The Ache Between Us

4. Twenty Minutes

The partnership terms arrived on Thursday, a day early, and I read them twice at my hotel desk. The first read was fast, scanning for the red flags, the clause that would reveal this was too good to be true. The second read was slow. They were offering office space on the fourteenth floor, full access to Nexus’s developer tools and testing infrastructure, a dedicated point of contact named David Mathew for operational support, and a monthly stipend that was modest by Bangalore startup standards but generous by the standards of a woman who’d been coding from her childhood bedroom six months ago. They weren’t asking for equity. They weren’t asking for an IP transfer. It was a clean, respectful deal, and I kept waiting for the part where it stopped being one.

I signed it that night and emailed it back before I could talk myself out of it.

Monday morning, I showed up at Nexus with a laptop bag and the specific kind of nausea that comes from wanting something to go well so badly that your body decides to punish you for it.

* * *

David Mathew was waiting for me at the reception. He was in his late twenties with a round face and glasses, and he was the kind of person who smiled before he spoke, like the smile was the first sentence. He shook my hand with both of his.

“Ananya, welcome. I’ve set you up on the east side, near the dev team. Kabir wanted you close to the engineers in case you need anything.”

Kabir wanted. I noted that and moved on.

David walked me through the floor like a man who genuinely loved giving tours. The main workspace was open plan, thirty-odd desks, with the hum of keyboards and low conversation filling the air, the way background noise fills a library. The breakout area had bean bags that nobody actually sat in except the interns, which David told me with a conspiratorial look that suggested he had sat in them and regretted it. Then there was the kitchen, which had real coffee and oat milk and a handwritten sign taped above the machine that said

IF YOU USE THE LAST OF THE FILTER PAPER, YOU MUST REPLACE THE FILTER PAPER. THIS IS NOT A SUGGESTION.

“That’s Meera’s,” David said, nodding at the sign. “Head of product. She takes coffee personally.”

“Good. So do I.”

He grinned. “You’ll get along.”

My desk was in a glass-walled alcove near the window, small but private, with a screen, a chair, a power strip, and a view of the Koramangala rooftops that made me want to take a photograph and immediately hate myself for being the kind of person who wanted to take a photograph. Someone had left a welcome card on the keyboard. It said

Looking forward to working with you

and was signed by the Nexus team, which was corporate and impersonal except that someone had drawn a small smiley face in the corner, and that smiley face did more for me than the whole sentence.

I set up my laptop, connected to the Wi-Fi, and opened Spekka’s codebase. For thirty minutes, everything was fine. I was working in a beautiful office with fast internet, free coffee, and a view, and I was a professional doing professional things in a professional manner.

Then Kabir walked past my desk.

He didn’t stop or speak. He was on his way somewhere with his phone to his ear, talking to someone in a low voice I couldn’t hear. He was wearing a dark grey shirt with no tie, and his sleeves rolled up, and he glanced at me as he passed, half a second, barely a nod, and kept walking.

And my concentration was gone for the next twenty minutes.

I hated this about myself. I had spent the entire weekend not thinking about him and had failed spectacularly, and the not-thinking had taken more energy than the thinking would have, and now he’d walked past me in a grey shirt, and my brain had decided to abandon its post like a soldier who’d spotted something more interesting outside the barracks. I was thirty-one years old. I had built an app from nothing. I had survived things that would have flattened most people. And here I was, losing twenty minutes of productive coding time because a man rolled up his sleeves.

I put my headphones in and opened the dialect-variation module and worked until I forgot about him, which took longer than I’m willing to admit.

* * *