shoulders squared, but his attention keeps skittering: toward the access door, toward the founder cabin, toward the invisible buzz of his pocket. His smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes; it’s a mask he can put on faster than he can breathe. When Dev’s hand brushes his arm again, Raghav’s fingers flex once, a tiny refusal that never becomes one.
Present, yes. But not choosing.
Manju waits, patient, tactical, until the crowd disperses just enough for a seam of quiet to appear. She steps into it and draws him with her, past the pitch corner into the corridor where the AC hum swallows chatter and no one is performing. Her expression stays composed, almost kind, which is why it hits harder. “Since when,” she asks softly, “do you do anything you don’t mean?”
The question hooks under his ribs and yanks. Under Manju’s soft tone sits the old accusation. His life reduced to a pitch deck, affection repurposed as leverage, truth trimmed until it fits a caption. Raghav’s mouth shapes a defence, strategy, runway, survival, because that’s what he’s good at. But guilt hits first, hot and specific, and he swallows, throat tight, eyes flicking away.
Dev didn’t ask. He opened his phone like it was a contract already signed and started building Raghav’s week in neat, confident blocks.
“Tomorrow, 8:[^30],” Dev said, thumb moving with practiced speed. “Koramangala. That place with the green wall. We do a quick breakfast, one clean shot. No laptops, no founder fatigue. Caption: Building and believing. Something like that.”
Raghav’s first instinct was to say he had a stand-up, a bug list, a partner call that could decide whether they lived past the quarter. But Dev’s calendar invite landed with a soft chime, already addressed to “Raghav +1”, already copying a PR email ID Raghav had never seen before.
“I didn’t agree to. “You agreed to results.”
Another block appeared. “Wednesday evening. Investor mixer at The Leela. You’ll do a panel. Don’t worry, it’s friendly.”
Raghav’s jaw tightened. His skull felt full of static. Every slot Dev created was a slot taken from the code freeze, from the demo rehearsal, from the two hours of sleep he kept promising himself like it was an optional feature.
“And Saturday,” Dev continued, as if Raghav’s silence was confirmation. “Brunch. Family friends. Nothing heavy. Just optics. Your parents will exhale. The right aunties will stop asking questions. You’ll look… settled.”
Settled. The word hit like a thumb on a bruise.
Raghav tried to find the seam in Dev’s schedule, a place where he could slip a boundary in without ripping the whole thing open. “This is getting… crowded,” he managed, hating how small it sounded.
Dev leaned back, still smiling, but his voice sharpened by half a degree. “It’s not crowded. It’s timed.” He tapped the upcoming demo date on the screen, then the string of appearances leading up to it, like a runway lit for landing. “We build momentum. We don’t give anyone space to doubt. You want that partner team to show up excited? You give them a story they can repeat.”
Raghav watched the week become something he was meant to inhabit, not choose. An agenda that made no room for truth, or for Manju’s question still burning in his chest.
Inside the glass-walled cabin, the office noise dulled into a muffled current. Dev placed a single stapled document on the desk between them like it was a term sheet.
“Storyline,” he said, light, almost amused. “For press. For the partner. For anyone who asks what Neon Nukkad is.”
Raghav skimmed. The language was clean to the point of antiseptic: mission-led, category-defining, India-first, a founder who’d “chosen impact over comfort.” Their messy, lived-in reality, client delays, compliance flags, last week’s near-miss, had been ironed flat into something that could fit on a LinkedIn carousel.
Dev leaned over his shoulder, cologne and confidence, and tapped two paragraphs with a manicured finger. “This,” he said, and drew a line through the section on current data-policy limitations. Another tap, lower down, where the renewal dependence sat like a small, honest bruise in the middle of the page. “And this. We don’t need it.”
Raghav’s pulse kicked. “But it’s… true.”
Dev didn’t look up. “True is negotiable. Perception isn’t.”
Dev’s tone softened, as if he was offering mentorship instead of a muzzle. “This isn’t deceit, Raghav. It’s… grown-up,” he said, palms open, the gesture almost tender. But his eyes didn’t soften; they measured.
Raghav felt his own spine go rigid. “Grown-up is telling them what we can’t do yet.”
Dev smiled like that was naïve. “Grown-up is not handing people ammunition before they’ve even met your team.” He tapped the page again, right where the messy truths lived. “You let them fall in love with the vision first. Then you negotiate the fine print when they’re already emotionally invested.”
Raghav’s jaw clenched. The sentence landed like a threat dressed as advice.
“Investors buy confidence,” Dev added. “Not caveats.”
The pressure tightened into a quiet ultimatum. Dev’s voice stayed mild, but every word carried a deadline: approvals had to happen “in the next forty-eight hours,” because the partner’s VP was “impossible to pin down,” because this kind of window was “rare.” Any last-minute wobble would look like instability. And instability, Dev implied, invited competitors to step neatly into their place.
Raghav did the math the way he did runway: cold numbers, hot consequences. If he nodded, the story would glide, calls would keep coming, the demo would land; and some part of him would rot quietly under the gloss. If he pushed back, the window could slam shut, the team would read panic in his face, and his parents’ “we told you so” would sharpen into prophecy. And Manju, Manju would notice the performance before he even finished it.
Dev’s message landed at 6:[^47] p.m., just as Raghav was rereading a burn-down chart like it could confess a miracle.
Low-stakes charity mixer, Dev had written. Old friends, safe donors, nothing political. You show face, we leave early. Promise.
There was a flyer attached: cream background, serif font, too much gold embossing for anything that pretended to be casual. The kind of event where people donated because the room expected it, not because the cause moved them.
Raghav almost thumbed out a no. His neck tightened at the thought of another evening spent performing competence in a room that smelled of perfume and polished wood. Then the second attachment opened: guest list.
He scrolled, half-distracted, until a familiar surname hit him like a dropped server. The partnership target’s executive. One of the two signatories who mattered, the one his BD lead kept calling “the real gate.” A neat little note from Dev beneath the name: He’s been dodging your emails. In person, he’ll have to be civil. Come for ten minutes, get your foot in.
Raghav’s chest prickled with the particular panic of timing. Three months of runway. One partnership that could reset everything. Saying no wasn’t neutrality; it was actively choosing the cliff.
He called Dev, because he hated the way texts made him feel like he’d already agreed.
“You’re sure this is not… a scene?” Raghav kept his voice low, even though the office was only his laptop and a half-empty steel tumbler on the desk at home.
Dev’s laugh was soft, practiced. “Raghav, relax. It’s philanthropy, not a film premiere. You’ll hate the hors d’oeuvres, shake two hands, and we’re out.”
“And the executive, ”
“Is real,” Dev cut in smoothly. “I wouldn’t waste your time. Also (” a pause, perfectly measured “) it won’t hurt for your parents to see you in the right rooms. Respectability. You keep saying you want them off your back.”
Raghav stared at the wall, jaw working. Every route out of this felt like a worse trade.
“Fine,” he said, and hated how much it sounded like surrender.
“Good,” Dev replied, warmth sliding into triumph. “Wear the crisp shirt. I’ll handle the rest.”
Inside the heritage hall, the air was cold with AC and old money, mogra, oud, and polished teak layered over a faint whiff of white wine. Raghav had barely crossed the threshold when Dev melted into the room like he owned it, palm on shoulders, names traded like business cards.
“Raghav, this is Mrs. Mehta: trustee board,” Dev said, smiling as if he was doing everyone a favour by existing. Before Raghav could decide whether to shake hands or bow slightly, Dev had already pivoted him toward the next cluster.
Raghav followed, one step behind, feeling his own body in a way he usually didn’t: shirt cuffs too tight, watch too loud, eyes too tired. Networking, he told himself. Ten minutes. Foot in the door.
Dev peeled away near the dining area, leaned in to the seating coordinator, an auntie type in silk, headset tucked under her hair, and said something soft, almost affectionate. The coordinator’s eyebrows lifted, then she nodded, quick and unquestioning.
When Raghav found his table, his name card sat beside another: Manjushree Suryavanshi.
Manju looked up as he reached for his chair, her expression composed: then a flicker, there and gone. The gap between their seats was small enough that even a polite lean would photograph like a confession.
Manju angled her glass by the stem, eyes steady. “So. Neon Nukkad. Still surviving on caffeine and fear?”
Raghav let out a quick breath that almost became a laugh. “Fear is optional. Caffeine isn’t. We’re… close to something.” Too fast, too eager: he heard it himself and slowed. “How’s your father? The new fund?”
“Busy,” she said, warmth kept behind her teeth. “As always. And you? Sleep?”
He opened his mouth, then shut it. “Later,” he admitted.
Dev slid in with a plate like he belonged at every table. “He’s being modest,” he said, easy. “Raghav doesn’t do ‘later’. Manju, you remember: back in college he’d vanish for days, then resurface with a plan.”
Manju’s smile tightened, polite as a clasp. “Some things don’t change.”
Dev’s hand hovered at Raghav’s shoulder, a light steer. “Some things do. Serious commitments, na?”
A lifestyle photographer drifted into their orbit, camera hanging from a leather strap like jewellery, lens cap on, smile bland. Yet every time he looped past, Dev’s laughter rose a notch, his glass lifted higher, his hand sweeping out. Presenting Raghav and Manju to the room. Nearby guests paused mid-bite, watching. The space around their chairs tightened, polite bodies forming a soft barricade.
Dev let the talk drift, harmless on the surface then landed it neatly on marriage without saying the word. “You know, Raghav, when families align, work becomes… smoother,” he said, eyes bright. “Manju, your father values stability, no?” Raghav’s throat tightened. Manju’s gaze sharpened: warning, calculation. The photographer edged closer, lens waking up.
Dev moved like he was rearranging furniture he owned: half a step behind Raghav, close enough that anyone watching would read it as camaraderie, not control. His voice slid in under the hum of conversation, pitched for Raghav alone. “Bas. Don’t look distracted,” he murmured, warmth lacquered over steel. “In their circle, you show respect properly. Otherwise it looks… careless.”
Raghav’s shoulders tightened. He’d stood in front of investors with product failures on the screen and still kept his chin level. This. This was worse, because there was no deck, no numbers, just eyes. Manju’s family cluster sat a few feet away, an island of silk saris and tailored blazers, the kind of calm that came from money that didn’t have to hurry. Her father’s profile was turned slightly, listening to someone, but Raghav could feel the angle of his attention like a blade.
“I’m fine,” Raghav said, too quick. He tried to pivot back to Manju, to keep it between them, private even in public. But Dev’s hand hovered near his elbow, an almost-touch that made Raghav conscious of every small movement, every way his body could be read.
“Not fine,” Dev said, still soft. “You’re brilliant in meetings. Here it’s different. Just. Align yourself.” He laughed aloud then, as if someone had said something hilarious, and used the laugh to cover the nudge: a subtle pressure at Raghav’s side that rotated him, degree by degree, until he faced the family cluster square on.
The photographer’s strap creaked somewhere to Raghav’s left. Raghav caught the glint of glass, lens, watch face, someone’s ring, everything reflecting, recording.
Manju’s eyes flicked to Dev, then back to Raghav. The warmth didn’t leave her face, but it thinned, turning watchful.
Raghav swallowed. The old instinct rose, perform, deliver, close. Except the deal here was his own life, and Dev was positioning him like a signature on a document he hadn’t read.
Raghav was still hunting for an exit line, something clean, something that wouldn’t make him look spooked, when Dev’s fingers settled on his wrist with the casual confidence of a man fixing a cufflink. The contact was light, almost friendly. That was the point. In a room like this, force wasn’t force; it was choreography.
“Relax,” Dev murmured, the word barely moving his lips. To anyone else it would read like advice, not instruction.
Raghav’s pulse kicked under Dev’s thumb. He tried to pull back without making it obvious, but Dev had already angled his hand, turning the movement into manners. A half-step closer, a fraction of a pivot, Dev guiding him like he was guiding him toward a photo op at a product launch.
And then Raghav’s palm landed against the small of Manju’s back.
Warmth through silk. A boundary crossed with the gentlest pressure.
His stomach dropped. He could feel the room’s attention condense, the silent click of people deciding what this meant: claim, commitment, family approval. The photographer’s lens lifted in his periphery, hungry.
Raghav kept his face steady, like in a pitch, while inside he scrambled: if he moved away now, it would look like rejection. If he stayed, it would look like agreement.
Manju’s breath hitched: so small it might’ve been nothing, if Raghav hadn’t been watching her the way he watched a dashboard right before a crash. She didn’t flinch, didn’t step aside. Instead, something slid into place behind her eyes: the soft ease of the evening sealing up, replaced by a composure so tight it looked sharpened. Her mouth held a polite curve, but it wasn’t warmth anymore; it was control.
Her gaze cut to his, quick and direct. Not anger. Not pleading. A question, almost clinical: Is this you choosing? Or you letting yourself be steered again?
Raghav’s palm felt suddenly too heavy, too public. He wanted to say her name, to explain in one sentence that could undo a decade, but all he could offer was stillness: an answer that could read as consent, or as cowardice.
Across the circle, the reaction travels faster than speech. An uncle’s brows lift in approval; a cousin’s grin sharpens, already drafting a story; Manju’s mother tilts her chin a millimetre, as if witnessing something inevitable. Two heads bend together, whispering behind bangles and perfume. Raghav can almost hear the arithmetic: timelines revised, alliances assumed, introductions cancelled. His hand stays where it is. Evidence.
