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“I just…didn’t know it would be so short. I think.”

“On the sides, here?” Tressa Fay feathered the layers that made up her client’s new long, wavy shag.

“No, in the back.”

“In the back?” Tressa Fay lifted the long waves in the back, fanning them out for the mirror she was holding up so the client could see. “I dusted off about a half inch back here, since you still wanted it mid-back.”

“No, not the back. Like, the pieces over the ears, maybe.”

“On the sides.” Tressa Fay tried not to smile. It didn’t disturb her that this young woman was feeling a way about her new cut, fighting unease. Nothing bothered Tressa Fay more than when someone said, It’s just hair. It will grow back. That might be strictly true, but how a person felt while a haircut they didn’t love grew back weighted and darkened that whole era and made it not as good as it could have been.

Hair was important. People had emotional and even sacred connections to their hair. Hair was a part of multiple stories in multiple faiths.

“Yes. On the sides.” Tressa Fay’s client looked at herself in the mirror, where the new cut had opened up her face. It meant, yes, her eyes looked bigger. Her dark, beautifully shaped brows were highlighted. Her one deep dimple in her cheek and the cleft in her chin were framed lovingly and expensively. But also, she had been using this hair to disguise the texture of the skin on the sides of her face, where it was scarred and pigmented from acne.

Tressa Fay herself found the texture of her client’s skin interesting. It had character. She was a very pretty woman. But this wasn’t about how Tressa Fay felt.

She heard the door jingle and Mary talking in a low voice to someone up front. She had thought the woman in her chair was her last client, but maybe she’d misremembered. She kept her focus on the mirror, looking into her client’s eyes.

“You liked to have your hair along here.” Tressa Fay pulled some longer layers forward over the scarring.

Her client nodded. “Yeah. I’m not used to…” She put her hands up along her face.

“In high school, I had really long hair,” Tressa Fay said, playing with the cut, more to soothe than to style. “And my hair is a lot like yours. I wore it all down, like you did when you came in today.”

She met Tressa Fay’s eyes in the mirror. “Because of your birthmark.”

“Yeah.” Tressa Fay touched her temple, where the birthmark started, and smoothed her hand over where it bloomed red along the side of her face, on her neck, a bit over the ends of her collarbones, over her shoulder, down her arm. “Especially here”—Tressa Fay touched her jaw and neck—“where it’s darker and a little rough.”

“Makeup doesn’t cover that kind of thing.”

“No.”

“When did you cut your hair short?”

“I had been sick in the hospital. I had too many bills and no money. I couldn’t make rent. I was sleeping on my dad’s sofa because he had already turned my old bedroom into a space where he could tie flies and store his fishing gear. I got really frustrated and sat on the bathroom counter and cut a French bob with my razor, myself, using a picture I found of this old film star, Lillian Gish, who mostly wore her hair long, but it was hair like mine and yours, an unholy mix of curly and thick and wavy, and in the picture I had, she’d cut it like mine.”

“You haven’t let it grow again?”

“I wanted to for a while. I felt kind of naked. But I had never gotten compliments on my eyes before. Then I did. Then someone complimented my birthmark, and that was something even my closest friends had never talked about, because obviously they could tell I didn’t want to. But with it exposed like that, the assumption was that I didn’t care, or that I liked it myself.”

The client looked at herself. “It’s such a banging haircut. It’s exactly what I wanted. It’s just that I hadn’t thought about the other thing.”

“It’s okay. Do you want to come back in a week and check in? Even if you love it?”

Her client laughed, then sniffed and wiped away a tear. “Yes.”

“Okay, let’s do it. Hey, Mary? Could we get Katie in here in about a week?”

Mary turned around and gave her big eyes, then motioned over to the bench in the little waiting area.

Tressa Fay looked.

Oh.

It was Meryl, who she hadn’t seen or heard from since they parted outside the salon four days ago. Meryl was sitting on the bench, watching Tressa Fay, wearing a black sleeveless knee- length dress and green Mary Jane heels. Work clothes. Her hair was piled up on her head in a big, messy bun, and she had on dark horn-rimmed glasses. If all of this had been calculated as a campaign to destroy Tressa Fay where she stood, Meryl had succeeded. Tressa Fay wanted to put her mouth on Meryl’s neck and breathe her in, even while she was hurt that Meryl hadn’t contacted her, at all , when she’d promised to.

