She looked…different.
“So what do you think?” Orange Hair asked. “I think the dark really brings out your eyes.”
Brynn nodded, turning her head from side to side. The girl was right. Brynn had never thought much about her eyes before. They were a light, ordinary blue. But with the dark brown hair, they looked piercing and sort of dangerous.
Or maybe she just wanted them to look dangerous.
Either way, the look was precisely what she’d wanted. She felt a surge of satisfaction. Meow.
“I like it,” Brynn said reverently, running a hand over the shortness. She’d expected to miss the comforting length that had been there her entire life. Instead, the choppy, shoulder-length cut felt light and freeing.
“The grow-out’s going to be a pain,” the woman said, taking a long sip of her water. “You’ll need to come in every few weeks unless you’re okay with blonde roots.”
But Brynn was barely listening, too busy staring at her own reflection. She had to give the girl credit, the look was exactly what she’d envisioned and hadn’t known how to convey.
Brynn hadn’t asked for it, but the girl had added some lighter brown streaks in the otherwise chocolate-colored look, and added several layers around the face. She’d also resisted the urge to go too short, so the longest layers brushed against Brynn’s collarbone. It was edgy without being sloppy. Dark without being gothic. Modern without being trendy.
“I wish I had a longer name so I could go with a nickname for a little while,” Brynn said to no one in particular. “You know, like go with a secret identify for a few days.”
“How about Bee?”
Brynn winced. So okay, maybe no on the name change.
But there were plenty of other things she could tweak. And she planned to start…
Now.
After paying for her new look and leaving a hefty tip, she hit up the next stop on her vacation-from-life plan. No not a plan. No more plans.
The receptionist at Brynn’s office looked up in surprise as she strode in the door. “Hey, Dr. Dalton. I thought you were out this week?”
“Oh, I am,” Brynn said with a bright smile. And I’m about to be out a lot longer than that. “When Dr. Wee is free, could you tell her I’m in?”
“I like the hair!” Erika called after her as Brynn headed to her office.
Brynn dropped her purse onto the chair and stood for a moment with her hands on her hips, taking in the perfectly tidy desk, the alphabetized journals on the shelves, the neat row of fake plants she’d set along the window because they looked more uniform than real plants.
“It looks like a robot lives here,” Brynn announced to the emptiness.
She reached out and moved her stapler a few inches so it wasn’t neatly in line with the pen holder and the paper clip dispenser. She promptly moved it back. Maybe she wasn’t quite ready for that. Brynn reached out again. Moved it a half inch forward.
There. That was okay. Baby steps.
“Rearranging?”
Brynn glanced up toward the voice and saw a very curious-looking Susan standing in the doorway.
“Sue, we need to talk.”
Susan entered and, closing the door, looked as unruffled and unperturbed as ever. It was how Brynn had always thought of herself. At least until her thirty-first birthday had brought it all crashing down around her, turning her into a high-strung, self-doubting train wreck.
“What’s with the hair?” Susan asked, settling into one of the chairs. “Midlife crisis?”
“God, I hope this isn’t the midpoint,” Brynn said vehemently, tucking her hair behind her ear and liking that it didn’t stay there the way it used to.
She dropped into the other guest chair next to Susan rather than across from her on the other side. “Things have been okay here, right? Since I’ve been out.”
Susan arched an eyebrow and folded her hands in her lap. “You mean in the all of four days that you’ve been gone? Yeah, we’ve been just fine.”