His mouth tipped into a laugh. “I just wanted to support you. I’ll always support you. I’m so proud of you, Lillian.”
I kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”
“Are you proud?”
I froze for a moment, letting the weight of the question sink in. Then I nodded slowly, a shy, genuine smile tugging at my lips. “Yeah. I am.”
He kept staring intensely, and after a few seconds too long, I squinted at him. “What?” I asked. “Do I have powdered sugar on my face from the donuts? Or hot sauce from the burrito? Or—?”
“Your face is perfect,” he said. “And free of food droppings.”
“Then why are you staring?”
His eyes softened. “Thank you.”
My brows pinched. “For what?”
“After my brother died and my mom got sick,” he said, “I convinced myself that holding everything together was the only version of me that mattered. I kept trying tobe what everyone needed—reliable, unshakeable,fine—until I accidentally mistook that performance for a personality.” He breathed out a small, shaky exhale. “But after we got married, someone else started bubbling up. This other me—one who laughs too loud at your stupid jokes, who smiles without asking permission, who feels light instead of obligated. And somewhere in the middle of all that, it occurred to me that maybe the man I built out of duty wasn’t me at all. Maybe the real me—the one who’s messy and hopeful and actually enjoys things—is the one who showed up with you. The one you somehow make feel is worth existing.”
I reached out and cupped his face between both hands, feeling the warmth of him, the vulnerability he was letting me see.
“You don’t have to thank me for loving you, Khalifa,” I whispered. “Not ever.”
He smiled, and his hands came up, gently covering mine, easing them down from his cheeks but not letting go.
My stomach did a weird flip—some acrobatic stunt it definitely did not train for—and then promptly flung itself into the abyss. “I can already feel a cheesy request brewing.”
“Your spidey senses stand corrected.” He took a breath. “Lillian, we did this all wrong,” he began, his voice rough with tenderness, “and I want to do things right before our baby comes. When we first met, I called you rude, arrogant, and unfit to be anyone’s wife. Only two out of those three things turned out to be true.”
I tried not to smile, but it slipped through anyway. “When we first met, I called you a lot of things. All of them turned out to be true.”
He grinned a small, lopsided thing. “We got married for convenience,” he said, “but somewhere between pretending to love you and realizing I actually did, I forgot where the actended, and the truth began. Somehow loving you became the most inconvenient thing I’ve ever done because now I can’t remember how to want a life that doesn’t have you in it.” My chest ached in that sweet, unbearable way only he could manage. He took my hands again, his voice dropping to a whisper that felt like a promise. “So what do you say we start a new marriage?”
I blinked, my throat tight. “I don’t think that’s legally a thing.OrIslamically.”
“I know,” he said. “I want to do it for us.”
“Okay.”
He looked at me, eyes catching the last of the light. “I love you, Doctor Lillian Tariq. Will you marry me?”
I tilted my head. “Under one condition.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“You can’t fall out of love with me.”
His laughter was deep and certain, and when he stroked his thumb against my cheek, I leaned into it like it was home. “Have you met yourself?” he asked. “Not a chance.”
Epilogue
I STOOD IN THE EXACTsame spot I had five years ago, with the same trembling hands, and wearing the same suffocating gown. Only this one wasn’t white.
Five years ago, I’d been the one in lace and fear, marrying a stranger my mother had chosen, in a dress she’d chosen, under vows that sounded more like instructions than promises. I remember thinking I might actually die right there—not from the corset or the heat or the hundred pairs of eyes watching—but from the weight of becoming someone I didn’t know how to be.
And yet, somehow, the day that felt like an ending had been the start of everything good.
Marrying Khalifa turned out to be the most reckless, miraculous, profoundly right decision I’d ever made. Our life together wasn’t the glossy version my mother used to imagine for me. It was real and messy. Full of mismatched schedules, late-night dinners, and arguments that always ended with laughter because neither of us knew how to stay mad anymore. We were a house full of noise and softness, a thousand tiny, ordinary moments that built a life that finally felt like mine.