Trouble, trouble, trouble.

Meryl looked at her steadily, leaning forward a little. She raised her eyebrows. Tressa Fay glanced back to Mary, who shrugged.

Tressa Fay finished up with her client, giving her a hug and sending her to Mary to schedule time in a week for any needed adjustments. Once that was done, Mary came up to Tressa Fay, close. “Do you want me to tell her to leave? Do you want me to stay? Take her picture and drag her? Use me.” Mary fluttered her new eyelash extensions, which had a lot to serve alongside her pigtails and sequined romper.

“I’m okay, for real. It’s possible there’s an ordinary explanation. Phones are weird, right? Maybe she put my number in wrong. Didn’t pay her phone bill. Maybe she only just recovered her memory after a bout with amnesia.” Tressa Fay was not cracking Mary’s skepticism.

“You’ve been out of the game for a while.”

“That’s true.” Tressa Fay felt the strap of her shortalls fall down her arm, exposing the scanty bra she wore with them. She did not adjust, given she could feel Meryl looking at her.

“So, because you’ve been out of the game”—Mary reached out and pulled up the strap—“I doubt you’ve recently exercised the self-preservation necessary to survive out there.”

Tressa Fay glanced over at Meryl again. She had pulled a book out of her bag and was reading. Her knees were as freckled as ever, God help her.

“Look at me,” Mary said.

“I can’t. She’s too hot, and she’s right there.”

Mary cast her long-lashed eyes to heaven. “You can have any number of hot women, Tressa Fay. You deserve one who calls when she says she will, and, if she can’t, does everything in her power to follow up some other way. Especially after hours of conversation and, hello, a fucking free trim. Don’t think I didn’t notice you comped that.”

“I can’t charge a client I had active prurient thoughts about while performing a professional service.”

“Keep it together.” Mary poked her finger into Tressa Fay’s chest. “I mean it.”

“I will.”

Mary narrowed her eyes at her. “You won’t. I’ll stay up late in case you need help in the aftermath.”

“You’re a good friend. Go away.”

Mary sighed and picked up her bag at reception, shooting a glare at Meryl before walking out the door.

Then it was just the two of them.

Tressa Fay turned to face her, and Meryl put away her book and smiled at her like she was the only reason on Earth to smile, which Tressa Fay’s heart and clitoris were completely convinced of in the moment, proving that Mary was right and Tressa Fay had no self-preservation whatsoever.

“You can keep reading. I have to clean my station.”

“I wouldn’t read. I would just watch you. Your outfit looks precarious, and I’m here for it.” Meryl crossed her legs and smiled at her again. Tressa Fay was definitely falling for these moves. They were excellent moves. Meryl’s moves had lots of corporate domme-y vibes, and so they were easily taking Tressa Fay out.

She decided not to preserve herself. She bent over much more than was necessary and used her strop to polish her razor suggestively. She unbuckled her leather thigh holster like she was getting paid to do it. When her strap fell down again, she did not put it back up, and she told herself that sluttishly gamboling in Meryl’s hot, hot gaze was recompense for Meryl’s not calling her after their date.

When she’d finished, she walked over to the bench and sat down next to Meryl.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” Meryl said.

Tressa Fay waited for her to offer an explanation, but there was nothing more. She turned sideways on the bench to rest her head against the wall. “It did hurt. I thought we had…something.”

Meryl smiled. “We did. You’re right. I haven’t stopped thinking about you.”

“What about?”

Meryl closed her eyes. “Everything. I’ll think about how your hands felt in my hair, then about one of your funny celebrity stories, then remember when you told me about how you’re restoring the clothes you inherited from your mom so that you can wear them. I think about your body and how it moves. Whether I could draw the shape of your birthmark from memory.” She opened her eyes. “I think about other stuff, too.”

Tressa Fay raised her eyebrows.

Meryl smiled.

