Page 24

When Tressa Fay opened her eyes, she turned to her side to reach for Meryl.

Spring rubbed against her searching hand, and she cracked open her eyes to the cat’s sweet black-and-white face looking back at her. Epinephrine was spooning him.

Then she remembered and sat up straight in bed, her heart racing so fast that she started to cough and couldn’t get words out. “Meryl.” She coughed again, squeezed her hands into fists, and managed this time to shout. “Meryl!”

She heard pounding up the stairs. Meryl appeared in the doorway of her bedroom. “I’m here. I’m right here.”

It was the fourth of September. The day Meryl disappeared.

“You scared me.” Spring stood up, stretched, and walked into Tressa Fay’s lap. “God. You’ll have to stay right next to me every second today.”

“That’s what future you says. ‘Tell her I said not to leave your side. Tell her to keep her eyes on you at every moment.’?” Meryl smiled, but it was a faraway smile. “Also, my sister. Who is downstairs. I was actually about to make coffee to take with me to work, but Gayle had already let herself into my kitchen and was sitting at the table like a ghoul.”

Tressa Fay picked up Spring out of her lap and set him down on the bed so she could swing her legs over the side. “You were going to work? Is there some kind of culvert emergency?”

Meryl shrugged.

That wasn’t right. Tressa Fay had known something was off last night when Meryl hadn’t wanted to talk about what would happen today and had spent a lot of time on her phone, texting. Last night, Tressa Fay had thought it felt wrong that Meryl, of all people, wouldn’t have a plan, but now it struck her as more wrong that Meryl had a plan that didn’t include her. “Tell me why.”

“Why don’t you get dressed and come downstairs? Looks like this day has already started.” Meryl crossed her arms, drawing Tressa Fay’s attention to the fact that she wore one of the no-nonsense button-up shirts and pairs of khakis that she put on when she planned to spend at least part of her workday outdoors, doing things like checking water levels.

She really had been on her way out without waking Tressa Fay up to say goodbye.

“We’ve done everything different,” Tressa Fay said quietly. “Every single world is different . What do you know? What were you told that you haven’t told me?”

Meryl sighed. “It’s not anything like that. I promise I’m just trying to have a day. Just come downstairs, okay?”

When Tressa Fay nodded, she turned and left.

Tressa Fay clenched her fists in the blankets so her heart wouldn’t crack in two. She made herself pet Spring between his ears—Spring who, to Tressa Fay, had meant real hope, real progress, because Meryl had adopted him. Epinephrine was purring softly. Tressa Fay tried to keep her heart just as soft. She wanted to be what Meryl needed today.

She got out of bed and put on the clothes she’d been wearing last night, a pair of ripped-up cutoff shorts that were more holes than shorts and a cropped tee. She followed the sound of Meryl’s and Gayle’s voices downstairs and walked into the middle of an argument.

“I never asked you to be a crystal ball!” Gayle was at the kitchen table, her arms crossed. “I’m simply saying I think we should consider some of the possible outcomes so we can be sure—”

“We can’t be sure,” Meryl interrupted. She was leaning back against the kitchen counter, also with her arms crossed, and her voice was rigidly calm. “We can’t be. That’s my point. There’s nothing we can do today or tonight. You’ve already tried everything. Tressa Fay told me you said so. You’ve learned what you could learn about my life, put security cameras on the outside of my house, kept eyes on me this whole day, stayed right next to me, but it didn’t work. Not once, ever, has it worked.”

“That wasn’t me , though!” Gayle’s frustration was audible. “All I’m suggesting is you let us try to keep you safe. Let us be together. Why wouldn’t we do that, no matter what happens?”

Meryl had flushed red from the collar of her shirt to the tips of her ears. She opened her mouth to respond, but Tressa Fay cut in before she could speak. “We are not doing this.” She pointed at Meryl. “You. Sit down at the table with your sister.”

Tressa Fay waited for Meryl to obey her. Then she crossed to the table and pulled out a third chair for herself. Gayle and Meryl had never resembled each other more than they did in this moment.

