The reception went well until the cake.
Not the cake itself. The cake was perfect, four tiers of white fondant with the ivory sugar flowers that the baker had spent three weeks on and which looked, under the Santos Technical lighting, exactly as they were supposed to look.
The issue was the cake table.
The cake table had been placed, according to the original floor plan, against the west wall. What nobody had accounted for, including me, was that the west wall was directly adjacent to the ventilation output for the kitchen and that by seven in the evening the heat from the kitchen service had raised the temperature of the west wall section by enough degrees that the fondant on the bottom tier was beginning to show the very early signs of a structural concern.
I noticed it at seven twel
