The Client From Nowhere

The studio had three weeks of rent left in the account and Tessa Quan was arranging peonies as though that fact were not true. It helped, the arranging. It always had. There was a logic to flowers that the rest of her life refused to imitate — you grouped the focal blooms, you let the filler breathe, you trusted the negative space. If only landlords could be reasoned with the way a centerpiece could. If only the wedding industry, which she had loved since she was nineteen years old, loved her back with anything like the same loyalty. The bell over the door rang. "We're closed for consultations," she said, not looking up. "But if it's an emergency I can —" "It's not an emergency. It's an offer." She looked up. The man in her doorway did not belong in her doorway. She knew this the way you know weather is about to change. He was tall and unhurried, in a charcoal coat that had been cut by someone who charged by the centimeter, and he stood in the middle of her small, hopeful, slightly shabby studio — the mismatched chairs, the mood boards, the wall of photographs from weddings she had poured her whole self into — and he looked around it with an expression she could not read and did not like. "Quan Events," he said. "You planned the Okonkwo wedding. The one on the rooftop, with the rain, when the marquee company cancelled at four hours' notice and you somehow produced another marquee." "I borrowed it from a film set. Long story." She set down the peonies. "Who are you?" "Adrian Cole." He said it the way some people said their own names — flatly, a little tiredly, as though bracing for the reaction. And Tessa did react, internally, because she read the business pages the way other people read horoscopes, and Adrian Cole was the founder of Halcyon, the founder photographed at launches and summits, the founder whose company was — and here her stomach did something complicated — currently the subject of a great deal of speculation about a board that wanted him gone. "You're a long way from your usual venues, Mr. Cole." "I need a wedding planned," he said. "Mine." "Congratulations." She picked the peonies back up, because her hands needed somewhere to be. "We'd be glad to take a consultation. I have an opening next —" "I need it planned in six weeks. I need it staged flawlessly, photographed by people who will be believed, and witnessed by approximately two hundred guests including nine members of my board of directors." He paused. "And I need you to know, before you agree to anything, that there is no bride. Not a real one. There will be a woman, and a ring, and a great deal of convincing material — but the engagement is a fiction, Miss Quan, built to buy me time, and I am telling you this on purpose, because I would rather lose the meeting than lie to the person I'm asking to build it." The studio was very quiet. Outside, the ordinary street went by. "You want me to plan a fake engagement," Tessa said slowly. "I want you to plan a *flawless* one. The fake part is my problem. The flawless part is the one I can't do without you." He took something from his coat — not a folder, she noticed, just a single card — and set it on the counter beside the peonies. "I've seen the numbers on your studio. Forgive me; due diligence is a habit. You have, I'd estimate, three weeks. I'm offering a fee that makes three weeks irrelevant, and a great deal more if it works." He stepped back toward the door. "Don't answer now. Answer when you've stopped being insulted and started being practical. Both are reasonable. I'd just like the practical one to win." The bell rang again as he left. Tessa stood alone in her studio with three weeks of rent and a billionaire's card and a fistful of peonies, and she discovered that her hands, against all instruction, had stopped trembling — because for the first time in months, the logic of the flowers and the logic of her life had pointed, however insanely, in exactly the same direction.