Chapter 1 — If You Are Marrying Me Because of His Face

“If you are marrying me because I have my dead brother’s face, then stop this wedding right now.”

Those were the last words Sebastian Morales said to me before he became my husband, spoken quietly in a side room off the little hall we had rented, while somewhere beyond the door our families were finding their seats.

I have replayed that sentence more times than I can count, turned it over and held it to the light from every angle, because it is the single most honest thing anyone said to me in the whole long deception, and it was said, I would learn much later, by a mouth that had no right to any of that honesty at all.

My name is Mariana Lopez.

I am thirty-five years old, and I teach high school English in Austin, Texas, which means I spend my days trying to convince teenagers that the words people choose are never accidental, that a writer who is any good means the thing they say and also the thing they leave unsaid.

I believed that about literature.

I had not yet learned to believe it about my own life.

If I had, perhaps I would have heard that sentence differently.

Perhaps I would have noticed that a man does not warn you against loving him for his brother’s face unless the face is the one thing he is most afraid you will look at too closely.

There is a cruelty in that sentence, buried so deep I did not feel it at the time, that I have never quite recovered from.

He warned me not to marry a face.

He, of all the men on earth, warned me of that.

And he meant it, I think, in his tangled way; some corner of him that still had a conscience wanted me to refuse him, wanted to be stopped before the lie grew one chapter longer.

But another corner of him said the words precisely because they were the most disarming thing he could have said, because a man who tells you not to love him for his brother’s face has surely proven he is not that brother.

It was the perfect sentence for an impostor to speak, and I have never been able to decide how much of it was guilt and how much was strategy, and I have stopped trying to decide, because I no longer believe the two can be separated in a man like that.

In November of 2022, I was on the verge of doing the one thing I had sworn, for three years, I would never do.

I was getting married again.