In a rush, she realized that all of them—Tressa Fay, Gayle, James, Michael, Guy, Mary, and Linds—had started out where Meryl was ending up right now. The summer had lifted away that fatalism, had given them all hope and a sense of adventure.

But as Meryl engaged with all of them up ahead, in the winter, where she still wasn’t , she had lost her hope.

“It’s the fourth of September,” Tressa Fay said. “We’re all scared. We’re going to have to work so hard to take care of ourselves and each other today, but that is what we’re doing. We’re keeping the faith. We’re putting one foot in front of the next. Meryl Whit, you adopted a cat, and you promised that nice lady at the rescue that you’d take care of him for the rest of his life. You promised .”

Meryl uncrossed her arms. The nod she gave Tressa Fay was tight, but it was something.

“You two are going to have to talk your way through this,” Tressa Fay said. “Or else we’ll never make it to midnight intact, and it will be because one of you murdered the other. Though, at least then we’ll know what happened.”

Meryl didn’t smile, but her mouth relaxed a fraction.

“I assume you’re yelling at each other because you told Gayle you planned to spend the day at work, but Gayle wants everyone to have a stay-up-late slumber party at her house with every door and window locked and the security system turned on.”

Gayle rolled her eyes.

“Basically, yes,” Meryl said. “But you knew that, because apparently she invited you.”

“I’ve been invited for ages,” Tressa Fay said. “I had no idea you didn’t know until last night, when you got weird when I tried to talk about today.”

“You can’t be mad at me for getting everybody together,” Gayle said. “It’s ridiculous. We don’t want to lose you, that’s all. I don’t want to. I just got you back.” Her voice broke. “And if I have to lose you, it’s not going to be because I took my eyes off you this time.”

Meryl’s shoulders dropped as curiosity replaced the last of the defensiveness in her expression. “What do you mean, this time ?”

Tressa Fay also needed this clarified.

“I just mean…with Mom.” Gayle rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “I didn’t even try to understand. I was so hurt by Mom, and you always took her side, so I just let it make me angry. You two had your cute little mother-daughter relationship, I thought, but whatever, I don’t fucking care . I took my eyes off you. I walked away. And what happened was you got hurt. By Mom. Of course you did, because Mom hurts people. So I told myself, never again.”

Meryl shook her head slowly. “If I go, it won’t be because you didn’t watch me close enough.”

“It could be.” Gayle recrossed her arms. “We know it could be because you get hurt. We’ve always known that. We haven’t been able to figure it out. If there is someone out there who’s going to hurt you today, we haven’t found even a hint of them, but Linds and I were talking about how so much depends on the life and decisions of this person who could hurt you, just as much as our own.”

Tressa Fay expected Meryl to shut down, but she didn’t. Her mouth firmed. “I have never, ever been afraid,” she told her sister. “I did race toward that big sign with my head down. I picked math and engineering even though it was hard and the dudes were the worst, because I wanted that thrill of being good at something hard, and of tromping around in the world where there aren’t trails. I’ve been attacked by so many geese, Gayle. You have no idea. Last week, a sandhill crane nearly took me out when I was setting water flow monitors too close to its nest, and I just laughed. Those assholes are four feet tall!”

“You didn’t tell me it got that serious,” Tressa Fay said. “You told me a cute animal story.”

Meryl shrugged. “My point is that I feel like I’ve been jump-scared by the world so many times since May. Not by a crane, but by a shadow in an alley. A weird email. A car that stays parked on my street too long. I’m exhausted with trying to shove off the inevitable future at the same time I’m working with everything I’ve got to prevent it from happening. But you know what I figured out?”

“No,” Tressa Fay whispered. She didn’t know what Meryl had figured out. But she did know what Meryl was feeling, which was that Meryl wasn’t someone who could stick it out. She wasn’t a person who showed up when it counted.

She was a runaway bride, a second-guesser, a saboteur.

This was when they most needed to have faith. They needed to believe they had changed the world, that they had changed many worlds.