The apology he’d rehearsed for years (between investor calls, between sleepless sprints) swelled up, hot and useless, then collapsed behind his teeth. It had been meant for a quiet corner, not for a caption under flashbulbs. The camera found him like a crosshair. Dev’s smile stayed soft, sponsor-friendly, anchoring the moment, making Raghav’s silence look deliberate.
Raghav’s mind snapped into pattern-recognition the way it always did under threat. The room wasn’t a room; it was a table of stakeholders arranged for maximum leverage. He took it in in clean vectors, entry, exits, sightlines, like he was mapping churn risk.
Manju’s elders held the doorway in a loose semicircle, the kind of placement that looked casual but controlled who left, who entered, who got to be seen. Behind them, the corridor glowed with outside light, escape, technically, but also the most visible channel out. A deliberate bottleneck. To the left, near the bar, two men in tailored suits stood with glasses they weren’t drinking from. He’d seen one of them in a partner deck once: an executive whose face never appeared on stage but whose name sat in the “Approvals Pending” column of every email thread. The other had that watch-and-wait posture of corporate legal. Not guests. Witnesses.
He felt the air change as phones came up, not all at once: one screen, then another, then the familiar angled grip of someone pretending to check messages while framing a shot. Somewhere behind him, he caught the faint stutter of a shutter sound, the small, ugly burst of certainty.
Dev moved like he owned the tempo. A hand at Raghav’s back (light, friendly, and impossibly directive) guiding him into the brightest patch of light under the chandelier. Not a push. An invitation that still forced a yes or a scene.
“Relax,” Dev murmured, close enough that it could pass as affectionate. “Just… be normal. They love normal.”
Raghav’s jaw tightened. Normal was shipping on time, not staging intimacy for strangers.
Manju stood in front of him, calm in a way that made his chest ache. Her expression didn’t give him cover. It offered him a mirror.
He heard his own voice come out steadier than he felt. “This is planned.”
Dev’s smile didn’t flicker. “Everything important is.”
Raghav’s fingers flexed, wanting to drop, to step away, to reclaim the only boundary he still controlled. Instead he tracked the geometry again, angles converging, optics closing, until even his options felt like pre-approved narratives.
Raghav tried a small retreat the way he would in a meeting when a conversation turned toxic: half a step back, a brief laugh, shoulders angled as if he’d been pulled into this frame by accident. It was nothing, almost graceful. A micro-edit to the narrative. He even lifted his glass a fraction, an easy, “Arre, kya yaar,” meant to dissolve the intensity.
It didn’t.
Manju’s mother looked at him the way investors looked at a founder who’d just promised a date on a slide, expectant, already budgeting for delivery. The host’s attention sat on his face like a hand: proud, proprietary, as if Raghav was proof of a win the family had quietly secured. Around them, the circle held its breath, waiting for him to complete the picture.
His heel hovered, then settled back down. He could feel how a sharper movement would land here: not as a boundary, not as “I need space,” but as an insult served in public. A rejection with witnesses. A headline without words.
Manju’s gaze flicked to his foot, then up, asking nothing, offering nothing. That was the worst part: she wasn’t saving him, and she wasn’t sabotaging him. She was simply letting him choose.
The photographer edged in, polite smile, predatory patience. Raghav heard the click again, soft, almost friendly, like a lock turning. Social proof, crystallising in real time. In this room, refusing didn’t read as privacy; it read as guilt. It would become a story everyone could tell without knowing facts: Why did he flinch? What is he hiding? Is it her? Is it him? Is it a business thing?
A phone lifted near the dessert table, angle adjusted with practised casualness. Someone laughed a little too loud, covering the choreography. Dev’s arm stayed lightly around him, a bracket disguised as affection, holding him in frame.
Raghav felt his smile drag onto his face like a compliance signature. One second for the photo. Years for the consequences.
His brain ran consequences like unit tests. Manju’s house would log this as disrespect, the kind that sat in family memory far longer than any quarterly report. The partner execs would quietly tag him: brilliant, volatile, not worth the risk. And his parents (Appa, Amma) would get WhatsApp screenshots from some well-meaning uncle before he could even type, It’s not what it looks like.
Runway numbers ticked behind his teeth, weeks, not months, while the partner’s executives watched from the margins like judges who didn’t need to speak. Raghav forced his shoulders down, let his feet root to the marble, and chose the least catastrophic version of being misunderstood. His stomach still rolled. He could already feel the photo’s afterlife: forwarded, framed, weaponised, outlasting any explanation he tried to offer later.
The flash caught him like a slap, white heat at the edge of his vision, and Raghav’s body reacted before his brain finished the thought. Half a step forward, as if closing distance could close a story. His hand came up, palm open, fingers relaxed, the universal one second that looked courteous even while it was a block.
“Sorry. Just a moment,” he said, voice pitched low and even, the tone he used when a client started freestyling scope in a review call. Not angry. Not pleading. Controlled. He aimed it at the photographer with a small, professional smile that didn’t reach his tired eyes.
The photographer paused, camera still lifted. Around them, conversation didn’t stop; it swelled, protective of its own momentum. Raghav could feel people registering the move, not as boundary, but as texture, drama, romance, secret. That was the problem. In rooms like this, friction didn’t reduce attention; it multiplied it.
Dev’s arm tightened an invisible fraction at Raghav’s back, a gentle steering wheel disguised as intimacy. “Arre, it’s fine,” Dev said, a warm laugh dropped into the air like sugar into chai. Loud enough for nearby ears. “He’s just: he gets shy.”
Raghav’s jaw ticked. He shifted his torso, angling his shoulder toward the lens, trying to break the line of sight without looking like he was body-checking the man. He’d done this before: standing between a founder and an investor when tempers rose, redirecting, rephrasing, keeping the optics clean. But this wasn’t a boardroom. There were no minutes, no follow-up email that could reset context.
“Please,” Raghav repeated, softer, firmer. “Not right now.”
He could feel sweat prick under his collar despite the air-conditioning. The marble under his shoes was too slick, the light too bright, his smile too practiced. He flicked a glance past the camera, catching fragments of faces, the gleam of phones held chest-high, the partner execs’ unreadable calm, and somewhere in that blur, he tried to locate Manju.
Because if she saw him flinch, she wouldn’t see a man protecting privacy.
She would see a man hiding something.
“Congrats on the engagement!” a woman in pearls sang out, glass lifted, eyes bright with the satisfaction of being first to name a story.
Raghav’s lungs stalled. Engagement wasn’t a word here; it was an announcement, a seal, a family decision disguised as celebration. He let the beat of the music cover the first spike of panic, then turned with a smile that felt stapled on.
“No: please don’t use that word,” he said, careful and calm, as if he were correcting a term in a contract. He kept his tone courteous, almost boring, because boredom was the only antidote he had to spectacle. “There’s been… a misunderstanding.”
A couple of heads pivoted, hungry. Someone chuckled like it was flirting.
Raghav’s gaze cut through the cluster, searching for Manju over shoulders and champagne flutes. He found her half a room away, still, spine straight, expression unreadable in that way of hers that used to mean I’m listening, don’t lie to me. His throat tightened.
“It’s not what you think,” he added, softer, to the woman, to the circle, to Manju, to the invisible WhatsApp groups already drafting captions. Clarity, he told himself. Precision. Like that could rewind a camera.
Raghav dipped his head closer to Dev’s ear, letting the music swallow the words. “Stop this. Now,” he said, each syllable pressed flat. “Ask them to back off. Tell them it’s not. Whatever they’re calling it. Redirect. Anything.” His mind ran in cold columns: partner optics, Manju’s family, his parents’ WhatsApp wildfire, the team watching for stability. One wrong caption and it would calcify into truth.
Dev’s face turned to him with an almost tender attentiveness, brows drawn like he was listening to a confession. From the outside it read like a lover’s private joke, a man absorbing vulnerability.
Raghav saw the angle of it (the theatre of closeness) and felt his pulse spike. Dev’s eyes held his, calm, proprietary, as if to say: Let them believe it.
Dev answered at a volume that travelled, warm, teasing, and oddly earnest. “Thank you, yaar. So much love,” he said, palms together for a beat. “Raghav’s like this: very private. He doesn’t like… big announcements.” Laughter rippled. Dev’s fingers brushed Raghav’s elbow, a feather-light steer that read as comfort, not command, placing him back beside him as cameras clicked.
Every time Raghav tried to pull air into the moment, “No, seriously, please,” a half-step back, a polite hand raised, Dev caught it like a tossed ball and made it look like intimacy. A soft laugh. “We’re not rushing labels, guys.” A look up at the ceiling as if praying for patience. The room melted, clapped, cooed. Raghav’s corrections thinned into background noise, overwritten by Dev’s story.
Raghav’s phone started vibrating in his trouser pocket before his feet even found the first step down from the dais. At first he told himself it was just the usual. An engineer asking for a decision, the finance guy panicking about invoices. Then it buzzed again, urgent, insistent, like a trapped insect that refused to die.
He slipped his hand in, fingers closing around warm glass. Screen lit. Slack.
Aditi (Growth): uh… why are you trending?
His throat went dry. Trending meant volume. Volume meant narrative. He kept his face neutral, the way you did in front of investors when the demo crashed, and angled his body so the nearest camera wouldn’t catch the screen.
Another vibration layered on top of the first. WhatsApp this time. Unknown number, no display photo, just a string of digits and a name he didn’t recognise. The message loaded with obscene speed, like it had been waiting.
A screenshot.
It was already neatly framed: his profile, Dev’s hand at his elbow, their heads tilted just enough to suggest a private world. The caption was tidy, celebratory, the kind that pretended it was humble: Some things are worth waiting for. A red heart. A ring emoji, because of course.
He didn’t realise he’d stopped walking until someone brushed past him and he caught himself, shoulders tightening. Around him, laughter rose and fell. Glass clinked. Someone called his name with the singsong affection reserved for men being softened into good sons.
Another Slack ping came through.
Nikhil (Partnerships): Partner execs are in our LinkedIn comments. What is happening??
His thumb hovered over the keyboard, useless. What did he type, it’s a misunderstanding, when a misunderstanding didn’t arrive pre-captioned?
He looked up, finding Dev a few feet away, still glowing in the attention, still perfectly placed. Dev’s gaze flicked to Raghav’s pocket, then back to his face, a micro-smile like a seal on an envelope.
Raghav’s scalp prickled. This wasn’t chaos. This was rollout.
He thumbed the first link open, then the next, then another, and something in his chest went cold with recognition: not the photo, but the choreography. Same moment, same two bodies, repackaged like a product launch. On Instagram it was tabloid-flirty: warm filter, soft-focus, a winking caption about “finally” and “keeping it low-key”, tagged to two lifestyle pages that lived off rings and rumours. On LinkedIn it had been cleaned, sharpened, made respectable. The account posting it wasn’t even a person; it was one of those networking handles that harvested founders like trophies.
Then WhatsApp. A forwarded image with the edges blurred just enough to pretend discretion while keeping his face unmistakable. Folded-hands emojis lined up under it like blessings. Hamare Raghav ko nazar na lage. The sender name was “Sharma Aunty (C-Block)”. Not his contact. Someone else’s network.
His thumb scrolled back up. Watermark. “Exclusive.” Too fast, too neat.
This wasn’t gossip. It was distribution.
It hit him with the same clarity as a churn graph finally stabilising: this wasn’t people talking, it was traffic being routed. The captions weren’t messy or personal; they were templated: three versions of the same sentiment, tweaked for platform tone. Instagram got romance-coded breathlessness, LinkedIn got “power couple” polish, WhatsApp got the bless-you beta warmth with just enough blur to feel “private”. Tagged accounts he’d never heard of were tagging each other back, looping the image through lifestyle pages, founder communities, and auntie networks that didn’t intersect unless someone stitched them together. Even the “exclusive” watermark looked like a brand asset, placed identical each time. Waves, not ripples. Someone had a calendar, a list, and a plan.
A new notification slid in, email, subject line bland, impact brutal. The angel investor he’d been courting for months: Congrats. Also. Can we talk tomorrow about “focus” and optics? The quotation marks felt like fingers on his throat. Before he could exhale, his mother’s voice note arrived, too bright, too calm. “Dev seems very serious, beta. We should speak to his family.”
Then came the most surgical strike. A thread hit his business inbox, forwarded by a “well-wisher,” already addressed to the partner’s executive assistant. Photos attached. A polite paragraph about “leadership maturity” and “continuity,” as if his private life was a risk-control document. Dev had packaged him into a reassurance and sent it ahead like a credential Raghav hadn’t agreed to submit.
By midnight, his phone had turned into a vibrating organ he couldn’t surgically remove. Every surface in the apartment felt like it was lit by the screen, blue, insistent, making his tired eyes sting. He told himself he wouldn’t open anything. He opened everything.
“Boss, big news yaar!” a junior founder he barely knew had DM’d, followed by a string of heart emojis and a GIF of fireworks. Another message came in on LinkedIn from a venture partner who’d ghosted him for six weeks: Congrats. So you’re finally settling down? Good. Investors like stability. As if love was a cap table term.
The congratulations were never just congratulations. They were congratulations dressed up as concern, as advice, as ownership. Hope this doesn’t distract you from the product. Happy for you, but make sure you’re not taking on too much. If you need to restructure your role, we can help. People he hadn’t given a right to opine were suddenly writing his life in bullet points.
