But then, in the middle of all the chaos—murmured prayers, the clinking of tea glasses, the low buzz of sobs—his voice came from behind me in a breath, barely audible.
“Thank you.”
And somehow, that two-syllable whisper broke me more than if he’d cried.
THE NEXT MORNING FELTsuspended in some strange, tranquil gravity. Beirut was awake, but subdued, moving on as if a woman hadn’t just left it.
The janaza prayer was held at a small masjid near the hospital. The building was old, with paint peeling in corners, but it smelled faintly of jasmine and ancient books. The imam’s voice carried through the space, and I watched the rows of men shift into formation while the women gathered behind, in the upper level, whispering du’as.
Khalifa stood at the front, a shadow of himself. He didn’t look back once.
I kept my eyes lowered, hands trembling slightly at my sides, reciting words I knew by heart but barely understood. It struck me then—how grief stripped people down to their most private selves. I had no claim to his heartache, no right to reach for him, and yet I burned with it all the same.
When the prayer ended, people moved like a tide. Outside, cars lined the streets, sunlight spilling over windshields. Ifollowed them to the cemetery, my hijab pulled tight around my neck, dust clinging to my shoes as we stepped through the iron gates. Men took turns with the shovel. I stayed back, watching the movements blur together, my heart pounding.
And then I saw her.
A woman standing near the far side of the crowd, face half-hidden beneath oversized sunglasses. She wasn’t from his family—I’d memorized every person that had moved through the house in the last forty-eight hours. Nor did she belong to the cluster of neighbors and family friends. There was something different about her—something unsettling in how her gaze clung to Khalifa, then to me. Our eyes met briefly before she turned away, disappearing behind a row of mourners.
I told myself it didn’t matter, that I didn’t care, but the feeling lingered as the men began to lower his mother into the ground. And when Khalifa finally stepped forward, lips moving, I couldn’t shake the image of that woman watching from the corner, as though she knew something I didn’t.
A FEW DAYS LATER, THEhouse finally exhaled. The guests had gone, the condolence trays had stopped arriving, and the smell of Turkish coffee and bukhur incense had thinned into the walls. What was left was a heavy, respectful,unbearablequiet.
We were all sitting around the dining table, the kind meant for large families, that could hold generations and arguments in equal measure. Khalifa sat beside me, his hand resting on the table, fingers drumming soundlessly against the wood. Across from us, his father spooned lentils into his bowl, silent for most of the meal.
Until he wasn’t.
“Have you decided when you’re moving back, Khalifa?”
The question landed with the subtlety of a thunderclap. I felt Khalifa’s body still beside me. My fork hovered midair.
Moving back?
In the days since we’d arrived, I’d barely seen his father. When I did, his words were clipped and formal—the same tone my mother used when she was disappointed in me but wouldn’t say it outright.
“I don’t remember saying I was moving back.”
His father didn’t look up from his plate. “You’ve been gone long enough. It’s time to come home. Your mother would’ve wanted that.”
A muscle jumped in Khalifa’s jaw. “My life is in Canada.”
“Life?” His father scoffed. “You call that a life? Sitting behind a desk, teaching Western children about things that don’t matter?”
“I’m a history professor, Baba. It’s not nothing.”
“History,” his father repeated, as if the word itself were offensive. “Instead of becoming a real doctor like Keenan, you ran away and became the only one in the family who was too weak to stay.”
Keenan? Who was that?
Khalifa’s fingers tightened slightly on the table’s rim. The irritation prickled beneath my skin, rising like static. I told myself to breathe, to keep my mouth shut; he didn’t need me to fight his battles.
I looked around the table, waiting for someone else to step in, to defend him, to stand in his corner the way family was supposed to. But all I saw were lowered eyes, glasses clinking and indifferent utensils scraping plates. They all kept eating like his father hadn’t just taken a swing at him five seconds after losing his mother.
And that’s when it hit me, that this was what it was like for him. This silence, this absence, this awful, practiced stillness.This room full of people who loved him in theory, but never in practice. Who expected him to keep holding everything together, even as they willingly let him fall apart.
No wonder his walls were sky-high. No wonder he treated vulnerability like it was a foreign concept. He’d spent his whole life being the reliable one—the one who got called, not chosen. The one who kept everyone else afloat while quietly learning how to drown gracefully.
I realized then that Khalifa and I were both haunted by the same generational curse. That we were just two sides of the same culturally inherited coin. I couldn’t become the daughter my mother wanted, and he couldn’t become the son his father dreamed up.
