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“I’m not sure what to ask for.” The young woman in her chair was petite, with huge blue eyes and a lot of very coily, bright-red hair that was currently one length, halfway to her shoulders.

“Hmm.” Tressa Fay sprayed some water on the woman’s hair and squeezed it through, looking at how it wanted to fall and what her curl pattern was. “Has it ever been cut in a style you’ve loved that you can tell me about?”

She shook her head rapidly, almost violently, and pressed her lips together. “Not ever. No.” Tressa Fay noticed the woman shrinking away from herself in her reflection in the mirror, looking at everything but her hair.

Tressa Fay avoided her own reflection, too, though she got a glimpse when she tried to catch the client’s eyes in the mirror. Hair too long. Dark circles. Too thin.

“Have you taken a look at pictures that you think are inspiring?”

“Sometimes I see something I like, but it’s always on hair a lot different from mine.”

Tressa Fay smiled at that. “Sure. Not very many people have glorious hair like yours.”

Her client sighed. “That’s what everyone says, but I kind of hate being a redhead. Everyone always feels like it’s license to say something to you. Or even to say something completely gross to you.”

Tressa Fay’s hands stilled. She could feel a warm rock ledge under her thighs and Meryl’s finger tracing over her birthmark. “My girlfriend told me that,” she let herself say. To her surprise, it didn’t feel wrong. It didn’t feel bad or doomed. If anything, that small act of claiming made Meryl feel closer.

My girlfriend. The memories from the creek. The water and the fossil and the cold—it had happened to Tressa Fay.

Her client met her eyes in the mirror. “Your girlfriend is a redhead?”

Tressa Fay smiled, the muscles in her arms and hands aching to think of Meryl, her smile, her body, what it felt like to hold her and to kiss her. “Yeah, she is.”

The client watched Tressa Fay’s face with shy interest, and then Tressa Fay got it. “Are you looking for a haircut that will speak to feelings around your identity? That can be a really hard thing to explain to a stylist, and also, it’s a different haircut for different people, but sometimes there are shared elements.”

Her client’s expression was big-eyed and soft. “Like, maybe with a part that’s…shaved?”

“Sometimes. Is it something like that you’re thinking about?” Tressa Fay let the client’s curls slip over her fingers, looking at her pointed chin and big eyes, the tiny hoop in her russet eyebrow.

“Yeah. I just didn’t know what to say, because my hair’s so curly, and no cut like that I’ve seen is. I’ve looked online, and when I went to Pride, there were so many people who looked so good. Like how I would like to look.” She couldn’t meet Tressa Fay’s eyes in the mirror, but her cheeks had gotten red and her mouth very determined.

Tressa Fay studied the shape of her client’s face. “That’s true. I feel like a lot of the really cool photo sets you see with an emotionally queer haircut feature very straight, shiny textures, or heavily styled texture that requires a lot of product.”

Her client smiled for the first time. “But there can be cool things done with hair like mine?”

“Oh my God, yes. It’s my favorite. You have to think about hair like yours as a texture or material that has a lot more body than straight hair. Your hair has more ability to be shaped and sculpted, and you don’t have to rely on linear shapes. Can I show you my bestie Guy’s hair? They have wavy, thick hair, and I cut it in a masc direction, but still a bit soft.”

“Yes.”

Tressa Fay showed her the pictures that had been taken back in October at Gayle’s house, on a stool in her kitchen, with Guy making their seductive face for Michael, who was behind the camera.

“Oh! That’s so…” Her client looked at the next photo in the set. “I like that.”

“It’s very pulled in on the sides. We could even shave or buzz up through here and stack the top all the way back to your nape. A kind of punk mullet? It would grow out cool, too.” Tressa Fay showed her by manipulating her hair.

“Yes. I want that. Thank you.” Her eyes met Tressa Fay’s in the mirror, finally, and they were shiny with tears. “That would be perfect.”

