Chapter 6 #2
“So are you.”
“I’ve been circling the block for ten minutes.” He admitted it like a confession. “Didn’t want to seem too eager.”
The honesty disarmed her. “I reorganized the sugar packets four times.”
“Only four?”
“Maybe five. I lost count.”
They ordered coffee and talked about Devney’s wedding.
She told him about a previous event, a bride who’d asked her to add a vegan menu three days before the ceremony.
He told her about the time Knox had attempted to host a dinner party and called him at eleven at night to ask whether the salmon had gone bad.
(It had. Knox served it anyway. Two of the four guests spent the night sick.
Knox was so mortified he taught himself to cook for real and got frighteningly good at it.
To this day he won’t plate a piece of salmon without checking it three times.)
She told him about the night her sous chef had set off the warehouse fire alarm during a tasting because he had decided to flambé something he hadn’t flambéed before.
He told her he didn’t own a single piece of cookware that had ever flambéed anything.
She offered to teach him. He said he’d hold her to it.
An hour passed. Then two.
When he finally stood to leave, he paused beside her chair. Close. Too close.
“This was good,” he said.
“It was.”
He leaned down. His lips brushed her cheek, the barest contact, a whisper of warmth that shouldn’t have felt like anything.
It felt like everything.
“I’ll call you,” he said.
She told herself she wasn’t waiting by the phone.
She was.
Three days passed.
No call. No text. Nothing.
“Boss.” Jessica stood in the doorway, tablet in hand. “Devney Wilder confirmed the two o’clock at Oath Capital. They want the conference room set up, the final menu approved, and the timeline reviewed.”
“Thanks for the reminder.”
At one, Tessa changed into the outfit she kept in her office for client meetings. The dress was a simple black sheath, professional and forgettable in the way she needed it to be. She arrived on Park Avenue at one fifty-five and rode the elevator to the fortieth floor by herself.
She remembered this lobby from Monday. She knew the building now. She wasn’t the girl from the wrong side of the endowment trying to prove she belonged in a room like this. She was Tessa Thorne, and she had built something. She walked into the room as that woman.
Conference Room B had its door open. Devney stood by the window with her phone pressed to her ear and waved her inside. Gabriel stood at the head of the table reviewing something on his laptop. He looked up.
“Tessa.”
“Gabriel.”
Devney ended her call. “Tessa. Thank you for coming.”
“Of course.”
Knox arrived. The meeting began.
Tessa walked them through the timeline. “Cocktails open at six fifteen. Three stations on the terrace, one inside. Two passed-canape runners moving the room. Dinner service starts at seven thirty. Five courses, plated in the kitchen, served simultaneously by a team of eight. Coffee and dessert at nine, station-style.”
“What’s the contingency on weather?” Ronan asked from the doorway. He hadn’t yet sat down.
“The terrace closes at any sustained drizzle. The interior reception room holds two hundred standing. Servers reroute through the south corridor. Total transition time, four minutes. We did it for the Cohen anniversary in May.”
Knox steepled his fingers. “Cohen as in?”
“As in. Yes.”
“That’s a relief.”
“It would be a relief to me if I didn’t have to do it again. The Cohens kept us until two in the morning.”
Devney laughed. Ronan came in and sat down.
“Do you have backup suppliers?” Gabriel asked.
“Three contracted alternatives. All vetted. All have served at least one event of comparable scale in the last twelve months.”
“Allergens.”
“Every place setting has a color-coded card covering vegan, gluten-free, nut-free, and shellfish-free options. Three guests on Devney’s preliminary list have severe allergies. They’ve already been emailed personally, and their cards will be placed by hand.”
Devney looked up. “You emailed them personally?”
“I started doing it after the Astor benefit two years ago, when three guests with severe allergies came up to me at the end of the night and thanked me for treating them like guests instead of liabilities. I’ve done it that way ever since. It costs me a Sunday afternoon, but worth it.”
Gabriel had stopped looking at his laptop.
Knox glanced at him, then at Tessa, then back at his folder. He didn’t say anything.
She walked them through the rest. Wine pairings she had built with the sommelier she’d brought on when Thorne Events outgrew the food truck.
A station concept for the September event that broke the room’s flow into four conversational nodes.
Cost per head, cost per station, cost per server-hour. Numbers. Names. Dates.
When she was done, Devney closed her folder.
“This is going to be amazing.”
“Wednesday morning, you’ll have the revised proposal.”
“Perfect.”
Knox stood first and shook her hand. “Thorne. A pleasure.”
“Likewise.”
Ronan offered the same. “Thanks for coming in.”
Devney’s phone rang. “I have to take this. Gabriel, can you walk Tessa out?”
“Yes.”
Devney stepped into the hallway.
The room emptied.
Gabriel was looking at her like the professional facade had cracked. “Thursday morning was too brief.”
“It was.”
“What about dinner?”
Her hands tightened on her portfolio.
He stayed where he was, hands at his sides, and let the distance between them do the work. “Dinner. An actual date.”
“Gabriel. The last time we tried this, you walked away to Harvard, and your mother told me what I was worth. That’s a lot to come back from.”
“I know.”
“You can’t just—“
“Thursday. Seven o’clock. I’ll pick you up. We can talk about what I can and can’t do over dinner.”
“I can meet you somewhere.”
“I’ll pick you up.”
“Okay,” she heard herself say.
His face changed. Relief. Want. His eyes dropped to her mouth and stayed there for a beat before he pulled them back to hers.
They walked to the elevator together. Neither spoke. The doors closed between them, and her last image was of him standing in the corridor of his glass-and-steel kingdom, watching her descend.
She’d said yes.
She had three days to decide whether it was the best decision of her life or the worst.