Chapter Ten
WE HAD CONSTRUCTED a routine, Khalifa and I.
A strange, lopsided kind of rhythm that didn’t resemble marriage so much as.
..cohabitation with a particularly difficult cat I didn’t like.
The kind that only emerged at night, silently judging you from the shadows, and then occasionally dropped a dead mouse at your feet, as if to say, Look. I provide.
We weren’t friends. Not even close. Friends confided, conspired, and sent each other poorly timed voice notes at three a.m. Khalifa was the type of person who would look at your phone lighting up at three a.m., and ask if you’d considered therapy.
We were something else—roommates bound by rings, by circumstance, by a bargain we’d begrudgingly agreed to.
And yet, in our own weird, fractured way, we worked.
He was clammed up, reserved, and so annoyingly secretive.
I didn’t know his favorite food, or what song he listened to when he was alone, or who had hurt him enough to make not speaking his favorite language.
But he knew things about me—small, stupid things I’d given away.
That I had a sweet tooth. That I hated sleeping with the door shut.
That sometimes I left the faucet running because silence made me nervous.
And unfortunately, he knew real things too because I was an idiot with no filter.
I talked when I shouldn’t have, filled every pause with confessions no one had asked for.
I let him see the parts of me I usually kept wrapped up and hidden: the insecurities, the sloppy edges, the pieces that didn’t photograph well.
Now those details lived in him, tucked away somewhere I couldn’t reach, and I hated that he carried fragments of me so carelessly—like he didn’t even know they were mine to break.
He was rude and bossy and perpetually condescending.
But he also cleaned my messes without complaint, stocked the fridge with foods he didn’t eat because I liked them, and made coffee exactly the way I wanted.
He irritated me in ways no one else could, but there were moments—brief, slippery ones—where I caught myself wondering if irritation was the whole point.
Because irritation was easier than intimacy.
And intimacy was the one thing I couldn’t afford.
The ceiling had become a cruel clock, each passing hour carving a hollow space in my chest. By two a.m., I’d stopped pretending sleep was coming. My body was buzzing, restless in a way no amount of tossing or repositioning could fix.
After a moment of hesitation—long enough that I nearly talked myself out of it—I swung my legs over the side of the bed and padded across the hall. My fist hovered over his door, uncertain, before I knocked.
Silence.
I pressed lightly on the knob, and the door gave way, creaking just enough to feel incriminating. The light from the hallway pooled into his room, and for a moment I just...stood there.
His room was everything mine wasn’t—neat, boring, personality scrubbed away like he was afraid of leaving fingerprints on the world.
He slept on the far left side of the bed, spine straight, one arm tucked beneath his head.
The right side of the bed looked like an untouched showroom mattress, sheets crisp and perfect.
I scoffed under my breath. Of course. The man didn’t even mess up a bed in his sleep.
“Khalifa?” My voice was a whisper, but it felt like a flare in the quiet. “Are you awake?”
There was a long pause. Then, finally, low and rough, “No.”
A reluctant smile tugged at my mouth. “I can’t sleep.”
“That,” he murmured without moving, “sounds like a you problem. Not sure what I’m supposed to do about it.”
I rolled my eyes and stepped farther inside, disregarding the prickle of nerves at crossing some invisible boundary, then threw myself onto the mattress beside him, bouncing hard enough to jolt him upright.
He blinked at me, groggy but incredulous. “What are you doing?”
“Let’s have a sleepover,” I suggested cheerfully.
He groaned and flopped back onto his pillow, turning away from me with exaggerated disdain. “I don’t do sleepovers.”
“It’s not a learned skill,” I assured him, scooting closer. “Literally anyone can have one. Even you.”
I poked his side playfully, and he jerked out of reach, betraying himself.
My grin spread like wildfire. “Khalifa Nasser is ticklish. Incredible. I am absolutely weaponizing that information at a later date.”
“I’m not ticklish,” he grumbled. “Is there something wrong with your bed?”
“Yes,” I said too quickly. Then, softer, “Can I tell you the truth?”
“No. You can leave, though.”
I ignored him, tracing a pattern on the navy blue silk sheets. “I’m kind of regretting my paint choices. It feels like I’m sleeping in a vagina, and I see enough of them at work.”
For a second, silence. Then—laughter. Real laughter, sudden and startled, breaking open from him like something he hadn’t meant to let escape. It was warm and deep and so unfamiliar it shocked me more than the sound of my name on his lips ever had.
Against every better instinct I’d spent years cultivating, I felt a flicker of pride. I’d made Khalifa Nasser—stoic, impossible, allergic-to-emotion Khalifa—laugh. Out loud. Even if it was because I compared my bedroom to female anatomy, it still counted.
But then he coughed, covering it up, shoving it back inside.
“Wait, was that a laugh? Like a real, non-sarcastic, non-demeaning laugh? I didn’t think your mouth was capable of producing such a sound.”
“It wasn’t a laugh,” he muttered.
“Whatever helps you sleep at night.”
“What would help me sleep at night is if you were in your own room.”
I burrowed more fully into his mattress with a sigh.
“Just paint over it, Lillian,” he said impatiently.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s what she wants.”
His head tipped slightly toward me, though his eyes stayed shut. “Who?”
“My mother.”
A beat, then a dry murmur, “Ah. I get it. Mommy issues. Didn’t see that on your list of fun facts.”
