Page 22 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

I say it in my best voice, the one that has ended vendor disputes in three counties, and she believes me, because everyone always believes me, that's the entire product.

Then she hangs up, and I stand alone in my glowing office on Bellflower Lane with eleven active weddings, a celebrity inquiry, a venue holding its breath for my answer, and no Tessa until autumn.

Looking at a calendar that was impossible this morning and has just become something well past impossible, a word I don't currently have, and will need to invent by Thursday.

The tide, I believe I mentioned, comes in faster than predicted.

CHAPTER 4

The Man Who Drove Away

~CADE~

Every party has a pulse, and my whole job is keeping my finger on it while looking like I'm just here for the shrimp.

Tonight's pulse is running at about one-forty, which for an album-release party in the Hollywood Hills is healthy, borderline athletic.

Four hundred guests on a cantilevered deck, a DJ who understands that volume is not a personality, lighting the color of good bourbon, and me, drifting through all of it in a jacket that cost too much while solving problems before they're old enough to have names.

That waiter's tray is tilting, intercept.

The label president's wife has been cornered by a crypto guy, extract, redeploy her toward the photographer who's been trying to get her all night, two birds.

Bar three is eleven minutes from running out of the good tequila, which would be a headline in this crowd, so I've already had a case walked up from the service kitchen, because the trick to a flawless event is simple.

Fix everything before anyone knows it was broken, then act surprised when they call it magic.

A woman I know from three parties ago materializes at my elbow to tell me this is the best event of the season, and I tell her she says that at every event of the season. She laughs and says that's because I do every event of the season, and we both enjoy the exchange exactly as much as it deserves, which is four seconds.

That's my range. Four seconds, I'm the most charming man you've ever met.

Don't ask about second five. Nobody has ever lasted that long with me in years.

The sponsor crisis finds me at nine.

The vodka brand underwriting half this deck has been swapped at the last hour for a tequila brand owned by somebody's cousin, which kills the signature cocktail, which was built on the vodka, which has a custom menu printed on letterpress card stock at every bar.

I taste the new spirit, stand at bar one for ninety seconds with the head bartender, and we rebuild the drink on the spot.

Same color, same glass, blood orange instead of yuzu, a salted rim to flatter the cheaper base, and I rename it after the album's third track so the label thinks it was intentional. By nine-thirty guests are posting it. The letterpress menus go in the recycling, and nobody at this party will ever know tonight had a first draft.

Nobody at any party knows about first drafts.

That's the product.

I sell the version of the evening where nothing ever went wrong.

The actor situation is trickier because the actor is a person.

He's twenty-six, four drinks past his talent, and about ninety seconds from saying something to a journalist that his publicist will spend a year mopping up, so I do what I do.

I arrive as his new best friend, laugh at the joke he hasn't finished, put an arm around him, and steer, one long smooth arc through the crowd, keeping the patter going the whole way, absolutely, brother, she said that, unbelievable, and by the time he understands he's been moved, he's in the quiet library off the kitchen with a plate of tacos, a bottle of water dressed up in a rocks glass, and a driver on the way, feeling not ejected but chosen.

Special access. VIP of the room where nothing can happen to him.

His publicist finds me twenty minutes later and grips my hand like I pulled her kid out of a pool, which, in the currency of this town, I did.

That's the whole gift, if you're wondering.