CHAPTER FOUR LILLAH
CHAPTER FOUR
LILLAH
I'd made it home in twelve minutes. The fabric of my shirt clung to my skin. Making it home in record time was probably the only break I was going to get today.
My leather portfolio had a little damage, but the leather had caught most of the coffee saving my presentation.
Some of the liquid had seeped onto the corner of some of the presentation, mainly the mood boards.
I had spent five hours on those boards. Five hours sourcing fabric swatches and paint chips, along with material samples that I'd arranged into a visual story that would hopefully make the client see exactly what I saw, and now they had splashes of coffee on them.
I pulled into my driveway, grabbed my bag and the portfolio, slammed the car door harder than I needed to, and went inside the house.
Cooper came bounding down the hallway, tail wagging, ears flapping, his whole enormous body vibrating with excitement.
He pressed his head against my hip and looked up at me with those brown eyes, tail wagging as he licked the front of my shirt while I held up a hand.
"Not now, Coop. Mama's covered in coffee, and she's about to commit a crime."
I raced up the stairs, peeling the blouse off as I went. I held the blouse under the bathroom light, turning it in my hands.
Ruined. Completely, irreversibly ruined.
The coffee had soaked through the silk in a pattern that now looked like an inkblot.
Silk was unforgiving. Cotton could survive a coffee assault.
Polyester would shrug it off. But silk absorbed everything and forgave nothing, and once it set into the fibers, no cleaner on earth was pulling it back out.
I'd paid a hundred and sixty dollars for that blouse.
If I wanted to look the part, I had to dress it, so I'd bought it on a whim.
That blouse had been an investment, the same way my portfolio case was, and the way my business cards on the heavy cardstock with the gold foiling were an investment.
Every dollar I spent on looking professional was a dollar I was betting on myself, and this man, this dog-shit man who existed solely to ruin my things, had wiped out a hundred-and-sixty-dollar blouse with one careless turn.
I dropped the blouse in the trash and watched it sink in the bin.
I had forty-five minutes to get to my meeting with this potential new client, and I was standing in my bathroom in a coffee-stained bra having feelings about a blouse.
I dug through my closet. The navy wrap dress would work for a client meeting. It wasn't the look I'd planned, but plans had to be flexible. I'd learned to build backup options into everything I did, because the world had a habit of rearranging itself without asking my permission.
I got dressed and sprayed some Chanel No.
5 that Mila had gotten me for my birthday.
She'd wrapped it in gold paper and handed it to me with the instructions: "This is for days when you need to feel powerful.
Use it strategically." I'd laughed, but right now, standing in front of my mirror in a backup dress with a dead blouse in my trash can, I sprayed it twice.
If ever I needed to feel extra power, it was now.
I checked the mirror. I looked fine. Not great.
This was not the version of myself I'd planned to walk into this meeting as.
I'd planned to walk in and let him know I had everything under control, but this was going to have to do.
I was still getting in through the door, and whatever happened after that was up to me.
My phone buzzed. I glanced at my screen to see Mila's name.
Mila: How's the meeting prep going?
I typed back fast, one thumb, already heading for the stairs.
Lillah: Great. My neighbor spilled iced coffee on me in the coffee shop. I'm running behind. Pray for me.
Three dots.
Mila: The dog poop guy??
I gritted my teeth at the mention of his name.
Lillah: Yes, the dog poop guy.
Mila: Lillah, maybe you need to move. Or he does. One of you has to leave before you kill one another.
Lillah: I'm not moving. Can't talk, got to drive. Meeting in 40.
Mila: You're going to kill it. Call me after.
I shoved my phone in my bag, gave Cooper a quick scratch behind the ears, and headed out the door.
The leather portfolio went on the passenger seat, where I opened it to check for damage.
Two of the three were fine. The third had a coffee stain across the bottom right corner, right where the hardwood sample swatch was mounted.
I looked at it and then decided I would have to work around it.
The drive to the client's brownstone in Back Bay took twenty minutes through Boston traffic.
