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The first thing Caleb Whitmore ever said to me was, “I need you to tell me exactly why this shit is ugly.”

I looked up from my tablet.

He stood in the middle of what would eventually become one of the prettiest spaces I’d ever designed, both hands tucked into his pockets, staring at a wall.

“It’s not ugly,” I told him.

Caleb looked at me. “It is.”

“It’s just…” I glanced around the unfinished space. “Unfinished.”

“Same thing.”

“No.” I tucked my tablet beneath my arm. “Ugly means someone made bad decisions. Unfinished means you haven’t paid me enough money to make the good ones yet.”

His head turned and that was the first time I saw his smile.

“That’s what everyone keeps telling me about you.”

I lifted a brow. “That I need more money?”

“That you aren’t easily scared.”

“Should I be scared?”

His smile widened. “Of course not.”

“Then I guess everyone was right.”

That was Caleb. At least, that was the Caleb I first met. He wasn’t loud. He didn’t walk into rooms announcing his money before his name. He didn’t wear logos big enough to tell strangers what tax bracket he belonged to. There was no entourage following him around, no assistant carrying his phone, no excessive jewelry besides a watch I knew cost more than my first car because I’d looked at one exactly like it online once and immediately closed the tab.

He was just… Caleb. A handsome thirty-three-year-old entrepreneur. He was the owner of enough businesses around the city that I’d known his last name before I’d known his face. He was apparently incapable of explaining what the hell he wanted that one business to look like.

“I want people to feel something when they walk in,” he’d told me during our initial phone consultation.

“What feeling?”

“I don’t know.”

I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it. “You don’t know?”

“I’ll know when I feel it.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“I was told you were good.”

“I am.”

“So figure it out.”

I’d almost declined the project on principle. Then his deposit hit and suddenly, I was inspired.

Three weeks later, I stood in the middle of twelve thousand square feet of exposed concrete, unfinished walls, and construction dust trying to turn I want people to feel something into an actual design concept.

I held my tablet out toward Caleb. “Tell me what you hate about it.”

He looked at it extra hard. “The wall?”