Chapter Seventeen
I MUST’VE FALLEN ASLEEP mid-flight because when I opened my eyes, the cabin was cast in that strange, bluish twilight that only existed in the clouds.
A thin blanket was draped over me. I didn’t remember asking for one. I didn’t remember anyone offering, either, which left only one possibility.
For a second—just one—it hit me somewhere I didn’t expect. That small, delicate gesture. That maybe he’d looked over and thought I might get cold. That maybe, beneath all his silence and cynicism, there was still a person who wasn’t sentimentally bankrupt.
I shoved the feeling down before it could settle. I was too tired, too raw, to get sappy about a stupid blanket.
He was awake, sitting perfectly motionless beside me, his seat tilted just slightly back, hands resting in his lap. His eyes weren’t on the screen in front of him or his phone, but somewhere outside the airplane, the kind of distance no flight map could measure.
And for the first time since I’d met him, his face wasn’t guarded. It wasn’t composed into that practiced neutrality, that cool, indifferent poise that made it impossible to tell what he was thinking.
He looked...sad.
It wasn’t a sadness that could be hidden behind a smile or dulled by conversation.
It lived deeper than that—woven into the stillness of his shoulders, caught in the lines bracketing his mouth, riding the gentle rise and fall of his chest. His gaze didn’t wander so much as dissolve, fixed somewhere far beyond the cabin, as though he were watching a reel of memories play across the dark horizon.
Something inside me split open then, sharp and immediate.
I hadn’t meant to feel it, hadn’t meant to let his sorrow reach me, but it did.
It moved through me like a tide, flooding every space I’d long assumed was empty.
And for one unguarded heartbeat, I wished I could take even a fraction of it from him to lessen his burden, to make the weight he carried a little easier, even if it was never mine to hold.
I adjusted my seat upright. Khalifa’s eyes flicked toward me, taking in my appearance for the briefest moment before he said, flatly, “Your hijab’s a mess.”
“Charming,” I muttered, shooting him a glare. I tugged my hood up over my head and unbuckled my seatbelt. The aisle was dim and hushed, scattered with the soft snores of sleeping passengers and the flicker of screens playing old movies.
I shut the bathroom door behind me, catching my reflection in the mirror with a groan. My scarf was lopsided, my skin was dull, my mascara had smudged into faint gray shadows under my eyes.
I splashed water on my face, watching the droplets slide down like tiny comets. Then I reached for the toiletries pouch I brought—moisturizer, lip balm, something to make me feel a little more human.
On my way back, I stopped by the galley and grabbed a bag of apple slices and a small bag of chips. When I slid back into my seat, I tossed the apples at him wordlessly. He caught it with one hand and started eating, eyes still fixed ahead.
We sat like that for a while—me crunching on stale chips, him chewing with the kind of focus that made me want to shake him. Finally, I said, “Are you okay?”
“Don’t start.”
I was so tired of being the only emotionally unstable mess in this anti-relationship of ours. The only one whose feelings refused to stay politely contained.
I sighed, turning toward him. “Why can’t you just admit that you’re sad, Khalifa? Your mom is dying. Anyone would be affected by that.”
“Because it’s a stupid thing to have to admit,” he said. “Of course I’m sad that my mother is dying.”
I blinked, completely thrown for a loop. An emotion? From Mr. Repressed Feelings and Historical Facts himself? The words were so startlingly sincere I almost forgot to reply. Then the embarrassment wriggled in—because, well, he had a point.
Still, pride was a hard habit to kill. I crossed my arms and grumbled, “It’s not that stupid.”
He scoffed, looking down at the apple slice between his fingers. “You think I don’t understand what it’s like to have a parent who makes you feel unworthy of existing? Well, I do. My father.”
I froze, a chip halfway to my mouth.
“Congrats, Lillian,” he said bitterly. “You were right. I have daddy issues.” He shoved the apple slice into his mouth, chewing like the motion alone could keep him from unraveling.
“My mom was the only one who was ever proud, who saw how hard I worked, how much I tried. She was warmth, and light, and love when everything else was cold.” His voice cracked, almost imperceptibly.
“And now she’s going to die, and when she does, she’s taking all of that with her.
All that’ll be left is my father’s disdain, disappointment, and his voice screaming that I’ll never be good enough. ”
He glanced at me then, and there it was—the grief he’d been hiding behind sarcasm and stubbornness and that ridiculously composed silence.
A sour taste crept across the back of my mouth as I grasped for something to say. The words tangled in my throat, heavy and useless, feeling the ache of it all—his sorrow, my understanding, the dizzying, unfamiliar pull of wanting to reach for his hand and not knowing if I had the right to.
Because even though I didn’t know much about Khalifa, I still knew him.
I knew he carried a past that scraped raw at the edges, that he had secrets he’d buried so deep they might never see daylight again.
I knew his walls were thick enough to outlast a lifetime of chipping, and that his doubt in the world ran bone-deep.
And I knew I wasn’t the magical exception, The One Who Could Heal Him just because I wanted to.
“I’m sorry he treated you that way, Khalifa,” I said finally.
“But everything she made you feel doesn’t die with her.
People like that...they leave fingerprints.
On the way you love, the way you think, the way you exist in the world.
Everything she was—every ounce of warmth, every proud word, every kindness—it doesn’t vanish when she does.
It lives in the way you remember her. It lives in you. ”
He stared down at the half-empty bag of apple slices, as if they suddenly required his undivided attention.
I almost took it back. The words, the softness, the tremble betraying that I cared more than I should’ve. But then he exhaled a long breath and met my gaze.
“She’d like that,” he said, his tone caught somewhere between disbelief and longing. “The idea that she’d live on through me.”
“She already does. Love lingers, even when everything else goes quiet.”
His eyes flickered with a fleeting tenderness. And just as quickly, it was gone. He turned back to the window, the reflection of city lights faint and far below.
But I could still feel it—the air between us, charged and fragile, too weighted to touch and too alive to ignore.
He was already retreating into himself, and some desperate part of me wanted to stop it.
To reach out, grab fistfuls of him, and keep him there.
To hold onto whatever small, unspoken thing had just cracked through the surface before he buried it again.
We were almost there now—seconds from touchdown—when the plane jolted hard enough to knock the wind right out of me.
The overhead bins rattled, a baby cried somewhere behind us, and before my brain could catch up, his hand found mine, curling tight, anchoring himself to something safer than gravity, to me.
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. Not from fear, not from the dip of the plane, but from that touch—unexpected, uninvited, and utterly undoing me.
I stared down at our hands like they were foreign things, like they belonged to two people who weren’t supposed to know each other this way—his fingers clutching mine, my pulse a wild drum beneath his thumb—and just when I thought maybe he wouldn’t let go, the plane leveled out, the tremor stilled, the world steadied, and so did he.
His hand slipped from mine as quickly as it had taken hold. No glance, no apology, just the subtle pull of distance sliding back into place.
He kept his eyes on the seat in front of him. “You okay?”
It took me a second to find my voice, my heart still galloping somewhere in my throat. “Yeah,” I whispered.
And it was such a small word, one syllable, soft enough to disappear under the whir of the engine—but it was a lie. Nothing about me felt okay anymore, and I wasn’t sure if it ever would.