It was impossible for me to tell her age or her nationality. She might’ve been Spanish. She might’ve been Russian. She might’ve been Indian, in part, or Chinese, or even Greek. And Karla was right—she had been beautiful once. It was the kind of beauty that grows from the sum of its parts rather than from any one outstanding feature: a beauty that strikes the eye rather than the heart, and a beauty that sours if it isn’t nourished by some goodness from within. And she wasn’t beautiful then, in that moment.