She was healed. And she was me.
It was jarring, even for me, the architect. The nose was my nose. The chin was my chin. The eyes—though the color was hers (she wore colored contacts to match mine, a detail she had insisted on to be ‘thorough’)—were framed by my eyelids, my lines, my exhaustion.
I picked up the large silver hand mirror from the table. I held it out to her.
“Take a look,” I said softly.
Chloe grabbed the mirror with greedy hands. She brought it up to her face, smiling, expecting the airbrushed perfection of a twenty-year-old Instagram model.
She blinked.
Her smile faltered, twitching at the corners.
She leaned closer to the glass. She turned her head to the left, then the right. She touched her cheek. She touched the bump on her nose.
Then, a sound rose from her throat. It started as a whimper, low and confused, and escalated into a guttural, animalistic shriek. It was the sound of a mind snapping under the weight of cognitive dissonance.
CRASH.
She threw the mirror against the wall. Shards of glass exploded across the marble floor.
“What did you do?!” she screamed, clawing at her face, her nails leaving red streaks on the fresh skin. “What is this?! I look… I look old! I look tired! I look like… her!”
She spun around to face me, her chest heaving. “You ruined me! You botched it! Who are you? I’ll sue you! I’ll own this place! I’ll kill you!”
I stood perfectly still.
Slowly, deliberately, I reached up to my face.
I pulled down my blue surgical mask. I reached up and yanked off my surgical cap, shaking my head to let my hair fall loose—hair that was the exact same shade of ash-blonde she had dyed hers to match.
I stared down at her. The face staring back at her was the mirror image of the one she had just seen in the glass.
“You look like the woman he is married to,” I said, a small, terrifying smile touching my lips. “You wanted to be the upgrade. I gave you the original.”
Chloe gasped, backing away until she hit the wall, sliding down it. Her eyes darted between my face and her reflection in the shattered glass on the floor.
“No… no… you’re the doctor… you’re…”
“I’m Dr. Evelyn Vance,” I said. “And I’m the hag.”
Chapter 6: The House of Mirrors
The door handle turned.
“Babe? Are you ready?”
Richard walked in. He was wearing his best suit. He was holding a massive bouquet of long-stemmed red roses—flowers he hadn’t bought me in a decade. He was smiling, the eager, lustful smile of a man about to unwrap a new sports car.
He stopped dead in the doorway.
He looked at me, standing tall in my navy scrubs, my face grim.
Then he looked at the woman on the floor, the woman sobbing in the silk robe.
He dropped the flowers. The vase shattered, mingling with the broken mirror, water spreading across the floor like tears.
He looked like a man having a stroke. His brain simply could not process the visual data. He was trapped in a room with two versions of the wife he had betrayed. One was holding a pair of shears. The other was screaming with his wife’s voice.
“Richard!” Chloe cried, scrambling across the broken glass toward him. “Help me! She’s crazy! Look what she did to me!”
Richard stumbled back, slamming into the doorframe. He recoiled from her as if she were a leper.
“Don’t touch me!” he yelled, his voice cracking.
He looked at Chloe. The sexual attraction he had felt for her was instantly executed, decapitated by the horror of the Uncanny Valley. She looked like me, but wrong. She looked like his guilt made flesh.
“Why… why does she look like you?” Richard whispered, turning his wide, terrified eyes to me. “Evelyn? What is this?”
“She wanted to be the only thing you saw, Richard,” I said calmly, walking over to my desk and picking up my purse. “She told me she wanted to replace me. She wanted to make you forget I ever existed. I simply… facilitated the transition.”
“Fix it!” Richard screamed, veins bulging in his neck. “Change her back! Right now!”
“I can’t,” I said, checking my nails. “Bone was removed, Richard. Cartilage was grafted. Nerves were repositioned. This is permanent. To reverse it would take years of painful reconstruction, and the scar tissue would leave her looking like a patchwork quilt. It would be messy.”
Chloe wailed, curling into a ball on the floor. “You said you’d make me beautiful!”
