I have run the scissors and the color bowls at Shear Heaven down in the strip mall off Peters Creek for twelve years now. It is a little three-chair shop where everybody knows everybody’s business whether you want to or not. Diane has sat in my middle chair every six weeks like clockwork since her youngest boy was wearing braces on his teeth. I know the exact shade of red her hair turns when she tries to stretch her root touch-up past the six-week mark, and I know she takes her coffee with two sugars and no cream.

Saturday afternoon was humid and the shop smelled like peroxide and cheap aerosol hairspray when Diane came in for her usual blowout. She kicked off her loafers and set her big leather handbag on the floor right beside my station. She was talking about her daughter’s new apartment over in Salem, her hands moving in her lap while I pinned up the top section of her damp silver-streaked hair.

“She found a place with a little patch of grass out back,” Diane said, smiling into the mirror at me. “Not much, but the landlord lets her keep a dog.”

I smiled back and kept my thumbs moving through her hair, sectioning it out the way I had a thousand times before. Outside, the traffic on Peters Creek was heavy with people running weekend errands. Frank, her husband of twenty-four years, was supposed to be down at the car dealership doing inventory.

He always worked Saturdays. Diane had mentioned it just last month when we were planning her birthday lunch.

About twenty minutes into her appointment, my front desk girl, Renae, called back from the front counter. Her voice carried right down the narrow linoleum floor.

“Your two o’clock is here, Bethany Cole.”

My hands went completely still in Diane’s hair. I did not drop my comb, but I wanted to. Because I knew exactly whose husband Bethany Cole had been seeing for the last eight months.

Bethany had started coming into our shop back in the spring. She is the kind of woman who fills up a room whether you want her to or not, loud-talking and always checking her reflection in the glass. She had been coming to Renae for foils and glosses, and every single time she sat in that chair, she talked about her boyfriend. A car salesman.

Married, but basically separated according to her, complete with the air quotes she threw up every time she said the word. She talked about the weekends they spent at a cabin up in Floyd County. She had even shown Renae a silver tennis bracelet he bought her off commission money.

I never put it together. Roanoke is not a village, but it is not all that big either. People cross paths all the time. But hearing Bethany’s name called out right then made my stomach drop like an elevator falling three floors.

On the counter right in front of Diane, her phone lit up with a text message. The screen flashed the name Frank and a preview line that said he would be home late because the car auction ran long.

Then the front door chimed and Bethany walked in.

I have never wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole the way I did right at that second.

Diane was still talking about her daughter’s kitchen cabinets, her eyes half closed under the heat of the shop lights. She had no idea in the world.

Bethany checked in at the desk with that big, booming laugh of hers. She announced her appointment loud enough for the whole strip mall to hear. Renae came out from the back room, took Bethany’s coat, and led her back to bowl two, which was just two stations down from where I was standing with my cape still wrapped around Diane.

And Bethany, God help me, started talking before she even sat down.

She dropped her oversized tote bag on the floor and looked right at Renae. “You will never guess where we went last weekend,” she said, her voice carrying over the hum of the hair dryers. “That same cabin. Frank rented it again. The man is obsessed with the mountains, I swear.”

I watched Diane’s face in the mirror. I watched the exact second the words Floyd County reached her ears.

Diane stopped talking mid-sentence. Her mouth stayed slightly open, but the words just dried up. She got very quiet, the kind of quiet that feels heavier than shouting. Her eyes opened all the way, staring straight at her own reflection.

Frank had taken Diane to that exact cabin in Floyd County for their twenty-third wedding anniversary the year before. She had brought pictures in her wallet to show me. She had told me about the old stone fireplace and the way the driveway was lined with wild ferns.

Diane’s hand came up off the armrest. Very slowly, she reached out and turned her phone face down on the counter so the glowing name disappeared against the formica.

Then she looked up at me in the mirror. Her face had gone completely gray, not a dramatic pale, but the flat, drained look of someone who had just been hit by a truck and hadn’t felt the pain yet.

“What did she just say?” Diane asked. Her voice was barely a whisper, completely flat, nothing like the warm way she usually talked.

I could not answer. My mouth was full of cotton. My throat had closed right up. Behind us, the blow dryers roared to life, but all I could hear was the blood rushing in my ears.

Bethany was still talking to Renae over at bowl two. She laughed again, that loud, unbothered laugh.

“He says his wife would never leave him anyway,” Bethany said, her voice cutting clean through the noise of the salon. “She’s too comfortable.”

Diane set her coffee mug down on the counter with a little click that sounded loud in the quiet shop. She did not yell. She did not cry. She turned her head, slow and deliberate, toward bowl two, watching Bethany lean back into the shampoo chair with her eyes closed.

Then Diane looked back at me in the glass. She reached up, unclipped the salon cape from around her neck, and laid it neatly across the chair.

“I think we’re done for today,” Diane said.

She stood up, grabbed her leather handbag from the floor, and walked out the front door without looking back once. She did not slam the door. She just pulled it shut behind her with a quiet click, leaving her half-dried hair smelling like apple shampoo and the gray roots still showing clear as day under the lights.