She looked a little tired, now that Tressa Fay was close. Her eyelids were puffy. Her freckles seemed to stand out all over her face, and her upper lip—that soft, bitable upper lip—looked like she had been rubbing it.

She’d done that on their walk, rubbing it with her first two fingers when she was thinking hard about something that Tressa Fay had asked her.

“What do you want?” Tressa Fay’s body was humming. The music in the salon was still playing, a new Taylor Swift this time, anchoring this moment in the here and now, the light outside pale and bright.

“So many things.”

“Pick one.”

“Go swimming with me.”

“It’s May. We’ll freeze, even though it’s seventy-five degrees out. Unless you mean, like, at one of the indoor places.”

Meryl shook her head. “Tell me your address. I’ll pick you up in an hour. Wear a swimsuit and shoes that can get wet.”

“This doesn’t sound like something I’m going to like.”

But it did. It sounded like an adventure. The kind with wet hair and slippery limbs and, hopefully, kissing.

The next hour went by in a bright streak, Tressa Fay racing home to feed Epinephrine and mist the plants and try on her swimsuits, one after the next, which was what she was doing when Meryl knocked on her door and the sound zipped through her whole body in the best, best way.

She noticed that she hadn’t wondered if Meryl would come. Even though Meryl had said she would get back to her and then had not. Which meant Tressa Fay was as unprotected as Mary feared, but also that she trusted this Meryl Whit.

She answered the door in her red one-piece that was technically one piece, as in one piece of two-inch red spandex flossed through a giant brass ring that circled her belly button. She had managed to dig an old pair of Converse up from the bottom of her closet, which she tied onto her bare feet.

Meryl gasped and shook her head. “No.”

She was kitted out in an adorable light blue tankini that was exactly what a marine biology student would wear to a field lab. It covered nearly everything and looked sturdy. The bottoms weren’t even swimming briefs, but sensible swimming shorts. Its description in the catalog likely promised long wear. It made Tressa Fay want to lick her.

“This is my swimsuit. Take it or leave it.”

Meryl reached out, slid one finger under the strap, and rubbed it over three inches of Tressa Fay’s upper chest. It should not have been so completely, utterly killing, but Tressa Fay was in a state. She stepped closer to Meryl. “I like your suit, too.”

Meryl looked down and laughed. “Really.”

“It is the swimsuit that Lois Lane would wear on a picnic date with Clark Kent when they sat side by side and watched the water and thought very deeply and in extremely dirty detail about what they wanted to do to each other, but only their pinky fingers ever touched, because they are coworkers, and she doesn’t know he’s Superman yet.”

“That is incredibly specific.”

“That’s really all you need to know to keep me erotically interested. Specificity.”

Meryl’s laugh was hard and a little shocked, and Tressa Fay savored it like the gift-wrapped present it was.

“Like you said, though, it’s not summer yet. You probably want to bring something to wear over it. And a towel. I have a sweatshirt and leggings in my car for after.”

Tressa Fay loved how serious and bossy Meryl sounded, like a midwestern mom. She grabbed a hoodie from her sofa and dug in a laundry basket on the floor for a pair of shorts and a towel. She held the shorts up for Meryl’s inspection.

Meryl laughed and moved out of the doorway so Tressa Fay could step out and lock up. She noticed Meryl didn’t invite herself in or express any curiosity about her apartment. Which was interesting, but also, they’d only had one date.

“Your swimsuit,” Meryl said from behind her while Tressa Fay did up the locks.

“Yep.”

“There’s nothing but you back here.”

Tressa Fay smiled at the door, then looked over her shoulder. “You’re going to see so much more. Are you ready? Because this thing will not stay in place for love or money. It’s like trying to bridle a cat.”

Meryl was still laughing when they got to the bottom of the stairs and pushed through the door to the street. She showed Tressa Fay to her car, which was the most practical possible Toyota hybrid sedan, navy blue, with gray upholstery. Tressa Fay had to take a moment after she’d buckled herself into the passenger seat. Meryl’s car was so clean, it still smelled new. Such a smart-girl car in every way.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

“It’s a secret.” Meryl pulled out of the space. She had a backup camera, but she checked all of her mirrors and did a shoulder check behind her. Tressa Fay could watch her drive forever. “But also, have you ever gone creeking?”

