The first time Arthur asked for a photograph of my face without makeup, I thought it was romantic.

By the fourth time, I’d started to wonder.

“Another picture?” I teased him over the phone. I was sitting in my kitchen with a cup of tea going cold beside me and my reading glasses pushed up on my head. “Arthur, you’ve already seen me three times this week.”

“Please, Holly,” he said. His voice was warm and a little rough, the voice of a man who’d smoked a pipe once and quit a long time ago. “I love seeing you as you are.”

I laughed.

“You’ve seen me as I am at our coffee date. And at the botanical garden. And in that awful photo by the rosebush where I’m squinting.”

“Not nearly enough,” he said.

I should have asked him why right then.

I didn’t. I was seventy-eight years old, and a man was telling me he wanted to see my face. I didn’t want to ask questions. I wanted to believe him.

I should explain about my face.

When I was a girl, I had a soft, thin little shadow on my upper lip, the kind lots of girls have. Nobody noticed. Then, somewhere in my late teens, it started to darken. By the time I was twenty-two, it was a mustache.

Not a faint one. A real one. Dark and noticeable, the kind people saw from across a room.

Doctors told me it was hormones. They gave me long words and pamphlets and pills that made me sick to my stomach. None of them made it go away.

I spent more than fifty years learning ways to hide it.

I bleached it. I waxed it until the skin bled. I tried electrolysis three times, and each time it hurt so badly I cried in the parking lot. I shaved it every morning in the bathroom with the door locked, even after I was married, because I couldn’t stand for anyone to see me do it. I wore heavy powder. I learned to tilt my head down a little when I smiled. I learned to hold a coffee cup or a napkin near my mouth when I laughed.

Strangers stared. Some of them remembered their manners and looked away. Some of them didn’t. Once, in a grocery store, a little boy pointed at me and said loudly, “Mommy, why does that lady have a mustache like Grandpa?”

His mother pulled him away by the arm. She didn’t apologize. She just looked at me with this mix of pity and embarrassment, which was worse than if she’d laughed.

What hurt most, all those years, wasn’t the staring.

It was knowing that people noticed my mustache before they noticed me.