Muttering under her breath, Faith hesitated before squeezing her car into one of the angled parking spaces in front of the Hair We Are between Dawn Logan’s Explorer and Maddie Logan’s ancient Impala. Running into her friends right now provoked some real mixed feelings, that was for sure. Especially Dawn, who’d been Faith’s best friend in high school. On the up side, even though Dawn had spent ten years in New York City becoming a lawyer, at heart she wasn’t any different after her return to Haven last year than she had been before. Actually, she and Faith had resurrected their old relationship with hardly a missed beat, and Faith knew she could always count on Dawn to be a true and honest friend. Still and all, not only was the woman extremely successful by Haven standards, a fact that had led to Faith’s praying to be delivered from envious thoughts on more than one occasion, but she was also technically a newlywed. All that unbridled bliss grew downright tedious after a while.

      However, there was nothing to be done for it now, Faith thought as she hauled her children out of the car and herded them inside. It was face Dawn now, or Luralene later. No contest.

      And yet the moment Faith set foot inside and five people greeted her as though her arrival had made their day, at least half her troubles sloughed off her shoulders. As usual, the shop smelled of freshly brewed coffee and hair spray and nail polish, the exuberant pastel decor a radical declaration of femininity, a sanctuary from all that was ugly and depressing outside its doors. Faith had had her first haircut here when she was ten and her mother finally gave up on her daughter’s unruly hair. And now, more than twenty years later, she realized being here settled her frazzled nerves far more than a drink in some bar could ever do.

      She couldn’t say the same for her children, however. Although Nicky had conked out in his car seat on the way over, poor Sierra was not at all sure about the shrieking ladies swooping down on her. The child ducked behind Faith’s legs, burying her face in the folds of Faith’s jeans at the knees, which God knew was the only place clothing was likely to bag on her body these days.

      “Back off, y’all,” Luralene barked to her staff—Stacey, who everybody still called the “new girl” even though she’d been there for two years already; Evelina, the manicurist; and Vyanna, whose beehives (both hers and her customers’) had more than once been compared to a perfect meringue. “Can’t you see you’re scarin’ the poor baby half to death? Hey, sugar,” she said, her knees cracking like gunshots when she squatted. “Your mama’s gonna have a seat in that big chair over there right beside that big old toy chest and get her hair cut. And I bet there’s some doll babies inside just waitin’ for you to love ’em, what do you think about that?”

      Faith smiled down into Sierra’s questioning gray-green eyes, thinking she wouldn’t mind a little loving herself, a thought she immediately replaced with a stern Don’t go there.

      “Come on, sweetie,” she said, Nicky’s baby seat banging against her leg as she led Sierra over to the play area. She lowered the seat to the floor where she could still see him, then knelt in front of the three-year-old, pointing to the empty chair. “See? I’m right here. So you go on ahead and play, okay?”

      Sierra peered around her at Luralene, then whispered, “The lady’s scary.”

      “You’ll get used to it,” Faith said, giving her a kiss on the forehead, then climbing into the chair. After a couple of very skeptical seconds, Sierra began to systematically haul each toy out of the open wooden box by the wall, inspect it, then toss it over her shoulder, rejected.

      “Tough customer,” Dawn shouted over the roar of a hair dryer from the next chair.

      “Don’t I know it,” Faith said, the incongruity of her friend’s being here finally hitting her. As long as she’d known her, the brunette had always worn her hair natural and nearly to her waist. “Oh my God—you got your hair cut!”

      “Don’t she look great?” Stacey said from behind Dawn’s chair, grinning underneath two inches of spiked black hair. “Like some actress or something, huh?”

      “Oh, Lordy, Lordy,” Luralene said. “Where’s my camera?” She abandoned Faith to scurry back to the reception table, banging drawers open and shut for several seconds until she finally unearthed an old thirty-five millimeter. “Here it is, here it is….” She scurried back, the camera already up to her eye. “We have got to put this up in the front window! Stacey, you have outdone yourself this time, gal…for pity’s sake, Dawn—smile! Think of Cal or something!”

      “Yeah, that’d sure do it,” Evelina said from over at her table, where she was doing Hazel Dinwiddy’s nails, and more than one woman there squelched a sigh at the thought of those smoky green eyes and that smile a woman only had to see once to remember the rest of her life.

      Anyway. Like everybody else, Faith joined in the oohing and ahhing over Dawn’s hair, which was still past her shoulders, but now a mass of wavy layers with wispy, sexy bangs that made her brown eyes look positively enormous.

      “You know,” Maddie Logan rasped from three chairs over, “you already had an unfair advantage over the rest of us, having the best boobs in town. This is just plain out-and-out overkill.”

      “No, I think Faith’s got me beat in that department,” Dawn said, glancing over. “Pardon me for saying this, but that is one impressive rack, lady.”

      “Five kids’ll do that to you.”

      “Yeah, right,” Maddie said, fluffing her fingers through her just-trimmed, golden-brown shag. “It took me four to work up to a full A. At that rate I’d have to have twenty-two to get anywhere near you guys.”

      “Honey,” Luralene said, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Long as Ryan isn’t complaining, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” She turned Faith’s chair around so she could tilt her back to wash her hair in the sink. “He’s not, is he? Complaining?”

      A comb flying across the salon was the last thing Faith saw before she closed her eyes, savoring the warm water streaming over her head. “So why’d you do it?” she asked Dawn. “I thought you loved your hair long.”

      “I did. Until I went to check my makeup in the mirror yesterday and my mother looked back out at me.”

      Faith chuckled—with her eccentric clothes and long gray hair, Ivy Gardner, Dawn’s mom and the midwife who’d delivered two of Faith’s babies, was a definite holdover from the hippie era. That she was going to be the new mayor come January was a testament to Haven’s being on the cutting edge of something, Faith supposed.

      “How’s she doing, by the way?” she asked, eyes closed.

      “Still bummed about losing her refrigerator,” Dawn said, referring to Ivy’s own close encounter with Mother Nature the week before. In Ivy’s case, the wind had uprooted a fifty-foot mulberry from her backyard and smashed it into her roof, right on top of her kitchen. Fortunately, Ivy hadn’t been in the house at the time; unfortunately, the house was currently uninhabitable, which meant Ivy was staying with Dawn and Cal at his horse farm outside town, which Faith guessed had something to do with Dawn’s precipitous decision to change her hairstyle.

      The old rotary phone on the front desk jangled as if it’d been goosed. Luralene went to answer it, then shouted over, “Faith, honey? I need to pop over to Coop’s for a sec, I’ll be back in two shakes, okay?”

      Faith heard the redhead scoot through the door to her husband’s barbershop next door, startling the little silver bell over it into a tingling tizzy. She opened her eyes to find herself the object of a pair of worried gazes.

      “So how are you and Darryl doing?” Dawn whispered, dark eyes huge underneath her newly cut bangs.

      Faith smiled brightly. “Oh, you know us, we’ll muddle through.”

      “Hey,” Maddie said, poking her. “This is us you’re talking to.”

      “That’s