I scoffed. “I do not have mommy issues. If anyone here has issues, it’s you. Daddy issues.”
That made him turn, eyes flashing in the dim light. “I don’t have daddy issues.”
I waved him off, settling deeper against the pillow. “Please. You moved halfway across the world to escape a man’s expectations you’ll never reach.”
He went still. Finally, quietly, “Wouldn’t you do the same if you could?”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek, thinking. “No. That would just give her the satisfaction of winning.”
“Didn’t she already win, though? You’re married, Lillian.”
Even in their simplicity, the words burned more than I wanted to admit. I swallowed, staring at the ceiling again, wondering if maybe we were both just running from ghosts that would always find us, no matter how far we went.
“She hasn’t called me since the wedding,” I blurted, surprising myself with how small my voice sounded in the dark. “I went from living under her microscope, every move analyzed, every outfit questioned, to...nothing. Like I don’t exist. Like I never existed.”
Silence pressed heavily between us. Khalifa shifted, the mattress dipping, and for a second I thought maybe he’d fallen back asleep.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” he asked eventually. “Freedom?”
The word clanged against me like it didn’t belong.
Freedom. That’s what I’d been chasing, wasn’t it?
To breathe without her sighing in disapproval, to eat a meal without commentary, to wear something without a raised brow, to not have every decision—every failure in her eyes—archived and used against me when she was in the mood to be cruel.
And yet, it turned out that when silence replaced scrutiny, it didn’t feel like victory.
It felt like exile. I wanted distance, but not this kind.
I wanted to escape, but not vanish. And maybe that was her genius all along: she had me in her grip whether she was calling to criticize me or ignoring me entirely.
She was still the axis around which my thoughts spun, the gravitational pull I couldn’t resist.
“I thought I wanted freedom,” I admitted. “But it’s like she wins either way. If she’s judging me, she’s in my head. If she’s ignoring me, she’s still in my head. I keep wondering if she’s proud, if she misses me, or if she’s already turned my room into a gym for my brothers.”
My laugh was soft, self-deprecating, and a little broken around the margins, carrying all the pieces of carefully hidden hurt.
But Khalifa didn’t reply.
I cleared my throat, instantly regretting spilling my guts all over the spotless room. My voice caught as I continued, faster than I meant to, as if speed could keep me from feeling exposed.
“I don’t expect you to understand, or to have a response,” I said defensively, then lowering into exhaustion.
“You’ll never know what it’s like to be a girl born into a family that only wanted boys.
To grow up in a house that was never your home, where every pristine corner, every white wall, seems to whisper that you’re not welcome. That you’ll never be welcome.”
The confession hung in the air, and my chest tightened with the weight of it. I swung my legs off the bed, moving toward my own room, trying to slip away before my vulnerability could make him pity or mock me.
I almost had the door closed when his voice stopped me.
“You’re not unwelcome here, Lillian.”
I froze, hand hovering over the knob, my back stiff against the wood. The words weren’t loud, weren’t dramatic—they didn’t need to be. They settled inside me like sunlight spilling through a crack in a curtain, illuminating the shadows that had been following me for ages.
My throat constricted, and all I could do was go back to my room instead of answering. The lock clicked behind me, and we never spoke of it again.
Weeks went by. Life filled the gaps with work, with routines, with the hum of everyday living.
Until one day I got back from the hospital late, exhausted, bones aching, and found my dinner still on the table, Khalifa already asleep on the couch.
Except when I tiptoed past the table and set my bag down, I heard the faint rustle of fabric, the subtle shift of weight.
Not the peaceful movements of a man asleep, no, the telltale signs of someone fake-napping.
Someone who’d waited up for me and only pretended to sleep once he knew I was home.
I bit back a smile and padded into my room, but the room wasn’t mine anymore—not the one I remembered.
The hot magenta walls I’d always thought I wanted, the ones that had felt like a stubborn reminder of unfinished childhood battles, were gone.
In their place, vibrant yellows, deep oranges, and blazing reds stretched across every wall—a sunset blooming, spilling warmth where there had once been nothing but fatigue and missed moments.
I stood there, stunned. Somehow, color-blind Khalifa, who couldn’t tell chestnut from crimson, had done this.
He’d turned my room into my favorite thing.
The door swung shut behind me, and I noticed a single stripe of hot magenta left on the back of the wood, a sticky note pressed against it. I leaned in, heart stuttering, and read the words, delicate in their blunt truth:
She only wins if you let her win.
And I felt it—the tug of all my old fears, all my old shame—but beneath it, something else.
A quiet willfulness. The suggestion that maybe I didn’t have to carry the weight of someone else’s judgment, or let a ghost from my past dictate the terms of my life.
For the first time in a long time, I let the feeling settle in my chest briefly, and I imagined letting it stay.
Later, when I went to throw something out, I found a stack of crumpled printouts in the trash—dozens of sunset diagrams he’d pulled from the internet, each one covered in handwriting that wasn’t his.
Every shade had a label, and next to each label, someone had written a matching note for the paint cans hidden under the sink.
Amber, can with the square sticker; coral, the one marked with a dash; tangerine dusk, the warm-toned tin, not the harsh one.
He’d asked one of the employees to help him match every name to every can like someone feeling their way through the dark. He’d taught himself the right colors, every hue and variation, just so he could get the sunset perfect for me without being able to truly see it.