Then I got my coat, and found my friend in the bar area finishing a conversation, and we walked out into the spring night and got in the car and drove south on dark roads toward the city and then past it, toward home.
## The Thing About the $2,400
I want to spend a moment with the twenty-four hundred dollars, because I think it is the number that reveals the most about what happened.
That twenty-four hundred dollars is irrecoverable. The contract was clear: the deposit was nonrefundable. It did not transfer with the client status; it stayed with the venue. I knew this from the beginning, and I made my decision to call Jordan about the transfer clause with full knowledge that the deposit was already gone. I was not trying to get it back. I was trying to not compound the loss with an additional seventy-two hundred dollars.
The twenty-four hundred is what I paid to sign a contract in September for a venue for a wedding I believed I would attend. The intention was honest, the relationship at the time was intact, and the decision to pay it was, in the circumstances of September, reasonable. What happened afterward was not predictable from that vantage point.
I have thought about whether I should have structured the original offer differently. Should I have asked Claire to sign the contract and then offered to pay the deposit as a gift? Should I have put the conditions in writing at the time? Should I have not offered at all, let Claire and Owen find a different venue within their budget, stayed out of the financing entirely?