Chapter 5: The Party Panic

The irony wasn't lost on Elara that her app called "Serenity" was about to drive her to a complete mental breakdown.

Three weeks had passed since her dinner with Julian, three weeks of carefully orchestrated encounters that felt like the world's most civilized courtship dance. Coffee in the lobby café became a morning ritual. Evening conversations in the hallway stretched longer each night. The tension between them had been building steadily, but neither had crossed the line from neighbors-who-were-clearly-interested into something more defined.

Now, staring at her laptop screen displaying the Serenity app's final beta version, Elara felt the familiar clench of panic in her chest. The app was perfect—a seamless integration of calendar management, task coordination, and life optimization that represented eighteen months of her best work. Her investors were thrilled, early beta testers were raving about it, and tech blogs were already calling it "revolutionary."

Which meant it was time for the launch party.

The very concept made her break out in a cold sweat. A launch party meant logistics. It meant venues and catering and guest lists and RSVPs and a thousand tiny details that needed to be coordinated perfectly because this wasn't just any party—this was the event that would determine whether Serenity became the next big thing or just another failed startup.

Her phone rang, Maya's face appearing on the screen with her usual cheerful expression that immediately shifted to concern when she saw Elara's face.

"Oh no," Maya said without preamble. "What's the crisis now?"

"Launch party," Elara said, the words coming out strangled. "I need to throw a launch party."

"That's... good news, right? Your app is amazing, investors love it, you should be celebrating."

"I should be celebrating by hiring someone else to plan the party," Elara said, running her hands through her hair. "But my budget is tight, and everyone I've talked to wants a deposit that's basically my entire marketing budget, and I keep thinking I should be able to handle this myself because it's just a party, right? How hard can it be?"

Maya's expression grew sympathetic. "Oh, honey. You know the answer to that question."

The problem was that Elara did know. She'd spent the last two days making lists of everything a launch party required, and each item on the list seemed to spawn three more items. Venue (but what kind? how big? what's available on short notice?). Catering (dietary restrictions? alcohol license? serving staff?). Guest list (how many people? which industry contacts? how to track RSVPs?). Marketing (photographers? social media coverage? press releases?).

Each category felt like falling down a rabbit hole of decisions she wasn't qualified to make, deadlines she was already behind on, and coordination requirements that made her chest tight with anxiety.

"I've been staring at venue websites for six hours," Elara admitted. "Do you know how many questions they ask? Capacity, setup preferences, AV requirements, parking arrangements, accessibility compliance—it's like they're speaking a foreign language."

"Have you considered—" Maya started.

"If you're about to suggest I ask Julian for help, the answer is no." The words came out sharper than Elara intended. "I can't keep running to him every time I can't handle basic adult responsibilities."

"Why not?"

The question caught Elara off guard. "Because... because I'm supposed to be independent. Because I've built my entire adult life on not needing anyone else. Because if I keep relying on him for everything, what does that make me?"

"Someone who's smart enough to use available resources?" Maya suggested gently.

But Elara was already shaking her head. "No. I need to figure this out myself. I'm a successful business owner. I can handle party planning."

Famous last words.

Over the next three days, Elara threw herself into launch party planning with the same intensity she brought to coding. She created spreadsheets, researched venues, contacted caterers, and slowly began to understand why people hired professionals for this kind of thing.

Every phone call seemed designed to make her feel incompetent. Venue coordinators asked questions she didn't know how to answer. Caterers wanted decisions about things she'd never considered. Event rental companies spoke in acronyms that might as well have been ancient Greek.

"So you'll need linens, chairs, cocktail tables, and what about a sound system?" the rental company representative asked during a call that had already lasted forty-five minutes.

"I... yes? Maybe? What kind of sound system?"

"Well, that depends on your AV setup, your venue's existing equipment, whether you're planning speeches or presentations, background music levels..."

Elara stared at her growing list of questions she didn't have answers to, feeling the familiar overwhelm beginning to spiral. "Can I call you back?"

By Thursday afternoon, she'd made exactly zero progress on actually booking anything, despite spending every waking hour on party planning. Her apartment was covered in printouts of venue information, catering menus, and rental equipment catalogs. She had seventeen different spreadsheets tracking various aspects of the event, but no actual event booked.

The breaking point came during a call with a caterer who came highly recommended.

"So for sixty people, you're looking at approximately forty hors d'oeuvres pieces per person, assuming a two-hour cocktail reception with full bar service," the caterer was saying. "Now, for dietary restrictions, we'll need final counts on vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and any specific allergies at least 72 hours in advance..."

