It doesn’t suit me. It suits whoever I’m supposed to become.
I can’t speak. Can’t move. Can’t do anything but stare at this woman who has my eyes but nothing else.
Movement in the mirror. Saul, pushing off the wall. Walking toward me with those thighs and that quiet certainty. He stops just behind the chair, close enough that I can see his face reflected next to mine. Close enough that if I leaned back I’d hit solid muscle. Close enough that I can smell him, soap and something warmer, like he generates his own heat.
“Hey,” he says quietly. Just that. Just hey.
But the way he says it, like he’s not going to pretend it’s fine, cracks something open in my chest.
“I don’t look like me,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“I don’t.” My voice breaks. “She’s gone. She’s just... gone.”
Saul doesn’t tell me it’ll be okay. Doesn’t offer platitudes about it being temporary or how I’ll get used to it. He just meets my eyes in the mirror and stays there.
Steady. Present. A witness to my undoing.
I take a breath. Then another. Force myself to look at the blonde stranger until my heart rate slows.
“What now?” I ask.
“Photos,” Saul says. “Then documents. And then we go.”
Right. Paperwork. Portraits of my new fake face. Hooray.
I stand on legs that don’t feel entirely solid. The cape falls away and Patricia sweeps the hair from my shoulders. My old hair, my mother’s color, scattered on the floor like something discarded.
I don’t look at it.
I can’t look at it.
The photo room is just as soulless as everything else in this building. White backdrop. Camera on a tripod. A man in a polo shirt who looks like he does this twelve times a day and has never once wondered about the people standing on his little X.
“Look at the camera,” he says flatly. “No smiling.”
I stand on the marked spot with my new blonde hair and my old face and try to look like someone who exists.
The flash goes off.
Twice more.
“Done,” Polo Shirt says, already turning away.
Three flashes and the new me is documented.
Back in another room, this one slightly less beige, more of a taupe, God I’m losing my mind, there are documents waiting.
Saul sits across from me while I look at them.
Driver’s license. Social security card. Birth certificate.
All with the same name.
I read it three times because my brain refuses to process it.
Elizabeth Taylor.
