He froze, eyes widening, his whole mouth going still beneath my fingertip like I’d just hit his personal off-switch. Then he nodded—very solemnly, very seriously.
The instructor came over, double-checking our gear. “You’re tandem,” he said cheerfully. “So you’ll be attached together—super close. One of you has to lead the jump. Who’s braver?”
We both said, “Me,” at the same time.
I arched a brow, and he conceded. “Ladies first.”
“I’m starting to think you want me dead.”
“If I wanted that, I wouldn’t be jumping with you.”
We were strapped together now, every inch of his solid frame against my back. His hand found mine, weaving our fingers together.
“Ready?” he murmured, his voice right beside my ear.
“No.”
“Good.”
And then we jumped.
The world dropped out from under us. My shriek tore through the gorge, piercing and wild, consumed by the wind. His arm wrapped tighter around me, securing me to him as the earth blurred and the river spun below.
And suddenly, it wasn’t terrifying.
It wasfreeing.
The air tore past me, its roar swallowing every sound I’d ever carried. The ground tilted out of existence, and for a suspended second, I couldn’t tell if the scream in my throat belonged to me or to the sky itself. The world turned upside down, and so did I, and maybe that was the point. Maybe I needed to see it all from a different angle to finally understand how small I was compared to everything I’d been trying to hold together.
The wind clawed through me, stripping away every terrible thing I’d been hoarding in silence—the weight of my mother’s rejection, the sterile hum of hospital corridors that had begun to sound like confessions, the ghosts of the three lives I couldn’t save. I felt them all loosen, piece by piece, ripped free and flung into the open blue.
Her voice—the one that had lived in my head like a second conscience,too tall, too loud, too much—dissolved into the wind until it was nothing. Mr. Thompson’s face vanished next, his fury, his grief, the words that had carved themselves into my ribs:you killed them. The way he’d looked at my hijab and saw a monster instead of a doctor, aperson. The way he’dgrippedit—grippedme—fingers closing around my property, my beliefs,my identity, as if ripping off my scarf could rip out my faith. As if my religion lived only in the cloth on my head and not in the chambers of my heart.
Gone.
And then the memory of last night—the alarms, the chaos, the blood that refused to leave my hands no matter how many times I scrubbed. I could still feel it, phantom and sticky, like guilt had a texture. But as the trees screeched around us, I understood something that no textbook or tribunal could teach: maybe it had never been my fault. Maybe I had done everything right, and the universe had still decided to say no.
For once, there was no one to prove anything to. No titles, no accusations, no endless revisions of the same story where I tried to save everyone but myself.
I wasn’t a doctor or a daughter or a defendant. I was just a body, unbound and weightless, falling through the endless blue.
And for the first time in years, it didn’t feel like falling at all. It felt likeflying.
When the cord finally caught us, the world yanked back into focus. My head fell against Khalifa’s shoulder, raw and breathless laughter bursting out of me effortlessly. His chest shook against my back, warm and solid and impossibly alive, and I realized he was laughing too.
They reeled us up, but the wind tugged at us like it wanted to keep us hanging there—halfway between sky and earth. Once we were unhooked and standing again, I turned to look at him, his hair adorably mussed, cheeks flushed the prettiest pink, adrenaline still sizzling through our veins. “That was...”
“Insane?” he offered.
“Maybe the most insane thing I’ve ever done,” I said, still smiling. “And yet you didn’t even make a sound.”
“I was distracted.”
“By what?”
He hesitated, the kind of pause that could hold a thousand words. Then he just said, “By making sure you didn’t fall.”
And I didn’t know what to do with the way that made my chest burn.
