“Guests.” She smiled. “We always refer to our clients as guests.” At that she slid my résumé off her desk and slipped it into a drawer, and I understood that I had been dismissed.

I made my way back out through the hair salon, where a client—guest—sat in front of a timer like a piece of meat cooking. The fumes from the dye were thick in the air, a forceful chemical tang that hit me in the back of the throat. What was she promised? I wondered. What pain or desire was she trying to soothe with a half-head of highlights, a few new layers around her face?

As I approached the desk, Emily looked up and quickly jerked her mouse to click out of an internet browser window. Her face changed when she realized it was me.

“Oh, just you. How’d it go?”

“Fine, I think. Thanks for the lipstick and everything.”

“Sure, it was nothing.”

“Have a good day,” I said, waving like an idiot, and right away I wanted to cringe. My voice echoed in the hush of the lobby, too eager. Too loud.

Emily sighed. “You’ve already got half the job down.” But by the way she said it, I knew it wasn’t a compliment.

When Deidre called me a day later to make me an offer, I thought of Emily’s face as I left that afternoon, of the dread I had felt sipping my drink at the bar. A knot formed in my stomach, yet I heard myself saying Thank you, yes, I’d like to accept. Yes, thank you. Monday is fine.

CLARA

IN THE FOUR DAYS SINCE the man had come to the shop, the posters asking for information about Julie seemed to have doubled. I saw her face around every corner: in the window of the saltwater taffy store, at the bus shelter on Pacific and Kentucky, the door of Tony’s Baltimore Grill. I couldn’t look at her picture without thinking that there was something hidden in the riddle of her disappearance that I should have been able to see. I felt the same fluttering in my gut that usually meant I was about to have a vision—both uncomfortable and pleasant, almost like the tingle before a sneeze, but it took over my whole body, starting with the center of my forehead and spreading outward through my limbs. It reminded me of the sensation I got when I thought about my mother, tried to picture what she must look like now, or remember the way she smelled, the sound of her voice. But when I tried to picture what was waiting for Julie Zale, I only saw a dark shape, like a spill of black paint.