Swooooooooosh, my brain says, loudly. I use the silver Tombow I’ve been testing to represent this noise on the page. It looks disappointingly similar to the famous logo, which is strike one million against my creativity lately.

“Uh. No.”

I don’t think she buys it, her lips pursing skeptically, and for the barest, most deranged of seconds, I think of telling her. There’s this guy, I’d say. He’s a former client who picked up on a bad habit I’ve got. We don’t know each other all that well, Lachelle and me, but we’ve got a friendly rapport whenever we’re at the shop together. She’s fun and kind and as talented as anyone I know, and maybe—

“Good, you’re still here,” Cecelia says to me, breezing into the room and breaking the spell, her arms full of a stack of look-books, various paper and writing samples she’s constantly assembling and reassembling for clients who come in needing ideas. “I got a call about you yesterday.”

There’s a thud of nerves in my stomach. What if he changed his mind? What if he decided Cecelia—she is, after all, the owner of the shop those programs came out of—needed to know what I’d done? What if his agreement to meet me was his way of putting me off the scent of this, his eventual truth-telling to my former boss?

“Oh?” I manage to make that single syllable into three.

Cecelia gives me a curious look but keeps moving, setting the books onto one of the white shelves lining the walls back here, all of them tidily organized and gorgeously color-schemed, two of Cecelia’s many strengths. “Yes, a new client. She’s desperate to hire you.”

My body sags in relief. It wasn’t him. Thank God, it wasn’t him.

Cecelia turns to me, the long curtain of her straight black hair—not even a whisper of gray in there, no matter that she’s nearing fifty—slipping over one shoulder, her hands going to her hips. “Desperate,” she repeats, her smile proud.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know why people don’t use the web form I have set up on my site.” Even as I say it, I know this isn’t really what I’m apologizing for, since Cecelia’s never acted annoyed by the calls she sometimes still gets about me and my work. I’m apologizing for that thud of nerves. For the cause of that thud, and the trouble it could have caused her.

Cecelia lifts a hand from her waist, waves it dismissively. “It’s no problem. She said she’s cautious about e-mail.” She pauses, peeks out toward the front of the shop to make sure it’s still only the three of us here. “I think it’s someone famous.”