I grimaced. “Ew, Robert. I don’t appreciate the innuendo hidden under that statement. And besides, marriage isn’t as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but I was already waving them both off. “Listen, I need to wash up and go meet his family. He has a thing against tardiness.”
And color, and meat, and basically everything me.
I closed the bathroom door behind me, letting the click of the latch seal me off from the chatter and teasing outside. I washed my hands, watching the water bead and run over my knuckles. Each swipe of the towel against my skin was purposeful, almost ceremonial, like I was scrubbing off the last remnants of one life and getting ready to step into another—even if only for the evening.
I examined myself in the mirror. Other than my obnoxious height and green eyes, I was just another face in the crowd—light ashy brown hair that caught the glare in subtle waves, skin that refused to tan no matter how long I baked in the sun, and a small beauty mark at the brim of my Middle Eastern nose.
Thanks to my mother’s endless commentary about my weight, I wasn’t exactly sure what my body looked like anymore. She started making me weigh myself when I was ten. I was growing fast, which meant the number on the scale was growing fast, which—apparently—meant her patience with me was dwindling just as quickly. She could never seem to grasp that a six-foot girl wasn’t built to hover at a hundred and ten pounds, or that a number that might’ve seemed unhealthy on someone much shorter didn’t mean the same thing on a human skyscraper with miles of limbs and bones. Somewhere along theway, the mirror stopped showing me a body and started only showing me what she insisted was wrong.
Still, I didn’t hate what I saw. Nor did I exactly love it—but wasn’t that the hushed, eternal dilemma of being a woman? Liking yourself enough to stand firm in your own skin, yet always feeling the whisper of something to fix, tweak, improve,apologizefor.
Tonight, the reflection was more than hair and eyes and marks; it was the accumulation of every life I’d touched, every baby I’d held and guided into the world. I had to compress it all, fold it neatly like origami, like I did with my gloves before every surgery, and present the version of me that would survive a night of polite smiles, probing questions, and carefully measured appearances.
Kevin knocked on the door, and I could hear his familiar, slightly overzealous energy even through the thin wood. “Um...you ready?”
“Almost,” I said, tugging the dress over my head. “Just giving myself a pep talk. And by pep talk, I mean staring at myself until I either feel confident or insane. We’ll see which one wins.”
“You’re going to look amazing,” he assured me. “Not that you don’t every day, but you know...”
I rolled my eyes, smiling despite myself. “Kevin, I appreciate the reassurance. I just wish my pep talk included instructions for surviving dinner with a man whose family probably has a six-step interrogation planned.”
“You’ve survived worse. Remember the postpartum shift last month when the power went out, and you delivered twins in candlelight?”
I laughed, shaking my head. “Candlelight twins. Somehow, this feels...different. More like a performance where everyone’s judging the smallest misstep.”
After securing the corner of my hijab with a magnet and sliding into my flats, I paused to study myself one last time. This was it—the final battle in the thirty-year war—and instead of going out guns-blazing as my unapologetic, chronically chaotic self, I wanted a different kind of bang. I wanted to look poised, polished,perfect, everything my mother had spent my entire childhood trying to sculpt me into, while simultaneously implying I didn’t have the innate biology to pull it off.
Despite the straight A’s, the awards, the medical degree, there had always been this...undertone in her voice:Nice, sweet, quiet girls get chosen. You? Try harder.
And for once, I wanted to show her that Icouldbe that girl. I’d always been capable of it—effortlessly, even. I just never wanted to be. I wanted my last act of rebellion to look suspiciously like compliance. A performance so squeaky clean she’d never guess the subtext:You don’t hold the puppet strings. I do.
Yeah, I was doing this to get away from her—to escape the house that was never a home, the bedroom that was never mine, the people that never wanted me—but she didn’t get to call the shots anymore. Every tilt of my head, every premeditated smile, every subtle gesture had been rehearsed in my mind a thousand times. I was primed for the spotlight, impeccably aware that this composure was mine and mine alone, even if it existed for a family I barely knew and for a love story that was completely fake.
Tonight, for the first time, the curated version of me wasn’t for her at all. It was for me.
Maybe I’d never know what real love felt like—the kind Sarah believed in with her whole chest, the kind that made you plan white dresses and hunky husbands and bundles of joy. Maybe I was destined to keep wearing the crown my mother placed on my head at birth, the one labeleddisappointment, pinned soneatly I sometimes forgot it wasn’t part of my skull. Maybe I’d always carry her around with me like a ringtone with no snooze button—failure, failure, failure.
But at least, I told myself, there would be proof. Something I could point to, something that said:See? I followed your script. I chose what you would’ve chosen. I bent myself into the shape you kept insisting was right.
And under that, under the pretending and the performing, was the subtler, truer wish: that if sacrificing romance, if dipping my reluctant toe into the so-called dating pool under the banner of marriage, if playing her game long enough, if doing theonething she wanted badly enough—then maybe I’d finally get to walk off the board. Maybe this would buy me an exit. A little distance. A version of my life that didn’t orbit her.
And if that was all I ever got out of this—if the only prize was the slow, aching promise of freedom—then I’d take it, even if it never once felt like winning.
Chapter Four
KHALIFA WAS LEANINGagainst his black SUV when I pulled into the driveway, arms crossed, gaze fixed and perfectly impatient. The second I stepped out of the car, he snapped, “You’relate.”
“Sorry. I was busy bringing life into this world.”
He let out a low, incredulous hum. “You couldn’t have done that earlier in the day?”
“I’ll be sure to pass along your preferred delivery hours to the next uterus I meet.”
He rolled his eyes, gesturing a hand toward the front door. “Go inside.”
I hesitated mid-step, a flicker of longing threading through the crisp evening air. I wished Sarah were here to look me over, to offer a compliment, to say I looked pretty without sarcasm. A small, absurd part of me wanted Khalifa to do it too, even though logic screamed that it would be him mocking me in some elegant, infuriating way.
