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. Shewas 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.