“Okay! I’m going to have Mary take you to the shampoo bowl.”

Her client slid out of the chair, and Tressa Fay listened to her chatting with Mary while she sat at Mary’s desk at reception with her phone cradled in her palm.

In every relationship, there was always an item connected to it that ended up having its own heartbeat. When she was young, it was often a picture or a piece of clothing, and no matter what the outcome of that relationship had been, she’d never wanted to let go of the picture or the T-shirt or the jacket. She’d wanted to have them to revisit, to understand just how far she had come each time she pulled on the shirt or saw the jacket in the closet or showed the picture to a friend. Over time, these kinds of things became more about herself than the other person or even the relationship. They became artifacts of her own life.

Tressa Fay never knew what they would be. She’d thought when her relationship with Amy ended that it would be the engagement ring she’d designed and brought home from Los Angeles, but it wasn’t. It was a beautiful bracelet Amy had bought Tressa Fay early in their relationship, too early, really, for a bracelet so expensive—a pure silver cuff set with faceted smoky quartz—but they’d both weathered the blushing self-consciousness of the gesture with a kind of sweetness that Tressa Fay would always associate with what she’d loved best about Amy. What had been lost between them.

She ran her finger down the screen of her phone. She had never let the battery go into the red, not one time since October.

Probably she wasn’t the first person managing the bittersweetness of a long-distance relationship who’d started to feel this way about their phone. A bit like it was the person they longed for. A lot grateful for it, and a lot resentful of it. Completely sensitive to its noises and alerts, almost like she would be to a child’s, and all the while trying to suppress how much she hated it.

She’d hated the phone. Hated the distance. She’d hated the substitution of words for skin. She’d hated how texting distorted meaning and tone and nuance. She’d hated how, no matter how much she talked to Meryl, most of the time the phone was a silent, black, shuttered window that looked in on nothing.

Five months ago, she had woken up next to Meryl in Meryl’s room. Epinephrine was asleep at the foot of the bed. She remembered because it was a day she’d had off from the salon for the floors to be polished, and because she’d woken up today in her own bed with Epinephrine, feeling that moment with Meryl all over again. And for the first time.

“Let’s go to that new cat café across the street from your salon and eat Korean hot dogs at Pink Guava.” Meryl had sat up in bed, pushing her hair from her face.

“Are you sure you actually want to go inside? Because I know few people who can resist a rescue who is determined to be taken home.” Tressa Fay stretched, and Epinephrine licked her toe.

“I’ve decided. I’m going to adopt that little tuxedo cat. I want to name him Spring.”

“So you’re finally done with flirting with him through the window.” Tressa Fay had leaned over and kissed Meryl’s neck.

Now she traced her fingertip around the screen of her phone. I miss you.

She wished so often that she could be the Tressa Fay in August, even though that Tressa Fay worried, watching the days creep toward September. Even though August Tressa Fay had gotten a little angry with Meryl after she fell in love with that cat, because what if she wasn’t there to take care of him? Tressa Fay didn’t want a cat who knew her only as the lady who wept into his fur.

The bell over her door rang, and James came in wrapped in a huge silver puffer coat and a dark gray stocking hat that Meryl had knit for him years ago when they dated.

“Hello, you beautiful thing,” she said.

“Come here, darling, and give me a hug.” He hung his coat up on the hook, and Tressa Fay got up and put her arms around him and breathed in his cold air and spicy smell. “This is a good hug.” He squeezed her hard one more time, and, for a heartbeat, everything James mixed together. Every meal they’d ever shared, when he had come into her salon for the first time, how he looked at Mary.

She stood back. “Always the best hugs. Your girl is almost done, and you can take her away if you want. I have one more today, and that client doesn’t get their hair washed.”

“You can take me,” Mary called up. “I am almost so takeable.” Mary had Tressa Fay’s client sitting up, and she was arranging a length of jersey in front of her to wrap around her curly hair.

