9. Harper
HARPER
Mallory Summers is exactly the kind of person I would have hired if I’d ever had a budget and a staffing decision to make.
She’s waiting for me in the tasting room at eight fifty-eight with a color-coded binder, a radio clipped to her hip, a coffee in each hand, and the calm, slightly caffeinated energy of someone who has been doing this long enough to stop being impressed by chaos.
She hands me one of the coffees before I’ve said good morning. I decide immediately that I like her.
“So,” she says, already walking, already expecting me to keep up, “the opening summer event is Saturday. That’s four days.
The layout is locked, the catering menu is approved, the florals are confirmed, and the entertainment schedule is set.
What we’re doing this week is making sure every single one of those things actually shows up and performs as promised, because in my experience, confirmed and present are two very different categories. ”
“They really are,” I say.
She points at me. “I already like you.”
We spend the first two hours walking the event footprint together, the south terrace, the tasting room main floor, the outdoor vineyard path that’ll be lit for the evening reception, and the private dining room that’s been reserved for the board and senior staff.
Mallory narrates everything as we go, not in a teaching-someone-new way but in the lateral, equal way of someone thinking out loud with a collaborator.
I pull my tablet out and start making notes and she glances over once at what I’m flagging and nods like I’ve confirmed something she suspected.
She’s good. Better than good. She runs this vineyard’s events the way I ran galas in Manhattan, two steps ahead of every possible failure point with contingency plans she doesn’t advertise because she’d rather just not need them.
“The one thing I’ll warn you about,” she says, turning us toward the main building, “is Asher.”
I look at her.
She catches my expression and holds up a hand.
“Not like that. He’s brilliant and his food is extraordinary and working with him is genuinely great.
But he has strong opinions about how his catering and the event programming interact and if you don’t loop him in early he gets very quiet about it in a way that means he’s reconfiguring everything in his head and not telling you. ”
“The silent problem-solver.”
“Exactly. So I always do the catering walkthrough first, before anything else gets locked. Come on.”
The vineyard’s main kitchen is the kind of space that justifies the whole building around it.
Commercial scale, immaculately organized, the kind of ordered infrastructure that only exists when the person running it cares about it as much as the output it produces.
Every surface is clean. Every piece of equipment is where it should be.
There are three prep cooks working at the far station and the whole room smells like something roasting low and slow that I’m going to need to ask about before I leave.
Asher is at the center island with a printed menu spread open in front of him, making notes in the margin. He looks up when we come through the door.
He looks at Mallory first. Then at me.
“Mallory.” A nod. Then, warmer, “Harper.”
Something about the way he says my name in this context, here in his kitchen, with that low even voice, does something to my equilibrium that I’m going to need to manage.
“We’re doing the catering walkthrough,” Mallory announces, setting her binder on the corner of the island. “Harper’s coming up to speed on the event structure and she needs to understand how the kitchen and the floor talk to each other.”
“Good.” Asher straightens and slides the menu toward us. “I had some notes on the reception course timing.”
Mallory’s phone goes off. She looks at it and makes a face that is small and very controlled. “I have to take this. It’s the florist.” She points at Asher and then at me. “Walk her through it. I’ll be back in ten.”
She’s out the door before either of us can respond.
I look at the door. Then at Asher.
He gestures to the menu. “She does that.”
“Does she?”
“Every time.” There’s something in his expression that suggests he finds it more amusing than inconvenient. “Come here. The timing issue is in the third course.”
I come around to his side of the island. He shifts to make room and I stand beside him and look at the printed menu and I am extremely focused on the printed menu and not at all on the fact that I can feel the warmth coming off him from six inches away.
He walks me through it. The reception course overlaps with the vineyard tour turnover by about twelve minutes, which means the floor staff will be split and the service timing will suffer.
His solution is clean and practical, a staggered release on the appetizer round that buys the buffer he needs.
He explains it the way he does everything, quietly, directly, no performance.
I make notes. I ask two questions. He answers both of them and then asks me one about the floor layout and whether the service path from the kitchen to the south terrace station is going to create foot traffic issues during the board reception changeover.
I pull up my tablet and show him the layout I’d flagged that morning.
He leans in to look at it. Close enough that I can see the detail of the ink on his forearm where his sleeve is rolled back, botanical lines and handwritten script, and I look at the tablet and I keep looking at the tablet.
“You caught that this morning?” he says.
“First walkthrough. It’s a natural bottleneck.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “Good eye.”
It’s two words. It shouldn’t land the way it does. I am blaming the kitchen and its very effective climate control system for whatever is currently happening to my body temperature.
He straightens up and reaches across me to turn the menu page and his arm passes close enough to mine that I go completely still, and he either doesn’t notice or decides not to acknowledge it, which means one of us is handling this better than the other and it is not me.
“The dessert course is the other thing,” he says.
I look at the menu. I take a breath. I am a professional and I am in a kitchen doing a catering walkthrough and everything is completely fine.
“Show me,” I say.
Mallory comes back fourteen minutes later with the florist situation resolved and an expression that suggests the florist situation was not resolvable through polite conversation.
She finds us at the island going through the dessert sequencing and drops back into the conversation like she never left, which I’m beginning to understand is just how Mallory operates.