“You’re kidding! You’re taking me creeking!” Tressa Fay couldn’t stop smiling.

“I am. And just so you know the whole plan, because I hurt your feelings and I do feel awful, afterward I am getting you a root beer float.”

Tressa Fay wrapped her arms around her middle, looking out the window at the farmland they were passing, feeling as though she had been on a path that led right to this moment, the nice interior upholstery warm against her nearly bare behind, watching Meryl’s golden tangerine hair blow around in the breeze.

They passed a farm stand selling eggs and strawberries. It had a big hand-painted sign made by someone who was an artist, and Tressa Fay recognized it. She had been to that farm stand with Amy, in May, though the weather hadn’t been this warm and breezy. It was cold and overcast. They’d just had a long argument, tearful on Tressa Fay’s part, determined and relentless and full of examples on Amy’s. She was a lawyer, after all.

It’s an incredible opportunity , Amy had said, looking over the contract Tressa Fay had been asked to consider. But I’ll help you find good representation in LA so this can be reviewed properly. You never want to accept someone’s boilerplate contract. It’s just an opening .

Tressa Fay had looked at Amy, her sleek dark hair falling over her shoulder as she flipped through the offer and reviewed a contract from a big studio that wanted Tressa Fay to do a kind of reality show following her days as she cut celebrities’ hair. There was talk in the offer about building a lifestyle platform to “celebrate” brands and celebrity wellness experts engaged in “clean, eco-safe, toxin-free” living.

It’s not really me , she’d tried to explain. Amy’s excitement over something was always so powerful.

But it’s exactly you , she’d said. It’s hair. You’ve worked with celebrities. Several are your regular clients, and you’re even friends with them .

Tressa Fay shrugged that off. She didn’t really think anyone could be friends with someone who was around once or twice a year. Texted sometimes. Sent a party invitation. I’ve worked hard to build what I have.

You’ve built this, too! Amy smiled. I mean, the way you’re doing this, right now, there’s a cap, right? Because it’s just you and Mary. There are only so many haircuts you can do in a week. You won’t even train and hire another stylist.

I can charge what I charge and pay myself and Mary what we’re paid because it’s just me. If there were another stylist, we’d be oversaturating the market in this area for what I do. Tressa Fay tried to ignore how thick her throat was. They’d talked about this before.

But another stylist could keep your salon doing what it does while you did this in LA, at least during filming. It would let you diversify your platform, collaborate with brands, which means different income streams. Much, much bigger income streams. Amy sounded like the language in the offer.

It wouldn’t actually be me anymore. It would be a lot of other people’s idea of me.

You’d still be you. The rest would be business. Smart business.

And there it was, what it always circled back to between her and Amy, which was an unspoken collusion between the two of them to agree that all the different factors and colors and experiences that made Amy who she was were more…elite. More than what made Tressa Fay.

Amy had never said as much. And Tressa Fay had never explicitly accused Amy of having such an opinion. Sometimes she would try to say it, even if it was awkward, but then Amy would simply provide a long list of unimpeachable examples of how her feelings about Tressa Fay were nothing but proud, excited ones, and so then Tressa Fay would end up confused and insecure. The hit to her self-esteem would hang around for days afterward.

That argument had been the first time Tressa Fay directly objected to Amy’s personal record of their relationship and persisted in talking about how she felt. But somewhere along the way, she’d lost the plot. She’d lost what she was trying to make naked between them so they could fix it, and she’d agreed to Amy’s suggestion that they take a drive. Take a breath.

They’d ended up at the farm stand, where they bought a half flat of fragrant, early, bright red strawberries.

Every single one had gone soft and moldy, uneaten.

“Tell me about a time when your heart was broken.” Tressa Fay looked over at Meryl driving. In the close quarters of the car, she could smell her sunscreen. She could hardly believe she’d asked something so deeply personal on a second date. “But if you don’t want to, it’s okay.”

