“She’s already eating however much she wants,” she fired back with razor-thin sweetness. “I can tell you stopped maintaining your diet. Look at your face—it’s puffy from all the salty junk you eat.” She tisked softly. “I told you not to get comfortable, Lillian. The real work starts after you get married.”
Automatically—like muscle memory forged in childhood—I touched my face, fingertips sweeping over my cheekbone as if I could smooth away whatever she’d pointed out. Then my hand drifted to my jaw, checking that the bone was still pronounced beneath my skin, still there, still visible. Another familiar panic sparked, and my fingers slid down the column of my neck, tracing the line to my collarbones, making sure they still dipped and hollowed the way she’d always insisted they should. My other arm wrapped around my stomach—protective, embarrassed,small.
Before the spiral could finish pulling me under, a warm hand closed around my wrist. Khalifa eased my arm away from my body, the hushed certainty of his touch keeping me present. His mouth parted, clearly about to launch a defense on my behalf, but—
“You’re still working long shifts?” she bulldozed on. “First, you deny your husband a honeymoon, and now you abandon him most days to fend for himself?”
“I can take care of myself,” Khalifa said.
“Of course you can,” she snapped, “but you shouldn’t. Lillian should. That’s her job—to take care of her husband. What about children? How are you going to have children working hours like that? You should quit.”
I chewed slowly, tasting the tension in every bite. My hands shook slightly as I set the fork down, the room spinning somewhere between my mother’s painful glare and the foreign protective stance of Khalifa. Every glance, every word was a subtle push and pull, a reminder that some battles were fought at the table, in silence, in the pause between a question and an answer.
“Would that make you happy,Amal?” I asked, meeting her gaze across the table. Using her first name was low and borderline rude, but calling herMamawhen she wasn’t exactly acting like one felt like a lie I didn’t have the energy to tell. “If I quit my job and had children, would you finally be satisfied?”
Her fork dropped to the plate. “Don’t speak to me that way,” she said, a tremor hiding behind the controlled edge.
I ignored her, letting the thoughts spill anyway, carried by years of depletion and invisible bruises. “I’m just curious,” I continued, softer this time but no less fierce. “Isn’t that what you want from me? To measure my life against your approval? To gauge every choice I make by whether it satisfies you? I need to know if children will finally do it, because I’m exhausted. It is so incrediblyexhaustingtrying to please you and never being able to.” I scoffed, shaking my head. “I mean, I’m adoctor. I’m kind, I’m a good Muslim, people enjoy my company, and I’m married—to a manyouchose for me, with a respected job and an accent—and yet, you’re still not happy. So tell me, Amal, will children finally tip the scale?”
My father cleared his throat tentatively. “Lillian...”
“Don’t bother, Baba,” I said. “You never stood up to her before, so why start now?”
Amal huffed, her chair scraping back against the floor. “Let’s go, Nabeel. I’m not going to let her speak to me like I haven’t spent her entire life giving her everything,sacrificingeverything when I didn’t even want—”
She stopped, but we all knew what she was about to say.
When I didn’t even want her in the first place.
I could armor myself in fake confidence all I wanted, but when the first person who was supposed to love you made you feel like a mistake, eventually you started to believe them.
My father sighed and bent to kiss my head, lingering just long enough to make me feel slightly guilty for ruining dinner by opening my mouth, then patted Khalifa’s back before following her out of the apartment.
Khalifa’s hand reached toward me hesitantly, but I recoiled. “Don’t touch me,” I said, my voice shaking under the weight of everything I was holding. The anger wasn’t really for him—it was for my mother, for my father, for every version of myself that never seemed to be enough—but he was the one here, so he caught it all.
He frowned, confusion knitting his brow. “Lillian—”
“You have to stop,” I interrupted, the words tumbling out like jagged stones. “You have tostopsending me all these mixed signals. One moment, you’re nice; the next, you’re distant and cold. You spend weeks pretending I don’t exist, and then you let me talk to you in your bed at three in the morning like it’s normal.” I stood abruptly, my heart hammering so loudly I feared it might betray me. “You can’t have it both ways, Khalifa. You have tochoose. Am I your wife, or am I a stranger you married for convenience?”
He rose, eyes searching mine. “You’re not a stranger.”
“Are you sure about that? Because I know nothing about you.”
“You know—”
“No, Idon’t!” The desperation oozed in despite myself. “I don’t know anything about you! Tell me something—something real, something stupid, something meaningless, something that matters—justsomething!” My hands clawed at the air, as iftrying to grasp the pieces of him I’d been shut out from. “What’s your favorite color? Your favorite song? A book you love? A guilty pleasure, a secret hobby, an irrational fear—anything!”
But all he gave me was the same unreadable expression, the calm that made me feel like a child banging on a door that wouldn’t open. I swallowed hard, my voice dropping, almost breaking. “My mother has made me feel unworthy of existing from the moment I was born. But you...you make me feel like I’m not even worthy ofknowingyou. Somehow that’s worse.”
I turned and fled the dining room before I could drown in my own emotional spiral. The door clicked behind me, and I let my back slide against it until I was sitting on the floor, knees drawn to my chest. My hands covered my face against the colors he’d painted, but the sobs found their way anyway.
Why was it that my mother’s judgment was never enough to crush me completely? Because it was predictable, calculated,expected. I knew from birth that I would never belong in her eyes, that no accomplishment, no act of devotion, no kindness could make me enough. But with Khalifa, it was different. I wanted to understand, to connect, to feel like I belonged somewhere, anywhere. And every moment that I realized I didn’t, it cut a little deeper, because this was supposed to be a place where I could exist without fear of judgment. This was supposed to feel like home, likefreedom.
And yet, I could only blame myself for agreeing to this in the first place—agreeing to a life where I pretended I didn’t need feelings, that I didn’t need closeness, that I wasn’t likeother girlswho dreamt of being seen, of being wanted. And in that, at least, I was right. I wasn’t like them. My mother had scraped away every gentle spot left inside me, chipped away at every tender corner, until only hardened marble remained. I had let her, willingly or not, make a fortress of the fragments she hadn’t broken completely.
Malik had proven that much. Six months of blurred lines and almosts, of “I’m not ready” and “we don’t need marriage to confirm what we have.” Six months of letting me believe that if I was patient enough, helpful enough with his studies, I could change his mind, before he’d finally looked me straight in the eye and said,You’re not the type of girl to settle down with, Lilly. You’re only good for a fun time.
I’d smiled, even laughed, because what else was there to do when someone confirmed your worst fear in such simple, devastating terms?
