And then I was moving—stumbling through the living room, my pulse pounding in my ears—until I reached the kitchen. I barely managed to hold my hair back before I doubled over and threw up into the trash.
He followed me, his voice shaking around my name. “Lillian? Are you okay?”
I braced both hands on the counter, my stomach convulsing. When I felt his presence behind me—his hand reaching, hovering—I jerked away, dry heaving so hard I could barely breathe.
“Don’t—” I choked, bile catching on my tongue. “Don’t touch me.”
Vomit dripped from my lips, splattering onto the floor. My body trembled from head to toe. Behind us, Dalal’s amused voice cut through the tension. “Looks like your charm still has the same effect on women, Khalifa.”
He turned curtly. “Are you kidding me right now? Where the hell were you, Dalal? I’ve been looking for you for ten years!”
Ten years?
My vision swam, the words echoing through my head. Ten years. He’d been married for ten years.
The bile rose again, and I bent over the trash can, retching until there was nothing left in me.
Dalal’s tone was soft, almost taunting. “Well,” she said, “I’m here now.”
He laughed in disbelief. “You’re unbelievable. You disappear for a decade and then just show up at my door like this? Do you even hear yourself?”
Their voices tangled—anger, incredulity, resentment—and I stood there, shaking, realizing they had the audacity to arguelike some tragic soap opera couple while I was still wiping vomit from my chin. My hand found the coffee mug beside the sink and chucked it at the floor. It hit the tile and exploded into a dozen glittering pieces.
The silence was instant. They both turned toward me, stunned.
I straightened slowly, breath uneven, and wiped the back of my hand across my mouth. “If someone doesn’t explain what the hell is going on, the next glass I throw is going to be atbothof you.”
Khalifa stared at me, his face stained with that guilt-ridden expression I’d come to despise—the one that said he wished the truth could be rewritten.
“She’s right,” he said. “She’s...my first wife. We’re still married.”
The room went askew. My pulse stuttered, then roared in my ears. Grief hit first, then betrayal, then heartbreak, each emotion lacerating its way through my ribs, fighting for space. But I didn’t let them win. I refused to let either of them see me crack.
“So when you said you didn’t want to hurt me, you were referring to another wife?” He flinched, but I kept going. “God,” I scoffed, shaking my head. “And here I was thinking you were hiding a secret toe fetish, or that early-onset balding ran in your family.”
Dalal’s laugh had the polite veneer of amusement and the teeth of a knife. “Shallowandanger issues? Your taste in women has obviously plummeted after me.”
I watched her, ridiculous and small and furious all at once, and chose not to give her the satisfaction of a reply. My hand slammed the door in her face before she could widen that smile into a victory pose.
I turned back to Khalifa and stacked my anger into a voice so quiet it might have been a thread. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you’d keep somethingthishuge a secret.”
He opened his mouth, ready to charm his way through a confession, but I cut him off before he could even inhale his next lie. “Just to clear up any confusion,” I said, enunciating every syllable, “when I told you I didn’t want to be anyone’s first wife, I wasn’t suggesting that second or third place were open enrollment.”
He blinked at me—slowly, dumbly, as if his brain needed a reboot—but I kept going. “And of course she’s perfect, and beautiful—”
“You’reperfect and beautiful,” he interjected.
“—and five-foot-four, and roughly the width of a breadstick.”
“Who said I wanted that?”
I arched a brow. “By marrying her, you kind of made that clear,Professor.”
“It was arranged—”
“Ourmarriage was arranged.”
“It was arranged by my mother, not me,” he said quickly, like that detail somehow made it better. “She wanted me to marry her friend’s daughter, and she had just gotten sick—”
