Page 183 of Across His Line

There’s a mug on the side table with a ring of dried tea in the bottom. A blanket over the arm of the chair. A pair of reading glasses, a different pair, folded on the windowsill. An old silver laptop on the footstool with a sticker on the lid from a 5K she must have run.

She actually uses this room. Every inch of it.

“This is mine,” she says, unnecessarily, and sits in the green chair and opens the laptop on her knees. I sit on the arm of the chair. Rafe leans in the doorway with his hands in his pockets, like he’s only there to keep an eye on us.

The group has a plain name and forty thousand members. She scrolls.

I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s a whole world going on behind a door I didn’t know was there. People are talking about their launches like it’s normal. Ad spend. Conversion rates. Email lists. Somebody’s complaining that their refund rate went up after a price change. Somebody hired their first full-time employee and is scared about payroll. Somebody else has a membership with nine hundred people in it and is asking how to stop them from canceling in month three. There are words I’ve never seen, churn and CAC and LTV, thrown around like everybody learned them in kindergarten.

And screenshots. A dashboard with a line going up and $41,862 at the top for the month. A launch that did $112,000 in five days. A woman who teaches people to make wedding cakes with a screenshot that says $314,000 and a little party emoji next to it.

I’m staring. I can feel myself staring.

Mrs. Waleska stops scrolling on a post. A man with a sunset for a profile picture, a screenshot of $200,000 in one month, a caption in all capitals about mindset.

“That number tells you almost nothing,” she says.

“Two hundred thousand dollars tells you nothing?” I repeat in shock.

“Not without the other side.” She taps the screen. “What did he spend on ads to get it? How many people does he pay? What’s his software bill? How many people asked for their money back? Did he pay other people a cut to send him customers? Taxes. Payment fees. What did it cost him to deliver the thing?” She tilts her hand back and forth. “Two hundred thousand might be forty thousand he gets to keep. Might be seventy. Might be he lost money and he’s posting this so people buy his course about how to make two hundred thousand dollars.”

Rafe snorts from the doorway.

“Forty thousand dollars in a month is still a lot of money,” she says. “I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m saying the screenshot is the costume. Ask what they keep.”

She scrolls further and stops on something else. A woman who sells planning templates to wedding photographers, posting a little anniversary note. Four years. She mentions, almost in passing, that she does about eighteen thousand a month, keeps most of it, works three days a week, and lives near her mother.

“Her,” Mrs. Waleska says. “I’d rather be her.”

I look at the post for a long time. Eighteen thousand isn’t two hundred thousand. It isn’t the biggest number on the page. It’s just a woman who built something that gives her a life she apparently likes, and goes three days a week, and has her mother close.

I take out my notebook and write REVENUE ≠ PROFIT and draw a box around it.

Mrs. Waleska closes the laptop. She looks up at me from the chair with her glasses back on top of her head.

“What do you actually want money to do for you?” she says.

The first thing that comes up in my head is stupid. A car. Security. An electric bill that I can always pay no matter what. A coat that isn’t from the Goodwill.

“I want to never have to go back to my grandma’s,” I say slowly. “I don’t want to worry. I want savings. I want to travel. I don’t want to worry about being homeless.” I stop. Start again. “Sorry. I just want to be able to help my grandma without—”

I don’t finish that one.

She doesn’t make me.

“Then build around that,” she says.

She doesn’t tell me to make a course, or start an agency, or go be Lorraine. She gets up out of the chair and goes to the shelf by the window.

She doesn’t pull down a stack. She pulls down three books. A thick one about why people buy what they buy. A thinner one about pricing, with a cracked spine and her handwriting all over the margins. One from Tony Robbins.

“Don’t treat any of these like scripture,” she says. “Half the people who write business books got lucky once and spent the next twenty years explaining why. But there’s good in them.” She taps the pricing one. “Chapter four. And six. Skip the part in the middle where he talks about his yacht.”

I hold them against my chest, all three.

“And don’t start something because somebody online says it’s profitable,” she says. “For business to last, you have to like what you do. There needs to be more than just money. Focus on impact.” She nods. “Learn why people buy. The rest comes after.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll be careful with them.”