Celestine Beaumont

Celestine Beaumont runs a catering company that has taken her from crawfish boils at Metairie country clubs to the kind of carefully considered, seasonally driven, technically precise events where the bride's family has opinions about sourcing and the timeline is laminated. She is good at this work. She has built her business on competence, organisation, and a relationship with Creole cuisine that she understands as inheritance rather than innovation. Remy Fontenot runs a restaurant that three years ago won the Pelican Invitational, a competition that Celestine had entered with a menu she had spent four months developing. She placed second. The judges praised her technique and her respect for tradition. They also praised his innovation and his willingness to take risks with the classics. She has not spoken to him since the ceremony. Now she's catering a wedding at Fontaine House in the Garden District. Remy is the best man. They will be sharing a kitchen, a city, and five days of enforced proximity in the week leading up to the ceremony. *New Orleans, November* is literary romance about professional competence, culinary inheritance, and the particular difficulty of working alongside someone who saw you at your most competitive and won. It follows Celestine and Remy across five days of prep, five days of proximity, and the slow, reluctant discovery that they might actually respect each other. The novel unfolds in four parts: The Venue (Monday-Tuesday), Five Days of Enforced Proximity (Wednesday-Sunday), What Changes, and New Orleans, November (the wedding day and after). The structure follows the catering timeline—the stock reduction, the roux, the trinity, the taste adjustments, the service—while building the relationship in the margins of professional work. Celestine is not a warm protagonist. She is organised, careful, and professionally exacting in a way that reads as cold until you understand that it's how she shows respect—for the food, for the people eating it