I remember, the once beautiful woman said, one of the worst parts of it all was the guilt. I honestly felt that, by growing older and losing my looks, I was a disappointment to people, I was letting them down. There was no denying that I was a disappointment to my husband, not that he ever said so, but he didn’t hide it, either. And when he started cheating, I knew that he used the fact that I didn’t try to make myself look better—meaning, of course, younger—as a justification. My own mother, who once worked as a model and was what you’d call a woman of the world, had warned me that I was putting my marriage at risk. After all, my looks had had everything to do with why my husband married me, it was a big part of what he fell in love with, he and I both knew that, it would have been absurd to deny it. But the girl he fell in love with and married was now gone—and how was he to have known he’d be incapable of desiring the woman in her place? And so he did what so many other men in his predicament do, the once beautiful woman said, he left me for someone else. Someone who, as friends kept pointing out—I suppose because they thought it would make me feel better—bore a strong resemblance to what I had looked like twenty years earlier, when I was her age. Friends also kept telling me, Now you’ll meet someone else, now you’ll find a man who loves you for yourself and not just for how you look! Funny thing, though, I never did meet such a man.

Maybe I really am weird, like the girl said, or maybe I’m just a terrible, shallow person, but it often feels to me as though I had died, the once beautiful woman said. All those years ago I died, and I’ve been a ghost ever since. I’ve been mourning my lost self ever since, and nothing, not even my love for my children and grandchildren, can make up for it.