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“Listen, Dad. I’m sorry, but I gotta go. I’ll call you after, okay?”

“Yeah, do that. Talk to you soon, Win-Win-Winnie.”

She hung up the phone and walked to the festival as swiftly as her heels allowed, leaving any thought of Dad on the pathway behind her.

Unfortunately, not even that helped to improve the event from the beginning.

With her advertising work beforehand—updating Foxwood’s social media profiles, throwing up ads in newspapers, websites, and on the radio, and more—they’d sold three times as many tickets as the last festival, if not four times. But even as the gates opened and the guests filtered in, Winnie’s hopes for a smooth event lowered little by little as more problems arose.

First, the carousel broke down after only three cycles, then the line for the pony rides and the bounce house—which had to be swiftly called in to replace the bumper cars that couldn’t make it in time—grew to an unmanageable size.

The food was better, though not by much, as Mrs. Porter had still insisted on providing her cabbage chowder, and the typical carnival food was being described as “the same as everywhere else.” The falconry had gathered a large crowd at first but was cut short due to the wind.

To add to the drama, the rest of the entertainment had been postponed due to Mrs. Jones missing an important phone call from the lost carnival games.

Fortunately, the cosplayers had shown up in droves, providing some much-needed immersion as crowds wandered around the craft booths and local art sales.

By the time the jousting rolled around, however, Winnie was being held together by a mere thread. The crowds surrounded the entire arena with looks of excitement, but the knights were late coming out of the stables again, driving away a number of people before Mr. Fogg’s monotonous voice finally announced their arrival.

She had been hoping for the tournament to wow people, but the feedback she overheard from passersby caused her insides to twist with worry.

“The scorin’ don’t make any sense.”

“The winner’s chosen before anyway. None of it’s real.”

“Mummy, I’m bored. Can I go back to the bounce house?”

“Look, they’re not even tryin’ to strike the small knight. No, the one who can’t even hold the lance up.”

Winnie chewed the inside of her cheek, if only to keep from relieving the contents of her stomach across the tournament grounds. This wasn’t what she’d planned at all. She’d poured all of her efforts into this, so why was it failing? Where was her success? Where was her praise?

Halfway through the jousting, the carousel started working again, much to the delight of every child in attendance. But when music, loud and plunky, blared out across the grounds, drowning out Mr. Fogg’s words—despite his new microphone—Winnie grimaced. With no volume control on the ride, one-by-one, families left the joust for the carousel, children tugging their parents away to something they found far more appealing.

Winnie could only imagine the staff’s words occurring behind her back.

“So much for Winnie’s promises of success.”

“You see? Now no one cares about the jousting when it’s scripted.”

“Just like Blackpool.”

Matthew would be thinking the same thing. After all, he’d called her out on her failure from the start.

But, no. She wouldn’t fail again. She was a good consultant. She knew too much, had learned too much, had given too much, to not succeed. The festival would be a triumph if she just worked harder and stuck to her plan.

And yet, despite her scrambling to improve matters throughout the latter half of the day—closing down the carousel for an hour, encouraging Mr. Fogg to explain the jousting points, and trying to boost interest in the big reveal at the end of who the small, secret knight was—the majority of the guests quit the festival as a whole, hours before the festival was scheduled to end.

When Jess was finally revealed as the winner, though she hadn’t managed to strike a single knight in the process, the response was so underwhelming, Winnie couldn’t take it any longer.

With worry clouding her common sense, she ducked behind one of the tents and pulled out her phone, anxious to read the feedback the guests had been given via the QR code on the back of the schedule of events. She’d promised herself not to read any of them until the end of the day, knowing they wouldn’t do her any good, but she could no longer keep herself from knowing the truth.

With each new sentence she read, stress clawed at her chest like a wild animal, dragging her spirits lower and lower until they were devoured altogether.

“Carousel was too loud. That’s all the kiddies wanted to do.”

“Wanted my children to experience a little culture from the past, didn’t get it.”

“The jousting was great. Too bad we couldn’t hear it.”