Prince Charming, Royalty Free

I want to preface this by saying I am a hairdresser, not a detective.

That said.

Melissa was in my chair first, color processing, wrapped up and waiting the way clients do — phone out, perfectly content to show me pictures of her life while I worked on someone else. She’d been seeing someone new. Long distance. They’d met online a few months back, hadn’t met in person yet, but things were serious. She had a whole album.

“He’s handsome,” I said, because he was. Almost distractingly so.

“I know,” she said, with the specific satisfaction of a woman who feels she has done very well for herself.

Twenty minutes later, Kayla sat down for a trim. Also new to me, walk-in, friendly. Also, as it turned out, seeing someone. Long distance. Met online. Hadn’t met in person yet but things were very serious. Did I want to see a picture?

I looked at the picture.

I looked over at Melissa’s phone on the counter.

I am a professional. I have thirty years of keeping my expression perfectly neutral while processing information that would make most people’s eyes go wide. This is one of my most valuable skills and I use it constantly.

I used it now.

“He’s very handsome,” I said.

“I know,” Kayla said.

Here is the thing about being in a profession where you listen for a living: you start to notice patterns. The same jawline. The same smile. The slightly-too-perfect quality of a man who looks like he was designed by committee to appeal to the maximum number of people.

I finished Kayla’s trim. I went to rinse Melissa’s color. And while I was doing that, I said, very casually, “You know, I saw something the other day about how you can reverse image search a photo. Just drop it into Google and see where else it shows up on the internet.”

Melissa looked at me.

I looked at the ceiling.

Five seconds of silence.

Then I heard Kayla, from across the salon, say — “Wait.”

And Melissa said, “What do you mean wait.”

And then both of them were doing it at the same time, and the salon got very quiet in the way it does right before something significant happens, and I busied myself with towels because this was absolutely none of my business.

The image, as it turned out, belonged to a Swedish modeling agency. The man in the photo was named Erik. He was twenty-three years old and had never been to Kansas in his life and was almost certainly unaware that he had a romantic correspondence ongoing in his name across two time zones.

Melissa and Kayla stared at each other.

Then Melissa started laughing. The slightly unhinged laugh of a woman who has narrowly avoided something and knows it. And Kayla followed, because what else do you do, and within thirty seconds they were both losing it completely, the kind of laughter that has some crying mixed in at the edges but is mostly just the relief of finding out you’re not alone in it.

They exchanged numbers before they left. Went for drinks that same evening, from what I heard.

Last I knew they were still friends. Book club, I think.

Erik, the Swedish model, remains unaware that he was briefly the center of a very dramatic Tuesday afternoon in my salon.

I think about him sometimes. He seems like he’s doing fine.