Chapter 450 | The Shape of It in the Numbers

Chapter 450: 450 | The Shape of It in the Numbers

Brooke walked her through it. Jordan tuned about half of it out, not because it wasn’t important but because Brooke’s voice had a specific frequency that made his brain start looking for the exit, and because he was busy watching Chloe’s face while she listened.

She was good at this. Better than good. She asked exactly one question per point, and the question was always the one that mattered, the one that revealed she’d already run three scenarios in her head and needed the fourth confirmed. Brooke answered every one with data. Neither of them wasted a word. It was, Jordan thought, the least romantic conversation two people could possibly have, and it was also the reason Chloe could sit on a desk eight minutes ago making noises that violated municipal code and then flip into this without a seam showing.

Two people. He kept forgetting that. She was two people, minimum, and she ran both of them so clean that most of the world only ever met one.

"Four point five," Brooke said. "The intellectual property clause. This is the one I care about most, so I need you to actually listen."

"I’m listening."

"Your voice is an asset. Legally. If you go public Friday and it does what Jordan’s Instagram did to Kumiko’s follower count, StellarNote becomes a brand, and the brand has value, and the value is attached to a real person, which is you." A beat. "I’ve built the agreement so that the brand can’t be sold, licensed, or leveraged without your written consent. Not Jordan’s. Not mine. Yours. Even if the company scales. Even if there’s outside money later. The voice stays yours."

Chloe was quiet for a second. Jordan watched her throat move.

"Why," she said.

"Because you spent six months being a product," Brooke said, in the exact same flat register she’d used for the revenue split, like this was just another line item. "I read the shape of it in the numbers even if I didn’t have the details. Something you owned but didn’t control. I don’t build things like that. If we’re doing this, you control the asset. That’s non-negotiable. I put it in bold. I never use bold."

The room went still.

Chloe’s hand had come up to her mouth. Just her fingertips, resting against her lower lip, and her eyes had gone bright and glassy, and Jordan understood that Brooke Hastings had just reached across a phone call and put her thumb directly on the exact bruise Chloe had been protecting for eighteen months without ever asking to see it.

"Okay," Chloe said. Her voice came out steady. Forty percent vocal fry, Jordan thought, and had the decency to feel guilty about it for a full second. "Yes. That works. Thank you, Brooke."

"You don’t have to thank me. It’s correct." A pause. "Are you crying. Your breathing changed."

"No."

"Your breathing changed. I have a baseline."

"Brooke."

"I’m going to assume it’s allergies," Brooke said, "because that’s the socially acceptable interpretation and because Dr. Nakamura is Kumiko’s therapist, not mine, but the principle applies. I’ll file the amendment tomorrow. Get Jordan to sign four point two through four point seven by noon. He can initial. He doesn’t have to read them. We both know he won’t." A shuffle of papers. "One more thing."

"Okay."

"Friday. The stream." Brooke’s voice didn’t change at all, which somehow made it land harder. "I ran the projections. Lila’s raid, the cross-promotion, Jordan’s engagement on the announcement post. Best case you hit twelve hundred. Worst case eight hundred. The thousand-follower target is inside the confidence interval but it’s not guaranteed. I wanted you to know the real number, not the optimistic one, because you make better decisions with the real number."

"I know."

"I also wanted you to know that I’ll be watching," Brooke said. "From my apartment. I won’t be in chat because I don’t know what to type and everything I try sounds wrong, but I’ll be there. I heard the clip Kumiko sent. The one with the bridge." A pause that lasted a beat too long for Brooke. "It’s the best thing I’ve heard in four semesters and I have a large data set. That’s not a compliment. It’s an observation. But you can treat it as a compliment if it’s useful to you."

Chloe laughed. It came out wet and cracked and completely real.

"It’s useful," she said. "Thank you."

"Eight fifty-three," Brooke said. "We’re done early. That never happens. Goodnight, Chloe. Tell Jordan the sections are due at noon."

The call ended.

Chloe sat there looking at the dark screen for a moment. Then she wiped under both eyes with the heel of her hand, turned in the chair, and looked at Jordan across the studio.

"She told me," Chloe said, "in bold. She never uses bold."

"I heard."

"She built the whole thing so nobody can sell me." Her voice wobbled and she pressed her lips together to stop it. "She figured out what happened to me from a spreadsheet and she just. Fixed it. Legally. In a clause. And then asked if I was having allergies."

Jordan got up out of the folding chair and crossed the room. He didn’t say anything, because he’d learned, over six weeks, that this was one of the times you didn’t say anything. He put his hand flat between her shoulder blades and left it there without running the skill, just weight, just warmth, and Chloe turned into him and pressed her face into his stomach and let out a breath that had been sitting behind her ribs for a year and a half.

"I hired a genius," she said, muffled, into his henley. "I thought I was hiring an accountant."

"You hired both. Everything about Brooke is both. You said so yourself."

"Shut up." But there was no weight to it. Her arms came around his waist and she held on. "I’m allowed to be a person for thirty seconds."

"Take a minute. Brooke gave you seven back."

She laughed again, into his shirt, and he felt it more than heard it. He rested his chin on top of her head and looked at the studio around them. The overlay Lila was fixing overnight. The ring light angled to catch her cheekbone. The camera that would be on in forty-one hours, pointed at a girl who’d spent six months hiding her face and was about to sing to the whole internet with it uncovered, on purpose, because her dead father had promised her she’d end up on the radio and she’d made him a promise back.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He didn’t check it. He already knew what it was, roughly. Some number. Some percentage. Some notification about the thing that had just happened, the System grading a moment that had nothing to do with it, trying to put a decimal on Brooke Hastings reaching across a phone call to unbuckle something Chloe had been carrying alone.

He let it sit there and buzz. Some things he didn’t want measured.

"Nineteen minutes," Chloe said into his shirt.

"What about them."

"You wasted one earlier. Staring." She pulled back and looked up at him, eyes still bright, mouth doing the thing where it fought a smile and lost by a small margin. "You’ve got eighteen left. I have a call that ended early and legs that still don’t fully work and a mark on my throat that this choker is doing a terrible job of hiding."

"You saying something?"

"I’m saying," Chloe said, and reached up to fist her hand in the front of his henley for the second time in one evening, "that Brooke gave me seven minutes back and I know exactly how I want to spend them, and if you make me say it out loud I’m going to change my mind out of spite."

Jordan grinned.

"Loft’s twelve feet away," he said.

"Then walk."