She looked at the receipt, then at me, then at my hair, which is short and dark and was growing in with a wave it never had before, and I watched her put it together in about a second and a half.

“Oh, honey,” she said.

“It’s not a sad story,” I said. “I’m fine. I got better.”

“That’s the whole point of the sad story, though, isn’t it.”

She went in the back and was gone a long time. When she came out she had a green ledger, an actual paper ledger, and she set it on the counter and turned it around so I could read it.

“We buy from walk-ins maybe forty times a year,” she said. “Most of it’s not usable. Yours was — twenty-four inches, no dye, no heat damage, healthy at the root. That’s rare. That goes to one place.”