“Fix it before next time,” she says.
“Working on it,” I tell her.
She moves away. The room exhales back into its own noise, twenty conversations resuming, the moment filed away into the category of things that happened today. The model is showing her pixie to the woman in the next chair, who is saying something that makes her laugh properly, and the grief of twenty minutes ago has transformed into what looks a lot like unexpected delight.
I look at my station as I start cleaning. At the honey-brown hair I’ve swept into a pile. At the mirror where a woman just discovered she could be someone she didn’t know she wanted to be. At my own reflection—flushed, a little undone, holding a phone with both hands.
I think about an eleven-second video and a dropped stomach and four unanswered calls.
I start laughing.
Not a small laugh—a real one, the kind that starts in your chest and takes over before you can do anything about it. The model looks over. Sees my face. Starts laughing too, because she doesn’t know why but laughter is contagious and the room has shifted into a frequency that makes it impossible not to.
Clarice watches both of us from across the room.
She decides, wisely, not to intervene.
I say goodbye to my model, who hugs me on her way out and makes me promise to follow her on Instagram so she can tag me when she figures out how to style it herself. I promise. I mean it.
Then I turn back to the room because I’m not done.
There are three more models waiting, clipboards shifting, stylists resetting, energy buzzing with that particular mix of nerves and competition that only exists in rooms like this. And whatever just happened—whatever cracked open and made me laugh—it doesn’t get to derail the work.
If anything, it sharpens it.
I roll my shoulders back, reset my station, and pick up my scissors.
The next cut is cleaner. Faster. More decisive.
No hesitation. No second-guessing. Just instinct and execution, the way it’s supposed to be when I’m at my best.
By the time I finish the last model, the room feels different. Or maybe I do.
Clarice catches my eye as I’m packing up my kit, gives me a single, approving nod—the kind she doesn’t hand out lightly.
Good. That’s what I came here for.
After packing up my supplies, I say goodbye to the other stylists and head toward the door.
Outside, the air hits—cold and clean and clarifying in the way that only genuinely frigid air can be. I stand on the sidewalk withmy kit bag over my shoulder and someone else’s hair on my coat and my phone warm in my hand.
Here is what I know, standing on a sidewalk in Minneapolis at four in the afternoon with a pixie cut on my conscience: I watched an eleven-second video this morning, and my stomach dropped before my brain finished loading the image. I called him four times. I stood in a showcase room and gave a stranger a haircut she didn’t ask for because some part of my brain was still on a bus somewhere between two cities waiting for his name to appear on my screen.
I am not managing him.
I’m not running Operation Soft Boy or designing emotional exercises or maintaining professional distance from a project. I’m a woman who spent her morning terrified that someone she—
That Bennett was okay.
I’m a woman who needed Bennett to be okay.
That’s not a new feeling. I know that now, standing here, in a way I’ve been avoiding knowing. It’s not new and it’s not going away and it is the single most inconvenient thing that has ever happened to me, which is saying something because I just gave a maid of honor a pixie cut four months before her sister’s wedding.
On my way to my car, my phone buzzes. I stop and pull it out.
Bennett:Heard you called this morning. Bus had no signal. Sorry I missed you.
I stare at that for a moment. He knows. Someone told him—Boone, probably, or Shep, because nothing stays private on a team bus—and he’s not pretending he doesn’t know. He’s not texting about the game or the weather or anything safe.
