For as long as I could remember, people had mocked my nose.
It started in middle school.
“Here comes the beak!” the boys would shout whenever I entered the classroom.
The girls left drawings of witches on my desk, and someone even wrote across the mirror in the locker room:
“Emily, no boy will ever love you.”
Over the years, I learned to pretend I couldn’t hear them.
I learned to pose only from the side in photographs, tilt my head while speaking, and avoid store windows so I wouldn’t accidentally catch my own reflection.
Then I met Michael.
He was the first man who looked directly at my face without turning away.
“You’re beautiful,” he would tell me. “You don’t need to change anything.”
We got married and spent eight years together. Michael never mocked me or made me hide from photographs. But the voices from my childhood still lived inside my head.
Whenever my coworkers chafar took a group photo, I pretended to be sick.
Sometimes I even got out of bed at night, stood in front of the mirror, and used my fingers to imagine what I would look like with a smaller, straighter nose.
For years, I saved money for surgery.
When I finally scheduled the procedure, Michael didn’t seem happy.
“Emily, are you sure?” he asked, holding my hand.
“I’m doing this for myself.”
He stared at me for a long moment, then nodded.
The surgery went well.
When I woke up, my face was completely swollen and my nose was covered in bandages. Dr. Harris 48 warned me not to judge the results for several weeks.
Michael drove me home.
He was silent the entire way. He kept one hand on the steering wheel and held my hand with the other.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“I’m just tired.”
The moment I entered the house, I realized something had changed.
The large mirror above the living room fireplace was gone.
The hallway mirror had disappeared too.
I hurried into the bathroom.
The mirrored door of the medicine cabinet had been removed. The full-length mirror in our bedroom was gone as well.
Michael had even covered our glass coffee table with a white sheet.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
He stood in the doorway, his face pale.
“I removed them.”
“All the mirrors?”