“I made you me,” I corrected sharply. “According to my husband, I’m a hag. But you seemed to want his life so badly, I thought you should have the face to match the ambition.”
I pulled a file from my bag and tossed it onto the bed.
“Here are the consent forms,” I said. “Signed by Chloe. Clause 4, Paragraph B: ‘Patient consents to total facial reconstruction at the surgeon’s discretion to achieve a specific aesthetic likeness requested by the patient.’ You showed me my own photo, Chloe. You asked for that bone structure. I delivered.”
I pulled out a second piece of paper.
“And here is the payment record. Your corporate black card, Richard. You paid fifty thousand dollars to turn your mistress into your wife.”
I walked to the door, stepping over the roses.
“By the way, Richard,” I said, pausing with my hand on the knob. “I filed for divorce this morning. Irreconcilable differences. Cruelty. Adultery. My lawyers have the receipts, the texts, and the surgical logs.”
Richard slid down the wall, putting his head in his hands. He couldn’t even look at her.
“You can have the house,” I said, my voice light and airy. “And you can have her. I imagine it will be very comforting for you to wake up next to my face every morning. Every time you kiss her, you’ll be kissing me. Every time you look at her across the dinner table, you’ll see your own betrayal staring back at you. You wanted to get rid of me? Now you never will.”
I opened the door.
“Enjoy the upgrade, boys.”
Chapter 7: The Aftermath
I walked out of the clinic and into the bright, blinding California sun. The air tasted sweet, cleaner than the filtered air of the OR.
I got into my convertible—a car I had bought myself, in my name—and drove.
I didn’t go home. I went to a salon in West Hollywood, a place where no one knew me.
“Cut it all off,” I told the stylist. “And bleach it. Platinum.”
“Are you sure?” the stylist asked, lifting my long, ash-blonde hair. “It’s beautiful.”
“It’s heavy,” I said. “Cut it.”
Two hours later, I looked in the mirror.
The woman staring back at me was a stranger. Her hair was a shock of white-blonde, cut into a sharp, dangerous pixie cut that accentuated the bone structure I had always hidden. I applied lipstick—a deep, violent red. I lined my eyes with black.
I looked fierce. I looked untethered.
I stopped wearing the severe, modest suits Richard liked. I bought leather jackets. I bought silk dresses in colors that screamed—emerald, cobalt, crimson.
Six months later.
I was sitting at a café in Paris, watching the rain streak the windows, safe in my new life. I had sold the clinic for a fortune. I was free.
But news travels, even across oceans.
I heard from mutual friends that Richard was living in a personal hell.
Chloe had tried to sue, but no lawyer would take the case. The consent forms were ironclad, and legally, the surgery was a success—she looked exactly like the reference photo she provided.
She spent her days trapped in the house I used to clean. She covered the mirrors with sheets. She wore heavy veils and large sunglasses when she went out, hiding from her own reflection. She had descended into a paranoia, screaming that she was fading away.
And Richard?
Richard was drinking alone in dive bars in LA, a man haunted by the living ghost in his bedroom. He couldn’t sleep with her—it felt like incest, or madness. He couldn’t leave her—she threatened to destroy him with the scandal. He couldn’t date—who would date a man living with his ex-wife’s doppelgänger?
He was stuck in a house of mirrors, forced to confront his mistake every single day.
I took a sip of my espresso, feeling the warmth spread through my chest.
A handsome man approached my table. He had kind eyes, a hesitant smile, and he wasn’t looking at me like an investment.
“Excuse me,” he said in accented English. “I just wanted to say… I love your look. It’s very… unique. Strong.”
I smiled. It was a genuine smile, one that reached my eyes and crinkled the lines I had earned.
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s a limited edition. The original.”
I picked up my spoon to stir the sugar into my cup. For a split second, I caught my reflection in the curved metal.
I saw the ghost of the “old” Evelyn staring back—the tired woman in the garden, the woman who tried so hard to be perfect for a man who wanted a doll.
I winked at her.
“Goodbye, old friend,” I whispered, the steam rising from my cup like a spirit released. “You’re someone else’s problem now.”
