The woman in the mirror was older. Same face, mostly (the eyes were hers, the jaw was hers) but years had settled into the skin that Rael hadn't accumulated yet. She looked like Rael might look in her mid-forties, if she went that way.
She had been seeing this for a year. The first time she had thought the mirror was malfunctioning. The second time she had stood very still and looked carefully. By the third time she had accepted it as the kind of thing that happened sometimes, in the same way she had accepted other things that happened sometimes.
A friend had said: maybe it's who you'll become. Rael had considered this seriously. If it was who she would become, then she would become her. If it wasn't, then whatever she became would be something else. She didn't find either possibility particularly alarming.
The older one looked back steadily. She had a quality that Rael associated with people who had been thinking about something for a long time: a settled quality, not peaceful exactly, just used to the weight of whatever it was. Rael understood this was probably projection. She was thirty-four and she had no way to know what a person in that face had been thinking about.
Sometimes the older one seemed to study her. Rael let herself be studied. She stood still for the few seconds the mirror offered and then it was her own face again.
She went to work.