I spent every minute trying to push the coffee shop incident out of my mind so I could focus on the presentation I had worked on for weeks.
Mr. Andersen was a tech executive in his mid-fifties.
He had recently divorced and wanted to update the brownstone he'd gotten in the settlement.
It was a beautiful property. Four floors that all needed redoing with the original crown molding, and a kitchen that needed gutting, and he had a budget that could support the work.
This was a project that could lead to word-of-mouth referrals in Back Bay.
I needed this job. My business was growing the way new businesses grow in expensive cities: slowly.
When I'd moved here, I had enough savings to cover my home and business expenses for a little over a year, but now that cushion was getting thinner with every passing month.
I had three active projects: a kitchen renovation in Cambridge, a nursery redesign for a couple in Somerville, and a small commercial refresh for a boutique hotel in the South End.
They were small projects, but the money from them helped build my bank account back up.
I had almost finished two of them though, and that would mean no more income.
What I needed was a marquee project, something that established Winters Design as more than a one-woman operation working out of her living room.
This brownstone could be that project, and with the projected income from it, I'd be able to advertise.
I parked on a side street, checked my teeth in the rearview mirror, paid for parking, and walked into the building with my portfolio under my arm, my shoulders back and my head held high.
The meeting started well. Mr. Andersen was tall and trim with silver hair and the sort of calm confidence that came from decades of success.
He shook my hand firmly, offered me sparkling water from a glass bottle, and led me through the brownstone while I took mental notes.
The bones of the brownstone were gorgeous: twelve-foot ceilings, walnut floors, plaster detailing that modern builders couldn't replicate.
The kitchen was the weak point. The cabinets were outdated, and the layout fought the natural flow of the space, with appliances that belonged in the previous decade.
The living areas needed updating, as did the main bath.
All solvable, and exciting, if I were being honest. This was the kind of project I'd dreamed about in design school.
We settled at his dining room table, and I took a moment to set up my portfolio.
I walked him through my design philosophy: listen first, design second.
I shared with him that understanding how a client would use the space was important, something I needed before I could propose how that space should change.
I had told him all of that before in our first meeting, then I showed him the mood boards, angling the portfolio to keep the coffee-stained corner facing me.
He leaned in and looked nodding every so often as I went over things. Then he asked me questions about the reclaimed oak I'd sourced for the built-in bookshelves he'd wanted put in the study, and that was when I stumbled.
I knew I'd lost him.
My mind was back in the coffee shop. The look on the man's face, guilty, yes, but also annoyed, like my existence was an inconvenience. The way he'd held out napkins like that was going to fix my coffee-stained silk blouse.
"Miss Winters?"
I blinked. Mr. Andersen was looking at me, his hands folded on the table, his head tilted at an angle that said he'd asked me a question and was waiting for my answer.
"Sorry," I said. The word came out too fast. "Could you repeat the question?"
"Could you source the reclaimed wood for the built-in bookshelves from local suppliers instead to reduce lead time."
"Yes, I have a relationship with a reclaimed wood dealer in Vermont who I prefer to use but I also have another in western Massachusetts."
"What would the lead time be on the one in western Massachusetts?"
My brain had switched off. I ignored his question and showed him wood grain options again, only realizing once I'd finished that I'd already gone over those with him.
I could see the shift in his expression move from interested to polite, which in the client world was a death sentence.
Even though I wanted to crawl into a hole I spent the rest of the meeting trying to recover ground I'd already lost. I talked too fast, cramming information into sentences.
I skipped an important detail in the budget breakdown, the contingency line item that showed him I'd planned for surprises, which was one of the strongest parts of my proposal.
When he asked about my client revision process, I offered a generic response: "I believe in collaboration.
" I should have given the specific, confident answer I had prepared, detailing my three-stage revision process that includes milestone check-ins and 3D renderings at each phase before starting any work to prevent unforeseen issues.
By the time I packed up my portfolio, I already knew.
"I'll be in touch," Mr. Andersen said at the door, and his handshake was looser than it had been when I'd arrived. I knew he'd already decided, and it wasn't me.