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If I put my head under the spray dry and matted, the water would tighten every tangle into a fist, and I'd be in there for an hour crying for two reasons instead of one. My mother used to say you don't fight your hair, you negotiate with it.

So I negotiated.

I got out the spray bottle, the conditioner, the wide-tooth comb, and the clips, and I sat on the closed lid of the toilet, gingerly, with a towel around my shoulders. I sectioned my hair, soaked the first section, smoothed conditioner through it, and started at the very ends with my fingers, the way my mother had taught me on Sunday nights before church, when I'd sat on a pillow on the kitchen floor between her knees with the radio playing gospel low. Ends first. Little pieces. Never pull. If it fights you, add more water and wait.

My hands knew the motions without me. Sometimes my hands remembered what the rest of me had tried very hard to forget.

My mother had spent hours on my hair every week of my childhood. She'd been patient. She'd been gentle. She'd talked to me the whole time, about school, about Jesus, about the boy who sat behind me in math. Her hands had been the safest place in the world.

Those hands had not touched me in years.

I worked through the front and the crown, the strands coming loose and springing back into curls under my fingers.

Then I got to the back.

The tangle at my nape was the size of a quarter and dense as felted wool. I saturated it and let it sit while I stared at the wall, and then I started picking at the edges of it, one tiny group of strands at a time.

It was the spot where Cam had held me and then—

Hands in your hair. Hold on.

Her fist there. My own fists there. Her voice in my ear telling me I was good.

I picked at that knot for twenty minutes, and I couldn't rush it, and I couldn't stop thinking about her the entire time. Every strand I freed felt like letting go of a second of last night. Halfway through, I started crying again, quietly this time, tears dripping off my chin onto the towel while my fingers kept working, because my fingers didn't care that I was heartbroken. They just knew the job.

When the last of it came loose, the comb went through clean.

I sat there holding it and sobbing like I'd lost a person instead of a knot.

By eight thirty, I was in the shower, trying to rinse her off my skin. I couldn't. I could still smell her on my wrists, cedar and clean sweat, sinking in under the steam.

The marks stayed too. They'd stay for days, going from plum to brown and slowly lightening until one morning I'd look in the mirror and not be able to find them anymore, and that, honestly, sounded worse.

I put in a deep conditioner, pulled a plastic cap over it, and sat on the edge of my bed in my robe with twenty minutes and no task but thinking.

I'd typed and deleted four different texts to Cam by nine thirty.

The first was too long. The second said I miss you and only that, which was pathetic after three hours. The third was a joke about the bonnet, which I deleted with the speed of someone defusing a bomb, because if she laughed at it, I would get back in a car and drive up that hill.

The fourth one, I sent.

Harper

For what it's worth, I don't regret last night. Not one second of it. Take care of yourself, Cam.

I watched it go from Delivering to Delivered and kept staring. My conditioner was well past twenty minutes, and I didn't move.

Three dots appeared. My heart stopped. They disappeared. My heart stopped again, harder. They came back.

Cam

I don't regret it either. You were everything. I'm sorry I couldn't be what you needed.

The tears came back, hot and relentless. I typed through blurry vision.

Harper

You were exactly what I needed. For one perfect night, you were everything to me too. I just need you to be it in daylight too.