He didn’t touch me, not in the way I feared. Instead, Charles served us both a drink, gestured for me to sit down, and spoke as if we were old friends trapped in a waiting room.
“I didn’t become Charles Harwood,” he began. “My name was Gregory Humes. I worked as a cosmetic surgeon in Los Angeles for almost 30 years. And a very good one, too.”
I sat rigidly in the chair facing him. I could barely see his face: how he moved , how he clung too tightly to inappropriate places. The glare of the lamp reflected the shine of the synthetic skin, glued on with clinical precision.
I made a fortune out of desperation. Actresses, executives, wives of senators… came to me to become other people. And I paid well.
He took a sip of bourbo. “But I became greedy. Too greedy.”
It turns out that Charles—or Gregory—had developed an illegal side business. Through experimental surgeries, facial reconstruction, and synthetic grafts, he helped criminals disappear, literally giving them new faces . He called it “erasure work.”
The FBI found out six years ago. They revoked his license. He faced 30 years in federal prison. But instead of serving his sentence, he reached an agreement.
He testified against high-profile clients—men who could exile governments—and in return, they gave him a new identity: Charles Harwood.
New name, new location and trust fund sufficiently large to maintain it secretly and occultly.
“But the irony,” he said, laughing bitterly, “is that I had to become my own patient.
