Chapter Two
I SET THE BOX DOWNand took a languid sweep of the room, silently daring something to leap out and beg to come with me.
Nothing rose to the occasion.
My bedroom had never really been mine. It was a carbon copy of my brothers’—same beige walls, same furniture chosen for practicality over personality, the same faint smell of detergent and dust. Every corner of this house bore their imprint, their noise, their permanence. My room was just another space designed to remind me I was a guest that had overstayed, a lease my family forgot to renew.
When I was six, I begged my mother to let me paint the walls hot magenta, a color loud enough to declare, I exist. She didn’t even hesitate.“Would you paint the walls of a hotel room?”she asked, her voice sharp in its logic. The answer she left unsaid was even sharper:Why would I let you ruin something that was never truly yours?
Temporary. That was the word that latched on to me, as stubborn as ink on skin. This wasn’t my home—it was a waiting room, a shrine to the sons who would always be welcome, while my presence was measured by its eventual absence. The carpet fibers themselves seemed to hum with the knowledge that one day I’d pack up, move out, and fulfill the role she’d decided for me the moment I was born.
That awareness—that constant, needling reminder that I was never the child she wanted—became the fire in my chest, the steady push that drove me in the opposite direction. She wantedme to marry a doctor? I became one instead. She wanted me wearing a ring by eighteen? I walked across the stage with a full-ride acceptance to one of the best universities in the country. Everynoshe handed me became my compass. My rebellion was my oxygen. My existence was my retaliation: to become the exact girl she’d tried so hard not to have.
It was payback, I told myself, restitution for the years of silence where love should’ve been. For every moment I’d been forewarned, subtly and explicitly, that I was a body before I was a person. A vessel with a womb, not a daughter with a name. She had handed me her blueprint of what a life should be, as if I were clay, as if my story were hers to mold.
And yet, under the steel I’d welded into myself, the armor I’d convinced everyone was skin, there was something else, something I hated to admit: a gradual, creeping suffocation. Because for all my small rebellions and victories, the truth was inescapably pressing in like a ceiling lowering inch by inch. That no matter how far I ran, she had still drafted the ending for me before I ever had a chance to pick up my own pen. My life had been plotted out in someone else’s cursive, and even as I carved new lines, I could feel her script beneath mine, faint but indelible, like an old tattoo under fresh ink.
What made it worse—what made itunbearable—was that I couldn’t decide if I was still running from it or if some secret part of me was running toward it. Maybe that’s why it suffocated, the not-knowing. The fear that even as I fought to rip out the stitches she’d sewn into me, I might still be shaped by the very pattern I despised. That I could live my whole life trying to prove her wrong and, in the end, prove her right anyway.
Unfortunately, cultural norms trumped logic in my house. It didn’t matter that I was a grown adult with a career who paid her own phone bill, car insurance, and the financial apocalypse that was my medical degree. As far as my parentswere concerned, independence wasn’t something women were capable of unlocking on their own—which meant there was absolutely no way in hell they were letting me move out while I was still single.
So here I was, hating every moment of the irony, giving them—my mother—the smallest taste of the satisfaction she’d been waiting for. One empty box sat at my feet, ready to be filled with the few possessions I was permitted to keep in a room that had never really been mine. And I was packing it up to move in...with aman.
“You’re still not dressed?” Mama’s voice sliced through the quiet.
I tightened the towel around me and bent to dig through my bag. “I had to shower. I smelled like hospital.”
Her heels clicked across the floor until she was standing over the bed, where my outfit lay waiting—bright, unapologetic, a reflection of me in a house that had never left much room for me to breathe.
“This is what you’re wearing?”
“Let me guess,” I said without looking up, “you hate it?”
She didn’t answer, which was answer enough. Instead, she crossed the room, opened my closet, and began flipping through the hangers with the disapproval of someone skimming a menu they had no intention of ordering from. After a moment, she pulled something out—subdued, lackluster, the opposite of everything I’d chosen—and laid it neatly on top of mine.
“This is better,” she said. “It’s more form-fitting, so don’t eat.”
Her words landed in that tender place I hated admitting existed. A bitter laugh slipped out as I folded my arms across my stomach. “Something every girl dreams of hearing from her mother before going out with her soon-to-be husband.”
She snatched the clothes and threw them onto the floor. “I’m just trying to help you, Lillian. But of course, I’m the worst mother in the world. I don’t know why I even bother.”
I exhaled slowly. “I never said—”
She cut me off with a click of her tongue, already rearranging her face into weary martyrdom. She patted the chair in front of the vanity. “Sit.”
I lowered myself reluctantly, watching her hands as they combed through my damp hair. Her touch was unexpectedly gentle, but even gentleness from her felt conditional and fleeting.
“I didn’t call you fat,” she murmured. “But let’s not pretend there isn’t room for improvement.” Her gaze skimmed over me, efficient, appraising. “I’m still amazed he didn’t change his mind. Men usually do when it comes to women like...well, you know.” A small, thoughtful pause. “Of course, it’s not real yet. Not until the kitab ketab. Anything can fall apart, so don’t get comfortable.”
Our eyes met in the mirror—hers steady, mine searching. “And after that?”
Her brows drew together. “After that, what?”
“Am I allowed to get comfortable after that?”
There was a beat. Then, firmly, “No. You can’t.”
She let go of my hair, smoothing the lines of her own skirt before turning away. “Wear the chiffon hijab,” she added, her voice clipped again. “And no heels.”
