Forty-Two Seconds
Chapter four
The Asheville couple arrived at eleven with matching lanyards and the kind of careful smiles that meant they were already grading her.
Jolene appeared at Margot’s elbow before she’d crossed the terrace.
“The Aldriches. Bryce and Camille. Expo sponsors. Third-tier. They were investors in a Henson and Hart event three years ago. Budget overrun. Flooring that buckled badly enough to send a caterer to urgent care. A venue that Caleb swore was climate-controlled and was not.”
Wonderful. Margot hadn’t even introduced herself yet, and she was already walking into someone else’s mistake. “Do they know I’m running this event?”
“Camille does. She mentioned your name to Elaine. In a tone.” Jolene fell back without being asked.
Margot tucked her pen into her clipboard and crossed the last twenty feet with her hand already extended.
“Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich. I’m Margot Pine. Welcome to Christmas in July.”
Bryce Aldrich’s handshake was slow. The assessing kind. Camille’s was warmer but watchful.
“We’ve heard about the Sloane Collection.” Camille’s gaze moved past Margot’s shoulder toward the pavilion. “We almost purchased two pieces last fall.”
“They’re extraordinary in person. I’ll arrange a private viewing before the showcase opens.”
“We’ve also heard,” Bryce said, “that you were associated with Henson and Hart.”
He let the sentence sit.
“I consulted on two events through a shared partnership arrangement. I built Pine Event Planning independently before that, and after.” She looked him in the eye. “References available within the hour if you’d like them.”
Bryce’s mouth shifted. Not quite a smile. The recalibration she recognized in people who’d expected an easier target.
Before Camille could answer, the pavilion went dark.
Not all of it. The west section. But the west section included the display platform track lighting and the power strip feeding the portable AC unit Lila had requested for the glass storage area. The hum died. A vendor’s drill whined to a stop. Three people looked up.
Pete, the security guard, jogged in the wrong direction.
Margot was moving. She had her headset on by the time she reached the pavilion entrance.
“Jimmy, main breaker panel, west corridor. Is the utility door open or locked?” She rounded the corner at a walk, not a run, because guests were watching and nothing sped up panic faster than someone running.
“Lou, can you cover the AC loss in the glass storage with the spare units from the kitchen? Ten minutes. I’ll explain later. ”
Static. Then Jimmy’s voice: “Breaker’s tripped. West strip. Resetting now.”
The lights flickered back on. She heard the AC coming back to life, and the drill resumed.
Forty-two seconds.
She turned back to the Aldriches, who had followed her to the pavilion entrance and were standing in the doorway.
“Resetting a tripped breaker,” she said. “The west circuit is feeding more load than we planned. I’ll have the electrician add a second line this afternoon so it doesn’t happen during the showcase.”
“That’s very calm of you,” Camille said.
“Problems during setup are information. They tell you where the vulnerabilities are before they matter.” Margot clicked her pen. “This one just saved us from finding it tomorrow night in front of two hundred people.”
Bryce looked at his wife. A look passed between them, quick and almost imperceptible, the shorthand of a long marriage.
“Show us the collection,” Camille said.
She walked them through the pavilion. The display case and the sealed glass storage.
The dedicated humidity sensors Lila had required and Margot had sourced in forty-eight hours.
She explained the lighting angles Caleb had calibrated.
She answered every question Camille asked about security, transport, and climate control without clicking her pen once.
Camille leaned close to the case. “How did you get the iridescent finish to hold under these lights without washing out?”
Margot explained the LED temperature calibration in enough detail to be credible and not so much detail as to be tedious.
When they left forty minutes later, Bryce shook her hand again. A different handshake this time. Approval, not audit.
She walked them to the lobby and came back to the terrace and stood at the railing with her clipboard under her arm and the ocean spread out below her and the residual adrenaline draining out of her palms.
“They looked satisfied.”
She turned. Evan was leaning on the railing six feet away, tools on his hip. He hadn’t been there a minute ago.
“Were you watching that?”
“I was fixing a loose deck bolt.” He set a wrench to the railing bracket and gave it a quarter turn. “Right here.”
“Convenient.”
“Is it?” The corner of his mouth moved. “You handled the power loss without breaking stride. Most people would have apologized.”
“Apologizing for a tripped breaker makes it a catastrophe. Solving it in under a minute makes it a footnote.”
He looked at her for a moment. Steady. “They were wrong about you. Whoever told them to be skeptical.”
The sentence settled heavier than she expected. Not a compliment delivered to be charming. Just a fact, offered and left there.
She turned back to the ocean before he could see what it did to her face. “I’ve got an electrician to call.”
“Second circuit to the west strip,” he said. “Use twelve-gauge wire. The existing run is undersized for the load.”
She wrote it down without looking up. Behind her, she heard the creak of the railing as he pushed off it and walked back toward the dock. She didn’t watch him go.
She told herself that was also a choice she’d made deliberately. Then she looked at the west circuit load on her clipboard again. The numbers Jimmy had given her. The breaker shouldn’t have tripped on that load. Not yet. Not for another two days of buildout.
She underlined it twice and didn’t know why.