He swiped into WhatsApp and the family groups were a slow-motion landslide. His aunt had forwarded a grainy screenshot. His face, Dev’s hand at his elbow, a caption that read like a promise. His cousin typed, Finally! Mum is crying happy tears. Another cousin, the one who always asked about valuations, added, Now partnership also will happen na?
Then the call from home cut through like a knife, not loud, just clean. His mother didn’t ask, What happened? She said, “We spoke to Sharma aunty. Dev’s family seems very good. They are also serious.” Serious. As if seriousness was a product requirement he’d missed.
“Maa, wait,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “It’s not. “If you are doing this, do it properly. People are watching. Your mother has already told your nani. Don’t make us look… confused.”
Confused. That was the word they used when they meant shameful. When they meant don’t embarrass us in public. Raghav stared at the call screen after it ended, throat tight, and realised the most terrifying part: back in that hall, he’d lived a moment. Somewhere else, a version of it had already become policy.
Manju didn’t call. She didn’t text. The absence sat in his chest like a weight with intent, not emptiness but a deliberate refusal to be pulled into his mess.
On Instagram, a society page had already tagged her as if it was a brand collaboration. In the comments, strangers speculated like they had term sheets in hand: power couple, strategic, finally aligned. A WhatsApp screenshot floated through his contacts: Manju’s cousin in some “family coordination” group, typing, If this is happening, we should speak to Malhotras about timelines. Timelines. Like she was a project plan.
Raghav scrolled, jaw clenched, and saw the language shift in real time: from curiosity to assumption to announcement. People weren’t asking what Manju wanted; they were assigning her a role that made everyone else feel organised.
His thumb hovered over her name. He imagined her phone lighting up with the same piranha swarm of “concern,” the same soft coercion dressed as tradition. The worst part wasn’t the headlines. It was how quickly her autonomy got converted into currency: and how he’d helped mint it.
On Slack, the #launch-warroom channel got weirdly polite, like everyone had suddenly remembered HR existed. The usual panic, bugs, churn graphs, client escalations, flattened into one shared anxiety with no owner. A meme showed up: his face cropped from the photo, pasted onto a movie poster, captioned Series A: The Wedding Edition. Nobody laughed. Someone deleted it. Someone else typed, then backspaced for a full minute.
Kavi pinged him privately: Tell me this isn’t going to become “founder optics” ka project. In the main thread, Arjun asked, too carefully, “Are we still negotiating on integrations… or on perception?” Another teammate: “If tomorrow you break up, hypothetically, does the partnership break too?”
Raghav read the messages like they were metrics. Except these numbers were people, and trust didn’t have a dashboard.
By morning, the partner thread changed flavour. No more banter, no more “excited to build together”: just calendar links and “as discussed” bullets. A senior exec asked, blandly, for his “succession plan” and who would “own the relationship” if “personal commitments” shifted. Another wanted Dev looped in for “alignment.” Raghav felt it: the contract wasn’t being negotiated against product anymore, but against a romance they’d decided was a governance signal.
Dev wasn’t in the room, not on any thread, not even in the photos: yet his choreography held. The same cropped angles resurfaced on different accounts, captions echoing each other like a press note: commitment, blessing, next step. Calls arrived in a precise sequence: first family, then “concerned” investors, then the partner’s comms lead. If Raghav hesitated now, it wouldn’t read as panic. It would read as a lie.
Raghav shut the glass cabin door with more force than he intended, then immediately hated the sound: like a signal to the whole open-plan that he was cracking. Outside, keyboards kept up their steady clatter, someone laughed too loudly at a joke he couldn’t hear, and the neon-blue “Live Tickets” dashboard glowed on the wall as if nothing in his life was on fire.
He stood for a second, palms on the edge of the desk, and forced his breathing to obey him. Panic was a useless emotion; policy wasn’t.
Laptop open. New document. Title: BOUNDARIES , PUBLIC ASSOCIATION. He made it look like something a lawyer would approve and an investor wouldn’t blink at. No adjectives. No explanations. No “please”.
His fingers moved in sharp, efficient strokes.
He paused, cursor blinking like an accusation. His chest still felt tight, but the list was clean: cleaner than his thoughts. The caffeine on his tongue turned metallic.
From the corridor, he caught a scrap of conversation, “…rumour going around…”, and his jaw clenched hard enough to ache. Dev didn’t fight fair. Dev fought with vibes and whispers and “concern”.
Raghav tightened the language further, removing every opening that could be interpreted as insecurity. At the bottom he added: This supersedes all informal understandings to date.
He read it once, twice, hearing Dev’s smooth voice in his head, imagining the practiced half-smile. Then he saved it as a PDF, because PDFs didn’t invite edits, and because he needed something that looked like a boundary and felt like armour.
He attached the PDF, checked the filename twice, then hit send from his official email: subject line bland enough to be boring: Public Association: Written Parameters. The timestamp landed like a gavel. Immediately after, he forwarded the same mail to Dev on WhatsApp, because Dev loved to pretend emails were “too formal” and WhatsApp was “more human.” Fine. Let the record exist in both places.
He kept the cc list surgical. Only one address: the comms lead Dev actually deferred to, the one who could translate charm into policy. No one from Neon Nukkad. No Kavi. No Manju. No mutuals who’d turn it into a group-chat referendum. Raghav could already hear the “concerned” voice notes if he let it leak.
In the body he didn’t soften anything, didn’t explain why. He added one final line, isolated on its own like a clause in a contract:
“Any deviation will be treated as deliberate misrepresentation.”
His thumb hovered over the blue ticked message. Seen or not, it was now outside his head. That, at least, was control.
He didn’t wait for Dev to “clarify” over a call and turn sentences into feelings. Raghav opened Drive, created a folder, Partnership Ops, and forced himself into process like it was a sprint ritual. Subfolders: Comms, Scope, Risks. He dropped the PDF, exported the WhatsApp screenshots, saved the sent-mail headers, then wrote a dated note in a plain text doc: what he asked, who was copied, what “deviation” meant.
A second file: Timeline. One line per incident, no commentary. Just facts.
He pinned a sticky note to his monitor anyway, because his brain liked to argue when it was cornered: Don’t debate. Don’t justify. Don’t negotiate boundaries in person.
This wasn’t about winning. It was about making distortion costly.
In the same breath, he redoes the partnership pitch to remove every soft edge Dev could tug. He kills the “founder story” slide (no childhood hustle, no teary resilience) and deletes the glossy social-proof montage. In its place: audited retention cohorts, ticket-resolution deltas, latency graphs, raw logs. The demo becomes a live workflow with trace IDs. He adds data-provenance footnotes and hard definitions, so “growth” can’t be strangled by semantics.
He changed his own patterns too. Two public panels: cancelled, no explanation beyond “conflict.” The next investor dinner he pushed onto Arjun with a tight brief, then refused the follow-up “catch-up” unless it came with an agenda and a calendar invite. When the team side-eyed the sudden rigidity, Raghav only said, “Let the product speak.” He turned back to the demo script, jaw tight, like it could block noise.
Raghav asked for the access logs like he was ordering lunch: flat voice, no space for debate. “Last sixty days. Admin actions also. Exportable.” He CC’d nobody, kept the subject line boring, and still felt the little flare under his ribs when the reply came: Sure, what’s this for?
Because somebody is holding a knife by the handle, his mind supplied, unhelpfully.
He pulled the CRM export next, dumped it into a clean sheet, and started cross-checking the top-line numbers that had suddenly become gossip. Leads claimed versus leads created. Pipeline velocity versus actual meeting count. Closed-won tags versus signed contracts. Every time a cell didn’t reconcile, he drilled down until it became mundane: duplicate entries, an overenthusiastic intern, a dropdown misused. Mundane was good. Mundane meant the world still obeyed rules.
In the event database, he ran queries with the kind of tenderness he never managed with people. Sessions by device. Ticket volume by hour. Retention cohorts cut by geography, by language, by plan tier. He compared dashboards against raw events until the pretty graphs stopped feeling like propaganda and started feeling like proof.
Kavi hovered near his desk with her camera strap looped around her wrist like a talisman. “You want me to… document?” she asked, eyes flicking to the open SQL console.
“Screenshots,” Raghav said. “Every export. Every timestamp. If anyone asks later, it shouldn’t be my memory versus their narrative.”
“Okay,” she said, too lightly. “You’re doing, like, forensic romance.”
He didn’t laugh. He couldn’t afford to. The steadiness he got from clean numbers came with an equal and opposite terror: if the story outside was bending, then someone had access, real access, to inputs that investors trusted. Not just gossip. Handles.
He opened the admin audit trail and scrolled, slow. Logins. Role changes. API keys generated, revoked. A couple of actions he didn’t recognise at first: then he matched them to a vendor integration Dev had insisted would “streamline reporting.”
Raghav’s jaw tightened.
Tools didn’t leak on their own. People did. And people always chose the shortest path.
Raghav opened a fresh doc on his laptop, named it something aggressively boring, Q2 Ops Notes, then locked it with a password and a private link. In his head it was an audit war-room, a place where the noise outside could be pinned down and examined under white light.
He formatted it like a bug tracker because feelings were slippery and bugs weren’t. Claim. Source. First sighting. Amplifiers. Likely intent. Beneficiary. Verification path. He pasted in the rumour as it had surfaced, an investor’s “just checking” WhatsApp line, a stray LinkedIn comment, a throwaway aside in a client call, then forced himself to write only what could be observed.
For each entry, he attached a counterproof like a stitching needle: a cohort chart exported raw, a query output with a timestamp, an email header showing forwarding chains, a screenshot of the dashboard before an integration sync. If something couldn’t be verified yet, he tagged it open and wrote the next step.
This wasn’t about winning a shouting match. It was about building a file that would still stand when someone with a term sheet and no patience asked, calmly, “Show me.”
Raghav waited until the pantry emptied, then caught Kavi by the elbow near the filter coffee machine. “I need you to do something,” he said, keeping his voice level like it was a design request. “Not… art. Evidence.”
Her brows drew together. “Evidence of what, exactly?”
“Of everything that keeps ‘just happening’,” he said. “Screenshots with timestamps. Photos of whiteboards before anyone wipes them. Record the all-hands Q&A. Only when it’s official, not random conversations. And if someone repeats a ‘fact’ that sounds rehearsed, make a ten-second voice note: who said it, where, time.”
Kavi’s mouth tightened. “This is giving… surveillance state.”
“I know,” he said, swallowing the shame. “But I can’t fight a narrative with vibes.”
She exhaled, then pulled out her phone. “Okay. I’ll build an archive. Clean, searchable. So nobody can gaslight us later.”
He mapped the leak surface the way he’d map an attack tree, cold, methodical, almost soothing. Partnership deck: who’d seen it, which version, which inbox, which forward chain. Investor calendar: view access, edits, exports. Runway: who knew burn assumptions, who’d heard the number spoken aloud. He colour-coded nodes (team, advisors, friends-of-friends) and ringed every overlap with Dev’s orbit: PR shops, mutual founders, family connectors.
With the leak map open beside his sprint board, Raghav tightened the system like he was tightening bolts, quietly, no announcement, no drama. Sensitive PDFs went out with faint watermarks and expiring links; Drive folders lost their casual “anyone with access” sprawl. Investor updates moved to one controlled email thread. Key calls became small-room meetings with written agendas, fewer voices, clean minutes. Control, via process: before stories rewrote him again.
The first time Raghav saw it, it wasn’t even on Slack.
It was a WhatsApp forward: someone’s “just flagging, bro” in a founders’ group he wasn’t part of anymore, a screenshot nested inside two layers of compression so the text looked fuzzed but still legible. He pinched to zoom, thumb smearing sweat across the glass, and felt something in his chest go cold with recognition: the shape of a takedown dressed up as concern.
A thread. Clean typography. A handle that read like it had been generated by a compliance team: insider_check or something equally bloodless. The opener was polite to the point of parody.
“Not accusing anyone. Just asking questions because we all care about ecosystem hygiene.”
Then came the exhibits.
A chart with the axes cropped so the baseline disappeared: retention flattened into a story of collapse. A dashboard tile, clipped to hide the date range, showing a spike without the trough before it. A quote from an old pitch deck, Raghav’s words, lifted from a 2023 slide, stripped of the caveats: ‘CAC solved via incentive loops’, now framed as if he’d confessed to buying users like vegetables.
He toggled between the screenshot and his memory of the actual deck. He could see the full slide in his head: assumptions, cohorts, the note about incentives tapering. The thread didn’t need the full slide. It needed a scent.
Someone had even pasted a “screenshot” of a Slack line: one of his PMs, months ago: “campaign push for Q3, need volume.” In the thread, it sat like a smoking gun.
Replies rolled in beneath. “Concerning if true.” “Would love clarification from the team.” “We should be cautious with partnerships.”
The cruelty was in how reasonable it sounded. No slurs. No direct allegation. Just enough ambiguity to make anyone repeating it feel virtuous.
Raghav’s phone buzzed again, another forward, and he realised it had already jumped platforms, Slack to WhatsApp to X, metastasizing with each share, shedding context, keeping only the sharp edges. He stared at the handle, at the careful sentences, and thought: whoever wrote this didn’t want truth.
They wanted doubt that looked like due diligence.
By lunch, the thread had sprouted a second spine, slicker than the metrics smear: less about numbers, more about him. It travelled faster because it sounded like concern in a low voice.
“Is Raghav okay, yaar? He’s… intense these days.”