“It’s the same as my job,” Meryl said. “At work, I’m responsible for taking care of this old, worn-out stormwater system that the city can’t afford to properly fix or replace, so really what I do is monitor it and worry about it and try to keep it from falling apart in some catastrophic way that will kill someone, and at the exact same time, I’m looking down at the whole city from, like, the top of the Ferris wheel at Bay Beach, and I can see Lake Michigan, the shoreline, the Fox River and the East River emptying into the bay.”

Tressa Fay saw the same view in her head, imprinted in her memory by their summer day at the amusement park.

“I can see the groundwater rising, and the Leo Frigo Bridge pilings sitting on unstable shale that’s going to heave up and take the bridge out. I can see those houses along the bay and the East River flooding and displacing the people who live in them. The planet warming. The water going where it inevitably wants to go. Where it belongs . And it’s my job to balance everything. It’s my job to shove off the persistence of water at the same time that I remember what’s going to happen to real people, right now, when the system fails.” She turned to look at Tressa Fay. “I’m tired.”

“Meryl,” Gayle started, reaching for her.

“That’s bullshit.” Tressa Fay felt her anger as a tingling from her shoulder blades down to her fingertips. “Not the part about your work. You know I love hearing you talk about that stuff. But until now, you’ve never implied that the entirety of the system is balanced on your head. Um.” Tressa Fay looked at Meryl, whose brown eyes had gotten big. “Yeah. It’s not. You’re not any more or less important than that crane. Or me. Or our cats. Okay, how about this?”

“What?” Meryl’s voice cracked.

“Those houses on the banks of the East River. The ones that flood every time it rains, because the East River simply can’t stay in the banks people gave it anymore? You’ve had a hell of a time figuring out with a bunch of other smarties how to convince it to stay put so you don’t have to displace families from their homes, which, if the city claims eminent domain, means they will have nothing. You talked to Guy about it at our picnic, in June? Because they were representing a group of activists? And you know what’s happening now.”

“There’s a new coalition of the homeowners who are working with the city to find a solution.”

Tressa Fay pointed at her. “Exactly. And that was Guy’s work. Not yours. Guy got it off your desk because you met them, became friends with them, talked to them, shared with them, made them a part of your life. Now you and Guy are a part of a whole bunch of people’s lives and the East River’s fate. Everything in that system, just like in a creek, is as important as everything else.”

“Are you listening to this?” Gayle put her hand on Meryl’s arm. “I like this.”

“So what am I supposed to do?” Meryl asked. She wasn’t paying any attention to Gayle. All of her nerdy, vulnerable, hot-cheeked, worn-out attention was focused on Tressa Fay. “I love you. I want you to be my Tressa Fay forever.”

Tressa Fay started to tremble, and her eyes filled with tears.

Meryl loved her.

She hadn’t said it before, even though they’d said so many things that were nearly that, and Tressa Fay had known it in her heart. Meryl Whit loved her. And any minute, Tressa Fay could turn around and discover that she was gone. She’d said that on September 4 she always disappeared at night, but there was nothing about the way this worked that made anything truly inalterable, which meant right now, or ten minutes from now, or an hour from now, Meryl could be gone with no warning and no explanation, and Tressa Fay would spend her whole life with her porch light on, hoping she’d come home. Or she could simply move from one breath to the next never aware she had known Meryl.

But she loved Meryl anyway .

For as long as Tressa Fay could remember, she’d wanted someone to love her for exactly who she was. Someone who chose to stick by her through good times and bad. Someone she picked for herself, who picked her back, over and over again, forever. But what Meryl was telling her was that having Tressa Fay, loving Tressa Fay, was not enough to give her faith.

“I don’t think any of us are supposed to love each other like we’ll be here forever,” Tressa Fay said quietly. “The point is to love each other like we don’t have enough time.” She reached over and took Meryl’s hand, which was cold. “I love you, too. I love you time after time after time. And not because of…”

“The drama,” Gayle supplied, sniffing back tears.

“ Not because of the drama.” Tressa Fay laughed. “I met you over text on a night I didn’t want to go out, I met you in my salon, I met you after I already knew you, but I always meet you. Right? You always meet me.”

