Chapter 11: Shifting Codes
1066 Words
Chapter 11: Shifting Codes
The week of the demo arrived like a freight train with no brakes.
Every corner of TechSpark buzzed with tension and caffeine. Teams paced, rehearsed, fine-tuned, and second-guessed themselves. Slide decks were rewritten. UI glitches were fixed and reappeared like gremlins. Somewhere between excitement and panic, Tiaraoluwa moved like a metronome, trying to steady the rhythm.
She had barely slept. Her slides were perfect. Her demo app? Functional. Her UI? Sharp. But her nerves betrayed her. She wasn’t scared of failing. She was scared of almost succeeding, getting so close to a breakthrough, and falling just shy. That was the weight she carried: not incompetence, but proximity.
TechSpark had become her battlefield, and she was both a general and frontline soldier. She showed up early, left late, checked in on her team like a sister and CEO wrapped into one. Chinelo was working herself into a state of silence. Tobi had developed a nervous tic involving his stylus, and their intern now double-checked every pixel like it might explode.
Tuesday afternoon came humid and hazy. As Tiara waited for her Uber outside the coworking hub, her arms folded and her face blank, his voice came up behind her.
"You forgot your charger yesterday."
She turned. He was holding it out like a peace offering.
"Thanks," she said, too aware of how close he was standing.
"Are you good?" he asked.
"Define 'good.'"
He gave her a crooked grin. "Still brilliant. Still overthinking."
"That obvious?"
"Only to someone who’s done the same thing."
She exhaled. "I don’t want to pitch. I want to build. But here I am, making another deck."
"Pitching is storytelling," he said. "And you’re one hell of a storyteller, Tiara."
She looked up, surprised by the gentleness in his tone.
"You’ve seen the numbers. You’ve used the product. You know it works. Now let them see it through your eyes."
She nodded. Then smirked. "Did you rehearse that in the mirror?"
He laughed. "Only the part where you’d smile."
The moment was soft but short-lived. Her Uber pulled in, and they parted without another word. But she felt lighter.
The next morning, the rehearsal turned chaotic.
Chinelo’s laptop crashed mid-demo. The HDMI cable refused to connect. The backup prototype froze on the login screen. Gbenga muttered curses, and the new intern accidentally overwrote a CSS stylesheet with a placeholder quote from Beyoncé. It would have been funny if the stakes weren’t so high.
Tiara watched it all spiral. She didn’t panic. Didn’t raise her voice.
"Pause," she said.
Everyone looked up.
"We fix this. Right now. Together."
And she led. Calmly. Decisively. Delegating where needed. Encouraging when she saw their eyes falter. She rolled up her sleeves, walked through every bug with Tobi, reviewed the staging server herself, and talked Chinelo through rebuilding the presentation architecture.
By the time the room emptied out, she slumped into a bean bag chair, heart pounding but face unreadable. She stared up at the lights and whispered to herself, “You’ve done harder things than this.”
That night, Kemi showed up uninvited with chin chin, zobo, and her usual honesty.
"You look like a haunted spreadsheet," Kemi said.
"That’s generous. I feel like corrupted code."
"Talk to me. What’s spinning?"
"Everything. The demo. The team. The weight of being seen. What if they love it, Kem? What if I’m not ready for what comes next?"
"Then we grow into it. That’s what we do, babe. We outgrow the fear, then stretch again."
Tiara lay back on the couch, face tilted to the ceiling. "I miss my mum. She’d know what to say."
Kemi sat beside her, hand brushing hers. "She’d say you were built for this. Because you are."
"She used to let me stay up late coding in secondary school. Even when we didn’t have power, she’d charge the laptop with a generator so I could keep learning."
"And now look at you. You’ve turned a childhood dream into a living product. You’re not just pitching code you’re pitching legacy."
Tiara blinked hard. "I’m scared, Kem."
"Good. That means it matters."
Across town, Iremide sat in his apartment, phone in hand, hovering over the send button.
He typed. Deleted. Typed again.
Iremide: You’re not alone. Even when you think you are.
He hit send.
Back in her apartment, Tiara’s phone vibrated. She read it twice before replying.
Tiara: See you at the demo.
She lay back down, hand on her stomach, heart strangely steady. If love was code, they were still debugging it. But something in her knew:
The system was running. It just hadn’t launched yet.
And tomorrow? It just might.
She stepped into the hallway one last time, nerves in her throat, clarity in her bones. Tomorrow, the world would meet her vision. And she was ready to show up.
But readiness wasn’t just about confidence it was about responsibility. Tiara’s path had been shaped by more than ambition. Every decision she made carried echoes of her family. She was the first in her lineage to reach this height, and she didn’t get there alone. Her late mother’s strength had laid the groundwork. Her younger brother’s tuition was still partially covered by what she made from freelance UX audits. Her aunt’s stall at the market had been rebuilt with savings Tiara could have easily used for a well-deserved vacation And yet, she never hesitated.
Each choice she made was a compromise between dream and duty.
The accelerator, the app, the growing spotlight it all seemed glamorous from the outside. But beneath the surface was the constant calculation of how long she could keep everything afloat. She didn’t have a trust fund. No angel investor in the family. Just her, a few loyal teammates, and a deep-seated refusal to let her mother’s sacrifices be in vain.
She thought of the nights she juggled pitch decks and online tutoring, how she’d send money home without blinking, even if it meant skipping meals. Those weren’t footnotes. They were the foundation. And now, everything felt like it was teetering on the edge of change.
If the demo went well, she wouldn’t just secure funding, she could finally build full-time without carrying the weight of survival. She could move her aunt closer. Pay her brother’s next year fees in advance. Breathe.
That was the real pitch. Not just to TechSpark. But to life itself.
- Writer
