When I stepped outside, the air felt new. It was the same old hospital parking lot, the same dull stretch of pavement and white lines—but everything looked different now, brighter somehow. Even the sunlight felt gentler, like the universe had adjusted its dimmer switch just for me.
I walked toward my car, phone in hand. For months, I’d avoided his name, built walls between us out of anger and pride, but after hearing that heartbeat—our daughter’s heartbeat—every ounce of resentment dissolved like sugar in water.
I’d realized it myself, hadn’t I? That goodness could grow from imperfect motives. And Khalifa, as imperfect as his motives were, was so perfectly the best thing that had ever happened to me.
He’d sent me flowers and meals and divorce papers. He’d given me space, but not absence. He’d been loving me from the periphery, waiting patiently while I untangled myself.
I thought back to every moment I’d snapped at him, every time I’d unraveled over something small, let my emotions spill everywhere—and how he never once met me with the same storm. He only ever met my chaos with calm. Somehow my fire found a home cradled in the shadow of his peace, still burning bright.
And suddenly, I didn’t want the space anymore. I wantedhim.
My thumb hovered over his name in my contacts. I typed outCan we talk?Then deleted it. Too formal. ThenI need to see you. Too desperate. ThenHi. Too stupid.
I sighed, drumming the phone against my forehead. “Come on, Lilly,” I muttered. “You deliver babies for a living, but you can’t deliver one text?”
Before I could type another word, a voice broke through the noise of the street—deep, accented, achingly familiar.
“Lillian?”
Chapter Forty-Four
I WHIPPED AROUND.
Khalifa was standing on the other side of the pavement, sunlight spilling over him like it had been waiting for this exact moment. His hair was a little longer, his scruff darker, his eyes fixed on me with a kind of hesitant wonder that made my heart stutter.
For a second, I couldn’t breathe. The ultrasound photo pressed against my ribs, the echo of our daughter still pulsing in my ears, and there he was—the man who started all of it.
He walked toward me slowly, stopping a few feet away. “Sorry,” he said, stumbling over the apology. “I wasn’t following you, I swear.”
I opened my mouth to tell him a dozen things—about boundaries, about communication, about the idiocy of appearing when your doctor-wife’s life is a fragile soap bubble—but the thought caught in my throat because a horn cut through the air suddenly.
Both of our heads turned. A car, too fast and too close, barreled toward us down the lot. Before my brain could process the physical threat andmove, he shoved me out of the way.
I hit the ground with all the grace of a sack of laundry dumped from a moving truck. Pain flared across my back, bright and immediate. I rolled onto my side and then pushed up, because survival instincts still outranked melodrama.
“Ow, Khalifa,” I gasped. “There was definitely a version of that move that didn’t involve mild assault.”
I sat up, fingers going over my ribs, my pelvis, the side of my belly—an inventory of abrasions, all present and apparently non-deadly. I was fine. Fine-ish. Adrenaline buzzed through me like bad coffee.
“What, no comeback?” I asked, looking around for his usual sarcasm.
He wasn’t there.
“Khalifa?” My voice dropped to a thread. Ahead of me, the car had stopped, and a man lay beside it. “Oh my God.” I ran and then paused, because my knees were suddenly cotton and my mouth wouldn’t make a clean sound. He was a crumpled human shape on the asphalt, head at an odd angle, eyes closed, glasses broken.
I sank to my knees beside him and checked for a pulse, a reflex drilled into me from med school. Two fingers on the carotid. There—quick, urgent. He was alive. Alive and very much not alarmingly dead. I almost laughed at the absurd relief.
“Is everything okay, ma’am?” A stranger’s voice hovered behind me, well-meaning and useless.
“Does it look like everything is okay?” I snapped. “Some maniac just hit him with a car. Go inside and get a damn gurney!”
A crowd formed with the speed of inevitability. People’s faces blurred into a collage of shock and helpfulness. A woman in scrubs produced a cervical collar as if by magic; another man—hands steadier than mine—uttered instructions that cut through the panic.
As they prepped him, the unreasonable muscle of my fury kicked in. I grabbed his shoulder when they tried to move him and said, “If you die, I will spend the rest of my life figuring out how to bring you back so I can murder you.” I scoffed, shaking my head. “What the hell is wrong with you? You don’t push meout of the path of cars—you push me infrontof cars. Just as I was about to forgive you, you find a new way to piss me off.”
“Ma’am, maybe don’t yell,” a volunteer suggested timidly.
“Yelling is my love language. If I’m quiet, he’d probably die of shock.”