Someone in sales mentioned he’d “ghosted” a partner call. Never mind it had been pushed by the partner twice. An advisor forwarded a clipped email subject line (Need this today) as if urgency was a symptom. A clip from that networking mixer weeks ago resurfaced: Raghav, jaw tight, stepping away mid-conversation when his phone lit up. In the retelling it became: “He snapped and stormed off.”
He could feel eyes in the office doing quick math on his face. The half-moon shadows under them. The way his hand went to his temple before he could stop it. He heard his own voice from yesterday’s stand-up, too sharp on one line, and hated how easily it could be weaponised.
The insinuation wasn’t that Neon Nukkad was flimsy. It was that its founder was volatile. Unpredictable. A risk clause disguised as a personality assessment.
Dev didn’t do drama on channels that kept logs. In the office WhatsApp group he stayed immaculate: thumbs-up stickers, heart reacts, a breezy Proud of the team under someone else’s launch photo, like he was just another well-wisher in Bengaluru’s founder carousel. But outside the scroll, he rearranged the week with a surgeon’s calm. A panel slot vanished because the sponsor “had compliance concerns.” The photographer for their feature suddenly “fell ill.” The venue manager called about a “deposit revision” and then went evasive when Raghav asked for paperwork.
Dev forwarded each update with the same soothing line, as if doing Raghav a favour: “Let’s not overexpose you right now. People are talking. I’m protecting you.”
Protection, Raghav realised, was just another word for control.
By afternoon the calls that mattered started landing (VC friends, a partner’s COO, an “uncle” from his father’s circle) each voice warm, each question edged. “Just checking, Raghav… you’re not burning out, right? This distraction… these reckless calls…” The same words, rehearsed. When he asked, quietly, who said that, they went vague. “Bas… people are worried.” The line would click dead, leaving him arguing with air.
That evening, Dev found him by the pantry, voice pitched like chai-time concern. “I can stabilise perception,” he said, thumb grazing his phone screen. “But you can’t keep fighting the optics. Come to the dinner. Smile. Stop doing ‘boundaries’ like it’s a press release.” Raghav’s throat went tight. “So. Blackmail?” Dev’s eyes stayed warm. “No. A favour. Say thank you.”
Raghav woke to his phone vibrating against the bedside table like it was trying to drill through wood. 6:[^12] a.m. A calendar invite with the kind of subject line that pretended to be casual and landed like a summons: *Quick sync. Sender: Anika Mehra, Partner Due Diligence.
He lay still for one beat, listening to his own pulse. The ceiling fan chopped the air. Somewhere down the lane, a milkman’s cycle bell cut through the morning.
He accepted before he could overthink it.
By the time the call connected, he was on the office terrace, Indiranagar still half-asleep below: shutters down, chai stalls just waking, a lone scooter coughing into life. He paced the narrow strip between the parapet and a cluster of planters, laptop open on a plastic chair, one hand pressed hard to his temple as if he could physically hold the headache in place.
“Morning, Raghav,” Anika said. Too bright. Too controlled. “We just need to clarify a few things around growth quality.”
Of course. Not is it real, but the polite cousin of it.
“Sure,” he said, voice low, eyes flicking to the raw dashboard. “Let’s do this cleanly. I’m pulling the retention logs. Not the slide version. Event-level, timestamped.”
A pause on the line, the kind where someone checks whether you’re about to get defensive.
He didn’t give her the chance to lead him into vague territory. “I can screen-share right now,” he added, fingers already moving, “or I can drop you into the data room. Read-only access. Cohort tables, churn reasons, support-ticket volume by segment. Everything.”
“Screen-share might be best,” she said carefully.
“Done.” He sent the link, watched his own cursor appear like a confession. “We’re not inflating,” he went on, forcing steadiness. “If you’re seeing a spike, it’s from two integrations going live. The activation funnel changes the denominator. I’ll walk you through the exact query.”
Wind pushed at his rolled sleeves. He tightened his jaw, scrolling past noise until he hit the ugly bits, refunds, drop-offs, angry tickets, because hiding those was what guilty people did.
“Ask whatever you want,” he said, and heard how it sounded: an invitation, and a dare.
He didn’t wait for a slot in the calendar. He walked into the open-plan floor like a breaker switch being thrown and said, “All-hands. Two minutes. Now.” Chairs scraped. Conversations died mid-syllable. People drifted toward the whiteboards with their laptops half-open, eyes already asking what new fire this was.
Raghav stood with his back to the retention funnel, marker uncapped. No preamble, no pep talk. “We’re not doing rumours in Slack,” he said, gaze cutting across faces until the guilty ones looked away. “One source of truth for numbers: this dashboard only. If you have a question, you ask in the thread I’m creating. Not in side DMs.”
Karthik from Sales opened his mouth. Raghav lifted a hand. “External queries, investors, partners, ‘friends of family’, all routed through me and Neha. If anyone pings you directly, screenshot, forward, done.”
He started writing names against boxes: cohorts, churn drivers, support-ticket deltas. “Owners. EOD updates. Treat it like a prod outage. No heroics, no improvisation.” His throat felt raw, but his voice didn’t shake. “We move fast. We move clean.”
By ten, the office had the hush of a hospital corridor. Lights dimmed, monitors bright, the street noise below softened into a constant hiss. Raghav took over the pitch corner like it was a war room. Two engineers, one PM, laptops angled inward; chai cups sweating rings onto the table. “Not a vanity widget,” he said, tapping the metric on the screen. “Post-resolution feedback, tied to repeat contact. If we reduce reopen, it’s behaviour. Not PR.”
The PM, Aditi, frowned. “So trigger after status ‘Resolved’ plus a 24-hour delay?”
“Eight hours,” Raghav cut in. “SMBs don’t wait.”
Arjun hesitated. “Edge cases. Bulk closures, spam ratings.”
“Log everything,” Raghav said, eyes burning. “Ship small. Ship undeniable.”
Before the deployment bar even hit green, the “quick clarifications” began to stack like missed calls. A once-warm angel wanted an off-the-record “sanity check.” A founder WhatsApp group pinged him an anonymous screenshot (growth hacked?) with laughing emojis that didn’t feel like jokes. Then the partner’s legal team mailed an addendum: founder bandwidth and stability. Raghav stared at the words, jaw tight, answering a question that had nothing to do with shipping.
Raghav wrote a clean, metrics-first note, retention cohorts, audit trails, third-party logs, every line a blade. He didn’t type Dev’s name once. Still, his phone kept jittering across the table: calendar holds titled Couple Appearance from numbers he hadn’t saved, venues tagged, photographers cc’d. Each curt decline seemed to summon a new “clarification” mail. By dawn, he understood: he was shipping proof while someone else kept shifting the goalposts.
By mid-morning, Neon Nukkad moved like a place that had learned to flinch.
Raghav walked out of the glass-walled cabin and the open-plan floor adjusted around him: chairs rolled half an inch closer to desks, heads dipped a fraction, a laugh that had been mid-air fell flat. It wasn’t dramatic. It was worse: smooth, practiced. As if everyone had agreed, without saying so, that sound itself was risky.
Near the pitch corner, two engineers who normally argued loudly about edge cases switched to Slack even though they were three feet apart. Raghav caught the glow of a DM window reflected in a monitor: let’s not discuss here. He kept walking, pretending he hadn’t seen, his throat tight with a familiar irritation: then guilt, because irritation was a luxury.
At the pantry, the usual chaos (steel tumblers clinking, Kavi’s sudden commentary on someone’s wallpaper, the chai vendor’s sing-song from the street) had collapsed into a corridor of half-sentences. Aditi stood by the counter stirring sugar too long, eyes on the doorway like it was an entrance exam. Someone said, “Investor call at, ” and stopped when Raghav reached for the filter coffee. The spoon hit the cup with a small, incriminating sound.
“Carry on,” he said, too crisp. It landed like an instruction, not reassurance.
He noticed the new micro-movements: laptops angled away when he leaned in; browser tabs switched with a twitchy Alt-Tab; a phone face-down, then scooped into a pocket when he passed. The office had always been cramped, but now the lack of privacy felt weaponised. The security camera at the entrance (something he’d insisted on for client visits) seemed suddenly like an extra employee with no loyalty.
Raghav paused at Arjun’s desk, intending to ask about the deploy logs. Arjun’s hand hovered over his trackpad, then he minimised a window too quickly.
Raghav forced his voice to soften. “Everything okay?”
Arjun blinked, lips parting, then he nodded too fast. “Haan, yeah. Just… checking stuff.”
Checking stuff. Like the room had started treating everyone as a potential leak. Like even the founder’s questions could be evidence.
The rumor reached them the way rot did. Through someone else’s family phone, wrapped in concern. Vinay, the newest backend hire, stood near the pantry with his screen angled like it could burn him. His thumb hovered over a WhatsApp forward from a cousin at a mid-size client: a screenshot of some thread, growth inflated… founder distracted… unstable. Names blurred, but Neon Nukkad wasn’t.
Raghav saw the colour drain from Vinay’s face before he saw the message. The kid’s jaw clenched, then unclenched, like he was trying to swallow shame.
Stand-up started on time because Raghav insisted it did. One by one, updates came out too clean, too rehearsed. When it was Vinay’s turn, he didn’t look at the board.
“I. Sorry,” Vinay said, voice wavering. “I just… I don’t want my name attached to a scam, sir.”
Silence. Not awkward: charged.
Aditi’s eyes flicked to Raghav and away. Someone’s chair squeaked and stopped mid-sound.
Kavi, leaning against the divider with her camera strap looped around her wrist, said softly, “Are we safe, or are we being used?”
Raghav felt the question land under his ribs. He forced his breath steady. “We’re safe,” he said. “But we’re going to act like we’re being watched: because we are.”
In the pitch corner, the investor demo rehearsal ran like a drill. Until it didn’t. Raghav had just said, “Okay, now we show retention,” when the dashboard refreshed and the line nosedived. Week-four, week-eight. Everything looked like it had fallen off a cliff.
For a second nobody moved. It wasn’t the numbers; it was what the numbers implied in this room, this week.
“What filter is that?” Raghav’s voice cut sharper than he intended. “Who touched cohorts?”
“Not me,” Aditi said too quickly. Arjun was already clicking, breath loud in the silence. Vinay started talking over him, “It’s the A/B slice from last night, the late test, ”. And Kavi’s eyes flicked to the doorway like she expected someone to walk in mid-crash.
“Reset. Now,” Raghav snapped. “Lock it. Take screenshots of settings.”
The line recovered. Relief didn’t. The air stayed sour, as if the fix proved nothing except how fast they’d all assumed the worst.
Raghav clamped down like a tourniquet. No more corridor clarifications. Only updates in Jira, decisions in writing, and every external call “aligned” through him. He cancelled two coffee catch-ups, skipped a founder dinner he’d promised to attend, and told Aditi, “No one replies to stakeholders without looping me.” Efficient on a spreadsheet. On the floor, it read as fear. Every boundary sounded like an alibi.
By evening, Vinay asked for “ten minutes” in the glass cabin, voice too polite to be casual. Through the frosted strip, Raghav saw his hands twist, saw him nod like he’d already decided. When Vinay stepped out his eyes were red. Kavi, near the pantry, caught shards. Belief. And it made his jaw set: enough of defence.
Raghav waited until the pantry emptied out: until the last laugh faded into the open-plan hum and the kettle clicked off. Kavi was rinsing a steel cup like she was trying to scrub a thought away.
“Kavi,” he said, not loud enough to travel. “Two minutes.”
She turned, eyebrow up, camera strap half-slid off her shoulder. “If this is about the dashboard, I swear, ”
“It’s not.” He glanced at the glass partitions, at reflections that could be eyes. “It’s about optics. And Dev.”
Her mouth tightened at the name. “Okay. Go.”
Raghav stepped into the corner where the snack boxes blocked most sightlines. The smell of elaichi chai and burnt toast sat heavy. He kept his voice even, the way he did in client escalations. “No more couple drama. No more staged photos at events, no more last-minute ‘drop in and smile for the cameras’ nonsense. Not at the office, not outside. If he wants public appearances, he can do them without me.”
Kavi searched his face like she was trying to match it to a memory she didn’t fully own. “You’re cutting him off.”
“I’m cutting the access.” His fingers found a stray napkin, then a pen. The need to make it concrete came like a compulsion. “He’s been using my calendar like it’s a lever. I’m done being moved.”
He drew three blunt headings: FACTS. TIMES. PROOF.
“Facts,” he said, tapping the first word. “We stop responding to whispers. We respond with data.” He underlined TIMES. “One meeting. No drip-feed. No ‘let’s catch up over coffee’ where someone can spin my tone into instability.” Then he circled PROOF so hard the paper thinned. “We give them raw metrics. Cohorts. Churn reasons. And read-only audit access so nobody ‘interprets’ our growth for us.”
Kavi let out a breath that was almost a laugh, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “That’s… very you. Aggressively reasonable.”
“It has to be.” His phone buzzed on the counter. Another unknown number. He ignored it. “And you, ” He hesitated, annoyed at himself for needing to ask. “If Dev reaches out, if he tries to loop you into setting something up. Don’t. Tell me first.”
Kavi’s gaze flicked away, quick as a shutter. “He already thinks I’m… useful.”
“Exactly.” Raghav folded the napkin and slid it into his pocket like it was a contract. “Tonight I’m mailing the partner. Single decisive session. Let them see the truth without the theatre.”
Kavi nodded once, sharp. “And if Dev doesn’t like being taken off the stage?”
