“That’s great,” she says, smiling. “You guys have done such awesome work. Thank you so much.” She leans in toward me, saying, “So you knew that you were this close and you still went through with your intimidation tactic?”

She has a point.

“It was kind of a principle thing,” I whisper back, hoping the guys aren’t paying too close attention to what Jessica and I are talking about. “I am very sorry about that, though. I should have thought it through.”

“That’s okay,” she says. “Hey guys. Everything looks great, but seeing all of your amazing work has given me a few more ideas that we can do to make this space even better than it is right now.”

“What are you doing?” I murmur into her ear.

“You’ll be doing a few upgrades free of charge,” she says. “If you don’t like that, I’ll simply nullify your contract for unwillingness to complete the project as requested.”

“You can’t do that,” I tell her, becoming acutely aware that it’s not so fun to be on the business end of a personal vendetta. “The project that was requested is hardly the project that we ended up with. If anyone violated the contract, it was you.”

“Actually,” she says, turning toward me seemingly just so she can look me in the eyes when she says it, “I had my lawyer add in a clause before we signed that changes to the initial plans could be made at my sole discretion at any point during the contract. So,” she continues, “here’s an ultimatum for you: You either do exactly what I tell you to do, free of charge, or we tear up your contract and you and your men are going to be getting a much smaller paycheck than you thought you had coming, and I’m not just talking about a few bucks either. I’m talking six figures.”

This is why you shouldn’t let a client pay you in installments and why you always, always read a contract twice.

Chapter Seven

Setting Boundaries… Or Not

Jessica

“So why don’t you want me to know your name or age?” he writes.

“Just because and you haven’t told your name or age either.”

My new phone buddy and I have been chatting it up on a daily basis, and I think Kristin is onto me.

“Well I’m just around thirty but my name…I like to keep the suspense.”

“Same here…”

“Why don’t you want to talk about what you do for a living then?” he writes.

“At this point, I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t talk about it without coming across as bitter and, really, there are better things to talk about.”

He writes back, “Yeah, I can understand that. So, what do you want to talk about?”

“What do you do when the thing you love doing gets soiled by someone who can’t help but ruin everything?” I ask.

“I thought we weren’t talking about work,” he writes.

“You’re right, of course,” I respond. “How long was your longest relationship?”

“One year,” he writes. “I know that doesn’t sound like much, but I really thought she was it. You?”

“I really wouldn’t feel bad about that,” I answer. “My longest relationship was for a couple years with an older guy.”

“What happened?” he asks.

“It turned out that he didn’t really like me, so much as he wanted to make someone else jealous. It kind of sucked figuring that out.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” he writes, “my last relationship ended when I came home to find my girlfriend packing up my things.”

I smile. “Yeah, that might be worse.”

“Oh, what’s worse is that she’d apparently been ‘dating’ someone else for a large portion of our relationship. He was there helping box up my stuff.”

“All right,” I type, “I think you win this round.”

“So, have you ever gotten close to tying the knot?” he writes.

It’s really not a question I want to answer, mainly because it’s one of the few questions to which I really don’t have a good answer.

“Work always seemed more pressing,” I write. I send another, saying, “Of course, I always thought that work was going to be the catalyst for the right kind of life, but apparently that’s not exactly as advertised.”

“Isn’t it great how we’re always told that work is going to make our lives the most livable, but it just seems to get in the way of everything else?” he writes. A few seconds later, I get another message from him, saying, “I know it’s trite by now, but aren’t we supposed to work to live, not the other way around?”

“That’s what I’ve always heard,” I write and laugh as I continue, “but I have a sneaking suspicion the people telling us that are the ones who are actually benefitting from the work we do.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk about work?” he writes. “It seems like that’s what’s really on your mind right now.”

“I’m sure. I’m sorry. I’m just trying, although failing, to think of something else to talk about. Work is really the only thing I do anymore.”

“No sorries,” he writes. “You said ‘anymore’ what did you do before you worked all the time?”

It takes a minute for me to recall, but my mind finally settles on a vague, hazy memory, “I used to paint. I was never really that good at it, but I really enjoyed doing it all the same.”

“Why don’t you paint now?” he writes.

I’m sitting on my couch, and I look out the window at the night. There are a lot of things I’ve had to push to the side in order to make it work at the store.

This is what it’s like to own a business and not be super rich.

I type, “Sometimes, to fulfill one dream, you have to give up on others.”

It’s the most depressing thing I could think to write, but it’s also the most accurate.

People don’t get ahead by trying to follow all of their dreams at the same time. It’s like multitasking: Yeah, you can work on multiple things at once, but it takes longer and nothing gets done nearly as well. It’s all about focus.

The phone beeps.

“I understand that you have to refine your plans, but that doesn’t mean you have to lose who you are and the things you love in the process,” he writes.

Yeah, I kind of do.

Who knows what would happen if I wasn’t there all day every day? Someone would probably end up breaking in and I’d end up getting a phone call from the security provider on my way homes from my cancer-ridden mother’s house.

Wait.

It’s not that I don’t trust my staff—I wouldn’t have hired them if I didn’t. It’s just that they have a way of doing things and I have a way of doing things.

While I’m there, I can oversee them and correct their course, but if I’m not there, they’ll just do things the way they think they should be done, rather than the way I know they should be done.

My phone beeps again.

“Still there?”

I write back, “Yeah. I guess I just don’t trust that things would get done if I wasn’t always there to oversee it.”

I flip on the television, not so much for the entertainment value, more for the fact that it’s just nice to hear another voice than the one through which my thoughts come. Mine.

“Bad staff?” he asks.

“No,” I write, “they’re great. They helped me build this thing. They just don’t have the inside experience to deal with everything that could come through the door.”

The more I’m watching myself explain this, the less convinced I am that it’s the right course of action. The problem is that I don’t know how to do it any other way.

My phone beeps, and I read, “Why not?”

I sit there and stare at the phone.

It’s a simple question that really should have a simple answer, but I’ve got nothing here.

I write back, “What do you mean?” just to by myself some more time, but I don’t think that’s going to work.

My phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Jessica,” it’s my dad. “I don’t want to worry you, but your mother and I are in the hospital. She’s fine, but she’s in a lot of pain. I was wondering if you might be able to come and sit with her a bit tonight.”