He lets go of my shoulders.

“How long have you known?” I ask, my eyes filling with tears.

“Since I found Georgia’s laptop in a cab.”

Stunned, I listen as he explains how he allowed himself to open Georgia’s diary document and stumbled upon descriptions of me and my friends and saw photos of me without the fat suit. He says since meeting me, he fell for me like he’d never fallen for anyone, and that’s why it didn’t feel right to let our relationship progress without my being aware of everything.

I don’t respond.

“Is this problematic?” he asks.

I nod. Tears start running down my cheeks.

“You see, I knew it.”

I say nothing.

He says, “I could easily have fooled you by pretending I didn’t know the truth about your true appearance and—”

“You mean as you have done?”

“Uh . . . yes. Except, I could have continued and allowed things to progress. But as my feelings for you deepened, it became harder for me to choose this dishonest option.”

He pauses, waiting for me to say something, but I can’t. I’m too upset.

“My conscience was getting in the way, you understand?” he says softly.

I nod, unable to speak.

“Because you mean so much to me,” he says.

I quickly nod as tears keep spilling, and I finally manage to say, “Can we continue this another time?”

“Really?” he asks, concerned.

“I’m sorry, I have to lie down now. I don’t feel great.” I start walking out of the living room. “Please let yourself out.”

“Barb, can’t we talk about this a little more?”

“Sure, later,” I call out, going to my bedroom.

But he comes after me. “No, wait, Barb.” He takes my arm before I reach my bedroom door. Touching my gray curls, he says, “I admire the system you’ve devised to ensure that your beauty won’t be the cause of your happiness. And I know I didn’t meet you the right way, but isn’t it better to have met you the wrong way and to love you the right way than the reverse?”

I say nothing.

Not giving up, he says, “I’m sorry I found out about your real appearance. I’m sorry because it robbed me of the opportunity to prove that I could pass through your filtering system.”

After hesitating a long time, I gently say what I know to be the truth: “You wouldn’t have passed. If you had believed I really was fat, gray-haired, and the rest, you never would have become interested in me.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because of my years of experience.”

“If I’d gotten to know you as I have, I would have fallen for you. As I have.”

“You wouldn’t have had the slightest interest in getting to know me in the first place. And even if you had, you wouldn’t have been able to think of me as anything but a friend.”

“My feelings for you now have nothing to do with your looks. In fact, I don’t care if I never see your physical beauty again. You could wear your disguise all the time if you wanted to.”

“I do.”

“Yes, but I mean you could keep wearing it if we were involved. And I mean all the time—even during the most intimate times.”

I can’t help laughing through my tears. “It wouldn’t be very practical.”

“I wouldn’t care.”

I shake my head and quickly enter my bedroom and lock myself in, saying, “Please let yourself out.”

I hear the front door close, and then for a long time I hear nothing but my sobs.

Chapter Sixteen

I’m at home, up late working on costumes for a historical drama. Deeply depressed by Peter’s revelation, I’m doing my best to lose myself in work, which is not going well, when the phone rings. I pick up because this time the caller ID says “Out of Area,” not “Peter Marrick,” as it did three times today already.

I answer Lily’s question with the truth: yes, Peter has now told me his secret. And no, I cannot accept him.

In the silence, I hear her breathing. And in her breathing, I hear her anxiety.

“What’s his secret?” she asks.

I tell her what it is.

“Maybe you just need a little bit of time to think about it, and you’ll come round to accepting it,” she says, full of hope, almost as though she’s arguing her own case.

“You know I can’t, Lily.” I wish I could add something to comfort her. But I can’t, because I feel dead.

After Lily hangs up with me, Strad joins her for their first night of sleeping in the same room.

They make love, snuggle, and Strad drifts off to sleep. But Lily lies awake, weeping silently inside her mask.

Strad wakes up to the sound of her crying. He’s kind and gentle. He says, “Are you sure you don’t want to get it over with now, and just tell me what this big skeleton in your closet is? I hate to see you like this.” He’s hugging her, stroking her hair.

“No, no,” she says. “Not yet.”

She feels suffocated by her mask, so she turns on the music and takes off the mask. Strad has no trouble going back to sleep, but she only briefly dips into slumber. The hours pass and the music is becoming unbearable to her. Unlike the mask, which asphyxiates only her lungs, the music is suffocating every pore of her being. And yet, the thought of its elimination tomorrow—and of the mask’s—is even worse.

She rushes to the bathroom, overcome by a surge of nausea.

When she emerges, pale but no less ravishing, Strad is awake, propped up on one elbow, watching her with concern. He taps the mattress. She sits. He pulls her to him, holds her in his arms. Using much patience and reassurance, he tries to convince her not to tell him the truth about her mask, since it’s clearly making her so miserable; not to worry about anything, and to just accept his marriage proposal.

She finally agrees.

LATER THAT MORNING, they drive around the island with the top down, her hair and her music blowing in the wind. Reclined in the passenger seat, her head relaxed against the headrest, she’s holding the mask firmly on her lap, just in case. It caresses her hands with its soft feathers made alive by the breeze. And she caresses it back, no longer hating it—at least not today, not right now. She’s engaged to Strad and she’s rarely been happier. He was right; not telling him her secret was the correct decision. All she had to do was embrace this state of things.

They stop for a picnic on a deserted beach, settling down in the shade of a cluster of palm trees. Lily positions her travel speakers next to them and puts a heavy rock on her mask to prevent it from flying away.

Strad looks blissful, feasting his eyes on her exquisite face framed by the turquoise ocean behind her.

THEY SPEND ALL afternoon in her hotel room with the music playing. They make love, they laugh, they talk about their future. He then settles himself in the easy chair and takes a couple of old magazines out of his beach bag to browse while he waits for her to get ready to accompany him to the pool.

“I love you. I adore you,” he says to her.

“I love and adore you, too,” she says, smiling at him.

As she rubs sunscreen into her arms and legs, she notices that something in one of the magazines grabs his attention. He places it down on the ottoman and pores over it. Lily sees him scratching the page with his thumbnail, as though he’s trying to get something unstuck. He’s frowning.

“What in the world is this,” he mutters. He picks up the magazine again to look at it more closely, and that’s when she sees its cover.

She freezes. She knows what he’s looking at.

As vividly as the previous moment represented a life of romantic bliss for Lily, this moment embodies its end.

Strad is looking at a picture of his transcendentally beautiful girlfriend, Sondra, in the magazine, and clearly wonders why the picture is in an article about Lily Stanton, his supremely unattractive musician friend, and why even the caption under the photograph so confusingly reads: Lily Stanton at her piano.