17. Hannah
— ? —
Hannah
Launch day.
I wear blue. Not red. The red dress is hanging in a closet across town, in a house I already said goodbye to, and today is a day for a color with no history in it.
My software is live. The event space is packed past comfortable, the air all catered coffee and nervous sweat, and I’m wearing a dress with a price tag I still can’t say out loud because Summer said first impressions matter.
My name is stenciled on the wall behind the demo stations, six feet tall. When I got here this morning before anyone else, I stood in front of it and touched the H like I was checking it would hold my weight.
I hate that she’s right. I hate that I listened. I hate that I keep catching glimpses of myself in reflective surfaces and not recognizing the woman looking back.
Summer arrives at ten with a bag of emergency supplies she won’t itemize and stations herself where she can see the whole floor, my one-woman security detail in heels.
But the software works. That’s what matters.
The interface is clean and intuitive, the focus-mode timer draws people in, and I’ve already watched a dozen strangers with ADHD light up when they realize someone finally built something that understands how their brains work.
By eleven, there’s a line at the demo stations.
I watch a gray-haired man in a pressed shirt sit down skeptical and hunch closer with every click, and when the focus mode dims everything but the paragraph in front of him, his hands go still on the table.
He reads the whole page. Then he waves over a woman I assume is his wife and makes her sit down and watch him read it again, and something in my chest pulls tight and good.
This is why I started this. Not for the press or the investors or the validation. For the kid in the back of the classroom who can’t make the words sit still. For the adult who’s spent their whole life feeling broken because the world wasn’t built for them.
For me.
My speech goes off at noon. I stand at the podium with the speech Cameron read to me at two in the morning, and this time the words hold still, because I know them by ear now, because I heard them in a voice that believed them before I did.
I built it because nobody built it for me.
The applause at the end is loud and long, and I find him in the back of the crowd, not clapping, just watching me with his hand pressed flat against his chest like he’s holding something in.
Marisse arrives at 2 p.m., trailing a camera crew and that smile I recognize from a video I’ll never unsee. I clock her the way you clock a wasp at a picnic: no sudden movements, no fear she can smell, one eye on her flight path while I finish shaking the hand in front of me.
She’s wearing the same red lipstick. The same predatory expression. The same air of a woman who smells blood and is ready to draw more.
She takes her time working the room first, sampling quotes from investors, positioning her cameraman, building toward me like weather. I keep doing my job. If she wants a flustered woman, she’s going to have to bring one from home.
“Hannah Jasper!” She approaches with arms spread wide, like we’re old friends instead of strangers with history. “Congratulations on the launch. Although I have to ask - isn’t it a little uncomfortable, building a company with your estranged husband’s money?”
The room goes quiet around us. I feel the weight of every gaze, every held breath, every person waiting to see if the chaotic wife will crack.
The crowd parts for her the way crowds part for ambulances, curiosity dressed as courtesy. Across the room, Cameron tenses, one foot already moving. I stop him with one look.
Mine.
I let the question sit for exactly one beat, long enough that everyone hears it for what it is, short enough that nobody mistakes my silence for a wound.
“My investor has no ownership, no vote, and no veto in this company,” I say, my voice carrying clearly across the sudden silence. “Unlike some people, he’s learned to stay out of my business.”
Marisse’s smile tightens, but she recovers quickly. “Still, after that charming interview, you’re not exactly known for being the business-minded type. Your own husband called you scatterbrained-”
“You mean when Cameron made those comments about me being chaotic?” I let the smile sharpen, let her see that I’m not the easy target she remembers.
“Yes, I’m familiar with my own brain. I have ADHD and dyslexia.
I’ve managed both since childhood, built systems and strategies to work with how I think instead of against it.
This software exists because of how my brain works - not despite it. ”
“How inspiring.” Her smile widens, shark-like. “Still-”
“Still what?” I step closer, close enough that the cameras can catch every word.
“Still wondering if people like me can succeed? Still thinking there’s a story here about the scattered little wife who got in over her head?
” I shake my head slowly. “I’ve spent my whole life wondering if I was enough.
If I was smart enough, focused enough, normal enough. Today I stopped wondering.”
My hands are steady. My voice is steady. Somewhere inside me, a girl in the back row of a classroom puts down the book she’s been pretending to read, and looks up.
Applause starts somewhere in the crowd. I find the source: the gray-haired man from the demo station this morning, on his feet, clapping with his whole arms like he’s flagging down a plane.