Raghav’s tired eyes hardened. “Then he can find a different story to sell.”
In the glass cabin, the world reduced to a laptop glow and the muffled clatter of keyboards outside. Raghav pulled up a fresh doc and typed a title like he was filing an FIR: Data Room , Partner Due Diligence (Read-Only). Across from him, Sana, his product lead, had her sleeves pushed up and a spreadsheet open like a shield.
“Okay,” she said, brisk. “What’s safe?”
“Cohorts, retention curves, ticket volumes, resolution-time distribution.” He spoke faster than his headache. “Mask customer names. Mask ticket content. No screenshots from live accounts.”
“And revenue?”
“Invoice totals by month. No bank statements unless they insist.” He paused, jaw tightening. “And no Slack exports. If someone wants ‘culture signals,’ they can come see us work.”
Sana’s fingers hovered. “Sign-off?”
“Me. You. Legal. And Vinay,” he added, because governance mattered when trust didn’t.
He practiced the pitch in his head, not as seduction: more like a witness being baited. If growth is inflated, why is churn flat? If it’s staged, why do cohorts behave? Outside, someone tapped the glass.
“Raghav,” a junior engineer asked, voice small. “These rumours… are they true-true?”
He didn’t blink. “No.” Exhaustion kept it clean. “And we’ll prove it.”
He didn’t call Dev. He sent a calendar invite like a ceasefire notice: subject line dry, location pinned, rules spelled out. Neutral lounge in a business hotel off MG Road; not a place either of them could claim. No photographers. No “friends” dropping by. No rescheduling. Forty-five minutes, hard stop, because time was the only currency Dev couldn’t inflate.
Raghav typed the agenda in bullets and forced himself to read it twice before hitting send: renegotiate the arrangement; define boundaries in writing; zero PR freelancing that touched Neon Nukkad. He added one line, any mention of my team is off-limits, then deleted it, retyped it, kept it.
When the confirmation pinged back, his hands still trembled. But now the tremor had a direction.
Dev showed up five minutes early, blazer unbuttoned, smile on like he’d been there all day. “MG Road lounge, good choice,” he said, settling in, and then, too lightly, “So you’re giving them read-only audit access by Friday, yeah? Smart. Also, Sana’s worried about churn if that senior backend guy quits.”
Raghav’s spine went cold. He hadn’t said that to anyone outside.
Dev didn’t deny it; he softened it. “Raghav, perception management is why they’re still taking your calls.” When Raghav laid out terms, Dev’s smile turned indulgent. “Go numbers-only and the market will smell panic. They don’t buy truth. They buy calm.”
By morning the air had changed, like someone had turned the AC colder without touching the remote. Messages he’d been expecting didn’t arrive; investor groups that pinged all night went politely silent. When he called the partner’s VP, the line went to an assistant with a rehearsed, “We’ll revert.” In the gaps, the whisper-chain did its work. Massaged metrics, governance gaps, a founder too distracted to be stable. Dev wasn’t debating love. He was narrowing the corridor to the deal until only his story could fit.
The email lands at 10:[^12] a.m., cutting clean through the hum of stand-up chatter and the whirr of the ceiling fan. Raghav watches the notification banner like it’s a verdict. Three sentences, two attachments, zero warmth. Legalese dressed up as politeness. Subject: Clarifications required. Not questions. Not next steps. A soft pause, the kind that lets them pretend they aren’t pulling away.
He clicks it open and feels the words press into his temples.
“Clarifications” reads less like curiosity and more like a pre-emptive charge sheet: retention windows, access controls, audit trails, founder oversight. Each bullet implies a shadow. Who else can see this? Can we trust you not to cut corners when the pressure hits?* The attachments are worse: a redlined governance addendum and a compliance checklist that balloons the timeline into something unrecognisable.
Outside the cabin, someone laughs too loudly at a joke he doesn’t hear. A chair scrapes. The office keeps moving. His stomach doesn’t.
His eyes snag on the last line: the partnership call “to be rescheduled.” No date. No calendar link. No “please share availability.” Just a door closed with the gentleness of someone who doesn’t want fingerprints.
Raghav’s cursor hovers over Reply. His first impulse is to fire back a paragraph. He types, deletes. Types again: Happy to clarify. Could you specify concerns? Deletes that too; it sounds like pleading. He forces his breathing to slow, counts to five like he’s debugging a panic attack.
On the other side of the glass, he catches fragments of his own team in reflection: tired faces, half-raised coffees, the whiteboard with the runway math that now feels less like numbers and more like a countdown timer no one can ignore.
He downloads the attachments, renames them with brutal order: GOV_ADDENDUM_v1, COMPLIANCE_CHECKLIST_PARTNER. As if naming can control them.
“Clarifications,” he mutters under his breath, and it comes out like a curse.
Raghav forwards the email to himself twice, first to his personal inbox, then to a separate label he’s created in Gmail: PARTNER, URGENT. The kind of overkill that feels like control. Like if he can put it in the right place, he can put his head in the right place too.
He stands, then immediately regrets it; the cabin feels smaller when he’s moving inside it. He paces the length of the glass, heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe, counting steps like it’s a sprint estimate. His eyes keep flicking to the open-plan outside, faces turned to screens, shoulders hunched, someone tugging at a hoodie string, everyone pretending not to look at him, which means they’re all looking at him.
He replays the last demo with a cruel precision. The exact sentence: “We anonymise at ingestion.” Did he pause long enough on at ingestion? The slide he trimmed to save five minutes, the governance diagram with the audit trail, was that the missing reassurance? He opens the deck, scrolls, scrolls back, as if the pixels will confess.
Nothing changed overnight, he tells himself. Not the product. Not the policy. Only the temperature in the room did: and someone, somewhere, decided to let it drop.
Stand-up doesn’t wait for his permission. Heads lift as he steps out, as if his shoes made an announcement. Raghav keeps his shoulders squared, jaw unclenched (small theatre, daily show) but Kavi’s gaze flicks to his hand, to the way he’s gripping his phone like a stress ball. Someone’s Jira board is open; nobody’s really looking at it.
“Okay,” he says, voice brisk. “Updates.”
They give them, bugfixes, call notes, a demo tweak, too fast, like ripping off a bandage. Then Prateek clears his throat, eyes not quite meeting Raghav’s. “So… are we still on for Thursday?”
Silence. Not awkward. Organised. Like the office itself is holding breath.
Raghav swallows down heat. “They’ve raised a couple compliance questions. We’ll address and revert today.” The sentence lands light, and everyone hears the weight it’s missing.
Out in the open-plan, the runway tracker on the whiteboard, his private, midnight spreadsheet made public, draws eyes the way a hairline crack does. People pass it “by accident” and slow down. The math is blunt: weeks left, burn, expected inflow, and one ugly line. Someone wipes away an old doodle to straighten columns. Another hand, not his, underlines the end-of-month date in red.
By evening, the countdown had acquired a tone. Chairs scraped softer, Slack pings felt like footsteps. Across desks, whispers threaded through the hum, “If it slips by a month…” “Freeze hiring?” “Stop promising the new SLA to support?” Even at the pantry, chai was poured like a transaction, eyes darting to the whiteboard. Raghav watched them do his arithmetic aloud, and the guilt sat in his throat like metal.
By nine, the office had thinned to the loyal stragglers and then to nobody. The street below kept living, pressure cookers hissing at the darshini, scooters skimming puddles, while Neon Nukkad’s glass walls held Raghav like an aquarium.
He rolled his sleeves up another fold, as if skin showing could buy him time. The whiteboard took the brunt of his mind: arrows, boxes, dates circled twice, a frantic little ecosystem of dependencies. “Clarifications” became a spine down the centre (DATA, SLA, ESCALATION, LIABILITY) each one sprouting bullet points like thorns.
His phone lit up with the first call. “Hi, yeah. “We need language that makes this unambiguous. No, I don’t care how standard it is, I care how it reads.”
The lawyer’s voice turned tinny on speaker. “Raghav, you can’t just, ”
“I’m not asking permission,” he cut in, hearing his own sharpness and hating it, and still not stopping. “I’m asking for a version they can’t misinterpret.”
By the second call his coffee had gone cold, and the headache behind his right eye had sharpened into a needle. He built scenarios: if the partner delayed two weeks, if procurement dragged, if an investor “waited to see traction.” Numbers clicked into place like handcuffs.
Kavi’s desk lamp was off; even the pantry diya had burned out. Alone, he talked to the deck as he rewrote it. He yanked out anything that sounded like a claim and replaced it with proof, screenshots, logs, a one-slide appendix that felt like a confession. He added a timeline so detailed it bordered on pleading: who signs what, by when, with which attachments.
At 1:[^17] a.m., he titled the compliance memo with a sterile neatness, “Clarifications: Response Pack”, and read it once end to end. It sounded like someone bracing for impact.
He saved, attached, re-attached, triple-checked recipients. The urge to call Dev flashed hot and immediate, but he swallowed it. Control first. Sleep later.
When he finally stood, the whiteboard looked less like a plan and more like a barricade he’d built around a fire that was already spreading.
Morning light made the glass partitions look cleaner than they were. Raghav opened his inbox with the brittle optimism of a man who’d stayed up to manufacture certainty.
The thread with the partner’s legal lead (yesterday’s cheerful “Just circling back” from him sitting on top) had stopped breathing. No “received,” no “thanks,” not even the passive-aggressive, “We’ll revert.” He refreshed once, twice, as if silence was a loading issue.
On WhatsApp, his request for an intro to the procurement head came back with a too-casual, “Arrey sorry yaar, got buried. Can you resend?” as if entire deals regularly got misplaced between memes and meal photos. He resent it, added context, stripped emotion, watched the double ticks and felt nothing move.
At 10:[^07], the calendar invite he’d built his week around shifted from green to grey. Rescheduled. No new time. Just a note: “Travel came up. Will coordinate.”
He leaned back, chair creaking, jaw tight. Each delay had an explanation you couldn’t accuse. Together, they were a hand on his throat, firm, patient, and impossible to pry off by working harder.
He started calling in favours like he was paying a debt with interest: batchmates from NIT who owed him introductions, an ex-client who’d once sworn, “Anything you need, boss,” a founder he’d mentored over beers on Church Street. Each call began with warmth and ended with a soft, inexplicable caution.
“Bro, I can connect you, but…” Pause. A throat cleared. “They’re being… particular right now.”
He tried a different route. Legal to legal, ops to ops, even a junior procurement guy he’d met at a panel. Same names surfaced, same invisible reception desk. Emails landed, got “seen,” then stalled. Calendars that were open yesterday suddenly had “conflicts.” Nobody said Dev’s name, but the air carried it: an orbit you couldn’t exit without permission.
A forward slid into his inbox from a mutual investor: subject line bland, tone almost friendly. He read the line once, then again, slower: “Let’s keep the narrative consistent before we move anything forward.” No questions on churn, no red flags on security, nothing about the product. Just story. His stomach dropped. This wasn’t diligence. This was choreography. And he was the one being placed.
The open-plan quiet thickened whenever Raghav’s cursor stopped moving. A few heads rose: too quick to be casual, too disciplined to be blatant. No one asked, but the question sat on their mouths: What now? He could read it in the tight smiles, the half-held breaths. And then it clicked (clean, brutal) there was only one route left: the one Dev would sign off on. Every other choice came with consequences aimed straight at runway, team, reputation.
The migraine hits Kavi like someone yanked a plug from the wall. One second she’s halfway through framing a shot of the terrace door and the next the office becomes a long, hollow corridor of sound. Keyboards clack from very far away. Someone laughs, and it arrives delayed, warped.
Her palms go cold. Not sweaty-cold: dead-cold. She presses them to the edge of a desk for proof that she’s still here, that this is Indiranagar and not whatever her brain is trying to drag her into. The laminate bites into her skin. She focuses on that sting the way she’s trained herself to: anchor, name, breathe.
“Water,” she manages, voice too small. Maybe she said it. Maybe she only thought it.
The fluorescent lights above flicker once, and her vision doubles. She shuts one eye, then the other, like she can manually reboot. But the tunnel feeling deepens, and behind it a different layer scrolls in. It isn’t a memory like a video. It’s a sensation with teeth.
She fumbles for her phone, fingers clumsy, and opens voice notes on muscle memory. There’s a list there, dates she doesn’t fully trust, captions she wrote for herself like labels on jars: “Don’t ignore the dizziness.” “Ask Raghav about that night.” “Dev???”
“Okay,” she whispers to herself. “Okay, Kavi. Capture it.”
Her thumb hits record. The red dot wobbles.
“I’m… getting it again,” she says, forcing each word through the nausea. “Right now. Office. Noon-ish. Light is… too bright.”
Her throat tightens. A phantom smell: petrol? rain?. Scrapes at her.
“Focus,” she orders herself, and digs her nails into her own palm, hard enough to leave half-moons. “What do you see? Angle. Detail.”
Her gaze skids across the glass partition, and for a heartbeat it isn’t glass. It’s a reflective surface in the dark, catching a face at the edge. Watching.
“Dev,” she breathes, and says it again into the mic like an oath. “Devansh. He was there. Not: not helping. Just… looking.”
Fragments punch through Kavi’s skull like someone flicking slides too fast: streetlight glare smeared like oil on wet asphalt; a flyover pillar with paan stains; bass thudding from somewhere that feels both close and unreachable. Her stomach lurches with it. The taste arrives next, copper, sharp, like she’s bitten her own cheek or like fear has a flavour.
