Chapter 7 Tessa
TESSA
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my first two weeks at Mosaic, it’s this: The Branson brothers aren’t a team. They’re a weather system.
Owen is the sunshine. He breezes into my office three times a day with coffee, bad jokes, or “urgent” questions about font choices that are clearly just excuses to lean over my desk and smell my hair.
He’s bright, warm, and impossible to dislike, even when I know he’s trouble.
He makes the long hours feel like a party, turning budget meetings into brainstorming sessions that inevitably end with us laughing over takeout containers.
Asher is the fog. He’s silent, omnipresent, and suffocating.
Since the night he drove me home, the night he touched my face and told me I was soft, we haven’t spoken about it.
Not a word. But I feel him. I feel his eyes on me across the office.
I feel the weight of his attention when he drops off data reports on my desk without a word, his fingers lingering on the paper for a fraction of a second too long.
He doesn’t flirt. He just… exists, filling the space around me with a quiet intensity that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
And Ethan? Ethan is the storm. He’s the thunder rolling in the distance, threatening to break. He’s the pressure drop that makes your ears pop.
And in my two weeks of being here, he has been completely, maddeningly invisible.
He ignores me in the hallways and sends me one-sentence emails, refusing to look me in the eye ever since the night he sent me out of his office.
It’s effective. It’s professional.
And it’s pissing me off.
“He’s doing it again,” I mutter, staring at the empty chair at the head of the conference table.
“Doing what?” Sarah asks. She’s setting up the projector, her blue hair pulled back in a messy bun held together by a pencil. She’s wearing a t-shirt that says CSS is Awesome inside a box that is overflowing the borders.
“Bailing on his own meeting,” I say, checking my watch. “It’s 10:05. The strategy meeting was supposed to start five minutes ago. I have four different mood boards to present, and if I have to stare at this empty leather chair for one more minute, I’m going to scream.”
“He’s in a mood,” Owen says, spinning his chair around.
He’s wearing a charcoal suit today, looking devastatingly handsome and completely relaxed.
He catches my eye and smiles. “The beta testers found a bug in the geolocation feature this morning. Ethan is currently in his office threatening to defenestrate his computer.”
“Defenestrate,” I repeat, fighting a smile. “Throw it out the window?”
“He likes big words when he’s angry,” Owen grins. “It makes him feel superior. Also, he thinks it scares the interns. Which, to be fair, it does.”
“He is superior,” Asher’s voice comes from the corner of the room.
I jump. I still haven’t gotten used to the way he seems to materialize into rooms. Asher is sitting in the shadows, his hoodie pulled up, tapping away on his tablet. He doesn’t look at me. He rarely looks at me directly anymore, as if he’s afraid of what might happen if our eyes meet.
“He’s not superior,” I argue, organizing my notes on the sleek glass table. “He’s late. And my time is billable.”
“Technically, you’re salaried,” Owen points out, stealing a donut from the tray in the center of the table. “So he owns your time. And your soul. It’s in the fine print of the NDA.”
“He pays for my time,” I correct, snapping my notebook shut. “He doesn’t own it. There’s a difference.”
The door slams open. Speak of the devil.
Ethan stalks into the room. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a month. His white dress shirt is wrinkled at the elbows, his tie is loosened, and his hair is a chaotic mess of dark waves that suggests he’s been running his hands through it repeatedly. He radiates tension like a furnace radiates heat.
He doesn’t apologize for being late or say hello. H walks straight to the head of the table, dropping a heavy stack of files with a loud thud and glaring at us.
“We have thirty minutes,” he barks. “The investors moved the Series B call up to noon. If we don’t have a finalized marketing strategy by then, we look like amateurs. Go.”
He sits down, crossing his arms over his chest, his cold, unyielding eyes locking onto mine.
I force the dryness from my mouth. This is it. The big pitch. I’ve spent two weeks building this campaign. I’ve analyzed Asher’s user data, I’ve brainstormed with Owen, I’ve interviewed Sarah’s design team. I know this strategy works.
But looking at Ethan’s face—tight, angry, and dismissive—I have a feeling he’s not in the mood to be impressed.
“Okay,” I say, standing up. I smooth down the front of my pencil skirt—my professional armor against him—and pick up the remote. “Let’s talk about intimacy.”
Ethan flinches. It’s subtle, just a twitch of his eye, but I catch it.
“The current brand voice is focused on efficiency,” I continue, clicking the remote.
The projector screen behind me lights up with a series of graphs.
