I haven't been to stiff formal meals before but having an assigned seat helps me figure out where I'm supposed to be. Eighteen table placements have name cards by them, and mine is in the middle of the long side of the table, with Linda to my left and a talkative bold guy to my right. Philip and Brenda sit together on one short side of the table, and Mr. Baxtor and Melissa sit on the other short side facing the younger couple.

I don't know any of the six men or the one woman on the long side opposite me, but the same man that Linda talked to upstairs sits next to her on her other side. They are talking about government funding and grant writing. Linda's relentless, and I suspect the Chicago Public Library is about to get a large donation from the insurance company the man owns.

The antipasto is as good as what we had at the restaurant, but the increasingly excited guy next to me distracts me from smelling and tasting it by narrating each slice and bite as if he were on camera. When he goes into the details of how the celery is pickled for the Artichoke Custard with Anchovy and Garlic Fonduta, Pickled Celery and Oregano, I abandon my reservations.

"At the beginning of the year," I say, "I filmed how cabbage, cucumbers, radish, olives and tomatoes underwent pickling with three distinct recipes and determined what was the difference in the flavors as a result, plus I explained the chemistry behind the transformations. But I haven't even thought about trying celery. I have more things I want to try to pickle, and I'll have to add celery to my list."

"I can send you the recipe for this one if you want to try. It's our chef's invention. Her take on traditional Italian food is the best. Her promotion was the best decision I've done in years."

Is he talking about an ad? School?

"Promotion?"

"I own Del Mio Senso. I'm Mo Ballerini." He puts his fork down and extends his hand my way over the table.

Will he give me the passata recipe the executive chef refused to share?

"Would you send me the passata recipe you use as well?"

"And the code to my safe?"

"No. I have enough money. But your passata remains a mystery."

He explodes in a shrill laugh, and I recognize it as one of the noisy reasons I escaped to the balcony earlier in the evening. "Good one." He continues to chuckle.

I take out my wallet and pull my card. Angie forced me to print some, but this is the first time I get to use them. I put it on the white tablecloth and slide it his way.

"Gastro Goodness? Oh, you run a YouTube channel? Benjamin Y. Leonards. What does Y stand for?"

"I've been doing food science for about five years now on the channel. And Y. stands for Yo-Yo. Like Yo-Yo Ma the cellist, not the toy."

"Interesting. Food Science." He puts my card into the interior pocket of his sleek black jacket. "Do you play the violin? I play guitar, but those are the only stings I touch. Did being named after a virtuoso help you become one yourself?"

"No. It used to be a hobby, but I don't remember the last time I practiced. Cooking has become the focus. Food science is my obsession, and it's taking up all of my time. Several weeks ago, I filmed how the bread dried and did a time-lapse of that, and then I showed the rehydration process. Part of what I like is figuring out the best camera angles and how to splice the footage together—a steep learning curve, but I've got it."

Mo nods and keeps up with my explanations, asks me meaningful questions, and gives me extensive answers. I forget where I am, and we join forces to take apart everything we are eating and come up with ideas for changes on the spot. I catch myself smiling and explaining how the variations in the freezer temperatures can affect the semifreddo.

A hand lands on my shoulder and takes me out of my flow. I wip around to see what's going on.

"We need to go." Linda's fakest smile is on while she's moving her eyebrows in a peculiar way.

"I'm still talking to Mo—"

"I know who this is," she tells me, and then she says to Mo, " I'm so sorry, I'm going to get him out of you hai— out of your space."

"No, no." Mo puts his hand on my other shoulder. "Ben's amazing. His brain is something else. I wish someone like him worked for me. I like the idea of collaborating with him on one of his food science videos. I haven't been this excited about food in quite a while. You caught a very smart guy here." He pats me on one shoulder while Linda is squeezing and pulling on the other. "Can I be a guest on one of your episodes? We can go over passatas, and I will reveal our recipe for comparison with others for it."

If that's the way I can get access to that recipe, he can be my first guest. I can adjust. "I think I can accommodate your presence in one episode."

"Sorry, Mo, we really have to go." Linda tugs on my sleeve.

I get up and follow her.

"Hold on, hold on," Mo shouts. He is scribbling something on a piece of paper on the table. I wait for him to finish and catch up with us.

"Here, this is my cell and my personal email address, and I need you to call me sometime on Monday. Or email me first, and my assistant will find you a spot, and we can talk. Monday, ok?"

***

"Did you see what she was doing?" Linda manages to both sound hushed and infuriated at the same time. She drags me by the sleeve out of the dining room, out of the apartment, and towards the elevator.

To say that I paid zero attention to all of the females at that table is an understatement. How many of them were there, maybe six? Yeas, six out of eighteen, were women. I need to exclude Linda. So we have five potential subjects for that question. Knowing Linda's hatred for her sister, I feel it reasonable to assume that it's Brenda she's talking about.

"Brenda?"

Linda's eyes widen. "Is Brenda involved in this? I haven't seen them talking."

"I don't know. You were not asking me about Brenda?"

"No, for once, it was not about her. Haven't you seen the girl across form us, checking her phone all the time?"

The elevator doors open, and she drags me in and pushes the button repeatedly with her finger.

"No."

"Why am I even asking. I think she's with yellow press. I know that trick, you check your phone and move around, and you're actually taking a video or photos with your phone. I've done it a million times myself."

