He’d...taken them for me. Because he knew I hated missing sunsets. Because every evening, while I was at work or on call or too exhausted to step outside, he’d been saving them for me, bottling light I hadn’t even known I’d lost.
I could barely picture him doing it—Khalifa, who probably hadn’t opened his camera app since the day he bought his phone, standing in public, squinting at the screen like it was some complex machine. Maybe crouching a little, maybe tilting his head, trying to get the “right angle.” Maybe being seen by actual humans. The thought made my chest hurt in a ridiculous, swoony way.
Kevin leaned over, peeking at my phone. “Oh my God,” he said slowly. “Is that...a sunset album? Did your brooding, emotionally buffering husband just send you—”
“Don’t say it.”
He grinned, full-on delighted. “—a digital love letter?”
“Kevin.”
“Oh, this is adorable,” he said, laughing. “He’s a romantic! A silent-sunset-picture-taking romantic!”
I rolled my eyes, but my throat was tight. “He’s just...being nice.”
Kevin snorted. “Right.”
But I wasn’t listening anymore. My eyes were still on the last photo—the most recent one. The sky was a deep lavender, a streak of gold cutting through the center, and in the corner, his shadow toward the horizon.
And I thought,maybe I never really saw him before now.
Chapter Twenty-Three
IT WAS THREE IN THEmorning, and the loft looked like a murder scene if the victim had good taste.
Every surface was covered in papers, graphs, sticky notes, and color-coded reports. I’d moved the couch against the wall, rolled up the rug, and turned the floor into a makeshift war room. The TV stand now held my laptop and empty coffee cups. Even the walls weren’t safe—I’d taped outlines and flowcharts to them like an evidence board for a very nerdy crime.
In the center of it all sat the forms Kevin had given me months ago.
The Maternal Wellness Initiative.
The plan had ballooned into something far larger than the little seed of an idea I’d first scribbled in the margins—now a full community program offering postpartum counseling, nutrition workshops, and at-home nurse visits for new mothers in underserved areas. It would partner with the hospital’s OB department, drawing on volunteer rotations from residents and staff. A postpartum support hotline. A monthlyMother’s Circlefor peer connection. A space where women could land softly instead of falling through the cracks.
Real. Doable.Good.
As an OB-GYN, we were trained to screen for postpartum depression—EPDS scores, risk factors, red flags. We were taught what to look for, what to ask, and still, somehow, it wasn’t enough. Women continued to slip past us, past the system, past themselves.
And yet, the cursor blinked at me from my laptop screen, a silent metronome counting down the seconds until I admitted defeat.
Draft eleven of my proposal lay abandoned beside an empty mug. I rubbed my temples and sighed, my words sounding hollow in the quiet. I’d rewritten the same paragraph so many times it had lost all meaning. Every version felt too polished, too performative, too...fake.
Because the longer I did my research, the more tangled my empathy became—stretching thin in all the wrong places, pooling not around the mothers who were drowning, but around the babies who had no say in any of it. Because my own mother hadn’t smiled when she held me. Because she’d made sure I understood—through pointed words or a silence that bruised—that I’d disappointed her simply by existing, by being a girl, by being me. I learned young that love was not a birthright. That sometimes the person meant to be your safest place became the first one to make you doubt your own worth. That sometimes survival meant carrying questions you were too afraid to ask out loud.
And I knew—God, Iknew—that my feelings were irrational, that I was projecting decades of my own hurt onto women who were suffering from a disease, that what I labeled as “instinct” was really just an old wound telling its story again, nosier and nosier each time I tried to shush it.
Logically, I understood the illness.
Clinically, I had compassion.
Academically, it all made sense.
But emotionally? Emotionally, I felt...disgusting for judging them, for shaming them for something I’d never experienced from the inside. For letting my scar tissue masquerade as moral clarity and allowing my own childhood ghosts to rise, eclipsing the very people I claimed to advocate for. For realizing, with asick twist of guilt, that every time I read a new study or statistic, a small, terrified part of me wondered—
What if my mother wasn’t heartless?
What if she were hurt? Or sick? Or lost?
What if the story I’ve been telling myself for thirty-two years is only half the truth?
