He Kept the Firm, So I Booked His Engagement Dinner novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Nine-Oh-Five
One minute after her divorce is final, Cora's mother-in-law tags forty-two relatives to say Cora is paying for her ex's engagement dinner. Cora picks the priciest table in town, then sees it was booked in her name three months ago.
My divorce became final at 9:04 on a Tuesday morning.
At 9:05, my mother-in-law, Marguerite, tagged all forty-two people in the family group chat.
"Cora is treating everyone to my son's engagement dinner! Pick anywhere you like, family."
Nobody had asked me.
Nobody had warned me.
I was at my desk, wrapping my drafting pencils in a dish towel, and I stared at my phone until the screen went dark.
Then I typed the address of the most expensive restaurant in the city and hit send.
The Larkspur. A rooftop, twelve courses, four hundred dollars a head before the wine.
The chat exploded.
"The Larkspur??? That's the one on the roof! Four hundred a person!"
"She's rich, she can take it. Order the wagyu."
"Six years of marriage and this is the first useful thing she's done."
"Honestly, we should bleed her dry. We're never seeing her again."
Forty-two people, and not one of them typed are you okay.
I opened a different app and called the travel agency.
"I need the earliest flight to Santorini tomorrow. I don't care what it costs. Book it."
I hung up. The chat was still going.
"The Larkspur books three months out. How did she even get a table?"
"Marguerite said Cora's covering it. Does anyone want to split an oyster tower?"
I put the phone face down and went back to the box.
Six years. That was what I had given the Lowell family.
I designed every hotel in the firm's portfolio.
The Linden. The Sparrow. The Pembroke suites, which Architectural Digest wrote up under Rodrick's name.
His reason was that "the client responds better to a male principal, Cora, you understand."
I signed over eight hundred thousand dollars of my father's inheritance to keep the firm breathing through one bad winter.
The next spring I gave another four hundred thousand.
I worked nights. I skipped my own birthday twice.
I believed every word Rodrick said to me at two in the morning with his head in my lap.
You're the only one who can carry this project. Just push a little longer. It's for our future.
Then I found the receipt for a three-carat ring I had never seen, in a jacket I'd sent to the dry cleaner.
Then I learned that Kelsey Dunning, twenty-six, hired as my junior, had been sleeping in my bed since March.
She had once asked me what a load-bearing wall was.
Then Rodrick sat across from me at our kitchen island and said, "I want a clean break. And obviously the firm stays with me."
Obviously.
Now they wanted one more thing from me.
They wanted me to smile, pull out my card and buy champagne for the woman wearing my life.
Fine.
I hoped every one of them remembered exactly what that meal tasted like.
My phone buzzed with a private message from Marguerite.
"Don't take any of it to heart, my girl. I know the chat got silly. Come tonight anyway. You're still family to me."
She had signed it with a little heart. In six years she had never once forgotten the heart.
I did not answer.
"Cora."
I didn't have to turn around. I knew that voice.
It had once asked me how to spell "aesthetic."
Kelsey leaned in the doorway of my office with her arms folded and the ring catching the window light.
"Wow. The Larkspur. You're really going all out."
She smiled. "Rodrick took me there for my birthday. It cost him almost two thousand for the two of us."
I kept packing.
She walked over and pressed her palm flat on the folder I was closing.
Not hard. Just enough.
"Don't be like that. I actually came to ask you a favor."
She turned her laptop toward me.
The screen showed a presentation deck for the Radcliff Hospitality pitch, the biggest contract Lowell Design had ever chased.
It was a new hotel on the lakefront.
The elevations did not line up.
The materials board had teak on one page and walnut on the next.
Someone had used three different fonts.
"Marguerite said you'd help," Kelsey said sweetly. "Rodrick needs it by tomorrow morning."
"You do these in your sleep," she added. "It'd take you what, twenty minutes?"
Marguerite said.
A year ago Marguerite had brought Kelsey to my desk with a plate of lemon bars.
She had asked me to take the sweet girl from her church under my wing.
I looked at the deck. I looked at the ring.
"Kelsey," I said. "My divorce was final at 9:04 this morning. I don't work here anymore."
"Rodrick said you'd be dramatic about it."
"Then Rodrick can open the file himself and find out who drew the Pembroke."
I lifted the box off the desk.
She let go of the folder.
My phone rang as I reached the elevator. It was The Larkspur's number.
Nadine Ferris ran that restaurant, and she was the best friend I had left.
"Cora, I need you to tell me something, and I need you to tell me fast."
Her voice was tight.
"Why did a reservation for forty-three guests just send a reminder email under your name?"
"I haven't booked anything. I only sent them the address."
"It isn't new," Nadine said. "It was made in July."
I stood there with the elevator doors open and a box of pencils in my arms.
Somebody had booked my divorce dinner three months before I knew I was getting a divorce.
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