Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
F rankie sat in bed, staring at the book on her tablet without seeing the words. Her heart and her head hurt. Her job was the only thing keeping her from being homeless. A harsh truth, but it was what it was.
But the possibility of a life with Lucas? That felt like a dream. A distant one, almost within her grasp and yet so far.
The bottom line was that a really good man was interested in being with her and she was going to have to walk away from him. A new ache bloomed in her chest. This wasn’t fair. It wasn’t one bit fair.
All because of the debt she’d incurred divorcing her husband. It was easy to say it was Tom’s fault, that the divorce had only happened because of him. That was true. But maybe she could have stuck things out. Dealt with his garbage.
She shook her head. That was a lie. She couldn’t have stayed. Not if she’d wanted to remain sane and healthy.
But this was an untenable situation. It was the absolute definition of injustice. It felt, in the worst possible way, like she was turning her back on her last chance at happiness. And she couldn’t do anything about it.
She’d never thought she’d get a second chance at love. She’d resigned herself to that reality during the divorce. She’d thought she was okay with it, too. Then Lucas had come into her life, and it was as if the sun had begun to shine on her again.
She felt valuable again. Not just because a man had looked at her. She wasn’t that vain. It was because another human being saw worth in her. Wanted her. Wanted to be with her. To spend time with her. Found value in her words and ideas. Thought she was creative and talented.
Thought she was beautiful.
A tear slipped down her cheek. She wiped it away, wishing the sick feeling inside her could be so easily disposed of.
Why was life so hard?
The screen of her tablet went dark, automatically shutting down after so many minutes without interaction. She put it aside and tipped her head back against the pillows to stare at the ceiling.
What would actually happen if she resigned as vice-principal, gave up her apartment, and moved here?
Well, for one thing, Harper hadn’t even decided to stay here, so Frankie was predicating these suppositions on a lot of maybes.
But if Harper stayed, and what if Frankie did all that, what would happen? She’d have to find another job. It probably wouldn’t pay as well or have the same benefits, but she could find something. Even being a cashier at Publix would be all right. A job was a job. Maybe she’d get a discount on groceries. That would be great.
Would she have insurance? She supposed that would depend on the kind of work she could find or where that job was. She doubted she’d be able to pay for it on her own. Insurance was expensive.
What would Harper expect her to pay? Frankie would want to pay her fair share. Just because her sister had inherited this place didn’t mean there weren’t bills. Electric, internet, water, insurance, and whatever else Frankie’s tired mind couldn’t come up with at the moment. But it wouldn’t be a small amount.
She’d have to talk to Harper about that, obviously.
Could Frankie afford whatever that amount was? What if she really did focus on her own illustration and graphic design business? How much work could she possibly pull in? Right now, the business was something she could only give her full attention to in the summer months when she wasn’t at school.
During a good summer, when she had work lined up, she might make an extra three to five thousand dollars. That was for roughly six weeks of dedicated effort. That was all the time she had off from school.
Using the low number of three thousand, she divided that by six weeks. That came out to five hundred dollars a week. Or two thousand dollars a month. Which was a measly twenty-four thousand a year. If she could get work year-round. Not exactly a lot to live on.
And if she couldn’t get work year-round?
There was no way that was enough to live on. Not with the payment she had to make toward her lawyer’s fees. Was she just supposed to stop eating? And what about insurance? Other than the necessary auto insurance, health insurance wasn’t even a consideration.
She frowned. This was a pointless exercise. There was no way she could make such a drastic change. Trying to find a way was only sinking her deeper into the stark reality of her sad swamp of a life.
Tomorrow, she would go talk to Lucas and tell him the truth. There was no future for them, no matter how much she liked him, no matter how much she wanted it. Her life just had limitations that his did not.
She’d never wanted to have a conversation less than that one.
She put her tablet on the nightstand next to where her phone was charging and turned off the light. She lay down and though she felt like crying herself to sleep, she didn’t. Wouldn’t accomplish anything and she’d just wake up with puffy eyes.
Maybe she’d have a dream about how to make a relationship with Lucas work. Or maybe she’d win the lottery.
She lay there, being sad and thinking about her life, and she realized she hadn’t checked her phone since she’d gotten home. Had she missed anything? A text from Lucas maybe? A reply from Buck?
She grabbed her phone, still attached to the charging cable, and tapped in her security code to open the home screen.
There were notifications galore, but she ignored those as she usually did and tapped on the waiting text messages.
There were two, both from Lucas.
