## Act I

Alice Windsor did not know which version of herself was the real one until the night when both of them looked in the mirror and saw different faces.

She was twenty-nine, the wife of Edmund Windsor, a barrister who practiced in the chambers of Lincoln's Inn and who was, by all accounts, a man of impeccable character and quiet distinction. Alice had married him at twenty-four because he was kind and steady and the kind of man who opened doors and remembered her mother's birthday and spoke to her in a voice that never rose above a gentle murmur, even when they argued.

They had been married for four years and had no children. Edmund did not mention this to her, but she noticed that when they attended dinners at the Inns of Court, his eyes would flicker toward her stomach for just a moment before returning to whatever conversation he was having, and that flicker was a kind of question that she could not answer.

The first episode began on a Friday in October. Alice was in her bedroom, dressing for a dinner party at the Windsors' friends the Cartwrights, when she felt a wave of dizziness so sudden and complete that she had to sit on the edge of the bed and close her eyes. When the dizziness passed, she opened her eyes and looked at the mirror above the fireplace and saw, for just one second, a face that was not hers looking back at her.

The face was older. It had deeper lines around the eyes and mouth, and the hair was different—pulled back more severely, in a style that Alice had never worn. But the eyes were the same: dark, wide-set, the color of wet earth. And for that one second, Alice understood something that she could not articulate: the face in the mirror was her own, from some future or alternate version of herself that had made different choices and borne different wounds.

Then the second passed, and the mirror showed her ordinary face again, and she was alone in the room, and the dressing gown she had chosen for the evening hung on the back of the door, and she was twenty-nine, and she was Alice Windsor, and nothing had happened.

But something had.

## Act II

The episodes came every few weeks after that, always at night, always when she was alone in a room with a mirror. Each time, the face that looked back was slightly different, aged by perhaps a year or two, bearing an expression that Alice did not recognize: not sadness, not anger, but something harder and more resolved, the look of a woman who had learned to survive by becoming harder than the world around her.

She began to keep a journal, not because she wanted to but because she felt compelled to, as if some part of her understood that this was important and that forgetting would be a kind of betrayal. She wrote in a small leather-bound notebook that she kept on the bedside table, and she wrote not in English but in French, the language she had studied at university and had not spoken aloud in five years.

> 23 octobre. Edmund was good to me tonight. He cooked dinner himself because I said I wasn't feeling well, and he set the table with the good china, and he played music—Debussy, of all things—and he held my hand and asked me nothing. He never asks me anything. That is his great virtue and his great failure. He loves me the way a man loves a house: with quiet satisfaction and no curiosity about the rooms he does not enter.

> 7 novembre. The face in the mirror was older tonight. She looked at me with something that might have been pity, but it was the pity of someone who has been through something terrible and has survived it, not the pity of someone who is sorry for you. She moved her lips, and I thought she was going to speak, but no sound came out. She pointed at the journal, and I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the room.

> 22 novembre. I asked Edmund about the mirror tonight. I asked him, casually, as if it were a question about the weather, whether he had ever looked in a mirror and seen something that wasn't there. He said no, but he said it too quickly, and I saw, for the first time, something in his eyes that I had never seen before: fear.

The fear in Edmund's eyes opened a door in Alice's mind that she had never known existed. She began to notice things about her husband that she had not noticed before: the way he changed the subject when she talked about the mirror, the way he avoided going into their bedroom after dark, the way he had begun to spend more time at the chambers and less time at home, claiming that a difficult case was requiring his full attention.

She searched his desk. She found nothing that could be called evidence, only hints: a second set of keys that she had not seen before, a letter from a doctor in London whose name she did not recognize, and a photograph of a woman standing in a garden that Alice did not recognize, a woman who looked, disturbingly, like the woman in the mirror.

## Act III

Alice went to see the doctor. She did not tell Edmund. She took a train to London, found the address from the letter in Edmund's desk, and sat in a waiting room that smelled of antiseptic and old magazines and waited to be called in.

The doctor was a thin man with tired eyes and a manner that suggested he had spent a lifetime hearing things that he wished he had not heard. He listened to Alice's story without interrupting, and when she was finished, he was quiet for a long time.

"This is not the first time a woman has come to me with this complaint," he said finally. "But it is the first time I have heard it described in French."

Alice felt the blood drain from her face.

"There is a condition," the doctor continued, "that affects women, sometimes after marriage, sometimes after a loss, sometimes for no identifiable reason at all. It manifests as dissociative episodes, in which the patient experiences a sense of detachment from her own body and identity. In some cases, it involves hallucinations, most commonly visual, in which the patient sees herself as she believes she might have been, or as she fears she will become."

"That's not what's happening to me," Alice said, but her voice lacked conviction.

"Is it not?" The doctor's eyes were gentle. "Then explain to me why you keep a journal in a language you have not spoken aloud in five years. Explain to me why you are afraid of mirrors. Explain to me why you came to see me without telling your husband."

She had no answer.

"Your husband has been here before you," the doctor said. "He came three months ago. He told me that his wife had been experiencing episodes, and he asked me if there was a treatment, a medication, anything that could help her. He was very concerned. Very loving."

Alice felt the room tilt. "And what did you tell him?"

"I told him that there is no treatment for what you have, because it is not a disease. It is a response. A response to something that has happened to you or something that you have not allowed yourself to feel."

"What happened to me?"

The doctor looked at her for a long moment. "That, Mrs. Windsor, is a question for you to answer. Not for me. Not for your husband. For you."

## Act IV

Alice returned to Lincoln's Inn and did not speak to Edmund about what she had learned. She went home and she sat in the bedroom and she looked in the mirror and she waited for the face to appear.

It came at midnight. The woman in the mirror was older, much older, perhaps forty or fifty, with lines that suggested a lifetime of hard choices and harder victories. She looked at Alice with an expression that Alice now understood was not pity but recognition.

The woman moved her lips, and this time, sound came out. It was a single word, spoken in French, the language of the journal, the language of the part of Alice that had always known this was coming.

"Souviens-toi." Remember.

Alice woke on the floor of the bedroom at dawn, the leather journal open beside her, and she understood that the woman in the mirror was not a hallucination or a symptom or a manifestation of any condition that a doctor could name. She was a message, sent across the boundary of Alice's own denial, from the part of herself that knew things the conscious mind had chosen not to know.

She went to Edmund's desk and took out the photograph of the woman in the garden and studied it. The woman was not the woman in the mirror. But she was Alice's cousin, Marguerite, who had died ten years earlier, in a fire at the family home in Kent, a fire that had been ruled accidental but that Alice had always suspected had been deliberate, and that she had never spoken of because to speak of it would have been to speak of her own mother and her own complicity in the silence that had followed.

The woman in the mirror was not Marguerite. The woman in the mirror was Alice, remembering Marguerite, remembering the fire, remembering the promise she had made to herself at nineteen that she would never let herself feel the full weight of what had happened, and failing, spectacularly, at the task.

Alice Windsor sat on the floor of her bedroom at dawn and wept for the first time in ten years. She wept for Marguerite and for herself and for the woman in the mirror who had waited so patiently for her to remember. And when the weeping was over, the mirror showed her ordinary face again, but it was an ordinary face that had remembered something, and that made all the difference in the world.

She got up, wrote a letter to Edmund in English (not French), and told him everything. She told him about the fire and the promise and the journal and the doctor and the woman in the mirror. He read the letter and sat at the kitchen table for an hour without moving, and then he came upstairs and held her and held her and held her, and for the first time in their marriage, she felt him not as a man who opened doors and remembered birthdays but as a man who was afraid, and human, and present.