The Thomasina Fund.
That’s us.
That’s my organization, and yes, I named it after my mother, and no, I have never once mentioned that to the Winslows, because the first time I tried — at a dinner, in year one — Corinne said, “How sweet, dear, a little charity named after your mama,” and I decided she had used up her turn.
Here’s how a nonprofit endowment property works, in the plain language I use with our board.
The Fund owns Ivywood House.
An events company leases and operates it.
Every wedding, gala, and corporate retreat held in that ballroom pays rent to the Fund, and that rent — eleven hundred thousand dollars last year — pays for emergency housing, legal fees, and the eighteen caseworkers who sit with women while they figure out how to get their name off a mortgage.
It is the most profitable thing I have ever built, and it is profitable because rich people will pay anything for a room with a chandelier.
Including the Winslows.
Who had booked the Ivywood ballroom eleven months earlier, for one hundred and forty thousand dollars, and had been telling everyone in three counties that they were “practically hosting” it.
They were renting it.
From me.
And Garrett knew.
That’s the part I need to be precise about, because people ask.
My husband knew where I worked, knew what the Fund owned, and had sat in our kitchen the night the auction closed while I cried into a dish towel because my mother had cleaned the fourth floor of a building I had just bought.
He knew.
He had simply decided, over two years, that the version of me that owned an eleven-floor building was less useful to him than the version that could be moved to Table Twelve without complaint.
Because a man who admits his wife owns the venue has to explain why he married her.
A man whose wife sits by the kitchen doors gets to keep being the interesting one.
As for the “final documents.”
That part was real, and that is what makes it my favorite thing that has ever happened to me.