"Wait," Elara interrupted, frantically taking notes. "Forty pieces per person? That seems like a lot. And how do I get dietary information from guests? Do I add that to the RSVP form? What RSVP form? Do I need to create—"

"Most clients use an event management platform for RSVPs," the caterer said with barely concealed impatience. "Eventbrite, or something more sophisticated if you're tracking industry contacts and press. You'll want to capture dietary restrictions, plus-one information, contact details for follow-up marketing..."

Elara felt her chest tightening, that familiar sensation of drowning in details that everyone else seemed to navigate effortlessly. "Right. Event management platform. Of course."

"I'll need a deposit to hold your date," the caterer continued. "Fifty percent of estimated total, which for your projected headcount would be around three thousand dollars, due within 48 hours of verbal confirmation."

Three thousand dollars. Just for the deposit. Just for the catering. Not including venue, rentals, decorations, photography, or any of the dozen other line items on her ever-growing list.

"I... I need to check some things and call you back," Elara managed.

After hanging up, she sat in her living room surrounded by the detritus of party planning, feeling completely defeated. This was exactly why she'd avoided event planning her entire adult life. The sheer volume of interconnected decisions and coordination required felt like trying to debug code while blindfolded.

Her laptop chimed with a new email—another venue sending her a quote that was double her entire event budget. Elara stared at the number, felt the familiar panic spiral beginning, and did something she hadn't done in years.

She started crying.

Not elegant, silent tears, but the kind of frustrated, overwhelmed sobbing that came from trying to handle something so far outside her skill set that she might as well have been attempting surgery. She was a successful business owner, for crying out loud. She'd built an app that was about to revolutionize productivity software. But ask her to coordinate a party, and she fell apart completely.

The knock on her door came just as she was reaching the truly pathetic stage of crying—the kind where mascara runs and breathing becomes hiccupy. She considered ignoring it, but the knock came again, gentle but persistent.

Through her peephole, she saw Julian standing in the hallway with two coffee cups and an expression of concern that suggested he'd heard her breakdown through the walls.

She opened the door, acutely aware of her appearance—red eyes, smudged makeup, wearing the same clothes she'd had on for two days straight.

"Rough day?" Julian asked gently, extending one of the coffee cups.

The simple question, delivered without judgment or alarm despite her obviously distressed state, made her start crying again.

"I can't do this," she said, accepting the coffee with shaking hands. "I can't plan a party. I can't coordinate sixty people and catering and venues and RSVPs and dietary restrictions and sound systems and—"

"Hey," Julian interrupted softly, stepping into her apartment and closing the door behind him. "Breathe."

He guided her to her couch, moving aside the scattered party planning materials with calm efficiency. "What's going on?"

"Launch party," Elara managed between hiccupy breaths. "For Serenity. It's supposed to be this big professional event, and I can't... every caterer wants thousands of dollars just for deposits, and venues are asking questions I don't understand, and I keep thinking I should be able to handle this myself because it's just a party, but it's not just a party, it's my entire career depending on not screwing this up."

Julian listened without interrupting, his presence somehow steadying. When she finally ran out of words, he was quiet for a moment, looking at the chaos of papers surrounding them.

"When's your target date for the event?" he asked.

"Six weeks from now. Maybe eight if I can push it, but my investors are expecting something soon, and tech blogs are starting to ask about launch events, and—"

"Elara," Julian interrupted gently. "Look at me."

She met his eyes, struck by the calm competence she saw there.

"This is what I do," he said simply. "Event coordination, vendor management, logistics planning. This is literally my job."

"I know, but I can't keep—"

"Let me be your project manager."

The offer hung in the air between them, simple and complicated at the same time. Elara felt something in her chest loosen and tighten simultaneously—relief at the prospect of help, terror at the thought of depending on him again.

"I can't afford to hire Thorne Dynamics," she said quietly.

Julian's mouth curved in that almost-smile. "I'm not offering as Thorne Dynamics. I'm offering as your neighbor who happens to be very good at making impossible things manageable."

"Julian..."

"Six weeks is plenty of time to plan a launch event," he continued. "I know the right vendors, I can negotiate better rates than you'll get as an individual client, and I can handle all the coordination that's making you crazy."

Elara looked around her living room, at the scattered evidence of her failure to handle what should have been a straightforward professional milestone. Then she looked at Julian, who was offering to solve her problem not because she was helpless, but because this was literally what he was trained to do.

"Okay," she heard herself saying. "Yes. Please. I need help."

The relief that flooded through her was so intense it was almost physical. Julian smiled—not his almost-smile, but a full, genuine expression of satisfaction.

"Then let me handle this," he said simply. "Trust me to make this work."

And for the first time in days, Elara felt like maybe it actually would.