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 werefrom 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.
