The Perfect Face by C.G. Twiles

Author:C.G. Twiles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Muradal Publishing

Back inside, she set the phone down somewhere and tried to sob quietly, acutely aware that Logan was two doors away. She didn’t want the humiliating sound to travel through the glass doors and onto her terrace and perhaps over to him.

She wasn’t sure why she was crying, exactly. The rush of emotions at seeing him was too much to explain to herself let alone to anyone else. Anger. Curiosity. Self-pity. The unfairness of it. Him breezily living his California dream with an adoring family; Maddie paralyzed, unable to move forward into the life she wanted.

After about 15 minutes of this, her tears dried and she felt strangely tranquil. In the bathroom, she splashed water on her face, then refilled her glass of Yastika, noting that the bottle was almost empty and she’d have to either ask Elias for another or find a store that sold the Doukas brand.

She considered letting this be the end of her search but, as if controlled by remote, picked her phone back up from her bed and wandered to her desk, staring at the screen and sipping Yastika.

Chelsea’s photos were benign—flowers, sunsets, her in yoga poses. She looked fantastic—sculpted and tanned—much sexier than the plain, matronly vision of Maddie’s dreams.

Maddie had to scroll down, down, down before she stopped at the same photo that Chelsea had as her profile shot—one of her and Daniel, both smiling, heads tilted together, a halo of sun rays behind them. The photo was tagged “Big Sur, California.” Because of Daniel’s sunglasses, Maddie couldn’t get much of a sense of how he’d aged, but he appeared essentially as he did in her memory, though his hair was shorter.

She kept scrolling and found only one more photo of him. He was sitting atop a motorcycle, wearing jeans, boots, and a black leather jacket. His arms were crossed and he smiled carefree and proudly at the camera. He was not wearing a helmet and his blondish-reddish hair was windblown, the longer hair of Maddie’s adolescent memory. The caption said, “My dear handsome husband, I love you always!”

Maddie felt as if something heavy was on her chest, stopping her from breathing freely. She realized she’d put down her drink but had no memory of it. She also realized she was grinding her teeth but couldn’t stop even though her dentist had made clear at her last dental appointment that if she didn’t stop grinding her teeth, or start wearing a mouth guard, she was going to be looking at tens of thousands in dental bills one of these days.

I love you always!

Oh, really, Chelsea? Would you love him if you knew? You probably would, wouldn’t you? Because you’d simply refuse to accept it was real.

At this point, Maddie was fairly drunk and only wanted to curl up in the comfy bed, thankful that Yastika was pretty strong stuff. Vision bleary, she plugged in her phone and set the alarm for 7 a.m.

She would not remember clicking “Follow” on Chelsea’s profile.

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