The way Meryl looked at her scared her. It made Tressa Fay feel certain she wasn’t going to be able to stop Meryl from disappearing—not because of the inevitability of the event across time, but because Meryl didn’t believe in them. She didn’t believe their ongoing love was more inevitable.

That day they’d gone creeking, when Meryl had said she wasn’t going to tell Tressa Fay about her biggest heartbreak, the heartbreak she’d been talking about was this one.

Tressa Fay couldn’t fight that. Only Meryl could.

“You know what I want to do?” Meryl asked. Tressa Fay looked at her beautiful face, her gilded mandarin-orange hair. “I want to go to your salon, and I want you to give me a haircut.”

“A haircut.”

“I’ll pay extra to get my hair washed.”

Tressa Fay laughed, refusing to notice how much her heart hurt. “I can cut your hair here.”

“I want it to be at the salon.”

“What are we…What’s today?” Gayle asked. “What is today? I feel like I’ve been thinking about this day forever, dreading it, and I will never get to the end of it. I never do. I’m just living in the run-up to this day, never able to make it move and be nothing.”

Tressa Fay took a breath, about to try to stumble to an answer, but Meryl reached over and touched Tressa Fay’s jaw. “It’s okay. I want to talk to Gayle. Go on and get ready for my appointment.”

So Tressa Fay had to believe in her own big speeches and leave.

She got into her car. She pointed herself away from Meryl’s little house, away from their cats, away from the sheets that smelled like the two of them together, and drove herself over the river. She parked at her apartment, because she wanted to wear something that would make her feel different. She stood in front of her closet, flipping through hangers.

Then she saw a flash of deep, reddish orange like the locks of hair at Meryl’s nape. She pulled it out, not having any idea what it was.

Oh.

She hung it from the door and stood back.

It was a dress. A rusty orange baby-doll dress with a black eyelet collar and hem, drapey, with black buttons all the way up the front.

It had been her mother’s.

Tressa Fay reached up to the top of her closet to pull down a big photo album. She sat on the floor and opened it to a spread near the front where she had a picture of her mom in this dress, at a party, with her dad. It was one of those overly glossy, slightly out-of-focus photo prints from the nineties. Tressa Fay’s mother wore this dress with black lace tights and black boots with thick soles and a fedora. She was grabbing on to Phil’s arm and laughing while he looked at her like she was everything, smiling at her in a way Tressa Fay had never seen him smile in real life until recently, when she caught him smiling at Jen.

In this picture, they were both impossibly young. Her dad surely had never, ever been this young or held a beer bottle like that, between two fingers, with a Camel box in the palm of his hand. There were chili pepper lights hung up on the wall behind their heads, and the music had probably been loud.

Tressa Fay peeled up the plastic film in the album and unstuck the photo to turn it over.

Lucy’s. October 1990. Me and Shelly.

Her dad’s handwriting.

She flipped through the album, pulling out photos and flipping them over until she found the one she wanted. It was a picture of Tressa Fay. A baby, but old enough to be standing up without holding on to anything. She had dark tufts of hair, and her port-wine stain was a deeper red than it was now. She wore a sagging diaper and a T-shirt with Big Bird on it, and she was laughing with her arms in the air.

Her mom’s handwriting was neat, with big, girlish loops, and the ink on the back of the photo looked as fresh as if her mom had just written the caption.

My Tressa Fay. 14 mos. Dancing to the Pogues.

My Tressa Fay.

She ran her finger over the letters and looked back up at the dress. She cleared her throat and tried hard not to feel awkward.

“Mom?” Tressa Fay cleared her throat again. “I’ve never done this before. Not even in my head.”

She decided it would be easier if she flipped through the album while she talked to her mom, so she started at the beginning, which was mostly group shots of her parents’ friends.

“I want to tell you what I’m worried about.” She turned to a page with pictures that looked like they had been taken on the east side of the Fox River. In the background was one of the bridges. Everyone was sitting at public picnic tables, laughing and eating what looked like take-out hamburgers. Her mom was sitting on her dad’s lap, feeding him french fries.

