“Do you want me to take off the coverings?” he asked. “Would you like to take a complete look at it?”
“No, it’s probably okay.” But then that inner voice of hers urged her to say, “No, we need to check it.”
He didn’t say a word. He just popped onto the scaffolding to the intricate set of ropes and wires that kept the sheets over the wall. When he finally had everything rolled up, she stepped back and nodded. “It looks fine.”
“Check it carefully,” he said. “We’ve only got a couple days.”
“I know,” she said with a smile. “Let me just stand here for a moment.” She checked each of the quarters, looking at a couple spots that she wanted to touch up on the last day, mentally filing them away. By the time she had checked it over carefully, she nodded and said, “Go ahead and cover it up again.”
He quickly dropped the coverings again, but it still took a good twenty minutes with the two of them tugging and pulling sheets back into place. He hopped down from the scaffold and said, “Satisfied?”
“I’m glad I took a closer look at it,” she admitted. “Peace of mind is worth a lot right now. Not to mention the fact that I think a couple things need to be tweaked at the top.”
He nodded. “I was wondering about that.”
“We can do that after we do the model.”
“Did you pick a model?”
She nodded. “Somebody I’ve never worked on before.”
“That’s taking a chance, isn’t it?”
“It is,” she said, “but—” She shrugged. “I’ll probably give all four of these gals a try, depending on which art piece I’m working on.”
He nodded.
“We’ll have what, three hundred people in here for this?”
“At least,” he said, rolling his eyes. “This is a big one.”
“They’re all big,” she said.
“But this is another huge charity project.”
She nodded. “For the animals.”
“And I suppose you did it at half price again, didn’t you?”
“Hard for me to not help out the animals,” she said with a slow smile.
“I get that,” he said. “It’s just an interesting thing.”
“It is what it is,” she said.
He nodded. “And you are what you are. Most people don’t realize it, and you never advertise that you do a lot of this for a fraction of the price.”
“People don’t want to hear that,” she said with a laugh. “They want to know that it’s all perfect and brilliant for right now, and then they yearn for the next moment.”
“You’ve become quite well-known,” he said with a laugh. “Famous.”
She shook her head. “No, I’m a realist. People want to be entertained for a few hours, and then they want to move on to the next thing.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything. He stepped up to her side as they walked out of the front door.
She took several slow deep breaths.
“Are you doing okay?”
“I’m doing okay,” she said. “It’s a process.”
“That is so very true, but you’re holding up well.”
“No, not really,” she said, but she didn’t want to tell Frankie about the parcels, the security guard at her apartment, or even the development of her relationship with Richard.
They slowly walked back to Cayce’s gallery. Frankie stopped and said, “I’ll head over to the coffee shop for a few minutes. I see a friend of mine is over there. And thanks so much for seeing Bellamy too. I know you had to move her original appt, but appreciate you squeezing her in.”
She waved him off and finished the last few blocks on her own. When she walked back in, she said to Anita, “Before I forget, please hire security from now on for all my installations in progress to protect from any vandalism, starting today if possible at the Arctic Ice project.” Anita nodded, frantically scribbling it all down. “Okay, let’s get at it.”
The next hour flew by as Cayce dealt with the business side of her life.
With all that finally dealt with, Anita hopped off her chair and said, “Now I’m going for lunch because it’s late.”
Cayce looked at her watch. Already one-thirty. Later than she thought. She groaned. “How is it that time just flies by?” she asked out loud. She headed to her office, realizing she still hadn’t heard from Richard all morning. That’s how bad it was, for him and for her, dealing with the fallout of Elena’s death. Yet she also kept expecting to hear from him, to see him, to be with him because she just plain missed him. It was a very strange stage of life for her.
Just then her cell phone rang. She snatched it up, and, sure enough, it was Richard.
“Did you eat?” he asked.
“No,” she said. She settled into her office chair, listening to Anita leave.
“Do that now.” Then he was gone.
She laughed. While he did hang up on her, and he did give her an order—and she wasn’t good with those—he had at least softened his tone of voice for her.
Now feeling a little weird and outside of herself, as if something was not normal, she got up and walked around, going into Anita’s office, and then heading back out to the main gallery area. This space wasn’t huge for a gallery, but it was more grandiose than she probably needed.
Something was still off, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
She wasn’t exactly sure how she’d been convinced into signing up for this lease. But she had, and this space had a lot of good things going for it. She just didn’t know why she felt disgruntled right now.
As she turned around, sensing somebody, she noted the cleaners were here. One cleaning guy looked over
