I never told my husband’s mistress that I was the plastic surgeon she’d booked for her consultation. She didn’t recognize me behind my mask and scrubs.

She casually showed me a photo on her phone and said, “I want to look better than this pathetic woman my boyfriend is married to. Make me younger so he finally leaves her.”

I smiled behind my mask and nodded.

The surgery was flawless. She believed she’d wake up with a face that would make me cry with envy. But when the final bandage came off, her face drained of color. She screamed, dropping the mirror. I hadn’t made her younger. I had turned her into an exact, permanent replica of me.

“I want to look better than this pathetic woman my boyfriend is married to.”

The words sliced through the sterile air of my clinic. She had no idea the face she insulted was the same one hidden behind my surgical mask—and that by the time I finished, she wouldn’t just resemble that woman. She would become her.

The Hartman Aesthetic Center in Los Angeles was all polished stone and artificial calm, designed to make people forget what really happened inside. I sat behind the glass desk, fully scrubbed in. To the world, I was Dr. Lauren Hartman, a respected surgeon. To the girl across from me, I was simply the woman who could reshape her future.

Maddison was twenty-three, blonde, and dripping with entitlement. She dropped her phone on the desk.

On the screen was a photo of a tired woman in a backyard, hair tied up, no makeup.

Me.

Taken weeks earlier, after a brutal shift.

“This is her,” Maddison sneered. “He says she’s boring. Says he stays for appearances. I want a younger, hotter version of this face. I want him to forget she ever existed.”