Page 198 of Sexting My Best Friend's Brothers
“The Strategist,” Sterling sneers. “You caused this mess.”
“I’m fixing it,” she says calmly. “You’re worried about the brand image? You think we’re a liability?”
“I know you are.”
“Check your email in forty minutes,” she says. “If you still want to pull the funding after that, we’ll accept it. And we’ll take our user base to a competitor.”
She hangs up the phone.
“Tessa, what are you doing?” Ethan asks.
“Asher,” she says, turning to me. “Give me the laptop.”
I slide it over.
“Do we have the photo?” she asks. “The one Harper took? Before she left? The one in the kitchen?”
“I have it,” Owen says. “Why?”
“Send it to me,” she commands.
She opens the Mosaic admin panel. She logs into the master account.
“What is the plan?” I ask, watching her fingers fly across the keys.
“Sterling thinks we’re selling sex,” Tessa says, her eyes locked on the screen. “He thinks this is a scandal. But it’s not. It’s a story.”
She uploads the photo.
It isn’t the glossy paparazzi shot. It’s the one Harper took the night of the pizza. It’s blurry. Ethan’s laughing, his head thrown back. Owen’s feeding me a pizza crust. And I’m looking at Tessa with a look of absolute devotion.
It’s raw. It’s messy. It’s real.
She types the caption.
#MyMosaic They told us we didn’t fit. They told us we were broken pieces. But that’s the thing about a mosaic—you take the broken pieces, and you make something whole. We aren’t a traditional family. We don’t fit in the box. But we fit together. Mosaic isn’t just an app for secrets. It’s an app for finding where you fit. Show us your mosaic. Show us the family you chose, the love you found, the life you built not looking like anyone else’s. If you’re broken, come sit with us. — Tessa, Ethan, Asher, Owen.
“Launch it,” she whispers.
She hits enter.
“Push it to every user,” she tells me. “Push notification. Now.”
The command executes. Two million phones buzz across the country simultaneously.
“Now we wait,” Tessa says, leaning back.
We wait.
The first ten minutes are agonizing. The data stream on my second monitor barely registers. A dozen likes. A few confused comments.
Twenty minutes pass. Ethan starts pacing, checking his watch. Sterling’s deadline is twenty-five minutes away.
At thirty minutes, the algorithm catches the engagement velocity. The data stream twitches, then spikes violently.
“Engagement is accelerating,” I report, leaning closer to the screen. “Ten thousand likes. Fifty thousand. The share ratio is compounding exponentially.”
“Look at the hashtag,” Owen says, pointing to X (Twitter).