“I’m worried I’m not enough.” As soon as she said it out loud, her throat filled with tears, and she had to swallow past them. “You know? Did you ever feel that way?” With her finger, Tressa Fay circled her mom’s face in another photo, the one where she wore the crocheted halter top that Tressa Fay had been wearing when she met Meryl.

“I wasn’t enough to keep Dad from being too sad. Don’t worry, I knew he loved me, but I knew he was sad, too. I didn’t want to do catechism classes. I knew he wanted me to, but I couldn’t, not even to make him happy. And I think I was a lot of trouble for him. He had so many routines and rules, things I knew made everything easier for him, but I was always messing them up. I never got on the honor roll. Or even in the higher reading group. I couldn’t sit still.”

Tressa Fay wiped one of her tears off the clear plastic covering a new page of photos. “I wasn’t enough for school, either. I mean, I graduated, but it just was the alternative graduation for the voc-ed students because I had already started my hair school classes, so I didn’t graduate with Guy and Linds. They invited me to a graduation party. It was with all their school friends. Smart kids. Cool kids. So, yeah.”

That party was a bit of a core memory for Tressa Fay. It was a bonfire at a kid’s house who lived by the bay, and everyone had so many inside jokes and favorite songs to dance to. Linds and Guy were giddy. At the end, everyone had brought their big binders and school papers and spiral-bound notebooks with Sharpie- written titles like Honors Bio , and they threw them into the fire, talking about where they were going away to college.

Tressa Fay had told a lot of girls she could definitely cut their hair sometime .

“Then there was the allergy thing.” Tressa Fay shook her head. “I don’t want to minimize that. It changed everything. It was horrible. It led me to what I really wanted. That was horrible. I couldn’t even be like everyone else in the career I had picked out, right? I had to do it some other whole way where it always felt like I didn’t have anyone to talk to. Years and years, I did it on my own. Linds gone to college and grad school, and Guy gone to college and law school, and me in my crappy apartment making so many mistakes dating. It felt like it was because, yet again, I wasn’t enough. I ran into this person I went to hair school with, right before my salon really took off, who told me how much money she was making doing unicorn hair. You know, with all the colors. She asked me what I was doing, and I told her, and it was like, ‘You just cut hair?’?”

Tressa Fay laughed. “And I know. I made it work. I have to explain myself over and over again, but I met so many amazing people, I started traveling, cool and important people wanted me to ‘just cut’ their hair. I was a bonfire cool kid, right?”

Then Amy , Tressa Fay thought. She tried to tell her mom, say it out loud, but she couldn’t. Even though she’d finally talked to Linds about it. Mary. Even Meryl.

Tressa Fay got on her hands and knees and pulled a shoebox from the bottom of her closet and dragged it toward herself. She opened it.

The ring box was small and made of cedar. It still smelled sharply of the woods. When she creaked it open, Tressa Fay was surprised, in a way, the ring was there. It was white- and rose-gold leaves, braided together, a pink diamond like a flower. Amy loved jewelry and scarves and barrettes with flowers on them, and she loved pink. Tressa Fay pulled it out of the box and slipped it on until it hit the knuckle of her ring finger. That was as far as it would go.

“I definitely wasn’t enough for her.”

Her voice sounded hollow in the empty room.

Tressa Fay put the ring away, the jewelry box in the shoebox, and shoved it back in the closet.

Then she pulled out a small plastic tub and opened it, digging through it until she found the black velvet ring box with a mall jeweler’s name on it that held her mom’s engagement and wedding rings. There was a thin gold band, along with a simple solitaire diamond in a white-gold setting meant to make the tiny diamond look bigger. She slid them on. They fit perfectly on her finger.

“I think Dad thought he wasn’t enough to keep you.” Tressa Fay took a deep breath. “And here’s the thing that I really want to tell you, because I can’t say it to anyone else. Sometimes I don’t think I’m enough for Meryl.” Her eyes spilled fresh tears. “You’re my mom, so you have to tell me that’s not true, but I’m so afraid it is. What’s how I feel about her in the face of the whole universe? I haven’t even loved her long enough to, I don’t know, mature my love into something bigger and stronger, something that won’t get swallowed up by some terrible future. Even though I tell myself there is proof we have a future, because Meryl talks to me in the future! But I’m so afraid that the thing that’s going to put a literal universe between me and Meryl is me. It’s that I can’t inspire Meryl to have the faith she’s looking for.”

