The phone comes out before she even sits down.

That’s always how you know. Not the nervous energy, not the long brief, not the overpacked reference folder. It’s the phone. Out before the cape goes on, screen already pulled up, thumb hovering over an image she has clearly looked at approximately four hundred times in the last two weeks. You’ve seen this before. You know exactly what’s coming.

She turns the screen toward you with the quiet confidence of someone presenting evidence.

“I want to look exactly like this.”

You take the phone. You look at the photo. You take a breath so small she doesn’t notice it.

The woman in the image is stunning. Genuinely. High cheekbones catching the light at an angle that suggests either a very good photographer or actual architecture. Skin three shades lighter than your client’s, undertones running in a completely different direction. Eye shape that would require a different technique entirely. A bone structure that is doing the majority of the work in this photograph and is not, to put it plainly, the bone structure currently sitting in your chair.

None of this is your client’s fault. She saw something beautiful and she wanted it. That is the most human thing in the world. She did not come here to be told what isn’t possible. She came here because she believes you can give her something that makes her feel the way that woman in the photo looks. That is actually a solvable problem. It is just not the problem she thinks she’s describing.

You look at the photo one more time. Then you look at her face — the actual face, the real one, the one with its own architecture and its own light and its own very specific kind of beauty that has absolutely nothing to do with the woman on that screen. You know what you can do here. You know exactly what you’re working with.

The phone is still in your hand. She’s watching you with that particular expression people wear when they’ve already decided what they want and are just waiting to find out if you’re the one who can deliver it.

You are. Just not in the way she’s expecting.