It isn’t a continuous memory. It’s geometry and impact. A curb edge, white paint flaking. A heel skidding. Someone’s bracelet flashing once and then vanishing. A car door: open? shutting?. The hollow thunk echoing inside her ribs. Voices overlap, but the words refuse to resolve; only the urgency remains, the way a crowd tightens and loosens like a fist.
Her skin remembers before her mind does: cold air on sweaty arms, grit under her nails, the sting of a scraped palm. She’s both in it and outside it, watching herself watch. Trying to grab a single fixed point before the whole thing dissolves back into nausea.
A face resolves out of the smear of light and motion, sharp enough to hurt: Dev. Not in the crush, not barking orders, not even pretending to reach for her. He’s off to one side, framed by a streetlamp’s glare, shoulders easy: as if the chaos is background noise. The stillness on him is what makes it wrong. Not shock, not concern, not that performative urgency people wear when they want to be seen doing the right thing. Just a steady, appraising watchfulness, like he’s tracking a countdown only he can see. Her stomach flips. In the fragment, her own breath is loud, ragged, and his isn’t. His hand lifts, near his cuff, a metallic flash, and then drops again, patient. Waiting.
The certainty holds for a breath, then the migraine’s fog shoves in. She almost believes it’s just that. Almost. But the expression on Dev’s face in that sliver of memory, calm, measuring, doesn’t feel like something her mind would manufacture. Panic spikes. She swallows it down, hard, and makes herself do the only thing that’s ever worked.
With fingers that couldn’t decide between numb and frantic, Kavi hit record and talked like she was laying tape over a crack in the world. “Approx… one thirty? Outside, signboard with the neon, ” Her breath rasped. “Dev was off right, under the streetlight, not moving.” A pause, swallowing bile. “Cufflink (silver) caught like a tiny blade.” She saved it, then saved it again, stubbornly.
Raghav caught Dev in the thin corridor that ran between the pantry and the glass-walled founder cabin: an architectural afterthought that became, for two people who knew how to use space, a choke point. The office behind them throbbed with late-evening noise: keyboards, a low argument about a bug, the hiss of the espresso machine trying too hard. Here, the sound flattened into a distant hum. Quiet enough that nothing could be “misheard,” close enough that Dev couldn’t curate an audience.
“Two minutes,” Raghav said, and didn’t wait for consent. He planted himself at an angle, blocking the easy exit without making it look like he was blocking anything. Startup body language: plausible deniability with a spine.
Dev’s smile arrived on schedule. “If this is about your partner’s ‘clarifications,’ I’ve already. Raghav kept his tone even, almost bored, the way he spoke to investors when his chest was on fire. “I’m here to recalibrate.”
Dev’s gaze flicked, quick as a notification. “Recalibrate what, Raghav?”
“Timelines. Clauses.” Raghav slid his phone from his pocket, didn’t show the screen yet. Just let the weight of it exist between them. “They’ve paused pending clarifications on data access, liability in case of misrouting, and… who signs off on the pilot’s governance. We can clean this up, but not with last-minute edits slipping in from ‘your side’ like they’re favours.”
A pulse jumped in Raghav’s temple. His knee started its stupid bounce, betraying the calm he was manufacturing. He forced his heel down, felt the vibration travel up his shin.
Dev’s expression didn’t change. It was all warmth and civility, like a LinkedIn post. “You’re implying I’m doing something without your knowledge.”
“I’m saying I need an independent review,” Raghav said, each syllable placed. “Third-party audit. Light touch. Keeps everyone honest, keeps the partner comfortable. Keeps my team from building on sand.”
Something tightened at the corner of Dev’s mouth. So brief it could’ve been a trick of the fluorescent light. “Audits take time.”
“They take less time than a collapsed deal,” Raghav shot back, then softened it immediately, on purpose. “You want this to work? Fine. Help me keep it clean.”
He waited, breathing through the thrum of urgency like it was a noise complaint. Dev had nowhere to perform, nowhere to deflect into charm. Only the corridor, the glass wall reflecting their two silhouettes, and the countdown Raghav didn’t say out loud.
Dev listened like he was in a boardroom, not a narrow corridor that smelled faintly of filter coffee and stress. He gave Raghav the right acknowledgements as if he was logging points to respond to later. His face stayed open, agreeable, the kind of expression that made people feel heard without him promising anything.
Then something flickered.
His hand drifted to his cuff, a casual adjustment, but the motion stuttered. The tremor was so slight it could’ve been dismissed as caffeine, except Raghav was close enough to see Dev’s fingers fighting for control. Dev’s inhale caught halfway, not a gasp (more like a disciplined correction) before his chest settled into a shallower rhythm. The warmth in his eyes thinned out, the shine going flat, revealing a fatigue that didn’t belong in a man who was always immaculate.
For a second, Dev looked… worked. Not just busy. Strained.
Raghav’s mind, wired on deadlines and patterns, latched onto it. This wasn’t theatre for anyone else; there was no audience to charm. Which meant the effort was real. And that made Raghav’s skin prickle. Because if Dev was slipping here, in private, what else was he holding together by sheer will?
Dev’s body angled a fraction, not away from Raghav, but as if he was turning his ribs out of the line of fire. The movement was too practised to be casual. For a beat his hand disappeared near his waist, then reappeared. An amber pill bottle cupped in his palm, label ragged, half a name and a dosage torn into uselessness. It caught the corridor light and glowed like a warning.
Raghav’s breath hitched; his brain did the math before his heart could. Dev’s fingers closed around it, fast, almost elegant. The bottle vanished into his pocket with a slickness that belonged in a close-up magic show.
Dev’s jaw flexed. Something sharp crossed his face (pain contained so tightly it looked like anger) then he lifted his chin, shoulders rolling back into that expensive, untouchable confidence.
Raghav logged the tremor and the flash of amber like a metric spike, data, not drama, and let it harden his voice without naming what he’d seen. “An audit isn’t an accusation, Dev. It’s insulation,” he said, keeping it practical, almost kind. “If they’re pausing, the only thing that moves them is transparency.” He leaned in, just enough. “Let me speak to them directly. I’ll handle it.”
Dev’s smile came back, smaller, almost tender, and somehow colder for it. He stepped closer until Raghav could smell expensive cologne over corridor coffee. “No more audits,” Dev murmured. “No more ‘clarifications’. You’re making noise.” His voice stayed gentle, but the meaning was a blade: he could turn a pause into a pullout, and aim the fallout at Raghav’s name. A light pat on the shoulder. “Stay in line,” Dev said, “or lose everything.”
By Thursday, the “pause pending clarifications” wasn’t an email subject line anymore. It lived on the main whiteboard, right next to the sprint burndown, boxed in thick black marker like a bruise: RUNWAY: 21 DAYS. The number changed the way air changed before a storm.
Raghav stood with a marker in his hand and tried to make it look normal. He drew arrows, broke down workstreams, wrote owners beside tasks with the calm authority he used in investor rooms. “Okay. We keep shipping. We reduce response latency by fifteen percent, we push the new onboarding flow, we. From the pantry, someone’s kettle clicked. In the open-plan quiet, it sounded like a countdown.
“Clarifications ka kya scene hai, boss?” a junior PM asked, attempting lightness and failing. Her eyes didn’t go to the roadmap; they went to the boxed number.
Raghav kept his gaze on the board. “It’s procurement theatre,” he said, too fast. “They want comfort. We give comfort. We’ll send the security docs, the data handling, ”
“Comfort?” Kavi’s chair squeaked as she shifted, phone in her hand like a crutch. Her face was too pale under the fluorescent lights. “People don’t pause if they’re comfortable.”
A couple of heads turned. Not towards her, towards him, waiting to see if he’d snap.
Raghav swallowed. His temples throbbed in time with the ceiling fan. “We’ve handled worse,” he said, and hated how it sounded. Like a line from an old version of himself. He capped the marker harder than necessary. “We focus on what we can control. Output. Quality. Demo-readiness.”
Across the room, Arvind didn’t open his laptop. He stared at the runway box as if it was a bug he couldn’t reproduce. “And what about what’s controlling us?” he asked quietly.
No one laughed. No one pretended not to hear. The room wasn’t looking for the next feature anymore; it was measuring whether belief itself still had any ROI.
Arvind didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t even stand. He just pushed his chair back a few inches, the wheels catching on the uneven tile, and folded his hands like he was about to give a status update.
“I’m out after this sprint,” he said.
For a second Raghav’s brain tried to classify it as another complaint, another vent to be absorbed and redirected. “Arvind, abhi?” he managed, keeping his tone level. “We’ll, ”
“No, listen,” Arvind cut in, still calm, which somehow made it worse. “Since v1 I’ve been patching prod at 2 a.m., doing releases on Sundays, taking calls when my dad’s in the hospital because ‘client escalation’. Scope changes every week. Priorities reset because someone had a meeting or a mood.” His eyes finally met Raghav’s, not accusing, just exhausted. “You keep saying one more sprint like it’s a bridge. It’s become a treadmill.”
Raghav felt heat climb his neck. “We’re close. This partnership, ”
“Partnership is paused,” Arvind said, nodding at the whiteboard without looking. “And the business side keeps getting yanked around by things we can’t even talk about. I can’t keep betting my health on your optimism.”
It wasn’t Arvind this time.
It was Nikhil: barely two years out of college, hoodie under his ID lanyard, the kind who spoke in stand-up only when asked. He cleared his throat, eyes fixed on the edge of his laptop screen like it could shield him.
“Sir… can I say something?” he asked, voice thin.
Raghav nodded, jaw tight.
Nikhil exhaled. “This… relationship thing. The photos. The LinkedIn comments. The ‘couple goals’ jokes in the corridor.” His fingers worried the corner of a sticky note. “It feels like we’re being run like a story, not a product. Like PR decisions are deciding sprint priorities.”
Someone let out a short, humourless breath. Nikhil swallowed and said the word anyway: “Circus.”
It hit the room and stayed there. Heads turned, towards Raghav, then away, like eye contact would turn it into a fight they couldn’t afford.
Raghav’s spine straightened on instinct. “Okay: listen,” he said, voice filling the gap before panic could. “We lock the demo by Monday, security docs out by EOD, I’ll take the clarifications call tomorrow. No more churn.” He heard himself selling it, the way he sold anything. But the silence didn’t loosen; it coagulated. People’s eyes weren’t on him: they were calculating. Even Kavi, at the edge, camera strap twisting around her wrist, didn’t smile; she looked like she was framing a wreck.
Manju appeared at the doorway with a thin folder and a small paper bag, as if she’d come to deliver something banal, signatures, sweets, a message she didn’t owe anyone. Her gaze swept the room: hollowed faces, Arvind’s stillness, Nikhil’s shame, and Raghav’s voice over it all like a lid. She didn’t argue. She met his eyes once, then stepped back (clean, final) refusing to become another headline, another bargaining chip.
The “clarifications” email thread sat pinned at the top of Raghav’s inbox like a polite countdown. Subject lines stayed civil, Request for additional documentation, Follow-up on data retention, Minor points from compliance, but the time stamps told the truth: 11:[^47] p.m., 6:[^12] a.m., 2:[^03] a.m. as if their legal team didn’t sleep because they were too busy measuring the exact second to stop trusting him.
He read each line twice, searching for anger. There wasn’t any. That was worse. Anger meant a door you could push. This was procedure with a guillotine built in.
On the whiteboard in the founder cabin, he wrote in block caps: RUNWAY: 13 WEEKS. Under it he drew four boxes, CLIENT CONFIDENCE, INVESTOR OPTICS, TEAM CAPACITY, PARTNER SIGN-OFF, and arrows between them until the diagram looked like a metro map designed by someone anxious.
Kavi wandered in, silent for once, and stood behind him. “You’re making it look solvable,” she said softly.
“It is solvable,” Raghav snapped, and immediately hated the edge in his voice. He capped the marker harder than necessary. “It has to be.”
He circled TEAM CAPACITY and wrote burnout in the margin. Arvind’s flat eyes floated into his mind; Nikhil’s “circus” sat like a bruise. Raghav drew a new arrow from INVESTOR OPTICS to PARTNER SIGN-OFF and paused, marker hovering. That arrow felt like Dev.
He didn’t write DEV. He wrote PERCEPTION instead, safer, cleaner, something a spreadsheet could hold. But his hand betrayed him, adding a smaller note beside it: access. That was the variable he couldn’t quantify, the part that didn’t belong on a board and yet had its own gravity.
Every path he drew, alternate partner, bridge, scope cut, branched and then bent back into the same dead end: anything sudden would look like panic; anything delayed would look like incompetence. Not a block, not a wall: an arrangement. Like someone had moved the furniture in his house so that whichever way he ran, he’d still trip.
He still tried the “reasonable” routes, because that was what a sane founder did before he blew up his own life. He pinged an alternate partner through a warm intro that should’ve been a straight line; the reply came back in three hours, polite, vague, suddenly “reassessing priorities.” He called a bridge-funding lead he’d kept on simmer; the term sheet that was “in progress” acquired a new step overnight: a reputational review, like his company had grown a stain while he slept.
In the glass cabin, he kept his voice level, his sentences clean. “We can narrow scope,” he told Arvind. “Cut the edge cases. Ship the core.”
Arvind didn’t argue. He just blinked, once, slow, like someone bracing for impact.
