“He’s obviously a brilliant young man,” Barry commented. “Look how he’s brought so many of us together.”

“And how long do you plan on being able to keep him under wraps?” the bank executive asked them with a smirk.

John Hutch nodded. He said, “Now, that’s a good question. You don’t pull off a grand event like this and plan to stand pat. We haven’t tried anything major like this for ourselves.”

Barry said, “I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out with him. He seems to be quite a reasonable guy.”

John grinned and responded sarcastically, “Yeah, we’ll see real soon how that goes. But we can at least expect another twenty-five clients out of this that we’ll owe him credit for.”

Chip, Mike, Dwayne, and a few of the other accountants from the office huddled near their bosses.

“Can you believe this? Ivan was setting all of this up right under our noses,” Chip commented, as his eyes continued to follow Gretchen in her gold dress, as they had all evening. Mike and Dwayne took in everything in silence.

Dwayne mused, There’s no coming back down from this. Ivan has put himself out there now.

Carol, from the soul food restaurant in Old Town, whom Ivan continued to promote on his website, looked at her daughter Ida and asked her, “Are you sure you can’t work anything out between you and Ivan?”

“Stop it, Mom,” Ida told her. “Now, I support what Ivan is doing for himself in business, obviously, but it stops there. And I have nothing else to say about it.”

Carol heard her daughter out and shook her head. She’ll learn ten more years from now when she still feels lonely with a man at her side who doesn’t have anything in order.

Just before midnight, the hotel catering staff wheeled out an enormous birthday cake with twenty-nine candles to light.

Red Face Lion then made an announcement calling everyone together at the center of the room to sing “Happy Birthday” and watch Ivan blow out his candles.

“Are you sure you want me to go through with this birthday cake thing?” Ivan whispered to Lucina. The idea seemed ridiculous to him. He wasn’t so sure he wanted to promote his age to everyone, either. Twenty-nine still seemed too young to be taken seriously.

Lucina told him, “Ivan, trust me. You do this correctly, and it can easily become a yearly ritual. Singing ‘Happy Birthday’ is a big moment for everyone, especially at a large party like this one.”

So Ivan went through with the ordeal, with the lights turned down low and everything. Red Face Lion led the song through his microphone.

“Hap-py birthday to you…Hap-py birthday to you…Hap-py birthday dear I-van…Hap-py birthday to you.”