Tressa Fay twirled her mom’s wedding set around her finger. “Tell me how to be enough for this, Mom. It was simple for you and Dad. Maybe you learned something by leaving us when you didn’t want to.”

She sat on the floor in her bedroom for a few minutes, waiting for an answer that didn’t come.

Then Tressa Fay stood up. She pulled the dress off the hanger to put it on. “I wish you were here,” she said. “I wish something had held you here.”

She was only a few minutes late to the salon, and she burst out of her Fiat and ran down the sidewalk in her Doc Martens, rushing because Meryl was waiting for her outside the salon’s door in crisp navy pants and a pale pink crewneck sweater that made her look like the goodest of all the good girls.

“Look at you,” Meryl said.

“Look at you .” Tressa Fay unlocked the salon door and flipped on the lights. “So many indecent thoughts are coming at me right now, one after the next.”

“I have this sweater in three colors,” Meryl said. “Hot Girl Autumn.”

Tressa Fay pulled her to the shampoo bowl and made her sit. “Are they from Lands’ End?”

“Talbots.” Meryl took her glasses off and handed them to Tressa Fay.

“Marry me.”

She’d meant it to be funny, but as she eased Meryl into the shampoo bowl and turned on the water, Meryl opened her eyes, and there was an unguarded moment when Tressa Fay saw more than Meryl usually showed her.

All the love.

All the fear.

Meryl’s eyes drifted closed as Tressa Fay massaged her temples. Her cheeks were flushed, her freckles standing out in stark relief to her pale skin. She looked young and scared, like a girl who’d always done everything she could to hold the world together.

Tressa Fay lingered over Meryl’s temples, smoothing and smoothing, trying to make the worry disappear. Meryl kept silent as Tressa Fay lost herself in washing her hair, pressing her fingertips over her scalp, scratching with her nails, rubbing circles over her nape, then rinsing the slick mass of it with warm water until the water went from milky to clear. It felt a little bit spiritual, maybe because of the water. It made Tressa Fay conscious of the good she did in the world.

A haircut was never just a haircut. It was transformation. It was self-expression. Bravery. Change. Confrontation. Guy deciding they were ready, and Michael kissing them in front of the salon mirrors. Katie’s brave decision to stop hiding her acne scars. Mary’s going-out layers that had made her feel ready to start something with James. Tressa Fay gave people something they needed. Something small that changed the world.

That was what Meryl was asking for.

She toweled Meryl’s hair dry and led her to the chair and gave her back her glasses. “What do you want?” she asked.

Meryl didn’t talk to Tressa Fay’s reflection. She turned in the chair and looked at her, just like she had that first day in May. Tressa Fay had the same response she had then. Belly flips, low-down and delicious thumps, a blushing neck. “You know a lot about this. You’re actually an expert. Brilliant, according to a lot of important people on the internet, including that guy who runs that super-fancy hair school in Culver City and tried to recruit you last month. So you tell me, in your experience, do people want to get their hair cut to mark something?”

Tressa Fay looked at the mirror, running her hands over Meryl’s hair. “Yes. I think it must be a very human thing. A very animal thing, because it doesn’t require speech. You can tell people something about yourself with your hair without speaking to them.” She lifted the weight of Meryl’s hair away from her shoulders and repeated her question. “What do you want? What are you trying to say?”

“I want my hair to take a long time to grow out,” Meryl told her. “I want everyone who knows me to do a double take or a triple take. My hair has never been different from this. In every single picture I have of myself, it looks just like this. I want to be able to tell that the part of my life that comes next is different .” Meryl reached up and put her finger on one of Tressa Fay’s black dress buttons. “Kiss me, though. We haven’t had one single kiss this morning.”