Outside, Slack threads turned cautious. People reacted with thumbs-up too quickly, asked “just to clarify” questions they’d never needed before. Even Nikhil, usually the loudest, went quiet when Raghav floated a new plan, as if he was waiting for the ceiling to move again.
Raghav felt the trap tighten with every attempt. If he pushed back publicly, he’d look erratic. If he complied privately, he’d look owned. Either way, someone else got to narrate him.
Kavi caught his sleeve near the pantry, fingers cold, eyes rimmed red like she’d been staring into a ring light for hours. “Don’t… don’t dismiss this,” she said, and her voice cracked on the last word.
She shoved her phone at him. A voice note, timestamped, her own breathing loud in the mic. Then a rush of sound: crowd noise, someone laughing too close, music tinny and harsh. Kavi’s whisper slid through it, panicked and precise. Bright lights. Too bright. He’s there. Dev. Not in the group: on the side. Watching. Like he’s counting.
“I can’t place the why,” she admitted, swallowing. “My head just… blanks. But I know this.” She mimed a wrist. “That watch. It flashed when he moved. Same one he wears now.”
Raghav stopped drafting convincing emails and started building a case file. If Dev had arranged this trap, then there would be seams, metadata, timestamps, someone else’s routine he’d had to lean on. He pulled calendars, guest lists, building visitor logs, Swiggy delivery entries, and, most precious, camera retention policies. Not stories, not vibes. Only things that could survive screenshots. One rule settled in his chest: make it recordable, or it doesn’t count.
Raghav picked the venue the way he shipped a release: controlled variables, auditable logs. Not a dim bar, not some “private” apartment. Somewhere with entry swipes, CCTV, receipts, and a plausible pretext. He texted Dev: One last alignment. Fifteen minutes. Then he booked a meeting room at a co-working space, glass walls and a printed visitor register.
Raghav stayed out in the open-plan, not because he wanted an audience, there wasn’t one, but because the room itself could testify. The entrance camera’s tiny red dot glowed above the access door. The pitch corner screen threw a hard rectangle of light over the long table, turning the glass partitions into dark mirrors. He’d positioned himself where both sightlines crossed, like he was lining up two graphs for a clean comparison.
He reached up and switched off the AC. The usual corporate hum died, replaced by the far-off Bangalore night. Autos coughing, someone laughing too loud by the chai stall downstairs, a scooter zipping past like a notification he couldn’t dismiss. Warmth collected fast, the kind that made collars damp and tempers quicker. Good. If his body felt uncomfortable, he wouldn’t mistake adrenaline for truth.
On the table: a neat stack of printouts: product metrics with time-stamps, customer tickets flagged, the compliance plan with legal notes in the margins. His laptop sat open, cursor blinking in a draft email addressed to the partner’s decision-maker; the thread was ready, attachments queued. One tap and the whole story would leave the building without asking permission.
His phone buzzed once.
Dev: On my way.
Raghav didn’t reply. He watched the wall clock instead, the second hand chopping up silence. He checked the door wedge he’d placed. He leaned back and rolled tension out of his shoulders, as if he could debug the tightness behind his eyes.
There was a moment, brief, unwelcome, when Manju’s face flashed in his mind: the way she’d looked at him the last time, like she was measuring the space he didn’t make for people. He swallowed. This wasn’t about proving anything to her. Or to his parents. Or to investors who smiled and said “great traction” while calculating how disposable he was.
Footsteps on the stairs. The access panel beeped.
Raghav stayed still, hands visible on the table, like he was about to start a deposition instead of a negotiation. He let the night noise below rise, ready to do what it always did: swallow the part where men tried to talk over each other.
The access-controlled door clicked, protested against the wedge, then gave way with a soft, unwilling swing. Dev slipped in like he belonged to the building. Like the glass partitions and KPI whiteboards were just another venue, another backdrop he could charm into compliance. His blazer sat too perfectly on his shoulders for midnight. Even his hair looked arranged for a camera.
He didn’t stop at the threshold. He let the door ease shut behind him, then paused, taking in the near-dark: the pitch screen’s hard glow, the long table, the neat stack of papers laid out with almost rude precision. His gaze moved the way investors’ did, fast, assessing, except he wasn’t counting TAM. He was counting Raghav’s tells.
Raghav felt his own heartbeat try to speed up, and held his face steady anyway. No greeting. No pleasantries. Don’t give him a hook.
Dev’s eyes settled on him, warm on purpose. “You couldn’t do this on a call?” he asked, voice dipped low like concern, like partnership. Then, with a half smile that invited complicity: “It’s late, Raghav. What’s the drama?”
Raghav tipped his chin at the chair opposite, palm open for a second and then flat again on the table. No chai offer, no “how was the drive”: nothing Dev could turn into warmth. He kept his torso angled, the corner of his eye catching the entrance camera’s red blink, as deliberate as a compliance checklist. Fingers spread, empty. Proof he wasn’t hiding anything; proof he wasn’t reaching.
“Sit,” he said.
Dev didn’t move immediately. His gaze flicked over the printouts, the open laptop, the email draft waiting like a loaded send button. Then he smiled anyway, the practiced one.
Raghav held his voice level. “I’m not asking for alignment,” he said. “I’m closing this.”
The sentence didn’t rise, didn’t threaten. It just arrived. Dev’s smile stayed for a heartbeat too long. Then softened, recalibrating into patient persuasion, as if Raghav were a founder having a moment that needed managing.
Dev’s expression rearranged itself into something almost sympathetic. “You know how this works,” he said, glancing at the papers like they were petty. “Partnerships aren’t just metrics. Investors want stability. Manju’s family wants… clean optics.” He walked around the table, close enough that Raghav caught his cologne, his voice dropping intimate, proprietary. “This kept doors open. Don’t burn what we built because you’re tired.” Raghav stayed rooted. Dev’s next step stalled.
Raghav didn’t point at Dev. He pointed at the pitch corner screen, its glow harsh on the empty chairs. “What we built is the product,” he said, voice clipped into control. “Not a story.” He let that land, watching Dev’s mouth tilt, readying another polished angle. Only when Dev inhaled to speak did Raghav reach for his laptop bag: zipper loud in the quiet, intent turning into evidence.
Raghav slid a slim folder out of his bag like he’d rehearsed the motion until it stopped feeling personal. White spine, black label: NNL, FACTS / TIMELINE / COMPLIANCE. No flourish. He placed it on the table between them, not offering it so much as setting a line you didn’t cross without consequences. His hand lingered for a beat on the cover, feeling the cardboard edge bite into his palm, then withdrew.
He didn’t look at Dev. Looking would invite a performance.
He looked at the laptop as it woke, the familiar startup chime too loud in the empty office. The browser was already staged. Tabs pinned, logins saved, no room for “send it later” ambiguity. When the dashboard loaded, it wasn’t a glossy screenshot Dev could shrug off as selective. It was live: time-stamps in the corner, filters on the left, cohorts stacked like layers of truth.
Raghav clicked once, twice, calm, surgical. Retention curves rose where Dev had insisted they were flat. A before-and-after toggle brought up ticket-resolution deltas: median down, backlog down, CSAT up. The week Dev had called “a wash” showed a clean inflection point.
Dev made a low sound, half laugh, half dismissal. “Numbers can, ”
“Don’t,” Raghav cut in, quiet. Not angry. Final. He toggled the date range wider, pulled the cohort split by city tier, then by language. The pattern held. No miracle, no spike. Just steady improvement, the kind you got when a team stopped being yanked around by someone else’s narrative.
He pushed the folder a centimetre closer, still unopened, like he was anchoring the table. “This is what you kept saying didn’t exist,” he said, eyes still on the screen. “The work. The evidence. The part you can’t charm into disappearing.”
Only then did he glance up. Just enough to catch Dev’s smile tightening at the edges, recalculating, as if searching for the angle where facts could be made to look like feelings.
Raghav kept scrolling, saying nothing. He didn’t need to narrate the curve bending upward or the churn line flattening; the dashboard did that for him, unforgiving and plain. He watched Dev’s eyes track the same numbers (looking, despite himself) then moved on before the moment could be turned into a joke.
A new tab opened. A document, clean and unromantic: Compliance Roadmap v3.2. Dates in a left column. Deliverables broken into weekly sprints. Owners assigned. Dependencies called out in red. The kind of plan Dev had always waved away as “later,” while using “policy constraints” like smoke whenever he wanted to stall a decision.
Raghav clicked to the last page. A sign-off block sat there like a stamp you couldn’t sweet-talk out of existence. External advisor’s name, credentials, registration number. Below it, an email thread header with timestamps, subject lines, and a chain of replies: clarifications asked, answered, and acknowledged.
He angled the screen slightly, not offering, not pleading. Just making sure Dev could see the part where the fog ended.
Only then did Raghav flip to the third divider. KAVI / TIMELINE: but it wasn’t handwriting and half-stories anymore. It was brutal in its neatness. A horizontal strip of dates; under each, images with metadata boxes, cab receipts with pickup and drop pins, building entry logs with badge IDs, and thin blue location pings from a synced account, all aligned like a spine.
He scrolled slow, stopping at each anchor just long enough for Dev to register the same pattern repeating: time, place, corroboration. Highlights in pale yellow marked overlaps. Two independent sources saying the same thing within minutes.
“This isn’t memory,” Raghav said, voice steady despite the pulse in his temple. “It’s a route. Anyone can walk it again.”
He didn’t raise his voice or ask permission. A cable clicked into the conference speaker; his phone screen lit with a number saved under a blank name. He dialled, then tapped mute before the first ring finished. When the call connected, the timer began to count up, live, steady, undeniable. Raghav set the phone down beside the folder. He let Dev notice it. That was the point.
Raghav finally lifted his gaze. Dev’s charm didn’t land when met head-on. He spoke with the calm he reserved for boardrooms. The kind that didn’t ask to be believed. “This is what’s real,” he said, one clipped gesture taking in the tabs: metrics, compliance, Kavi’s stitched timeline, the muted call ticking. His fingers curled, decisive. “If you have a story tonight, sell it to the data.”
Dev’s face did that thing it always did when he wanted the room to exhale on his cue: softening at the edges, brows knitting into concern, palms open like he was offering help instead of leverage. The office lights turned his watch into a small, expensive flare every time he moved.
“Raghav,” Dev said, gentle. Too gentle. “You’re running on fumes. This is spiralling. You don’t need to burn everything down because you’re stressed.”
Raghav felt the familiar hook in it: not denial, not admission. A diagnosis. You’re tired, therefore you’re wrong. He didn’t bite. His skull throbbed behind his right eye, caffeine and sleep debt arguing in his blood, but his hands stayed steady as he clicked a tab.
“You told me I was overreacting on the fifteenth,” he said, reading, not looking up. “At 11:[^42] p.m. You said, and I quote: Stop catastrophising. Let me handle perception.”
Dev’s smile flickered. Less warmth, more calculation. “I was trying to protect you.”
Raghav scrolled. The fluorescent hum filled the pauses. Somewhere downstairs, a scooter revved; a tea vendor’s laugh floated up, oblivious.
“Same night,” Raghav continued, voice flat, “you texted Meera from PrismPoint at 12:[^06] a.m.: He’s emotional. Give him twenty-four hours. I’ll manage the story.”
Dev leaned forward, concern turning into wounded patience. “That’s… business. You’re reading it like betrayal because you want a villain.”
Raghav finally looked at him. Dev’s eyes held, bright and persuasive, like stage lights.
“I want clarity,” Raghav said. He toggled again. “At 12:[^19] a.m., you forwarded our internal ‘compliance risk’ note to a number saved as ‘V.’ That number belongs to Vikas D’Mello. The same Vikas who messaged a journalist at 12:[^27] a.m. with the exact phrase data safety theatre.”
Dev’s hands lowered, slowly. The curated concern didn’t fit as neatly now. “You’re connecting dots,” he said, and for the first time the softness sounded strained. “Everyone connects dots in this city.”
Raghav let the call timer keep counting beside them like a metronome. “No,” he said, tapping the screen once, firm. “I’m reading timestamps.”
Dev’s mouth tightened into something like hurt. “I expected better from you, Raghav.” The warmth came packaged with disappointment, the way elders scolded when they wanted obedience, not answers. “All this, documents, calls, cameras, what are you trying to prove? Investors don’t back chaos. Partners don’t sign when they smell drama. And families…” He let the last word hang, heavy as a threat without teeth. “Families don’t forgive public mess.”
Raghav didn’t flinch. He turned the laptop a few degrees, enough to share without inviting. “I’m proving sequence,” he said, and his own voice surprised him, steady, almost tender, like he was reading out a post-mortem.
“9:[^14] p.m., version six of our PrismPoint deck exported from your login. Not mine.” He clicked once. “9:[^21], that same deck emailed to ‘presslist@. “9:[^29], the ‘unstable founder’ talking point appears on FoundersFeed. Same phrasing you used in the pantry. Word for word.”
He spoke each timestamp slowly, deliberately. Like someone else was listening, somewhere the truth needed to land.
Dev’s voice stayed even, but his sentences started shedding responsibility the way oil sheds water. “Raghav, come on. Everyone has access to a deck link. Timelines slip. Vendors forward things to the wrong thread all the time.” He spread his hands, inviting the mess to feel normal, inevitable.
Raghav didn’t argue the philosophy. He opened the delay log.
“Here,” he said, dragging the cursor down a neat column of red flags. “Every ‘pending approval’ sits on one choke point. Same approver. Same escalation loop.” He clicked into the chain. Who requested, who held, who released. Names, timestamps, identical patterns.
