Page 19 of Never Invite a Vampire to Dinner

So I complain. I don’t hold back, because he’s asked, and because he’s listening to me now and it’s like standing in a warm doorway. I tell him about the bride who wants a raw bar and the mother who’ll go into anaphylaxis at the sight of it, and how neither will bend, and how the bride keeps changing the head count by fifteen people every three days, and how the venue coordinator hates me for reasons I’ve never established.

“And I can’t say no,” I finish, “because it’s the biggest job I’ve had all year and my van needs new brakes and I have a mortgage. So I just—smile. And absorb it. And lie awake.”

Julian’s quiet for a moment. I expect sympathy, which is what everyone gives, and which is nice and useless.

“You’ve framed it as one problem,” he says. “It’s three.”

I blink. “What?”

“Three problems, wearing one coat.” He turns his water glass, thinking. “The shellfish is a safety problem. Put it in writing. Frame it as your liability, not their argument. ‘My insurance does not permit an open shellfish service with a documented allergy present.’ People fight preferences. They rarely fight paperwork.”

I stare at him.

“The changing head count is a money problem,” he goes on, unhurried. “So charge for it. A final number by a fixed date. Changes after that date billed per head, stated in a written contract. When a change costs, people stop making changes carelessly. You will find the count settles within a day.”

“And the coordinator who hates me?”

“Make her an ally instead of an obstacle. Ask her advice about something small, something you already know the answer to.” The corner of his mouth moves. “People rarely hate someone who needs them. And she will fight the bride’s chaos harder than you ever could, because now it’s her show too, and no one who runs a venue wants a bad wedding on her floor.”

I sit there with my mouth open for the second time tonight.

“Where,” I say slowly, “does a reclusive art collector who spends his mornings reading dead harbormasters learn how to negotiate a catering contract?”

“I invest,” he says, which is one of those Julian answers that’s shaped exactly like a real answer and contains nothing.

“That’s annoyingly good advice. I don’t know what to do with you.”

“You could write it down,” Julian says.

“Don’t get clever.”

“Penny.” He’s looking at the room, not at me. “This is one bad client in one bad season, and you will have a great many more seasons than she will. Forty. Fifty. It will not signify in⁠—”

And then he stops. It isn’t a stumble. It’s more like watching a man reach for a shelf and correct his arm halfway there. The whole sentence changes direction while it’s still in the air.

“—in a year or two,” he says. “It will not signify in a year or two.”

“Fifty seasons.” I put the napkin down. “I’m thirty-two, Julian. I’d be eighty-two. I wouldn’t be catering anything, I’d be Eunice Ballard with a folding chair.”

“Yes.” He looks away briefly. “That was careless of me.”

“It was flattering, actually.”

“It was arithmetic,” he says, and picks the water back up, and does not drink it.

“You just fixed my whole week.”

“I offered opinions. You’ll fix your week.”

“That’s a very Julian thing to say.”

“Is there a Julian thing to say?”

“There’s a whole category,” I tell him. “It’s growing.”

He laughs—actually laughs, a quiet, low sound that I’ve never heard from him before and immediately want to hear again. The fiddle swings up and somebody hauls Theo into a dance. For a long while it’s just noise and warmth and the smell of chowder and this man beside me being, against every expectation I had, easy to be with.

By ten the room is at its worst and its best. The steam. The noise. Someone has put music on and Theo has taken it off again, twice.