“We market Mosaic as a tool. ‘Find your tribe faster.’ ‘Optimize your social circle.’ It’s clean.
It’s tech-forward. It’s exactly what a venture capitalist wants to hear. ”
I click again. The screen changes to a mood board I built—images of people sitting alone in coffee shops, staring at phones in dark rooms, looking out rainy windows.
“But it’s wrong,” I state. “People don’t use Mosaic because they want to be machines. They use it because they’re lonely. They use it because they feel invisible.”
I press the button for the next slide. Three distinct profiles appear on the screen.
“I built three user personas based on the raw session logs Asher pulled for me,” I explain, walking toward the screen. “We tracked deletion rates—how often someone types a message and then erases it because they’re afraid to hit send. It happens three times more often between 10 PM and 2 AM.”
I point to the first profile. “First, we have ‘The Drifter.’ He’s twenty-eight, works remotely, and moves cities every six months. He has five thousand Instagram followers but no one to help him move a couch. He’s looking for grounding.”
I point to the second profile. “Then, ‘The Burnout.’ She’s thirty-two, has a high-powered career, and works eighty hours a week. She doesn’t have time for hobbies or small talk. She needs people who speak her language, but she’s too exhausted to find them.”
I glance at Ethan. He’s staring at the profile of the “Burnout.” His jaw tightens.
“And finally,” I say softly, clicking to the third image. “The Ghost.”
“He’s the one logging in at 2:00 AM. He doesn’t post; he just lurks and reads the forums. He’s desperate for connection but terrified of rejection. He’s safe behind the screen.”
I look at Asher. He has stopped typing. He is staring at “The Ghost” persona with an unreadable expression.
“These people don’t care about our algorithm,” I say, turning back to face the table. “They care about being understood. My proposal is a complete pivot. We stop selling the tech and the ‘Phantom Trio’ genius angle, and start selling the feeling. The campaign is called ‘Be Seen’.”
I click to the final slide. It’s a mockup of a billboard. Just a black background with stark white text:
You aren’t broken. You’re just buffering. Find your signal.
“It’s vulnerable,” I admit. “It admits that our users are struggling. But it treats that struggle with dignity, not as a problem to be solved.”
Silence fills the room. I hold my breath, waiting. The air conditioning hums. Sarah is chewing on the end of her pencil.
“I love it,” Owen says softly. “Buffering. That’s genius, Tess. It turns a tech negative into a human positive.”
“It aligns with the data,” Asher adds. His voice is low, but firm. “The peak usage times correlate with isolation windows. This speaks to the core demographic without alienating the casual user.”
Sarah nods vigorously. “The design language supports this. We can soften the UI, use warmer colors, move away from the ‘Matrix’ green we’ve been using…”
“No.”
The word cuts through the room like a gunshot. We all turn to look at the head of the table.
Ethan hasn’t moved. He is staring at the screen with an expression of pure disdain.
“No?” I repeat, blinking.
“It’s weak,” Ethan says. He stands up, looming over the table. “We are a tech company, Ms. Hartley. We are selling a proprietary matching algorithm that is five years ahead of the market. We are not selling a therapy session.”
“We aren’t selling therapy,” I argue, feeling the heat rise in my cheeks. “We’re selling a connection.”
“You’re selling weakness,” Ethan snaps. He gestures aggressively at the screen. “‘Buffering’? You want our launch campaign to associate our brand with lag? With failure?”
“It’s a metaphor, Ethan.”
“It’s bad branding,” he counters. “Investors want confidence. They want dominance. They want to know that Mosaic is the shark in the water, not the sad goldfish in a bowl.”
“Investors aren’t the users!” I snap back. “The users are real people who are tired of pretending their lives are perfect on Instagram. If we come out swinging like ‘sharks,’ we just look like another Silicon Valley predator trying to monetize their attention.”
“We are monetizing their attention,” Ethan growls. “That is the business model.”
“That’s the revenue model,” I correct him, stepping closer to his end of the table. My heart is hammering, but I’m not backing down. “The business is people. If you treat them like prey, they will run. If you treat them like people, they will stay.”
“I don’t need a lecture on business from someone who has only been here for two weeks,” Ethan says coldly.
The projector fan’s ambient noise roars in the sudden silence. Owen winces. Sarah looks down at her notebook. Even Asher looks uncomfortable.
It’s a low blow. A reminder of my place. You are the employee. I am the boss.
I take a deep breath, forcing myself to stay calm.