The Plus-One Clause

Hattie Ellison has written forty-one wedding speeches and never once believed one while she was writing it. When a publicist offers her a fee to be chef Luca Bassani’s steady, happy public partner for twelve appearances, she reads the contract twice and adds two clauses of her own: no kissing without both of them initialling the schedule, and a clean exit if the arrangement ever requires her to lie to a client. He signs without reading it twice.

Two years ago Luca’s fiancée left him for his business partner at a launch party, on someone’s phone, and he has been managing the story ever since. Hattie is the first person who can see exactly how much of him is performance, because she manufactures believable intimacy for a living. The appearances go fine, then better than fine, and a near-kiss in a service corridor gets papered over with paperwork that fools nobody.

Then Hattie’s agency books a June wedding: the bride is Thea Whitlock, the groom is the business partner, and the series wants the wedding as its finale. Hattie refuses to drop the client. Luca tells her to write Thea the best speech of her life, and slides the schedule across the pass with the wedding already initialled. What follows is a contract nobody needs, a speech Hattie writes, and the question of whether a woman who edits other people’s love stories can let her own be said out loud, in public, unedited.