“I’ll get her hair good and hydrated, Mary. You can bring her over after you plop her curls.”

Mary walked the client over to the chair. “Let me clean up, Jamesie, and then I belong to you.” She kissed him on his jaw. Tressa Fay didn’t miss how his eyes closed.

She was fastening on her scissor-and-comb holster and her razor holster, listening to Mary hum while she cleaned up the shampoo station, when James touched her arm. “Catch up with Gayle today, okay?” he asked. “She was thinking about getting everyone together, but I told her to hold up. I really think you should talk to her, though.”

Tressa Fay took a deep breath against her instant aversion. “I will, for sure. Are you and Mary still meeting up with Michael and Guy?”

“You bet,” Mary said. “We’re going to that place that used to be pizza before it was barbecue and is now vegan street food? You know, like way over by Baird Creek?”

Tressa Fay’s client turned around to smile at Mary. “That place is pretty weird,” she said. “It was so unexpectedly nice and good, my friend and I wondered if it was secretly fundamentalist.”

Mary nodded. “That is always a hard call around here. Will report back.” She stood in front of James, who helped her put her coat on, and then she kissed him while he tried to put on his, and they were gone.

James and Mary and Michael and Guy barely seemed to notice anymore the way their mutual past shifted and changed. The changes were no more than ripples, layers sifting in and out of their history together—things they made into jokes or cheerfully bewildered remarks. What Tressa Fay had observed was the same thing she’d noticed after she and Meryl decided to meet each other back in May and Meryl walked into her salon for a trim. The strongest effect of the experiment was on their feelings for each other.

It was how they were able to love each other and hadn’t been before.

But for Tressa Fay, it only made her notice more acutely that Meryl wasn’t here. She knew Gayle felt the same. The two of them were closest to Meryl, and so they were the most affected by her absence.

She turned up the music and lost herself in the cut. It was easy to do with such beautiful hair and how quietly excited her client was, turning her head to look at the progress whenever she had the chance. By the time Tressa Fay had styled it, letting the coils on top fall forward, running her hands over the buzzed sides and through the trailing curls at the back, her client was ecstatic. Tressa Fay took pictures of her posing in front of the ring light, and she was beautiful and comfortable and had the greatest bouncy, prowling stride of all time. She left walking on air, shoving her hat in the pocket of her coat so it wouldn’t smash the height of her curls, and Tressa Fay caught her grinning at her reflection in the salon’s front window.

Alone in the salon again, Tressa Fay called Gayle, hoping they could talk while she cleaned her station before her final client of the day came in.

“Hey, Tiff.” Gayle had adopted Linds and Guy’s old nickname for her. “I’m glad you called. Did James make you?”

“He did. I’m guessing he’s looking out for you in some way, so tell me.”

“It’s…I don’t know.” Gayle laughed the way she did when she couldn’t find the right words. “Sometimes I realize I’ve gone a long time remembering nothing new, and then I remember so much that I have no idea what month it is or where I am or what’s happening, you know?”

“I do.” Tressa Fay didn’t think of time, or of memories, anything like the way she once had.

“Yeah, so, I was steaming some clothes for my shop, and I started thinking about Meryl’s case, like, as a case, the way I used to before…I’m not sure, exactly. Before. ”

Tressa Fay found herself standing in the open space of the salon, her phone to her ear, staring through the pane of glass in the entry door.

It was getting dark so early now.

“You know how in a dream, your dream gives you some task to do, like a quest, and it feels incredibly important, but when you wake up, it was nothing?” Gayle asked. “Like something silly, like you had to deliver a Christmas ornament to your third-grade teacher to keep your dog from running away?”

“Yes.”

“It was a feeling like that, except I’m not asleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much she loves her job, how many people she works with, and how much impact she has there. She really loves her job.”

Tressa Fay knew Gayle well enough by now to hear how tough this was for her to talk about. “She does love her job.”

