Chapter 8
The last client left at ten minutes to five.
Meghan swept her station while Brynn wiped down the color cart. They moved through the closing routine separately and efficiently—two people who’d done this enough times that it no longer required discussion.
Meghan emptied the dustpan. Brynn rinsed the combs. Meghan restocked the product shelf from the back room. Brynn counted the register.
The cat watched from the window, tail curled around its front paws.
They’d never assigned the tasks. The routine had built itself the way routines did when people shared a space long enough—through repetition, through noticing what the other person didn’t get to. Meghan swept. Brynn counted.
It worked.
At five, Meghan pulled her keys from the hook by the back door. Brynn was already holding hers. They walked to the front of the salon, and Meghan held the door while Brynn stepped through.
The cat stayed on the windowsill.
Meghan locked the door and tested the handle.
Brynn stood on the sidewalk, bag over her shoulder, looking down Main Street at the traffic that was heavier than usual.
Two trucks with parade equipment had been parked in front of the courthouse all week, and Richard had coned off a section of the curb near the square for reasons he hadn’t explained.
“Mrs. Dalton wants to go blonder,” Brynn said.
Meghan pocketed her keys. “How blonde?”
“She brought a picture from a magazine. The model was twenty-two.”
“Mrs. Dalton is seventy-four.”
“I’m aware.”
They stood in the warm early-evening air.
This was the part of the day that used to stretch.
When they were teenagers, working afternoons at Faye’s salon, sweeping up for free just to be there, the end of the day had been the beginning of everything else.
They’d walk to the diner, or sit on the bench outside with their feet in the street and talk until the streetlights came on.
Sometimes Elissa or Sadie would meet them.
Sometimes it was just the two of them. That had been enough.
Now closing was closing. They locked the door, exchanged a few sentences, and went in separate directions.
“Richard stopped by while you were with the Henley appointment,” Brynn said. “He wants to know if we can offer discounted cuts to parade volunteers the week before.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him I’d ask you.”
“We can do ten percent.”
Brynn nodded. “That’s what I was thinking.”
A car passed. Someone waved from the driver’s side window. Meghan didn’t catch who, but she waved back anyway. Small-town reflex.
“It’s supposed to hit ninety-five this weekend,” Brynn said. “I might bring a fan for the back room.”
“The one in storage still works. It just needs a new plug.”
“I’ll look at it.”
The conversation ran out. Not abruptly. It simply reached the place where there was nothing left to say that didn’t require crossing a line neither of them was willing to cross. The weather, the clients, the parade. Safe territory, surveyed ground.
“Night,” Meghan said.
“Night.”
Brynn turned left toward the hardware store. She rented the apartment above it. Meghan turned right toward the hill that led to her place—a small rental house three blocks off Main Street with a porch she never sat on and a yard she kept mowed but didn’t use.
The walk took seven minutes. She’d timed it once, not on purpose. She’d glanced at her phone when she left the salon and again when she reached the porch, and the number had stayed with her.
Seven minutes. The entirety of her commute, contained in the time it took to pass the pharmacy, the dentist’s office, the empty lot where someone had been talking about building a coffee shop for three years, and the row of houses climbing the hill toward the ridge.
Tonight, she walked slowly. The air was thick and warm, the kind of June heat that sat on your skin and didn’t lift until after dark. The mountains at the end of the street were hazy with it. Somewhere nearby, someone was grilling, and the smell of charcoal carried on air that wasn’t moving.
She thought about the sidewalk.
The two of them standing there, talking about Mrs. Dalton’s hair and the weekend forecast and Richard’s discount idea. Three topics. Maybe four minutes of conversation. Functional and civil. None of it real.
Civil was the word they’d chosen three years ago, when they’d sat down at the diner and worked out the terms of the business partnership. Brynn had said it first. We can be civil about this. Meghan had agreed.
Civil was manageable. Civil was professional. Civil meant they could share a salon and a lease and a closing routine without acknowledging that they’d once shared everything else.
But civil had a weight Meghan hadn’t anticipated.
It was heavier than silence. Silence was just absence.
The thing that happened when you stopped talking.
Civil required maintenance. You had to choose the right words, the right tone, the right lane.
Every exchange became a negotiation between what she wanted to say and what the terms allowed.
What she wanted to say changed depending on the day. Some days, it was nothing. Some days, the civil version was the only version, and the line between them felt earned and necessary.
Other days—days like today, when Brynn had said I told him I’d ask you and meant it, when the silence on the sidewalk had felt less like a wall and more like a held breath—Meghan wanted to say something that would crack it open.
She never did. She said night and turned right and walked home.
The hill was steep enough that her calves burned by the second block. She’d lived in Hope Hollow her whole life and had never gotten used to the grade. Elissa used to joke that it was the only town where you needed hiking boots to walk to the mailbox.
Elissa, Sadie, Brynn, and Meghan. There’d been a bench outside the old Hope Hollow Salon—the one that became The Cutting Room—that was meant for two people.
It was wooden and narrow, with a back slat that had someone’s initials carved into it.
The four of them had fit on that bench every afternoon for three years of high school.
Crammed together, shoulders overlapping.
Sadie on one end with her knees pulled up and Brynn on the other with her legs stretched into the sidewalk.
They’d talked about nothing. Teachers and boys and what they were going to do after graduation.
Who was going to Knoxville for the concert.
Whether they could all fit in Elissa’s car.
The hundred small things that made up a life when you were sixteen and the future was a place you’d get to eventually.
The bench had been too small. They’d sat on it anyway. Back then, Meghan had taken that for granted. You showed up. You sat down. The people who loved you made room.
She reached her house. The porch light was off. She’d forgotten to set the timer again. Meghan climbed the steps in the near-dark, unlocked the door, and stood in the doorway for a moment before going inside.
She could still feel the sidewalk under her feet. The warm air. Brynn standing three feet away, talking about a fan for the back room. The conversation that ran its course in four minutes and left nothing behind.
Civil.
Meghan stepped inside and closed the door.