Spreads. Swells until the room is clapping and cheering, and Marisse’s smile has frozen into a rigid, uncertain shape.
“Speaking of success-” She’s trying to recover, to find another angle. “Care to comment on the divorce?”
The room gasps. No one here knows about the filing except Summer and my mother. The leak came from somewhere else. From someone who wants to see me fail.
Beside the stage, Summer has gone very still, her eyes moving through the crowd like she’s already hunting the leak. I don’t flinch.
“My marriage is between me and my husband.” I hold her gaze steadily, refusing to look away. “But I’m very curious to know who gave you that information.”
Marisse’s face flickers with what might be uncertainty. “Sources.”
“I’m sure.” I turn away from her, dismissing her entirely. “We’re done here.”
Across the room, Cameron’s shoulders come down. He catches my eye and doesn’t smile, exactly, but something in his face rearranges into pride so naked I have to look away from that too.
The rest of the launch blurs together. Investors circle with business cards and compliments, and my cheeks ache from smiling real smiles for once instead of the other ones.
One of them is a face I know: the man who told me a month and a half ago to come back with my husband’s signature.
He works his way over with a smile like nothing ever happened and a card extended between two fingers.
“Impressive turnout,” he says. “I’d love to talk about investing, whenever you’re ready.”
I look at the card. I don’t take it.
“I’ll keep your advice in mind,” I say pleasantly. “You were very clear about what my company needed. A man’s signature. As it turns out, the only signature I’m still waiting on is one.” I smile with all my teeth. “Enjoy the canapés.”
His face does a complicated thing. I walk away before it finishes.
Press coverage flows in, positive for once, focusing on the product and the mission instead of the woman behind it.
Somebody’s already calling the focus timer a game-changer.
Somebody else wants to pilot it in a school district.
I collect the words like I used to collect his apologies, except these ones are worth keeping.
It’s past seven when I finally escape to my office, my heels in my hand and my feet aching in that specific victorious way, and Cameron’s waiting.
He’s holding two glasses of the good champagne from the reception, and he hands me one like a man presenting evidence at his own trial.
“You were incredible,” he says, his voice rough with emotion.
“Someone leaked the divorce.”
“I saw.” His jaw tightens, and he takes one slow breath through his nose. “I’m going to find out who.”
“It came from your side. No one on mine knew except Summer and my mom.”
“I believe you.” He pulls me into a hug without asking permission, and I let him because I’m too tired to fight it. “You were still incredible. Watching you take her apart-”
“She had it coming.”
“She really did.” His chin comes to rest on top of my head, briefly, an old habit arriving uninvited, and I feel him catch himself and lift it away. “Your speech was the best thing I’ve ever heard in that room or any other.”
“You wrote half of it.”
“I typed half of it. You wrote all of it. There’s a difference, and I finally know what it is.”
His arms close around me and I fit there, still, after everything, my cheek finding the same spot on his chest it always found.
He smells like coffee and the long day and himself underneath it, and I lean into him for a moment, just a moment, letting myself feel safe.
Then I pull back, because safe is a dangerous thing to feel around Cameron Jasper.
That night, back at my apartment, the coverage goes everywhere.
Summer refuses to go home and shriek-calls me from the living room even though I’m down the hall, both of us watching the clip count climb on different screens like it’s election night.
She reads me the headlines in increasingly ridiculous news-anchor voices until I’m laughing so hard I can’t breathe, and for an hour my life is just this: my best friend, a couch, a good day that belongs entirely to me.
“BILLIONAIRE’S WIFE SILENCES REPORTER” trends on every platform, and for once the story is mine to tell.
Cameron’s old interview gets dragged across social media, torn apart by people who see now what I saw then.
I wait to feel vindicated about that. Mostly I feel tired, and something adjacent to sad, because the man in that old clip really is a stranger now, and the man from 2 a.m. with my speech in his mouth is someone else entirely, and I don’t know what to do with either of them.
My mother calls at nine and cries happy tears at me for ten minutes, and I let her, and maybe I cry a little too, and neither of us mentions Cameron even once, which is its own conversation.
I watch my own clip exactly once. The woman on the screen is steady-voiced and sharp-eyed, and she doesn’t look like someone who’d lose her head if it wasn’t attached. She looks like someone I’d want to be. It takes me a full minute to accept that she’s someone I already am.
I’m brushing my teeth when my phone buzzes, and I assume it’s Summer sending the headline again with more exclamation points.
It’s a text from an unknown number.
You think you’ve won? Sweetheart, I haven’t even started.
***