She read the first one. Just wanted to say how wonderful today was. And how wonderful you are.
She smiled, her heart breaking a little more with the loss of what might have been. Another time, another life. She read the next one.
Hope you don’t mind, but a friend, Stacy, reached out to me about your logo design, so I gave her your email. She wants to talk to you about a logo and some illustrations.
Frankie sat up and started typing. I don’t mind that at all. Thank you. For everything. You’re pretty wonderful yourself. Night.
Out of curiosity, she opened her email app and found an entire page of unread emails. Most of them had been sent through the contact form on her website. Some were junk mail. Some were notifications of sales through her store. None were from Buck. She deleted the junk in order to have a better look at the ones that mattered.
She found one from a Stacy P. and opened it.
Hi Frankie! I’m Stacy Paul, a friend of Lucas’s and I adore the logo you did for him. I’m in the same biz he is, but I don’t cook. I do makeup tutorials, cosmetic and skincare reviews, and some lifestyle content. I am currently working with a company to launch my own product line of organic skincare and eventually makeup. Pretty early days, but I def need a logo for the packaging. It needs to be high-end and super classy as these are not going to be cheap products. I have a max budget of $2k, but have more allotted for merch, so besides the logo, I was thinking about doing a couple of cute, girly T-shirts to offer in my shop as part of the launch. Totally open to ideas.
I look forward to talking to you soon.
Stacy
Below her name, she’d included her phone number.
Frankie read the exciting email again, then tried to decide if she should respond now or in the morning. It wasn’t that late. There was no reason she couldn’t do a logo for this woman. She still had to get the illustrations for the children’s book done, but Lucas’s logo had only taken a couple of days. Those hadn’t been full days of work, either.
Still, she hesitated. She wanted to talk to Lucas about Stacy first. See what kind of customer she might be. Lucas was so easygoing. What if Stacy was super picky? What if she wanted fifteen different mockups or hated everything Frankie showed her or ended up never being satisfied?
That just made Frankie realize that if she was going to get into the logo design business, she needed to set some parameters for her work. Limits to the number of mockups. Limits to the number of changes. That sort of thing.
She’d have to investigate what other logo designers did, see how they set things up. This was new ground to her and would take a few hours of work.
Clearly, that wasn’t going to happen tonight, so the response to Stacy would have to wait. That was all right. Replying too soon might make Frankie look desperate. She wasn’t in the best state of mind to be writing important emails anyway.
She went back to her inbox to have a look at the other emails. She started with the first one. The contact form, which had been filled out on her website, contained a note telling her that the writer had heard about her on Lucas’s live broadcast, loved the logo she’d done for him, and went on to ask if she did pet portraits.
Frankie had done some. Not many, but working from a picture was fairly easy. Even so, she decided to put off answering that one as well.
She clicked through to the next email. Very similar to the one she’d just read, this one wanted to know if she did live paintings at weddings.
Frankie knew that was a thing now, but it wasn’t something she’d ever considered. She’d answer that one tomorrow, too.
Almost every contact form email was like that. Some were just notes to say they loved the logo she’d done for Lucas, but at least two-thirds of them were inquiries about possible work. One or two mentioned they planned to buy something from her shop. It was kind of staggering that Lucas’s quick mention had garnered her that much attention.
Next, she looked at the sale notifications. Her shop didn’t have a ton of products. Mostly notecards, coffee mugs, T-shirts, and tote bags, all featuring illustrations she’d done. She did some rough math in her head as she went through the receipts.
Somehow, she’d sold three hundred dollars’ worth of stuff today.
Three. Hundred. Dollars.
Didn’t mean she’d made that much. Her cut of that was more like a hundred and fifty. But still. For one day? That wasn’t bad at all. Probably more than she’d made in total since she’d opened the shop. How was that possible?
Was it all Lucas’s doing? If so, would it continue or was this a one-time thing? She had no idea, but it made her want to grab her laptop and upload more items. Maybe she should do a calendar. Most of the items that had sold were T-shirts and mugs. She’d get some new ones up tomorrow. She’d been meaning to do that for ages. Maybe she’d add some sweatshirts and hoodies, too.
More importantly, the sales made her reconsider what she’d been thinking about.
Could she truly make her side business a full-time endeavor? It felt like much more of a possibility now. She’d need to do some projections, figure out what living here would cost, calculate how much work she’d have to bring in to make ends meet but then there was the biggest factor of them all: Seeing where Harper stood.
If Harper wasn’t staying, none of this mattered.
Frankie couldn’t live here on her own.
Or could she?