She has painted nails for nine years. His face got the ten thousand followers. Her back screamed through the Chen bridal set and she finished every blossom anyway.

Page 3

"I have been thinking about the post-expo content," he says. "If we win we do a six-part series. The Polish & Co. method. I will host. We bring in two stylists and a content lead. We pitch a sponsorship deck to OPI."

"The Polish & Co. method."

"Yeah."

I set the cup down. I open the second drawer. I close it. I do not say anything. He goes to the back. He closes the door.

—

On Sunday I go to my cousin Linh's daughter's first communion. It is the first Sunday afternoon in three years that I am not at the desk. The other techs are covering my one fill.

We sit in a pew near the back of the church. Linh sits next to me. She has not asked me about the shop in nine months because the last time she asked I cried in her car on the way out of a parking lot. She asks me today, halfway through the homily, if I am sleeping.

"Yes."

"How many hours."

"Six."

"That is not enough."

"I know."

"I read a thing in the journal at the salon I go to," she says. "About a registered nail formula. I thought of you. Nine other women. There is an article. They want to talk to a tenant lawyer in San Francisco. The lawyer's name is in the article. I copied it down."

I close my eyes. The communion bell rings.

In the parking lot afterward Linh hands me a folded piece of notebook paper. A name and a phone number in her teacher's handwriting. Helen Park. Four-one-five area code.

I put the paper in the inside pocket of my purse. I drive home. Marco is at the kitchen island looking at expo content on a laptop. He does not ask where I have been.

That night, when he is in the shower, I open my phone. There is a notification from the NMC registry portal. A message forwarded through the system. One line.

I will be at the hospitality Friday. Bring the lot number for the suspension batch.

It is signed: P. Cole.

Friday night. Eleven-fifty-two. The shop empty. Marco at the back desk with the laptop open. He came back from the hospitality at ten and instead of going home he came back to Polish & Co. The motion light over the side parking lot has triggered four times since I left at nine. I know this because I am at home and the salon shares a security app with my phone and I have been watching the notifications stack up.

Inside, Marco is at the front desk. The reception laptop is open. The Polish & Co. Instagram analytics dashboard is on the screen. He is scrolling the engagement chart for the last ninety days. The dashboard has a column for posts that include him in frame and a column for posts that do not. The first column is taller than the second. The second column has a single recent spike. The single spike is the post-Chen-set carousel that ran on March 14.

He minimizes the browser. He opens it again. He goes back to the dashboard. He scrolls.

He has had two glasses of red wine and a small piece of brie. He stood next to a man from a salon group out of Las Vegas for ten minutes and tried to use the phrase cuticle math three different ways and the man laughed politely and walked away. Patricia Cole was twelve feet from him for the last twenty minutes and she did not look at him once.

On the reception desk, the aunt's handpiece is sitting next to a stack of foil pouches. He brought it from my station thirty minutes ago, used it as a leverage tool on the perforated tab of a sealed gel-pod box, and set it down. The housing has a damp wipe across the burned section now from the acetone wipe he used to clean the bit before he gave up trying to slot it back into the cradle.

He picks up his phone. The text thread with me is empty for ten days. He types: are you up. He deletes it. He types: thinking about the booth. He deletes it. He puts the phone down.

He looks at the handpiece.

He picks it up. He turns it over. The cord I replaced in 2020 is heavier than the original. The housing is the original. The little burn mark on the housing is the size of a pencil eraser. He does not know that the burn is from a heat-cycle in 1989 in a salon in District 10 in Saigon. He does not know whose hands held the housing first. He registers that the handpiece is old. He registers that it is on his front desk. He sets it back down. He does not return it to my station.

He opens a tab on the laptop. He searches for the registry number from a memory he formed earlier this evening. He saw it on a clipboard at the hospitality. The clipboard belonged to Patricia Cole. NMC-TA-2024-1189. He typed it into the notes app on his phone. He pulls it up now.

The registry result loads. The page is plain. Three columns: title, registrant, peer reviewer.

Title: Mica-coated borosilicate micro-glitter suspension for UV-verifiable signature in cap-layer gel formulations at 0.003% (w/v) loading.

Registrant: Nina Tran.

Peer reviewer: Patricia Cole.