“He’s such a stickler for rules,” someone else adds, which, for the record, I donotsnort at.
“And a heartbreaker,” the woman in the seat next to mine mutters.
Half the women in the room twitch.
I swear they do.
Opal ignores the murmurs. “I’m thinking we’ll give you a pixie cut.”
Junie gasps.
“Oh no, I can’t do short hair.” I cringe to myself—Who’s the stick-in-the-mud?—but I keep pushing anyway. “I have to be able to pull it back in a ponytail so it doesn’t get in my way when I’m working.”
“It’s called a headband and hair clips,” she deadpans. She runs her fingers through my hair, swishing it this way and that. “You’ll get used to it. And you don’t have a lot of options with this short clump here.”
“My hair—”
“New life, new hair,” Opal interrupts. “You can’t get out of a rut if you don’t make changes, and your hair’s a good change. Ponytail saysI’m a mom who can’t fully get my life under control and is happy to let someone else take credit for my work. Pixie cut saysWatch out, world, Maisey Spencer is sassy, ready, and fabulous for whatever you think you’re gonna dish out.”
“Hey,” the olive-skinned woman in the chair next to me says. She points to her own long hair. “Rude.”
Opal rolls her eyes, but she also looks amused. “On Maisey, not on everyone,” she corrects. “You make that ponytail look badass, Charlotte.”
“Thank you,” Charlotte says.
Opal ruffles my hair again. “Definitely a pixie cut. And if you truly hate it, it’ll grow back in another three or four years. What’s three or four years of learning to love your hair again in the grand scheme of things?”
“You don’t pull punches, do you?”
“Not when it comes to helping ladies step into the next fabulous version of themselves.”
“Can you talk to Coach Jackson and convince him that my fabulous version of myself involves being on the soccer team?” Junie asks.
Opal smiles at her. “You want on the team, you go talk to him.”
Junie meets my eyes in the mirror, then goes back to her phone. “His loss.”
“I love teenagers,” Opal murmurs. “They’re so very intelligent, and also so very belligerent. Sort of like newly divorced mothers who think moving across the country and into a random ranch they inherited from a free-spirited old guy will solve all of their problems.”
This could go really, really wrong. “You knew my uncle Tony?”
She arches a brow.
“Right. Small town. And Flint rents his gatehouse. Of course you did.”
“There’s not a person in town who doesn’t have a story about Tony.”
“Or Gingersnap?” Junie asks.
“Oh, that cow.” Opal chuckles. So do half the other people in the building. “She broke in my back door and got into my hair dye one night a few years back.”
“She broke into my law officewhile I was meeting with the governorand made a snack of his toupee,” Charlotte adds.
Something clicks in my brain, and I jerk my head to look at her. “Oh my gosh! You’re Charlotte. You did Uncle Tony’s will.”
She nods and gets her head grabbed by her stylist, much like Opal’s grabbing my head and turning me to face forward again too. “He updated it about ten years ago.”
My heart suddenly hurts. Junie was six, and Uncle Tony invited us out so she could ride horses.
