I didn’t know any of this during the months between Christmas and February. I knew things felt slightly off. I didn’t know how off.
## After the Call: The Contract Question
I did not sleep well the night of Claire’s call. I lay in bed running through the conversation, looking for the part where I could have responded differently, and also thinking very practically about Willowmere Hall.
I knew I had signed a contract. I knew the deposit was nonrefundable. I knew that I had made a verbal commitment, not a written one, to cover the remaining seventy-two hundred, but that my signature was on a legally binding document that named me as the client responsible for those payments.
I was not going to try to cancel the booking. That was not an option I considered. The deposit was gone; that was a twenty-four hundred dollar lesson I was absorbing. But I was also not going to fund a wedding I was not invited to, which felt like one of the stranger sentences I had found myself in a position to have to think clearly about.
The transfer clause was what I remembered. I had read it in September. I pulled up my email the morning after the call and found the PDF of the contract that Jordan had sent after signing, and I read the clause again.
It was clear. A transfer of client status and payment responsibility required written agreement from the venue, the original client, and the new client, completed no later than thirty days before the event. If all three parties agreed in writing, the original client could be released from the remaining payment obligation. The nonrefundable deposit was not addressed in the transfer clause; that twenty-four hundred had been paid and would remain with the venue regardless.