She had worn that face for so many years that she no longer remembered the one beneath it. He had loved her smile, so she kept smiling. He had loved her silence, so she swallowed every word. And whenever something inside her began to break, she learned to hide the cracks. Until the day she discovered that the person she had become was the very person he had betrayed. That night, she stood before a mirror and reached for her face. It came away in her hands. Behind it, there was nothing she recognized. She held it carefully, almost tenderly, remembering all the years she had spent becoming someone worth loving. And for the first time, she wondered whether the cruelest thing he had taken from her was never his love. It was the person she had been before him.