Page 73 of Counting the Days

The fear of losing him was too great. If he learned she still wanted to be a mom, would he end the relationship? If she confessed to all of her manipulative tactics, would he be angry? If she was going to come clean, she first wanted to mentally photograph every part of him; that way, if she lost him, she could go through all the photos in her mind forever. She memorized theway his long eyelashes rested on his cheeks, his jugular vein gently pulsating on his neck, the water dripping off his earlobes.

“You’re so beautiful,” she said softly.

He smiled. “Right back atcha.”

“…The first thing I noticed about you was your eyes…. The way they crinkle when you smile, I love it so much,” she said.

“Well, it’s a good thing you make me smile a lot.”

She smiled at this.

He opened his eyes and studied her face. “The first thing I noticed about you was your nose—”

Rhea’s hand involuntarily flew out of the water and covered her nose.“What?”

“What? I love your nose. You don’t?”

“Why? What do you mean? No, it’s not that I don’t—I just—What?Why do you like it?” She sat upright and craned her neck to look in the mirror.

“Why wouldn’t I like it?”

“No reason,” she said quickly, trying to seem less stunned.

“When I was, like, eleven, we were in London,” Danny began, “and we went to a museum and I saw this marble bust of Helen of Troy. My mom told me she was considered the most beautiful woman in the world and I became, like, obsessed with this statue.” He laughed. “Like a little weirdo, I made them buy me a book at the gift shop ’cause there was a photo of the statue in it. Full disclosure…it was the first picture I masturbated to.”

Rhea’s mouth was hanging open.

“Don’t judge me.”

“I’m not.” She closed her mouth.

“In my defense, this was in the good old days, before kids had easy access to porn. Anyway, when I first saw you, that’s who you reminded me of. You have her nose; you have her whole face.”

“Helen of Troy?”Rhea looked in the mirror again.

“Yeah, you look exactly like her.”

The moment she walked in her front door the next morning, she hungrily opened her laptop and searched for a Helen of Troy bust in the city of London. She found a marble bust of Helen and stared at it for an exceedingly long time. Rhea Darby and the face that supposedly launched a thousand ships to kick off the Trojan War could have been twins.

The bust was not of the real Helen; she was Helen as imagined thousands of years after her supposed existence by an Italian sculptor, but that did not change the fact that this sculptor believed wide, long noses were beautiful. And it wasn’t as if the general population had revolted against the bust. They all seemed to agree with the artist’s rendering:This is an objectively beautiful face.

The large-nose trend was not in some far-off, imagined future; the trend had happened a mere two hundred years ago. Which meant, like all trends, it had to circle back eventually. She hoped she would not be dead by then.

An anxious thought gripped her: If she had surgically tweaked her nose, would Danny never have noticed her? Was she born with her exact face so her soulmate could find her? Was every human face a map that guided them toward the life they were meant to have? Or were faces truly like houses, much easier to sell after an extensive remodel?

Rhea ripped the teenage nose off her vision board and threw it away. She printed the Helen bust, cut it out, and glued it where the teenage nose had been. She closed her eyes and tried to manifest a future Rhea Darby who believed she was beautiful exactly the way she was.

Which beauty trends to ignore and which to follow? This groundbreaking discovery made Rhea want to ignore all of them.

173Days

Rhea opened her front doorand watched Danny walk up fifty-two steps with a tote bag full of Italian ingredients. Since she had spent so many nights at his house, he’d insisted on traveling west for her. She did not argue, mostly because she hoped being on her turf would give her the strength to confess her inner turmoil. That way, if he stormed out, she could at least sob into her own mattress; driving home in thick traffic after Danny shattered her heart would be too much to bear.

The romantic plan for the evening was to make a pizza, then go to the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica Pier. After learning that Rhea had not only never been on the Santa Monica Ferris wheel but had never been onanyFerris wheel, Danny became determined to change that.

Like camping, riding a Ferris wheel was an activity Rhea never knew she had always wanted to try. She pushed aside her fear of heights and relished the image of her and Danny eating cotton candy while soaring above the ocean on a giant wheel: the American dream, a symbol of happy childhoods and loving families; the ideal location to inquire how Danny felt about being a father.

As they began mixing pizza dough, Rhea offered the perfect lubricant for shoving the idea of parenting onto Danny: a picture of Tiny’s newborn son, Wolfie. She held up her phone, and Danny gave the appropriate response to a newborn he did not care about: