“Well, if they know who she is, why haven’t they arrested her?” another of the stylists asks, and Amira nudges me with her foot. She nods toward the door, silently begging me to leave with her, but I shake my head. I need to hear this.

This isn’t a bunch of anonymous assholes online. This isn’t a few idiot boys at school. These are adults. Tax-paying, mortgage-holding, grocery-buying adults who’re supposed to believe in concepts like “innocent until proven guilty.”

“They’re not going to arrest her,” the woman with the timer says. “Her mother is that lady cop who got her husband off on all those drug charges last year.”

Blood drains from my face, leaving me cold. My hands clench around the magazine I’m holding, and it trembles in my grip. I can feel Amira watching me, and suddenly it feels like a miracle that none of the other women have recognized me yet.

“We don’t know that that’s true,” Renee pipes up, using the end of her long dye brush to separate another part of Karen’s hair to be colored. “Julie Bergen is one of my clients, and I can’t imagine her—”

“You’re such a sweet, trusting soul.” Karen smiles at her in the mirror. “But the truth is that we never know who anyone is until they show us their true colors. I remember that mess last year. It was right before he killed himself, wasn’t it?”

My dad didn’t kill himself.

“What a waste,” the woman with the timer says.

“Why? What happened?” the stylist closest to me asks. She must be new in town. “I don’t know this story.”

The woman with the timer leans back in her chair and crosses her legs. “Kyle Bergen was a couple of years ahead of me in school. Everyone knew his family. Lived in a single-wide, out on the edge of town. Uncle in prison. Mother cleaning houses, off the books. Dad drawing disability. Kyle got in trouble his senior year—no surprise—and the judge gave him two options. Jail, or the army. Kyle chose the army.”

She shrugs, as if these words spilling from her mouth don’t carry any more weight than the breath used to speak them. As if they aren’t bullets fired straight into my soul.

“Kyle showed up again ten years later with a bunch of medals, a pretty wife, and three little kids. Army suited him, I guess. He looked good. Used his VA loan to buy a house in town and went to work for the fire department. For a while, it looked like he really had his shit together. Like he might pull the Bergen name out of the mud.” Another casual shrug. “But blood will out.”