“I decided just to close my shop for a bit and walk to where her office is. It’s not far. I thought that the cold and the walk would help, and either I would get there and my brain would sort everything out, or at least I would’ve gotten the exercise in. I think, too, I was hoping that seeing her office would maybe, I don’t know, crisscross all the memories and feelings and prove this gap in time is closing up, once and for all. I’ve been avoiding her office, and even avoiding everyone else who knew she disappeared. Like if I stayed the course that Meryl has put into motion, everything would come together.”

Tressa Fay rubbed her arms, nodding like Gayle could see her. She had never been to Meryl’s house, a house she knew as well as her own apartment. She avoided looking through the window at the cat café, afraid she would see the tuxedo cat. She knew. She understood.

“When I got to the building, I saw this woman I remembered from some time ago when I went to an office Christmas party with Meryl. I knew she did something at Meryl’s work that meant they knew each other, but they didn’t work together every day.”

“Okay.”

“So I told her hi. I said I was Meryl Whit’s sister, and she and I had met at the Christmas party a few years ago. She looked at me for the longest time. Then she said, ‘Who?’ I told her again, ‘Meryl Whit. She’s a stormwater engineer.’ And this lady shook her head. She had no idea who I was talking about. None.”

Tressa Fay reached out to brace herself against the wall, dizzy with the implications. “You’re positive she was the person you thought?”

“I asked her if she still had the same job she’d always had, and she told me she’d recently gotten her ten-year pin.”

“So then…what do you think? What is it that we should be doing?” The questions spilled out of Tressa Fay, even as she understood Gayle couldn’t have answers. There were no answers.

“Something is broken and messing up, but I don’t know if it’s what we wanted to break.” Gayle sniffed. “And, Tressa Fay, what it feels like, in my heart, is that I am letting her go. I don’t want to, but I also don’t want to let the rest of my life feel like this. Meryl would hate that. But maybe all these feelings are just that it’s wintertime and so dark. I don’t know.”

Tressa Fay closed her eyes.

A few days ago, she and her dad had a rare dinner alone, without Jen. Her dad had come to her apartment, which he had started doing lately, even fixing things that were broken. Tressa Fay had made grilled cheese and soup. She started talking to her dad about Meryl. About how everything, everywhere, reminded her of her and Meryl. Like driving over one of the Fox River bridges and thinking about how high the water looked.

Her dad had listened until she was done talking. Then he’d said, I understand what you’re feeling .

She didn’t think he’d ever said that to her before.

Her dad told her that there were still so many things he never would have known to enjoy without her mom, and that his life was better for that, even though she was gone.

“I understand what you’re feeling,” Tressa Fay told Gayle.

The line was quiet for a long time before Gayle said, “I think you do. I guess that’s some kind of comfort.”

Tressa Fay thought of her phone again, so heavy with the battery attached to it. Meryl’s messages. I miss you. Something Meryl often texted, even though she had Tressa Fay right there, making plans to adopt a cat. Even though Tressa Fay didn’t believe Meryl had ever thought of the woman right next to her in bed and the woman on her phone as different people.

“You know what? You and Meryl are never, ever not going to have each other. You could’ve gone your separate ways a long time ago, when it was so hard, but you didn’t, and that means you’re stuck with your little sister forever.”

After Tressa Fay and Gayle got off the phone and she’d seen her last client and locked up the salon, she went across the street to the cat rescue and looked in the window. She didn’t see the small tuxedo cat that Meryl had been so taken with, so she pushed through the door, the sound of the bell over it making her break out in a cold sweat.

The woman who came to talk to her seemed slightly confused. She couldn’t quite understand something about what Tressa Fay was asking her, as though the ripples of everything that kept changing, configuring and reconfiguring around Tressa Fay and the salon across the road, had blurred parts of this woman’s life, too.

But there was no way for Tressa Fay to misunderstand what the woman told her.

The tuxedo cat wasn’t there.

He never had been.