“Well, you haven’t got long to decide.” He looked at her pointedly. “You do know it’s tonight, don’t you?”

Nory stopped what she was doing, a book hugged against her chest.

“Tonight? It can’t be. Are you sure?”

“Yes, Nory, of course I am sure. It’s been booked for months.”

“But. So today is Saturday? Saturday the twelfth?”

“Correct.”

“How did I lose track of the time like that?”

“You’ve been in a wormhole of woe.”

“Oh god, that’s pathetic!”

“I’m surprised Ameerah hasn’t been on at you about outfits; the only thing that woman likes more than the law is clothes.”

“Don’t forget Dev.”

“As if we could! Who knew that under that hard-nosed barrister lay a hopelessly romantic Marianne Dashwood?”

Ameerah always joined them on their Christmas work dos, partly because she bopped into the shop so often she was practically an honorary employee, and partly to add to the numbers; only Andrew and herself actually worked at Serendipitous Seconds, and if she didn’t rustle up a date that year, it would just be Andrew, Seb, and Nory out on the town.

“Now I think about it, the last few times I’ve spoken to her, Ameerah has mentioned the work do,” Nory mused. “I’d just assumed she was talking about it for, you know, sometime in the future, sort of getting ahead of the curve, you know how organized she is.”

“Yes, well, the future, as they say, is now. So, you’d better start thinking Christmas pudding and drunken bankers; these venues love to pack in the work parties. I hope they don’t deconstruct my food. I hate that. Just put the bloody meal together. Don’t hand me a plate of separate ingredients and call it deconstructed, it’s just laziness. If I wanted to make my own dinner, I’d have stayed home.”

Nory made a mental note to check the menu before tonight. If Andrew’s Christmas pudding came out as separate piles of brandy-infused dried fruits on a plate, there could be trouble. He already had an aversion to foods served to him on pieces of slate and/or tiles.

“And don’t get me started on slate tiles!” he said, as though reading her mind. “Slate is for roofing, not for eating your dinner off of. The only people who should be eating from slate tiles are roofers on their lunch breaks.”

Nory thought she’d better change the subject. They were skirting dangerously close to the subject of Jenga chips: the restaurateur art of building a structure of precisely cut rectangle chips in the style of the Jenga game—another foodie foible that drove Andrew to distraction.

“Is Seb’s mum babysitting Matilda?”