Chapter 7 | The Cinnamon Croissant Offensive

Luna sent Okay at one in the morning, slept four hours on a couch that smelled like somebody else's life, and woke up at six with the VELLUNE plan open on her laptop.

She worked straight through the gray Brooklyn morning. Draft after draft of the pitch, the supply math, the first run of samples. At one point she reached for a ruler on the edge of the desk, missed, and came away with a thin paper cut across her index finger. She licked it, stuck a bandage on it, and kept working. By ten she had a deck she was almost not embarrassed by, and a date with a croissant.

The old coffee shop was on a corner in the Village, the kind with a worn oak counter and an espresso machine that hissed like an angry cat. She'd been coming here since she was fifteen, when boarding school let her out and Jasper would sneak her here on his bike.

He was already at their booth by the window, two cups of espresso and a cinnamon croissant on a plate between them, flaky and still warm.

Jasper Whitmore. Clean-cut, earnest, the kind of boy who'd grown up in a smaller old-money house and never once used it as a weapon. When the Sterling family did its cold arithmetic, Jasper was the one warm number left on the page.

He stood up when he saw her, and his face did something complicated — relief, then worry, then a quick blink so she wouldn't catch it. "Hey. You look like you haven't slept."

"Good observation." She slid into the booth and pulled the croissant toward her. "Did you see the part where they froze my cards and towed my sports car?"

"I saw." He sat. "I also saw the part where you poured thirty-year Scotch over a man's head. That was you, right? The internet is very excited about that."

"Forty-five hundred dollars of Scotch, technically." She bit into the croissant. Cinnamon, butter, warmth — the first thing that had tasted like anything in a week. She let out a sound she didn't intend to. "Oh, that's illegal. That should be against the law."

Jasper laughed. It was the first real laugh she'd had in days, and it surprised both of them.

He was the one person in the world who'd never flinched when the Sterling name turned cold. They'd met at fourteen, when her parents had sent her to a charity gala she didn't want to attend and he'd spent the whole night hiding from his own father in the garden. They'd compared notes on what it felt like to be raised as an exhibit, and somehow never stopped talking.

"I saw the livestream," he said, pulling the croissant onto a plate and cutting it in half, the way he always did. "The two-pot-lids thing. I sent it to my mom. She said, and I quote, 'that poor girl.'"

"Your mother is the only person on the internet who felt sorry for me correctly." Luna took the half he'd cut. "The rest felt sorry for me like I was a car crash. Your mom feels sorry like I'm a person."

"She's been asking when you're coming over for dinner." He said it carefully, like he was offering a thing that might break. "She said she'll make the roast you liked."

Luna looked down at her coffee. The steam curled up between them. "Tell her I'll come. When I'm not, you know, universally hated."

"You were universally hated before."

"True." She smiled. "Book it for after I'm bankrupt. That's the honest version."

He got to work fast. He pulled the VELLUNE deck up on her laptop, turned the screen between them, and started marking it up in red. Jasper was an accountant by trade — quiet, exact, the kind of man who could find a dollar missing in a column of ten thousand and sleep on it.

"Okay." He tapped a line. "Here's the problem. Your unit economics are honest. Your marketing math is a fantasy."

"It's a seed-round fantasy." She tore off another piece of croissant. "Seed rounds are supposed to be fantasies. That's the whole pitch."

"It's a bad fantasy." He didn't look up. "You've priced the first run at eight hundred units. At your cash-on-hand —" he glanced at her "— which is four hundred and thirty-seven dollars, even the Italian fabric lady on cash terms is a bridge too far."

"She is." Luna leaned back. "Which is why I need one of two things. A brand-name investor who doesn't want to own me, or a miracle."

Jasper was quiet a second. Then he reached into his bag and pulled out a notebook — real paper, the old kind — and started writing columns. Income. Burn. Runway. A financing path, step by step, in his neat hand.

"Here's what you do." He pushed it across. "You don't chase the old-money investors. The Sterlings blacklisted you, and every VC within ten blocks of them knows it. You go to small checks. Friends-and-family. A handful of angels who like the story more than they fear your last name. You raise two hundred thousand on a convertible note, not two million. You run lean for six months. You prove the livestream converts. Then the big money comes to you."