Page 38 of First Comes Marriage

He glanced her way and she nodded, that smile lighting up her face again. “It’s at least more interesting than rehashing the workshop on public transportation and infrastructure.”

Norm shouted over the growing conversations in the room as the assembled business owners splintered into smaller and smaller groups bemoaning the declining wedding industry in town. Finally, exasperated, he stuck his index fingers in his mouth and blew, the piercing whistle cutting through the noise.

“That’s enough,” he huffed. “Now Baz and Sabrina are here to tell us what they learned at that conference so we can make sure the Food and Wine Festival has its most successful year, even with Jamie and Tessa needing to take a back seat. That’s the only thing on the agenda for tonight.”

“We might be able to do both,” Sabrina said, stepping to the center of the space at the front of the room. “There was a lot to learn at the conference, and we’ve sent all the slides from the various presentations to Norm. He can make those available to anyone who’d like to review. But I think we can do better than rehash hours of slides about dynamic pricing models.” She reached forward and turned off the projector, the machine whirring as it shut down, before turning the full force of her smile on the gathered business owners. “If you really want to address the shrinking wedding market and increase alternative tourism streams, the town’s festivals should be part of the plan, and we need to be talking about gamification.”

“What’s that?” Jenny asked skeptically.

“It’s simpler than it sounds. It’s just turning things into a game. There’s all kinds of blah-biddy-blah in the slides about exactly what it means and complicated ways to do it, but what it boils down is, you decide what you want people to do, and then you figure out a reward system for when they do it. And it’s even better if they can compete against other people, earn points over time, that sort of thing.”

“It’s a very common concept in marketing,” Gavin chimed in from the back of the room. “Like when you see those online crowdfunding campaigns and people team up to see which team can raise more money.”

“Exactly.” Sabrina beamed. “But instead of getting the tourists to raise money, we want them to make reservations at local restaurants and hotels, buy tickets to a museum, rent a kayak, come to a festival. That kind of thing. When I had my studio in Maine, the other local businesses and I did something really similar one summer. We made a passport of sorts that encouraged people to visit all the arts businesses in the area—the galleries and the art museum and the bead shop. And if you visited all the businesses on the list, you were entered into a raffle for a cash prize. We all saw more business that summer.”

Baz leaned back against the wall of St. Anthony’s listening as Sabrina—with some help from Gavin—helped the association brainstorm lists of ways they could gamify their tourist experience: a passport of local businesses that, when completed, would enter the visitor in a drawing to win a prize; a repeat visitor program that rewarded tourists who came back year over year; ways to earn extra points for leaving reviews online and referring friends to book their own Aster Bay vacations. The list went on and on. By the end of the meeting, they’d developed a rough plan for testing out gamified promotions at the Food and Wine Festival and Sabrina was swarmed with members of the association, eager to continue the conversation.

Through it all, he couldn’t take her eyes off her. She was magnetic, weaving a spell that captivated everyone in the room with each open-hearted laugh and nod of encouragement, and blossoming under their reflected appreciation. She practically glowed with it.

“She’s got them eating out of the palm of her hand.”

Baz turned to see Ethan leaning against the wall beside him. He’d been so caught up in watching Sabrina, he hadn’t even noticed his friend approach.

“She’s good with people,” Baz said.

“Unlike your grumpy ass.”

Baz shot him a look. “And she knows how to run a business.”

“Why’d she leave her studio in Maine?”

Baz shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Ethan tilted his head towards Baz’s hands. When he glanced down, he realized he was turning his wedding ring on his finger. He hadn’t even noticed he was doing it. He shoved his hands in his pockets.

“Did I ever tell you I asked Stephanie to marry me the day I turned eighteen. I wanted to do what you two did, run away to Vegas and get married before our parents could talk us out of it.” Ethan said.

He hadn’t told him. Not that Baz was surprised. Ethan had been head over heels in love with his childhood sweetheart. Even when she’d gotten pregnant with Tessa at sixteen, Ethan never wavered.

“What happened?”

“She didn’t want to marry me.”

Ethan looked at Sabrina and Baz followed his line of sight to where she stood, surrounded by their friends and neighbors, like she’d been one of them all along. As though she could sense his eyes on her, Sabrina turned to meet Baz’s gaze, flashing him a bright smile that made his skin feel too tight.

“I know you don’t want to talk about how you went fromhating her for ten years to marrying her, but that woman—” Ethan tilted his chin towards Sabrina, “—she’s something special. And it seems like she thinks you’re not half bad either.” Baz shoved Ethan’s shoulder without ever taking his eyes off Sabrina. Ethan laughed. “Don’t overthink it.”

“I’m not—”

“I could see those gears turning in your head from all the way across the room.”

Baz exhaled through his nose, watching as Sabrina added more notes to the whiteboard from the group excitedly chattering around her. “Just can’t figure out why she came back in the first place.”

“Does it matter?”

Baz shrugged. Maybe it shouldn’t matter, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that it did. That maybe it had something to do with that pain she was in the other day, with the fact that she didn’t have—and clearly needed—health insurance.

“Then ask her about it,” Ethan said.

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