We finish the walkthrough. I have four pages of notes and a much clearer picture of how the event machine actually runs, and more importantly, where it’s going to need support on the day. Mallory rolls up the printed timeline and points us toward the terrace to check the furniture delivery.
We’re crossing the main corridor toward the south wing when Mallory slows.
It’s subtle, just a half step, and she pulls in a breath through her nose before she straightens and puts on a smile that is professional and pleasant and involves absolutely zero warmth.
I follow her eyeline.
A woman is coming down the corridor toward us.
She’s somewhere around fifty, though she carries it the way some women do, less like age and more like refinement, something time improved rather than diminished.
Dark hair, swept back. A cream silk blouse and wide-leg trousers that belong in a magazine.
Jewelry that is understated precisely because it doesn’t need to be anything else.
She moves like someone who has never once had to announce herself because rooms have always done it for her.
She looks at Mallory first.
“Mallory.” Her voice is low and even and pleasant in the way that expensive things are pleasant, smooth all the way through.
“I walked the terrace this morning. The centerpiece heights on the east row are inconsistent. The linen press on the board room chairs needs to be redone, two of them are unacceptable. And the wine station placement is blocking the sightline to the vineyard which defeats the entire aesthetic purpose of having it outdoors.”
Mallory’s smile doesn’t waver. “Of course. I’ll see to it that everything is up to standard before Saturday.”
“To my standard,” the woman says. “Not the general one.”
“Absolutely.”
The woman turns her gaze to me.
I’m in the black wrap dress I’d chosen for the day, professional and pulled together, and she looks at me with an expression that doesn’t change but somehow still communicates an assessment. Her eyes move from my face to my shoes and back without haste.
“And you are?”
“Harper Brooks.” I extend my hand. “I’m assisting with the summer events.”
She looks at my hand. Shakes it once, brief and cool. “Hmm.” She turns back to the corridor. “The executive suite lodgings need to be turned over before this afternoon. See to it.”
I blink. “I’m sorry, I—”
“Evelyn.”
The voice comes from behind us.
I turn.
Killian is coming down the corridor in black from collar to shoe, button-down open at the throat, and he does not look pleased, and I don’t mean mildly displeased, I mean the specific controlled displeasure of a man who has walked into a situation he’d have preferred to arrive before.
His eyes find Evelyn first. Then Mallory. Then me.
Something moves through his expression when they land on me. Something he organizes away quickly. But I see it.
“Killian.” Evelyn’s whole register shifts when she says his name, warmer, smoother, and she lifts a hand toward him like a woman flagging down something that’s always been hers. “I was just going over a few items with your staff.”
“Mallory.” He nods at her, then turns to me. “Harper. How are you finding things so far?”
The question is directed at me and it’s direct and it’s warm and it is categorically different in tone from how he just said Mallory’s name, which I’m sure I’m imagining.
“Good,” I say, and I mean it. “The event infrastructure is more sophisticated than I expected. Mallory runs a tight operation.”
He almost smiles. “She does.”
“Why would you employ such a homely-looking child for event planning?”
Evelyn says it softly. Conversationally. Like she’s noting a curious staffing decision rather than saying something that lands in my stomach like a stone dropped from a significant height.
Nobody moves for a moment.
Killian turns his head and looks at Evelyn and the temperature in the corridor drops by several degrees.
“This is Harper Brooks,” he says. His voice is completely even.
“Sophia’s closest friend. She has a professional background in luxury events and hospitality coordination and I brought her on for the summer season.
” He pauses, and there is something in the pause.
“I don’t run my staffing decisions by the board. ”
Evelyn receives this without blinking. She looks at him with the expression of a woman who has been receiving things from this man for decades and learned long ago not to let anything register on her face. Then she looks at me.
Her gaze moves over me one more time, unhurried, top to bottom. Something that might be a smile if it wanted to be curves at the corner of her mouth.
Then she loops her arm through Killian’s.
“We have the board pre-brief to get through before lunch,” she says smoothly, already turning them in the other direction. “Don’t let us keep you.”
And just like that, she walks him away.
Killian glances back over his shoulder once. Our eyes meet for exactly one second before the corridor takes them around the corner.
I stand there.
Mallory exhales beside me, a long breath through her nose.
“Whelp,” she says. “You’ve officially met Evelyn Thorne and survived.” She tilts her head and looks at me sideways. “How do you feel?”
I think about what I actually feel, which is small in a way that I didn’t walk into this corridor feeling, and young in a way I don’t usually register, and entirely too aware of the fact that a woman like Evelyn Thorne makes complete and obvious sense standing next to Killian Thorne.
Same world. Same language. Same particular gravity.
The kind of woman who was built for that life and shows it in every deliberate, elegant inch.
And then there’s me, in my wrap dress and my red bottoms and my AirDropped contact details, standing in a corridor in the south of France trying to remember what I was doing before I was reminded of exactly where I fit in the picture.
I smile at Mallory.
“I think,” I say, “I need a drink.”
Mallory raises her binder. “The tasting room opens at eleven. I will personally escort you.”
We keep walking.
I keep my shoulders back and my pace even and I do not look toward the corridor where Killian and Evelyn disappeared, because looking would mean I care about what I just saw, and I don’t care about what I just saw, and I’m going to keep telling myself that until it starts being true.
Four days until the event.
I have work to do.