“Three times.” God, I sound like I have a bad case of OCD.
“I watched you check it a fourth time while you were on the phone.”
I straighten a bottle that doesn’t need straightening. “The lighting changes how the colors read.”
“The lighting is fine.” She takes the bottle out of my hands. “Go be the person whose name is on the banner. I’ve got this.”
I let her take over because she’s right and because the guests are starting to arrive and because standing in the corner rearranging products I’ve already arranged is not the energy I want to bring to the next three hours.
The room fills in layers. Local press first, then clients, then the broader Sorrowville contingent who showed up because free product samples and small-town curiosity are a combination no one can resist. I know most of them. Have cut most of their hair. Have heard about their children, their divorces, their strong opinions about the new stop sign on Fourth Street.
They hug me. Tell me they’re proud. Mrs. Henderson from the antique shop tears up, which sets off a chain reaction I manage to escape by pivoting to the Luxe regional manager at a critical moment.
Then the Fosters arrive.
Not individually. Together, because that’s how they operate—Beth and Boone and Brogan and Joely, taking up exactly as much space as a family that size requires, which is considerable. Beth makes a beeline for me and squeezes both my hands without saying anything, which somehow communicates everything.
Nora arrives behind them, silver-haired and unhurried, surveying the transformed salon with the appraising eye of awoman who helped pay for it and has never once let me forget it in the best possible way. She finds me across the room and nods once.
You did this, the nod says.I always knew you would.
I have to look away before I ruin my makeup.
That’s when I see Bennett.
He’s at the edge of the setup area near the window, and he’s holding the reflector panel.
Nobody asked him to. Derek’s assistant is standing six feet away, technically responsible for exactly that piece of equipment, watching Bennett with the confused expression of someone trying to determine if they should intervene.
They should not intervene.
I catch Derek’s eye. He looks at Bennett. Looks at me. Performs the silent calculation of a man who has accepted that this particular variable is now a permanent feature of his professional landscape.
He turns back to his assistant. “Just let him.”
Bennett hasn’t noticed any of this. He’s angling the panel with focused concentration, adjusting by increments, trying to catch the light the way he’s watched Derek do it a dozen times without ever being taught.
Same Bennett. Completely different man.
He looks up and finds me watching him. Across the crowded room, through the lighting rigs and the product displays and the people I’ve built my life around, his expression does the thing it does now—open, certain, completely unguarded.
You okay?he mouths.
I think about this morning. The Post-it board. The purple note still sitting on my station counter because I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.
I give him a thumbs up.
He nods, satisfied, and adjusts the reflector panel three degrees to the left.
Derek makes a sound that might be pain.
I turn away before I laugh out loud, and go back to being the person whose name is on the banner, in my salon, at my event, in the life I built and finally stopped being afraid to share.
Then there’s a shift in the room’s energy—a ripple that moves through the crowd the way it always does when Shepard Sawyer decides to make an entrance. Conversations pause. Heads turn. Derek’s new assistant looks up from her clipboard with the expression of someone who has just registered an unfamiliar but potentially significant variable.
The door swings open.
Shep spreads his arms wide. “THE PROPHECY HAS BEEN FULFILLED.”
