Chapter 14: Partners Welcome

At 8:58 on Friday, four hundred people were sitting on folding chairs on the roof of the plant, eating bagels and waiting to be told something.

Marcy sat beside me with a clipboard.

"I've mapped the exits," she said. "There are two, and one of them is the bagel cart."

"This isn't a fire drill."

"It's worse. It's a surprise."

Victor stood at the back, behind the sauce-tasting table, holding a ladle.

He had not looked at me once since I sat down.

He also hadn't stopped holding the ladle, which told me he had looked at me plenty.

Sal sat at the side in a padded chair with a blanket over his knees.

His cardiologist had allowed him forty minutes.

Dean Hollinger sat in the front row, relaxed and smiling, with a notebook open on his knee.

Domenic walked to the podium to applause he had arranged by sending the invite.

"Good morning, Aston Foods," he said into the microphone. "I have a short deck."

The first slide said Family in a very large font.

The next showed a photo of him and me at a vineyard, squinting.

Slide four was a pie chart titled Why Nadia and I Work.

It was forty percent Shared goals, thirty percent Sundays, and thirty percent Her tea.

"He has never made me tea," I whispered.

"Then he's rounding," Marcy whispered back. "Thirty percent is a lot of tea."

Slide nine said Option 2.

Under it there was a blank space where a risk had been, and someone had deleted it.

Domenic stepped around the podium and got down on one knee.

The roof went silent in sections, from the front rows to the back.

He opened a ring box.

The diamond was the size of a cough drop, and it had been chosen to be seen from the back row.

"Nadia Bell," he said, in his warm voice, the one that closes deals. "Will you marry me, again, properly, with all of us here?"

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