devoid of laughter and stomping feet, and no calls of “Mommy, wipe!” emanating from the hallway bathroom, because while he was fully potty trained, he was only four, still learning how to handle his own basic hygiene.
Four hundred eighty-five days of this nightmare.
Panic sets in. She takes a minute and does the deep-breathing exercises her therapist taught her until the worst of it passes and she can function. Nothing about anything feels normal anymore, but she’s better at faking it than she used to be. For the most part, she’s stopped scaring people. She’s been back at work for four months now. The routine of work has been good for her; it gets her out of the house, gives structure to her day, and gives her something to think about other than Sebastian.
Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she winces as a sharp pain stabs her in the temple. She downs her Lexapro and a multivitamin with what’s left of her lukewarm water, and is in the shower within five minutes. Forty-five minutes later, she’s out of the bathroom, fully dressed, makeup on, hair clean and styled. She feels better. Not great—her child is still missing and it’s still totally her fault—but she does have moments when she doesn’t feel like she’s dangling by a rapidly unraveling thread. This is one of them. She counts it as a win.
The day passes quickly. Four haircuts, a double process, a balayage, and a staff meeting, which she attends but Sadie leads. She promoted Sadie to general manager with a huge salary bump right after she had the baby, and Sadie now runs the day-to-day operations for all three salons. Marin could hardly stand to lose Sadie before everything happened with Sebastian; afterward, the thought was unfathomable. Marin needed to stay home and fall apart, which she did, for a year, until Derek and her therapist suggested it was time to come back to work.
She still oversees everything—the company is, after all, Marin’s—but mainly she’s moved back to the salon floor, cutting and coloring hair for a select group of longtime clients known internally as VIPs. They’re all absurdly wealthy. More than a few are minor celebrities, and they pay six hundred dollars an hour to have their hair done personally by Marin Machado of Marin Machado Salon & Spa.
Because once upon a time, she was somebody. Her work has been featured in Vogue, Allure, Marie Claire. It used to be cool to be Marin Machado. You could google her name and photos of the three biggest celebrity Jennifers—Lopez, Lawrence, and Aniston—would come up, all women she’s worked on personally—but now articles about her work take a back seat to news reports about Sebastian’s disappearance. The massive search that went nowhere. Complaints about the special treatment she and Derek received from the cops because Derek is a somebody, too, and they’re an affluent couple with connections, a friendship with the chief of police (which was vastly overstated—they barely know the woman outside of seeing her at a few charity events over the years), and rumors that Marin tried to kill herself.
Now she’s a cautionary tale.
It was Sadie’s idea to put her back on the floor. Doing hair is good for Marin. It’s something she enjoys, and there’s no place she feels more herself than behind the chair, mixing colors and painting strands and wielding shears. Hairstyling is the perfect blend of craft and chemistry, and she’s good at it.
In her chair right now is a woman named Aurora, a longtime client who’s married to a retired Seattle Mariner. Her naturally brunette hair is going gray, and she’s been transitioning to blond for the past few appointments. Aurora is requesting face-framing platinum blond highlights that look “beachy,” but her hair is dry, fine, and aging. Marin decides to hand-paint the highlights in with a low-strength bleach mixed with bond rebuilder. When the woman’s hair lightens to a shade of pale yellow similar to the inside of a banana peel—a processing time that can take anywhere from ten to twenty-five minutes, depending on a hundred different factors—Marin rinses and applies a violet toner, which she leaves on for no more than three minutes, to create that perfect white-blond look the client is hoping for.
This process is complicated, but it’s something Marin can control. It’s extremely important for her to do things with predictable outcomes. Her first week back to work, she realized she’d have been better off coming back to the salon