“Well, at least you’re self-aware.”
“Oh, painfully so,” she agreed, placing a dramatic hand over her heart.
“You know,” I said slowly, “I think this was our first actual fight.”
“You’re right. Wow. First fight in twenty-seven years of friendship. How do you think we did?”
“Classic showdown: two-faced liar versus overreaction of the century.”
“Truly iconic work.” She grinned briefly before tilting her head, studying me with that unnerving intuition of hers. “Does Khalifa know?”
“No. I haven’t seen him in a while.”
Her brows knitted together. “What? Why?”
I exhaled, long and tired. “I found out he was still married to another woman in Lebanon. Before he moved here.”
Sarah shot up from the couch. “I’m sorry—what? That asshole!”
“He’s not,” I said quickly, then grimaced. “I mean, heis. A little bit. But it’s more complicated than that.”
And then I told her everything—Dalal, the cheating, the baby, the way he tried to divorce her and she vanished like a ghost who enjoyed causing paperwork-related misery. By the time I finished, Sarah’s eyes were so wide I was worried I’d have to call an optometrist.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “What a nut job. Poor Khalifa.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So, what happened? Did you ask for a divorce?”
“No,” I murmured. “I just...needed space.”
“And he actually gave it to you?”
I nodded, staring down at my hands. “I’m in love with him, Sarah,” I confessed. “And it’s not just that. Being with him...” I swallowed. “Being with him made me start falling in love with myself. The pieces I spent years calling unlovable, everyflaw I stamped as bad—he held as if they were good. Every part I’d labeled broken, he saw as something beautiful. And the girl I spent years trying to shrink, to silence—he accepted so effortlessly that it made me wonder why I ever believed there was anything wrong with her to begin with.”
It wasn’t until I said it out loud that I realized it was true. For so long, I’d molded my personality to fit whatever room I walked into—louder here, smaller there, agreeable when it was safer, razor-edged when I was afraid—that somewhere along the way, I’d collected so many different versions of me I couldn’t remember which one was real.
But with him, I didn’t have to edit. Or translate. Or apologize first, just in case.
With him, I didn’t feel like I was performing. I felt like myself. I feltreal.
And maybe that was why I was so terrified of letting him back into my life. Because once someone saw the real you, they got a kind of power—the power to change how you felt about yourself. I didn’t want to hand that over to anyone ever again. But if he was using that power gently, carefully—forme, notagainstme—then...would it really be so awful to let him?
A grin spread across her face like she’d just cracked the case. “Dr. Lillian Tariq,” she said, clutching her chest dramatically. “Queen of cynicism, sworn enemy of romance and rings, patron saint of ‘men are a disease’...is in love. Forreal. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”
I shot her a look. “Are you done?”
“Not even close,” she said, eyes softening. “Forgive him.”
“What if he hurts me again?”
“He might. And you might hurt him, too.”
“That’s...comforting.”
“That’s marriage, Lilly. That’s love. Sometimes you hurt each other without meaning to. It’s about what you do after. Whetheryou stay, apologize, change, rebuild. That’s the real part no one writes songs about.”
I leaned back against the pillows, her words sinking into me like sunlight through dirty glass—warm, but still too much to look at directly.
