“Your nose did not always look like this,” she continued. “It was broken that day. The doctors wanted to operate immediately, but I refused.”
“Why?”
My mother said nothing.
I snatched the report from her hands.
Near the bottom, one sentence stood out:
“Facial injury apparently caused by significant blunt force.”
I lifted my eyes from the page.
“Who hit me?”
Daniel suddenly sank into a chair as though his legs could no longer support him.
My mother reached into the envelope again and brought out an old school photograph.
A group of teenagers stood together in the picture.
At the center was a girl named Lauren.
I remembered her perfectly.
She had been the first person to call me a witch.
Beside her stood a thin, dark-haired boy.
At first, his face meant nothing to me.
Then I looked at his eyes.
Gray eyes.
The same eyes I had seen every morning for the past eight years when I woke beside my husband.
The photograph slipped from my fingers and landed on the floor.
“No…”
Daniel lowered his head.
“At school, my name was Daniel Carter,” he said. “Later, my mother remarried, and I took my stepfather’s surname. That was how I became Daniel Walker.”
I took several automatic steps backward.
“You were there too.”
“Yes.”
“And you recognized me the very day we met?”
He did not answer. He only nodded slowly.
The room seemed to shrink around me. The walls felt as though they were moving closer.
My mother began to cry quietly.
That day, Lauren and several of her friends had locked me inside the school changing room.
They took my bag, drew all over my face, and laughed while I begged them to stop.
At one point, I tried to run.
Lauren shoved me from behind.
I lost my balance and struck my face against the open metal door of a locker.
My nose broke.
And Daniel had been nearby the entire time…
filming everything on his phone.
I looked at him.
“You recorded me?”
“I was a stupid fifteen-year-old.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
He covered his face with both hands.
“Yes. I recorded it.”
By the following day, the video had spread through the entire school.
That was when everyone began calling me “the beak,” “the witch,” and all the other cruel names that followed me for years.
Daniel’s father had been a wealthy and influential businessman.
He came to the hospital and offered my mother money if she agreed never to tell anyone what had really happened.
“How much did he pay you?” I asked.
My mother lowered her gaze.
“Forty thousand dollars.”
A laugh escaped me.
There was no amusement in it.
“So you sold the truth about what happened to me for forty thousand dollars?”
“Your father was seriously ill,” she said through her tears. “We were drowning in debt. We had almost lost everything. And they threatened me. They said that if I went to the police, they would claim you had attacked Lauren first.”
I could hardly understand the words I was hearing.
“So you let me spend all these years believing this nose was something I had been born with? Believing that there was something wrong with me?”
My mother reached toward me.
I stepped farther away.
Then I understood why Dr. Morgan had spoken with Daniel.
During the surgery, the doctor had found evidence of a serious old injury from many years earlier.
The damage inside my nose did not match the story recorded in my later medical files.
The surgeon had started asking questions.
And Daniel had realized that the secret he had protected for all those years was about to come out.
I turned toward my husband.
“Why did you remove the mirrors?”
He raised his face.
Tears were running down his cheeks.
“I didn’t take them down because I was afraid you would see yourself after the operation,” he said. “I did it because I couldn’t bear to look at my own reflection anymore.”
My eyes moved to the empty wall where the largest mirror had hung only hours before.
For eight years, I had believed my husband was the one person who had always seen me as beautiful.
Now I knew that, long ago, he had been one of the first people to make me believe I was ugly.
Daniel drew in a shaky breath.
“When I saw you in that café years later, I recognized you immediately. At first, I approached you because I wanted to apologize. But I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. Then we started talking, and I fell in love with you. Every day, I intended to tell you. But the happier we became, the more terrified I was that the truth would make me lose you.”
I looked at him for a long time.
“You wouldn’t have lost me if you had told me from the beginning. You lost me because you chose to lie for years.”
Daniel dropped to his knees.
“Please, Claire. Tell me what I can do. I’ll do anything.”
I reached into the pocket of my jacket and pulled out my phone.
The moment I entered the house and saw that every mirror was gone, I had known something was wrong.
While I was still in the hallway, I had quietly started recording.
Daniel and my mother both went pale.
“Claire…”
“This time, no one is going to buy my silence.”
The next morning, I packed my belongings and moved into a hotel.