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“This Sofia is a good girl to do all of this for me, even after you broke her heart.”
“What makes you think I broke her heart?”
“You’re my son. Who wouldn’t fall in love with you? Don’t let pride make you stupid,mijo. If you love her, go make it right.”
* * *
When Jake had askedAdrian to join her on the walk-through shots Wednesday morning, Sofia had cringed. She knew that the network execs had liked the tension between her and Adrian on screen and had requested more scenes together, but this was the last thing her heart needed. They still hadn’t cleared the air, and she hadn’t managed to reconstruct those walls around her heart yet.
Every time she saw him, her heart pinched at her conscience. She could break the standoff just as easily as he could, but her pride stood in the way. They couldn’t even talk about the little things because the bigger issue felt like a boulder in the middle of the path between them. It had been two days since Graciela had come home, and Sofia still didn’t know how his mom had liked the room. She didn’t know how the trip had been. She didn’t know if Adrian had been missing her as much as she missed him this last month. She hadn’t even had a chance to tell him how she’d modified the plans after she’d seen his reports. So now they were going to end up having this conversation on camera. Fabulous.
At least she’d been able to give more attention to this design, since Meena had gotten up to speed over the last week fairly quickly. With the bulk of the office work off her mind, Sofia had been able to really create. She was very proud of the plan she’d put together, and she tried to channel some of that into excitement for the camera.
Sofia stood with Desmond and Patience Ong on the front lawn, trying to ignore the man making her heart race, standing to their left. “So, out here, we were thinking of adding a short wooden fence, since your property does face a busy street. This way, if you have kids or decide to get a pet, there is one more layer of safety between them and the traffic. I would love to do horizontal slats to give it a more modern feeling.” It would also keep the costs lower with fewer cuts and less planking, but she didn’t need to tell them that. “What do you think?”
“I think that will work. We’ve got the post hole diggers already, and I can lend a guy or two to Enzo and knock it out more quickly,” Adrian said.
“I wasn’t askingyou.”Asshole.“Patience, what do you think of the horizontal idea? I can show you pictures if you want to see what I was thinking.”
“No, I’ve seen them in the neighborhood. I like the fun and kind of funky look. What color were you thinking?”
“A very natural stain on the cedar to keep it slightly rustic.” Patience nodded, and Sofia pressed on. “In keeping with your request to turn the yard into garden space, we will add lemon, plum, and persimmon trees to the front yard, making it into a small orchard, with benches built in around the trees for comfort and ease of harvesting. I’ve got some beautiful raised planters going in the back as well.”
“Oh, I can’t wait!” The small Singaporean woman bounced on her toes and clapped her hands. Patience clearly did not possess much of her namesake.
“It’s going to be beautiful. Enzo does amazing work.”
“I know. I vetted his work on his website.” Desmond Ong, pediatrician and researcher at Stanford, was the more straight-laced of the two. It was clear that while he was willing to indulge his wife’s design ideas, he wasn’t going to commit to anything without thoroughly researching it. Sofia considered it a compliment that they’d chosen Valenti Brothers even before the show had been a consideration.
“Then you know. As for the exterior of the house, we are going to touch up the stucco in a few places and repaint it a nice neutral.”
“All this neutral. Does anything about me say neutral?” Patience gestured to her brightly colored maxi dress and grinned.
“In terms of resale value, this is the better choice for the exterior, but never fear. I’ve worked your love of color into the interiors.”
“She’s right. It makes good sense to keep the exterior in line with the rest of the neighborhood.” Adrian voiced his opinion again, and Sofia couldn’t help the glare that crept onto her face. Like she needed his help convincing Patience. Who did he think he was? This was her area of expertise.
Oh wait, that’s right. He didn’t think she had a lick of sense. She wasn’t about to give Jake the satisfaction of melting down on television, so she gritted her teeth and moved on. “Let’s head inside, and I’ll show you what I mean.”
Once inside, they all crowded into the small foyer, while Trina set up the shot from across the room. Adrian ended up behind her, while Desmond and Patience stood spooning on her right. She could feel his heat warming her even though they weren’t touching. While her heart was urging her to lean back into his strength, her head reminded her that his support and comfort were no longer hers to claim. The battle inside her was exhausting. It was all she could do to keep still as she painted the design picture from memory.
“So this is your living room.” She gestured with her hands as if she was literally throwing ideas at the walls as she spoke, knowing that was exactly how it would look after the special effects crew got their hands on it. “Over here, we’ll have a seating area, cozy couch, lots of fabrics and textures in the pillows, the rug, the window treatments. We keep the walls a bright white so that the colors all pop. Picture reds and oranges in here. I saw the picture over your fireplace at your other house, and I’m using it as an inspiration for the color scheme in this room. What do you think?”
“I love those colors. We bought that picture on a vacation in Thailand before we married, and I would love to keep it in the room.”
Yes! Another intuition validated.She didn’t need Adrian to value her work. Only her clients mattered, and so far she was two for two.
“I noticed that this living room flows into the dining room, and it looks kind of small. What are your plans for that space?” Adrian asked calmly as if the answer wasn’t a ticking time bomb he’d lobbed in her lap.
She waited until Trina had backed up into the corner of the space before escorting the couple across the floor. To the viewers, she hoped it looked like a casual transition question. “The existing footprint of the dining room is small, and you lose a lot of space to this wall here. I would love to open up the kitchen and connect it to this room, giving you a larger eat-in area in the kitchen, as well as providing more seating options for entertaining. I haven’t quite decided if I want to take out the whole wall or simply enlarge the opening and build around it.”
There, take that.No firm commitment, and she’d left herself wiggle room to make that decision later.
“Actually, in my inspection report, when I checked out that wall, I noticed that the sconces were wired in a pretty sketchy way.”
“Is that bad?” Patience looked worried, and Sofia opened her mouth to comfort her, but Adrian beat her to it.
“It’s bad if we ignore it, but it’s good if you want that wall taken down anyway. To repair it we’d have to pull off a good bit of the drywall, and since it’s not load-bearing, it would be easy to just take the whole thing out.”
