Chapter 165 - 164: The Argument And The Trouble!

Lunch turned out to be a far less dramatic affair than Adena’s buildup had promised. Caelestis was, in fact, not sitting there pathetically alone, but reading through a report with mild irritation, which smoothed into surprise and something warmer when Eleanore actually walked in and took a seat.

"You came," he said.

"Adena wore me down. This isn’t a pattern."

"Of course not." But he was smiling slightly, the kind he tried and mostly failed to hide behind his glass of water.

Adena, for her part, looked entirely too pleased with herself as she settled into the seat across from them, practically vibrating with some new idea she was clearly bursting to share. It took approximately four minutes and half a bowl of soup before she couldn’t hold it in any longer.

"So," she said, setting her spoon down with a decisive clink. "I’ve been thinking."

"That’s never a good sign," Eleanore said.

"Rude. Hear me out." Adena leaned forward, eyes bright. "We should have a tea party."

Caelestis raised an eyebrow. "A tea party."

"Yes! A proper one. Little sandwiches, fancy tea, everyone dressed up. It’ll be fun! We never do anything fun in this house, it’s all business dinners and stiff conversations about trade routes."

"We had a stiff conversation about trade routes at the last dinner because you asked about trade routes," Caelestis pointed out.

"That’s beside the point." Adena waved him off, turning her full attention back to Eleanore instead, sensing correctly where the actual decision-making power in this conversation lived. "Please? It’ll be good for you too. You never do anything that isn’t work."

Eleanore considered it for a moment, turning her glass slowly between her fingers. It wasn’t, admittedly, the worst idea Adena had ever had and given how the summer was shaping up so far, a small, controlled social gathering sounded almost pleasant by comparison to everything else currently happening in this house.

"Fine," Eleanore said finally. "We can have a tea party."

Adena’s face lit up instantly, already halfway out of her seat with excitement. "Yes! Okay, I already have ideas, we could do a theme, maybe pastel colors, or—"

"I said we can have one," Eleanore cut in, holding up a hand before Adena’s momentum could carry her any further. "I didn’t say you’d be organizing it."

That stopped Adena mid-sentence. "What? Why not? It was my idea."

"Because organizing an event like that falls under the duchess’s responsibilities, not a guest’s," Eleanore said, calm but firm, the kind of tone that left very little room for negotiation. "Guest lists, seating arrangements, noble invitations, that’s not something I’m handing off on a whim, even for a tea party."

"I can handle a tea party, Madam. It’s not exactly foreign diplomacy."

"It’s exactly the kind of thing that becomes foreign diplomacy the moment you invite the wrong two people to the same table," Eleanore said dryly, and beside her, Caelestis made a small sound that was very clearly a poorly disguised laugh. "You can help. You can pick a theme, suggest food, whatever you’d like. But the actual organizing stays with me."

Adena opened her mouth to argue further, then seemed to reconsider the futility of it, slumping back into her chair with a dramatic huff instead. "Fine. But I’m picking the theme. And I get final say on the sandwiches."

"You can have the sandwiches."

"And the theme."

"You can suggest a theme."

"Close enough," Adena muttered, though the smile tugging at her mouth suggested she was already fully invested in planning out color palettes in her head, negotiating powers or not — and Eleanore, watching her, felt the corner of her own mouth lift despite herself, the small, chaotic warmth of it settling somewhere she hadn’t expected to let it.

The argument didn’t start over anything significant — that was, in retrospect, the most irritating part of it. It started over napkins.

"Cloth, obviously," Adena said, like the answer was so self-evident it barely warranted discussion. "Paper napkins at a tea party is basically a crime."

"Cloth needs to be pressed, monogrammed, and returned to the linen service after," Eleanore said, not looking up from the notepad in front of her. "That’s an extra two days of coordination for something no one will remember by next week."

"It’s a detail, Madam. Details matter."

"So does not adding unnecessary work onto an already tight schedule."

"You’re being difficult on purpose."

"I’m being practical, which you’d understand if you’d ever actually organized anything larger than a picnic."

The words came out sharper than she meant them, but she didn’t take them back, mostly because four days of Adena hovering over every decision had worn her patience down to something thin and brittle. Adena’s expression flickered hurt, quickly buried under indignation and she turned, almost instinctively, toward Caelestis, who had been very deliberately not participating in this conversation until that exact moment.

"Caelestis, back me up here. Cloth napkins, right?"

He hesitated, glancing between the two of them with the particular caution of a man realizing, half a second too late, that he’d wandered into a minefield with no clear path back out. "I mean," he said slowly, "cloth does look nicer for something like this."

Eleanore set her pen down. "Excuse me?"

"I just mean — for presentation. It’s a small thing."

"It is not a small thing when it’s an extra two days of work that falls on me," Eleanore said, and the sharpness in her voice this time wasn’t aimed at Adena anymore. "You asked me to organize this. If you’re just going to override every decision I make because Adena pouts about it, then organize it yourself."

"That’s not what I’m doing."

"That’s exactly what you’re doing."

"Eleanore—" Caelestis tried to speak.

However, she didn’t let him finish. She pushed back from the table, chair scraping loudly against the floor, and walked out of the dining room without another word, leaving both of them sitting there in a silence that neither seemed particularly eager to break.