“I don’t mind.” Meryl’s voice was soft and low. “I’m not going to tell you about the biggest time. I can’t yet. But I can tell you about the second worst. I was engaged.” Meryl glanced over.

“Oh.” Tressa Fay had told Meryl on their walk that she had almost been engaged, that someday she wanted all of that, but she’d only sketched an idea of Amy.

“I told you about my friend James.”

“Yes.”

“Well.” Meryl smiled, taking a turn onto a narrower county road. “After James, there was Kaley. She worked in the mayor’s office. She wrote the copy for releases, materials, community education, that kind of thing. Still does, although now she’s assistant press secretary.”

“Fancy.”

“Kaley is fancy. She’s charming, ambitious. She’s the kind of person that doesn’t just say it would be a good time to see the Broadway show everyone is talking about, in New York, on Broadway. She books the tickets on her phone the first time she reads about it. On our second date, I mentioned how much I had enjoyed martial arts as a kid, and she signed us up for lessons that we went to for our whole relationship.”

“Did she have a lower gear?”

“She definitely did not.” Meryl signaled at a four-way stop where the other vehicles were farm vehicles. “If anything at all was scalable, she was ready with an action plan, with money, with ideas. Everything important could always be bigger.”

“Oh,” Tressa Fay breathed, mostly to herself. Scalable . An idea that always seemed to come for her, mostly to make her feel like she was doing something wrong. “Including you?”

“Yes. That’s right. And if you were in the middle of the action plan, on your way to more, and you didn’t like it, and put it aside or let it go, or changed course, you were a quitter.”

A chill had crept into Meryl’s voice, a sort of super calm that told Tressa Fay that they had hit a sensitive subject. “Kaley wasn’t a quitter,” Tressa Fay ventured.

“No. She was a finisher. Always.” Meryl’s hands gripped the steering wheel, and then she sighed. “But before I sound…Here’s the thing. She’s generous. Being the person who Kaley loved was like breathing pure oxygen, when before you’d just been breathing air.”

Meryl turned her car off the road onto a gravel one-lane access path that cut through a field. There was a small metal sign on a pole with a barcode on it, and she stopped her car and stuck her hand out the window to scan the barcode with her phone. “This creek is one we monitor to tell us what the water table is doing. I’ll put in a few data points later about anything I notice. My scanning the code just confirms I was here.”

“That’s incredibly sexy.” Tressa Fay laughed, mostly at herself, since she hadn’t entirely thought in advance about saying that out loud. “But you didn’t get married.”

Meryl shook her head. “Here’s the part where I won’t hold it against you if it changes your opinion about me. We didn’t get married, no. Not because she didn’t want to. In fact, she planned the most beautiful, amazing, huge wedding. Such a huge wedding, completely paid for, that I walked away from two weeks before it was supposed to happen.”

The control had crept back into her voice as Meryl said this and parked her car. Tressa Fay could see the creek sparkling through the trees, shafts of light hitting big rocks that the clear water rushed past and around. She could hear the creek. Smell it.

“I think sometimes I would really like to have gone to that wedding,” Meryl said. “It would have been something. But I couldn’t be a bride in that wedding. I couldn’t have told the truth in front of everyone at that wedding. I didn’t believe in it. I wanted to. I still often think I should have been able to. But I didn’t have faith when it counted.”

Meryl’s tone hadn’t let go of any of the tight control. It told Tressa Fay this was something Meryl thought was true about herself—that she wasn’t someone who had faith when it counted.

Meryl’s hand was resting on the gearshift. Tressa Fay reached over and took it. She had been thinking about doing that for a while.

Meryl turned her palm up and laced their fingers together.

Tressa Fay found it easy to believe Meryl’s heartbreak wasn’t about faith. She thought instead that this was a woman who’d walked away, two weeks before her wedding, because she couldn’t marry Kaley and stay true to herself.

It was the same reason Tressa Fay had torn up the contract for the reality show. The reason behind the worst of her fights with Amy. The truth that Amy wouldn’t talk about.

But this felt true. Right here. Holding Meryl’s hand.

That was what mattered about living your life, wasn’t it?

The story that you, and no one else, could tell.