Page 199 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
#MyMosaic is trending.
And it isn’t hate.
People are posting photos. A single mom with her three kids. A gay couple with their dogs. A group of friends living in a commune. A soldier coming home to his wife.
My mosaic is my grandma who raised me. My mosaic is my polycule. My mosaic is just me and my cat, and that’s enough.
The internet isn’t judging us anymore. They’re joining us.
The dashboard loads. “Sentiment analysis just flipped from eighty percent negative to sixty percent positive. But look at the user acquisition cost.”
Ethan looks at the screen. “It’s zero.”
“Exactly,” I say. “We aren’t paying for ads. The scandal is doing the work for us. We just acquired fifty thousand users in forty minutes for free.”
“That’s our leverage,” Ethan realizes. “Sterling doesn’t care about morals. He cares about margins.”
The phone rings again.
Sterling. Five minutes before the deadline.
Ethan picks it up. He puts it on speaker.
“Branson,” Sterling’s voice is different now. Breathless. “What did you just do?”
“We fixed the brand,” Tessa says.
“The numbers…” Sterling stammers. “My analysts are saying user sentiment has flipped. You’re trending number one in the App Store.”
“The board vote?” Ethan asks coolly. “Because if you fire us now, Robert, you aren’t just removing three executives. You’re decapitating the company in the middle of its most viral moment. You’ll be the banker who killed Mosaic just as it became a unicorn. Do you really want that headline attached to Sterling Capital?”
There’s a heavy pause on the line. I can practically hear him executing the risk assessment.
“I’ll suspend the vote,” Sterling says finally, his voice tight. “For now. But you’re on a short leash, Ethan. If those retention numbers dip for even a single quarter, I’ll trigger the clause and strip you of your equity. Do you understand?”
“Understood,” Ethan says. “Just keep cashing the checks, Robert.”
Ethan hangs up.
Nobody speaks.
Then, Owen lets out a whoop shaking the windows. He grabs Tessa and spins her around.
“You did it!” he yells. “You absolute genius!”
Ethan walks over, pulls Tessa from Owen, and kisses her hard. “The Strategist,” he murmurs against her lips. “You saved us.”
I look at the screen. The numbers are still climbing. The variables have shifted permanently. We’re no longer a startup fighting for survival. We’re a phenomenon.
“We need the house,” I state, closing the laptop. “The Westlake compound. We need to put in an offer immediately.”
“Why?” Tessa asks, breathless from the kiss.
“Because,” I say, standing up and crossing the room. I wrap my arms around them—my chaotic, statistically improbable family. “We require sufficient square footage to expand our sample size.”
“Sample size?” Owen asks.
“We have eighteen years of child-rearing data to generate,” I state. “And I prefer to do it in an environment where our variables aren’t constrained by external judgment.”