Tressa Fay pushed the lever on the floor, smiling, to raise Meryl up, and then Meryl pulled her into her arms, the short skirt of Tressa Fay’s dress rucking up around Meryl’s thigh. Meryl’s kiss was serious right away, teeth against Tressa Fay’s lower lip line, hands at her hips, fisting the dress, and Tressa Fay slid her tongue against Meryl’s, and her hips jerked without warning, making Meryl exhale a hot, breathy noise.

Her body needed to lean against something, to lie down, to properly melt into a horizontal surface, but all she could do was push the gusset of her panties against Meryl’s slacks and try to find a way to hold Meryl when Meryl was in charge of this, deliciously in charge of it, so Tressa Fay’s hands moved over her back, under the little sweater, against Meryl’s damp nape, and through the wet weight of her hair.

The moment Tressa Fay started pulling on Meryl, trying to make her come with her to the back room, to the floor, to a bench, Meryl laughed against Tressa Fay’s mouth. “It’s a long ways to the ground right this minute.”

Tressa Fay pulled Meryl’s hair. “I’ll catch you. I’ll carry you. Do those slacks have one of those fasteners with a button and a little hook? I hope so. It will be like undressing a courtier.”

But Tressa Fay laughed, too, and let Meryl kiss her one more time before she bent to the side to turn the chair around.

Tressa Fay squeezed Meryl’s shoulders as she looked at Meryl’s eyes in the mirror, at her thousands of freckles and her swooping, arching auburn eyebrows, and how both of their faces were flushed and their lips swollen. She thought about how Meryl’s throat hollowed out and then sloped downward. Her full breasts. Meryl’s shoulders were narrow but rounded with muscles, and her waist pulled in over the softest and prettiest hips, which gave way to legs so strong, Tressa Fay had to ask for breaks when they went on walks, and Tressa Fay was on her feet all day.

She pulled a fresh cape from the shelf at her station and fastened it on, thinking about kissing Meryl, making love to her, hiking along a brook with her, fucking her in the wee hours after teasing each other all day, the clever things she said to Meryl from the future that were on Meryl’s phone, things that made Meryl laugh and then lean over and kiss her.

She started cutting.

She cut until Meryl’s lashes were the longest she’d ever seen them, and as many freckles were exposed as possible, and her fat upper lip, bigger than her lower, looked like something out of a silent film. She cut Meryl’s hair so that her eyes were deeper and darker and another unexpected curve was exposed at her nape. She watched the pieces she left long curl into ringlets, then refined with her razor until Meryl’s hair painted itself into its full mosaic of blush and orange and rust and rose gold and sunflower, exposing every color at once, so that it looked like a setting for her beautiful face.

When Tressa Fay was done, she rubbed honey-smelling wax into Meryl’s hair and made it messy, messy, and the way it stuck out against Meryl’s proper sweater and the dark frames of her glasses made Tressa Fay want to turn her around and kiss her.

She did that.

When their mouths met, Meryl’s hands went right to gripping her waist, and Tressa Fay felt everything. The weighty dread of this day, the fourth of September, and the worry on Meryl’s face when she squeezed her eyes shut at the shampoo sink, and the way the fabric of this dress that Tressa Fay’s mother had once worn felt as it shifted and moved against her skin, and how frightened she was—and, most of all, how much she wanted a future with this woman, not to be her biggest heartbreak.

“It’s perfect,” Meryl said, pressing her thumb against Tressa Fay’s lips. “Exactly what I wanted. You always give me exactly what I want.” Meryl looked at her with her brand-new big brown eyes. “You’re everything I could ever want, ever, and what I need is exactly you.” Meryl’s thumb moved to Tressa Fay’s chin and held it, making sure Tressa Fay understood.

She did. Meryl was saying that Tressa Fay was enough.

“I love you, Tressa Fay. I love you. I love you. I love you.”

Tressa Fay closed her eyes and let herself entertain the possibility—standing in the salon she’d made, with the woman she loved, wearing her mother’s dress—that there was more than either having someone or losing them.

That love found a way.

Love found you .