That someone would do such a thing makes no sense to me. Linda's prone to over exaggerations.

"Don't look at me this way. It's more than a hunch, and I'm going to prove it. All guests of the wedding were supposed to sign in with the concierge below and show their ID."

The elevator doors open, and Linda skip-runs on her high-heel shoes over the marble floor of the foyer to the concierge station. A middle-aged man in glasses and a nametag that says 'Luca' is talking on the phone and typing on the computer in front of him. He acknowledges that he sees us and points to the receiver sandwiched between his ear and shoulder, and shows us three fingers.

Linda gives him two thumbs up and leans over the desk, where the guest book lies open. She mimes to him that she wants to look into the book, but he pulls it towards himself and closes it while shaking his head and continuing the series of "yes" and "yes, Sir"s into the receiver.

Linda narrows her eyes and walks around the station, puts her hand on the corners of the guest book, and tugs it to her. I recognize this as inappropriate behavior and follow behind her to prevent this from escalating. Luca sees me approach behind Linda and takes a couple of steps back, without letting go of the guest book, the receiver, or the strings of yeses that keeps coming out of his mouth.

I take Linda by the elbows and whisper into her ear, "We need to wait. You can't grab it from him." Mom told this to me so often as a child, every time I think about this phrase, it plays in Mom's voice in my head.

Linda lets go of the book, turns around, and stomps away from Luca and me. I mouth 'sorry' to the guy and follow Linda, who's back to her phone and doesn't acknowledge my approach.

"I'm right. OMG, I'm right. What are we going to do?" She turns her phone my way, and I see a face of a smiling woman who does not look familiar. Her dark hair reaches her chin, red lips are parted to reveal a row of perfect white teeth, the black turtleneck covers her neck and shoulders.

"I don't know who this is," I say.

"It's her. Ronda Quinn. The woman who sat opposite us at the table."

The face of the woman eludes me, but I'm confident she had long blond hair, glasses and I can't remember her lip color.

"The woman was blond."

"A wig, and it's her signature, sneaking into high profile events in disguise. I need to know who she came with. She's a plus-one."

Luca hangs up the phone.

"I'm sorry, miss, that I made you wait, but we are not allowed to give the check-in book to the guests. You can sign-out now." He opens the book and puts it on the counter facing us, and extends a pen our way.

"We are not guests. I live here. Lived here. I'm Linda Baxter." She moves her hand along the lines of names and signatures. "Aha. Cory Thomson, he sat next to her."

The name after Cory's was R. Quinn.

"I'm right. She didn't even bother with a fake ID. It's all going to leak."

"If you're not signing out, I'm afraid I have to take this back," says Luca. But Linda got what she came for.

"We need to stop her. Tell Mom and Dad. Let's go." Linda can't move fast in her shoes and looks like a mix between a figure skater and a snowshoer as she guns for the elevator. She proceeds to stab the button with her finger over and over again.

"It's not going to come any faster if you do it. The signal was received and the elevator needs to descend from whatever floor it's on down. Pushing the button multiple time does not accelerate the speed with which it—"

"I know, I know. Would you rather I were hitting the wall?"

Stimming. That's what she's doing. I'm all too familiar with the comforts of stimming, and although this situation does not worry me in the slightest, it appears to be stressing Linda.

"How can I help?"

"I don't think you can. I don't think I can either. She probably sent it all out already. It's one of the reasons my parents abhor the use of smartphones or devices with cameras around us. We've had one too many photos taken of us this way in most unflattering situations."

The elevator doors open, and we get in. The ride up takes a couple of minutes, during which Linda's glued to her phone, the concertation on her face evident.

"Fuck." She shakes the phone with one hand, and I worry it's going to fly out of her hand, such is the force of her motion. She shakes it in her hand like a rattle and then slams it a bit too hard against her forehead. "We're too late." She turns the screen of her phone my way.

The headline reads, "Brenda wins again: the Baxter girls newest love square." The photo is of Brenda clad in the liquid gold of her dress walking between Philip and me, the moment after we exited the balcony, and she escorted us downstairs for dinner. I scroll down, and the article details Linda's divorce from Philip cites Brenda's alleged pregnancy and suggests that Brenda was seen leaving my room at night, then questions the paternity.

The doors of the elevator open.

"Who would believe this?" I ask Linda. "And even if I had sex last night, I couldn't have impregnated her retroactively."

"So you admit to sleeping with Brenda as well as Linda? Is this one of the family fetishes—sharing boyfriends and husbands?" The blond woman with glasses is talking, aiming her phone at us.

Linda grabs at her phone, but the blond, who, according to Linda, is at fault for the garbage that is written in the article, is quicker and steps away out of Linda's reach. Linda stumbles forward and loses her footing, but's I'm close enough to grab her and catch her before she falls. I hold her in my hands and move away from the reporter and to the door of the apartment, while the reporter is openly filming us at this point.

"You're not going to get away with this," shouts Linda.

The reporter smiles and continues to film us until I shut the door.

Who d'you think is behind the reporter's invite and the leaked information?

NaNoWriMo: Day 26 . I'm at 44, 131 words right now. The next chapter is almost finished and I did a little bit of the ending chapters again, because some of what was happening in the chapters this week will come around to have a meaning in the end, so I wanted to capture that.

I'd say there'll be 3-4 more chapters out by November 30th. I'm on track for the 50K by EOM.