I breathe again.
The wallpaper is yellow with brown flowers, slightly faded. It belongs in a different decade. Doris Harrow has good bones in her house and reasonable decorative choices, and I am sitting in her bathroom at seven o’clock, changing my appearance because my best friend decided that fifteen years of friendship was enough.
I breathe. Lock the box. Put it back on the shelf.
It doesn’t go as easily this time.
It sits at the edge of the shelf, the weight of Daniel’s handshake, Amber’s rehearsed voice, and the five months I spent not knowing. I hold it there until my hands stop shaking, and then I put it back.
Locked.
For now.
The timer on my burner phone goes.
The rinse takes longer than the application. I do it over the tub, which is undignified but effective. The water runs the color of rust and then lighter and then clear. When I straighten up and wrap my hair in the towel from the rack, my shoulders are still obscenely tight.
I unwrap the towel.
I look in the mirror.
Auburn. The box was not wrong. It’s warm, it’s reddish, it’s a significant departure from what was there before. In bad light it’ll read as brown with warmth. In good light it’ll read as red. Either way it’s not the hair that’s been on the news, and the first second of recognition will clear differently now, and that’s the purpose.
The rest is just looking at my own face with different hair. I’m still there. The same jaw, the same eyes, the same expression that apparently reads astightly wound and possibly furiousacross a room, which I’ve been told and don’t dispute.
I’m still there but the outline has changed. I look at the woman in the mirror and I think:you missed it once. You can’t afford to miss it again.
I think:Amber wouldn’t recognize me in a first glance.
I think:Good.
The second part of the kit is scissors.
Not much. Two inches, maybe three, taken from the length that will change the weight and themovement and close the gap between what the security cameras recorded and what’s currently in this mirror. I’m not precise about it—precision is for people with time—I’m just practical. Sections, even tension, a clean line.
Hair falls into the tub.
I don’t watch it fall.
When I’m done, I shake out what’s left, which settles differently now, the texture of it redistributed. I examine the new silhouette and I do the first-second calculation.
A stranger?
Not completely. I’m still in here, I’m still the specific arrangement of these features, nothing short of significantly more dramatic intervention changes that. But the first second fails. The glance-recognition fails. The woman who walked past those cameras and onto the news doesn’t immediately resolve in this mirror, and that’s enough.
That’s what I need.
I clean up.
This is important. Not the clean up of someone who is tidy by nature, which I am not particularly, but the clean up of someone who has learned to leave spaces the way she found them. Doris Harrow’s bathroom should not know I was here for longer than necessary. The box goes in my bag. The gloves go in my bag. The hair in the tub goes in the small bin in the corner, covered.
I wipe the mirror.
I wipe the counter.
I look at the bathroom and it looks like a bathroomsomeone used and treated with care. Good. That’s the aim.
I go back to the bedroom.