Dev leaned in, searching for air, for ambiguity.
Raghav tapped the screen once. “The story you’re selling is noise. This, ” he nodded at the repeated name surfacing like a watermark “, is intent.”
Dev tried to wrap it back in romance, like a shawl over a bruise. “I took the heat so you wouldn’t have to,” he said softly. “Stay with me, publicly, and all this noise… it dies. PrismPoint calms down. Your parents stop circling. We get through.”
Raghav’s stomach tightened, then steadied. “So that’s the deal,” he said. “Access in exchange for affection. Leverage dressed up as care.” He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t insult. He just named it, cleanly, and the room went heavier because Dev had nowhere to file it as drama.
Dev’s charm began to skid into speed. He cut in mid-syllable then tried to zoom out. “You’re obsessing, yaar. Bigger picture.” Raghav didn’t let him. “Recipients?” he asked, and waited. “Edits?” Another click, another log. Each verified line snapped shut like a latch, and Dev’s warmth thinned into strain.
Dev moved like he was closing a meeting, not a distance. One calm step, then another, until the desk’s edge became the only polite geometry left between them. The open-plan office around them held its breath: dark monitors, abandoned beanbags, the faint whirr of the AC trying too hard. From below, the street threw up a steady wash of horns and late-night laughter, a soundtrack that could make any sharp word seem like just another Bengaluru night.
He kept his voice low, not because he was afraid of being heard, but because a hush made everything sound reasonable.
“Listen,” Dev said, palms resting lightly on the tabletop as if he owned the surface by familiarity. “You’ve proved your point. You have logs, you have timelines, you have… whatever Kavi managed to piece together.” The pause was deliberate: credit given with one hand, dismissal with the other. “You also have a company three months from a cliff.”
Raghav felt the words hit the sorest place and looked straight through them. Dev watched his face the way investors watched a burn rate: for flinches.
“I’m offering you an exit that doesn’t burn the building down,” Dev continued, warmth carefully portioned. “We keep the relationship story intact. Publicly. You don’t have to do anything dramatic. No posts, no declarations. Just… don’t contradict the narrative.” He tilted his head, a near-smile. “Let me manage the optics. I’ll speak to PrismPoint. I’ll make sure the partnership doesn’t… drift.”
Drift. The word was soft. The meaning wasn’t.
Raghav’s hands stayed at his sides, but his jaw tightened until it hurt. Dev leaned in a fraction more, lowering the last line into something that could still pass for counsel if anyone walked in.
“You can be right,” Dev said, gentle as a knife laid flat, “or you can be funded. Don’t confuse pride with principles, Raghav. This is mercy.”
Raghav didn’t step back. He didn’t raise his voice to meet Dev’s hush, didn’t reach for the familiar reflex of negotiating his way out of discomfort. Instead he shifted, half a degree. Enough that the mounted screen caught their reflection and the glass of the founder cabin threw it back. Two men, same frame, nowhere to hide. If Dev wanted optics, fine. Let the optics record truth.
He kept his hands visible, palms loose. His heartbeat was loud in his ears, but his words came out level.
“This ends here,” he said. “Tonight. The arrangement, the story, all of it.”
Dev’s mouth twitched, ready to package it, to soften it into something sellable. Raghav didn’t let him have that opening.
“I’m not doing a ‘pause’. I’m not doing ‘we’ll see’. I’m not letting my company’s runway be tied to my personal life.” He swallowed once, felt the sting of it, then continued anyway. “No posts, no dramatic exit, no revenge. Just. If someone asks, I won’t lie. And if PrismPoint needs a performance to sign, we walk.”
He held Dev’s gaze. “I’m done paying with my face and feelings.”
Dev didn’t accept the word ends; he repackaged it on instinct. “Not a breakup. A strategic pause,” he said, like he was summarising minutes. “Not coercion. Alignment. And please, don’t call it sabotage. It’s market reality.” Each label came with a tiny, maddening correction. “It was Tuesday, not Monday. It was Ananya who looped you in, not me. And PrismPoint didn’t ‘threaten’: they flagged.”
As if the right nouns could bleach the intent clean.
Raghav didn’t argue the adjectives. He opened his laptop and slid it forward. “Timestamp. 11:[^47] p.m.” Click. “Deck version history: your edits after my sign-off.” Click. “Email chain delayed by three days.” Click. “And the reschedule request that only appears after you called their VP.” He looked up. “Facts don’t need rebranding.”
Dev’s face rearranged. Smile shearing into a thin, dangerous line. The warmth in his voice turned metallic. He slammed the folder onto the desk; the impact skittered a demo phone, its screen blinking awake like a startled eye. “After everything I’ve done,” he hissed, “this is how you repay it?” Gratitude became threat, consequences implied. For a heartbeat the mask dropped: rage. Then something like panic, raw and uninvited. The office narrowed, corridor-tight.
Raghav let the pressure in the room crest and break on its own. Silence, held steady, made Dev’s anger look unedited: no provocation, no ambiguity. He kept his hands where the glass and camera could read them, fingers unclenched, voice calm enough to sting. “No,” he said. “Not for funding. Not for anyone.” Optics for control, survival for submission. He wouldn’t buy it. One misstep became Dev’s headline; one clean step became proof.
Dev’s hand drifted towards the phone like muscle memory: the cleanest exit, the fastest amputation. His thumb hovered over the red icon, the screen throwing a pale glow on his cuff. He angled his torso slightly, already aligning himself with the door, with plausible deniability, with the narrative he could sell later: call dropped, network issue, we’ll revert.
Raghav didn’t lunge. He didn’t grab. He watched the movement the way he watched a metric spike, quietly, precisely, then shifted half a step to his left. Not to block Dev’s path. To bring Dev’s hand, the phone, the doorway into the security camera’s frame.
“Don’t,” Raghav said.
The word landed without heat. Not a request. A boundary drawn with a straightedge.
Dev’s eyes flicked to him, then, almost involuntarily, to the camera dome in the corner. A microsecond of calculation. His smile tried to return, tried to soften the moment into a misunderstanding. “Relax, Raghav. We can regroup tomorrow. No drama.” His thumb pressed lightly, testing the screen without committing. “You’re making this bigger than it is.”
Raghav’s pulse thudded behind his temples, caffeine and sleep debt turning everything too sharp, too bright. He kept his hands visible on the table’s edge, fingers splayed, posture open enough to look harmless. That was the point. Let the aggression belong to Dev alone.
“It’s already big,” Raghav said, voice steady. “You just want it quiet.”
Dev exhaled through his nose, the warmth draining out of his face. “You think you’re some crusader now?” he murmured. “You’ll burn your own company to feel morally superior.”
“I’ll burn my company,” Raghav replied, “before I let you own it.”
For a beat, Dev’s thumb hovered again: one tap and the line would be dead, the partner’s silence converted into an indefinite pause. Raghav didn’t move faster. He moved cleaner.
He reached for his laptop instead, opening it with a deliberate slowness that looked like choice, not desperation. The hinge clicked. The screen woke. His cursor slid to the call window. He didn’t look at Dev when he hit unmute.
Raghav flipped his laptop open with the same measured care he used in boardrooms. Slow enough to show there was no scramble, no cornered animal. The fan whirred up, the call window steady on the screen. One click and the mute icon vanished.
“Hi, apologies for the dead air,” he said, voice even, Bengaluru-polished. “I’m Raghav Iyer, founder at Neon Nukkad Labs. I want to use the next sixty seconds to keep this strictly on delivery and governance.”
He glanced once at the timestamp, then back to the screen. Dev’s presence at his side felt like heat, but Raghav kept his posture open, hands visible.
“We’ve shipped the multilingual intent model to production for three pilots. The deflection rate is holding at thirty-two percent week-on-week, and escalation accuracy improved by twelve points after the last sprint. Rollout for your SMB cohort would be phased: ten stores, then fifty, with audit logs and human-in-the-loop thresholds locked.”
A beat. He let the numbers land.
“And to be transparent: communication around this partnership has been interfered with. Messages were rerouted, timelines misrepresented, and pressure applied outside your stated process. I’m not speculating on reasons. I’m correcting the record, now, while you’re on the line.”
Dev gave a soft, almost affectionate laugh, the kind that suggested the whole thing was heartbreak dressed up as governance. “Come on,” he said, voice turning wounded, “this is between us. You’re making it sound like: like I’m some villain because we had… an understanding.” He leaned in a fraction, warmth weaponised. “Don’t do this on a call.”
Raghav didn’t take the bait. His throat tightened anyway; he swallowed it down like bad coffee. “Not interested in character assessments,” he said, and clicked Share Screen.
The dashboard filled the laptop: before/after curves, cohorts, deflection trends. Then annotated incident logs: message IDs, timestamps, routing changes. Then the compliance checklist: policy links, owners, due dates, green ticks where they’d earned them.
He kept his gaze angled toward the camera dome’s reflection, not Dev’s face. Proof over performance.
The line went silent. Not a polite pause. An evaluative void that made the honking below and the chaiwala’s shout feel like they’d been turned down. Raghav counted his breaths, refused to fill it with explanations. Across the table, Dev’s jaw flexed, smile searching for a foothold. Raghav stayed still. Let the screen, the logs, the timestamps speak first.
A voice cut through the line, clipped, procedural, uninterested in theatre. “Send the compliance plan and the latest metrics. Now. And include your audit-log schema.” The air in the cabin changed; gossip collapsed into due diligence. Dev went still, as if his charm had been unplugged. Raghav’s pulse jumped, but his fingers didn’t. He dragged the prepared folder into the chat and hit send before anyone could breathe.
Raghav kept his palms spread on the tabletop, as if the wood could absorb the tremor in his veins. The instinct to do a victory lap rose and died in the same breath. He didn’t trust himself with theatre. Theatre was how they’d gotten here.
Across from him, Dev sat with that curated ease, posture relaxed, mouth arranged into a smile that usually made rooms cooperate. Raghav watched it like a UI element stuck on a loading screen, spinning, searching for data that wasn’t coming. No one laughed. No one rushed in to smooth it over. The silence had weight now, the kind that belonged to facts.
Dev’s eyes flicked, quick, to the laptop, to the corner of the cabin where the camera dome caught a faint reflection. Raghav noticed. Dev noticed he noticed. For a second, the warmth on Dev’s face drained, leaving something sharper underneath, like a blade revealed when the velvet sleeve slips.
“You’ve made your point,” Dev said softly, voice pitched for reasonableness. Not apologetic: strategic. “We can discuss this without. “Without turning it into… a scene.”
Raghav didn’t look away. His throat felt scraped raw from holding back everything he wanted to spit out: the late-night calls, the manufactured closeness, the way his own name had become a prop in someone else’s pitch deck. He let none of it show. He gave Dev nothing to latch onto.
“This isn’t a scene,” Raghav said, even, almost bored. “It’s a record.”
Dev’s smile tried again, small and intimate, the old trick: make it feel like a private misunderstanding. “Raghav,” he murmured, like it was a plea.
Raghav’s shoulders stayed square. He didn’t soften, didn’t flinch, didn’t fill the air with reassurance. He simply held his posture and watched Dev’s expression keep searching for purchase until it found only flat ground.
Dev leaned back, hands open on the armrests, voice lowering into something almost tender. “You think I enjoyed any of this?” he said, like they were alone in a restaurant corner and not under a lens. “I was protecting you. Your parents, your investors: people like stories, Raghav. A clean one. You give them a story, they stop digging.”
The words were packaged too neatly, the kind of line that sounded better with applause.
Raghav felt the old pull: relief at being handled, at not having to fight every expectation himself. It flashed and died. He looked at Dev’s face and saw the calculation beneath the warmth, the way “protecting” always meant “controlling.”
“No,” Raghav said. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just final. “Whatever you’re calling this: stop.”
Dev’s nostrils flared. “Don’t be naïve. You’ll lose. “It’s over. We’re done. And Neon Nukkad is not trading intimacy for leverage again. Not with you. Not with anyone.”
For the first time, Dev’s smile didn’t return on cue.
Dev’s chair scraped back, a controlled sound in the glass cabin, and he walked out without another line that could be replayed. Raghav tracked him to the door, not moving, not giving him the dignity of a chase. When the latch clicked and Dev’s footsteps faded into the open-plan dark, the quiet rushed in. Only then did Raghav’s body remember it was alive. His pulse spiked late, a delayed wave; his jaw loosened with a dull ache. His knees softened, threatening to fold, and he caught himself on the table edge, fingertips white. The caffeine in his veins stopped feeling like power and started feeling like poison.
He exhaled, slow, through his nose, and let the tremor pass without naming it.
He forces his hands to behave. Cursor, click, export: no shaking, no drama. He pulls the camera log, cross-checks the timestamps, trims the clips to the exact seconds that matter, then saves them twice: local drive, encrypted cloud, names bland enough to survive scrutiny. He re-sends the compliance plan and metrics bundle and adds one tight paragraph: what was asked, what was given, when. Daylight, enforced by formatting.
He walked the aisle between desks like a man crossing a bridge he’d just lit behind him. Monitor screens asleep, half-eaten biscuits and chai rings marking the last sprint. In his head, tomorrow multiplied: investor side-eyes, WhatsApp forwards, his mother’s careful voice turning sharp, the team reading his face for cues. Fear stayed, but cleaner now: no performance, no shield. Just him, and the product, in daylight.