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“I’m more than okay.”
“Fantastic. We’d be screwed otherwise.”
Hannah’s hair had been long all her life, certainly never above her shoulders in her memory. The feeling of weight lifting off her head was incredible. And as she watched, something started to happen. The freed locks sprang up into waves.
“Do you have curls in there?” Miriam asked in delight.
The hairdresser ran his hands through the shorter pieces, considering. “They don’t know how to curl right now, but I bet if you did some work, you could retrain them.”
“You still want color?” Noelle asked. “This is already more change than you usually like to deal with all year.”
“Hell yes.”
While she waited under the dryer, Miri went next door to get them bubble tea, and Noelle read celebrity gossip to her from year-old magazines, complete with commentary. When Hannah saw the final product, instead of a honey-gold braid down her back, she had red waves that stopped above her collarbone.
In the truck on the drive back, she ran her fingers through the ends and felt them brush deliciously against her neck. She suddenly felt her throat constrict. Levi Blue had loved her all her life, but what if he didn’t love, or want, this new version of her?
“Having second thoughts?” Miriam asked.
Her whole being felt freer, and she thought the freedom might be part of what was causing the panic. She was always the one holding everything down, never the free one.
“If he doesn’t still love me after a haircut, I guess I wasn’t actually the sun around which his soul orbits, or whatever. Which I should probably know now.”
“He’s going to like it,” Noelle grumbled. “You look hot. And he’s not the kind of guy who stops loving his wife because of her haircut.”
“Noelle Northwood!” Miriam clapped and bounced in her seat. “Did you say something nice about Blue?”
Noelle harumphed. “He’s not…that bad.” This, coming from the woman who’d once told the love of her life that she “wasn’t the worst person Noelle had ever met,” was high praise. “I still think it was unhealthy of you both to hide your marriage, but I am willing to allow that Levi himself is…ugh. He’s fine. I don’t like him. But he’s fine.”
“You like him,” Miriam teased. “You text each otherFlight of the FordhamGIFs. He made the special granola that only you eat because you’re a monster who loves raisins. You let him shave the side of your head the other day.”
Noelle threw up her hands. “Fine! He’s my friend! Which I hate! He’s going to like your hair. The question is, do you want him to?”
Did she? She’d spent four years casting him as the villain in her heartbreak, because it had been simpler than recognizing that neither of them had been wrong, that they’d needed opposite things—and also they’d both been wrong and broken each other’s hearts. She was mad at Cass, and herself, but she wasn’t mad at Levi anymore.
In the place where that anger had been, grief swept in to fill all the holes. Grief that she’d been given a love beyond anything she could ever have imagined, and she’d pushed it away because it had made her feel trapped. Meanwhile, she’d locked herself in Carrigan’s like Rapunzel in a tower, refusing to come down, pretending it was her choice instead of her fear choosing for her.
Her prince had come to her window and offered her the whole world, but she’d sent him away, then raged at him that he’d left her.
She wasn’t ready to jump back in, but she wasn’t ready to be done either.
“I’m scared,” she admitted.
Noelle nodded. “Mir, do you have paper and writing utensils on you?”
Miriam pulled a sketchpad and a giant pack of colored pencils out from her purse.
Hannah quirked her head. “You keep colored pencils in your purse?”
“You keep colored Post-it Notes in yours,” Miriam pointed out. Hannah couldn’t argue. “Okay! Ready to write. What am I writing?”
“We are going to make a list of Hannah’s fears about Levi,” Noelle told them.
“You might need a bigger notebook,” Hannah deadpanned.
Miriam poked her in the side with a pencil. “Start talking. What are you afraid of?”
“Oof. Okay.”
