1. Shayla #2
I give them my best grin. The one that hides everything.
"Now. Who wants to see the parking garage view? Because it is spectacular."
The first joint executive meeting happens three days later in a conference room that could double as a surgical theater.
Everything is white, gray, or glass. The chairs are Herman Miller.
The table is a single slab of something that probably required deforestation.
There's a carafe of water with cucumber slices floating in it like this is a spa and not the place where my professional autonomy comes to die.
I arrive seven minutes early because my mother raised me right and because I learned in my twenties that white corporate spaces treat a Black woman's punctuality like a character test. I move my laptop to the far end of the table, pull up my integration deck, and pour myself a glass of cucumber water I don't want.
Tyler's people trickle in. Dawson Ponts drops into the seat directly across from me, smelling like too much Tom Ford and not enough competence. He gives me a nod that's half greeting, half appraisal. I return it with a smile I keep strictly professional.
Two VPs I don't know take seats near the middle. A woman from legal. A man from product development who introduces himself as Greg and immediately mispronounces my last name.
"Barnes," I correct. One syllable. Hard to get wrong.
"Right, right. Barnes."
Tyler arrives at exactly 9:00. Not 8:58, not 9:02. The man is a metronome. He takes the head of the table without looking at anyone, sets down a single black folder, and opens it. No laptop. No tablet. Just paper, a pen, and that terrifying quiet he wears like cologne.
"Let's go." Two words. The room snaps to attention.
Dawson kicks off with a product roadmap that makes my left eye twitch.
He's slotted Prism into their existing analytics suite like it's a plug-in.
A widget. Something you'd download from an app store for $4.
99. The entire predictive engine, the thing I spent two years training on proprietary data sets, reduced to a feature bullet point under the heading Enhanced User Insights.
I wait. Let him finish. Take a sip of cucumber water that tastes like patience.
"Thank you, Dawson." Tyler flips a page in his folder. "Miss Barnes, your integration timeline."
I stand. Click to my first slide. The projection fills the wall behind me with a clean, color-coded Gantt chart that Keiko and I spent all of last night perfecting.
"The Prism algorithm requires a minimum sixteen-week integration period.
Eight weeks for infrastructure mapping and API compatibility testing.
Four weeks for model retraining on Cox Ventures' existing data architecture.
Four weeks for staged deployment with live monitoring to catch drift.
" I click to the next slide. "Compressing below sixteen weeks introduces a thirty-seven percent failure probability on initial deployment.
That number comes from our internal stress tests, not from guesswork. "
I let the number sit. Thirty-seven percent. In a room full of people whose bonuses depend on a clean Q3 launch, that number should land like a grenade.
Tyler doesn't look at the screen. He looks at me.
"Sixteen weeks puts us six weeks past the Q3 window."
"It does."
"Which makes it irrelevant."
The word drops clean and cold. No malice. No heat. Just a man crossing an item off a list.
Dawson leans back in his chair, arms folded, doing absolutely nothing to hide the satisfaction pulling at the corners of his mouth.
"The Q3 target is ten weeks out," Tyler continues, still looking at me. Those gray eyes flat as a frozen lake. "We launch in ten. Adjust your timeline."
"Adjusting the timeline doesn't adjust the math.
If you push Prism live in ten weeks, the model won't be properly calibrated.
You'll get garbage outputs dressed up in a nice interface, and when your clients realize the predictive accuracy is forty percent below what you promised them, the reputational damage will be extremely expensive. "
The room holds still. Greg from product development reads his notepad like it contains classified information. The woman from legal types something I can't see.
Tyler closes his folder.
"Ten weeks. That's the deliverable."
Not a discussion. Not a negotiation. Just a wall, dressed in a slate-gray suit.
I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper. My slide still glows on the wall behind me, all those careful color-coded bars suddenly decorative. I click my laptop shut.
"Noted."
I gather my things. Tyler stops me before I reach the door.
"One more item."
I turn. My laptop bag hangs from one shoulder, my jaw locked so tight my temples pulse.
He doesn't stand. Doesn't shift in his chair. Just observes me from the head of that obscene table like I'm an item on the line he hasn't finished reading.
"Starting tomorrow, you'll relocate your workspace from the fourth-floor lab to the executive suite on forty-seven. The office adjacent to mine." He uncaps his pen. Pulls a fresh sheet of paper toward him. Already moving on. "Seven AM. Sharp."
My grip tightens on the strap of my bag. The leather bites into my palm.
"I work with my team. In our lab."
"You work where the integration requires you to work." He doesn't look up. "Seven AM, Miss Barnes. Don't be late."