Chapter Twenty-One
KHALIFA’S MOTHER DIED on day eight of being in Beirut.
In medical school, they teach you how to approach a patient or loved one who’d just lost someone—what tone to use, where to stand, how to offer empathy without breaking apart yourself.
Then they teach it again in residency, as if repetition could ever make it less daunting.
I’d never had to use that training before, though.
I’d been lucky enough not to lose a mother—or worse, a baby.
But that training seemed laughably useless now because Khalifa wasn’t my patient, and he technically wasn’t a loved one, either.
If they really wanted to prepare us for the realities of life, they should’ve offered a course called How to Approach Your Closed-Off, Emotionally Unavailable Husband—Whom You Only Married for Convenience—When His Mother Dies.
I would’ve paid extra for that elective.
He didn’t cry. Not when the phone call came in from the hospital, not on the drive there, not even when we stood in the narrow hospital corridor, surrounded by the faint echo of his family’s tears and footsteps.
He just nodded once, thanked the doctor in that calm, devastatingly polite voice of his, and walked out.
I followed him through the sliding doors, my heart a knot in my throat, every instinct screaming to say something—to do something—but what did you say to a man who’s built entire fortresses out of silence?
He drove us back to the house, his fingers gripping the wheel, his eyes never leaving the road.
The outside world moved like a film reel—too bright, too alive for the moment we were in.
I wanted to reach across the console, to rest my hand on his, to tell him I was sorry in a way that didn’t sound like a cliché.
But the air felt so delicate, like one wrong move would shatter it.
When we got there, people were already gathering. Aunts, uncles, neighbors—grief spilling into every corner. Khalifa stood in the center of it all like a statue carved from restraint, accepting condolences with a soft jazakAllah khair and a curt nod.
But for all his stoicism, there was an instant when he looked at his mother’s empty chair, and his Adam’s apple worked like he was swallowing glass.
I found myself wondering what it must feel like to live that way—to force yourself into being anesthetized, to press emotion down so hard it never quite reached the surface.
To lock every tremor, every spasm, every truth behind the same door where he’d kept everything else.
His childhood. His fears. His parents. Me.
I didn’t want to be his wife out of duty, or compassion, or even curiosity.
I just wanted to be someone he could fall apart in front of.
I wanted to shove my hands into his soul, grab fistfuls of all that ooey, gooey, complicated pain, let it stain my fingers so he didn’t have to choke on it by himself.
I wanted to carry the mess with him—not fix it, not solve it, just share the weight so it stopped crushing him alone.
But instead, I offered comfort in a different way.
I cleaned. I made tea and coffee, served milk and dates, handed out Qurans, passed tissues from lap to lap.
I dragged extra chairs from around the house, re-parked cars out front so no one was blocked in.
I filled the spaces his heartbreak left hollow with motion, because movement felt safer than stillness.
In a fleeting moment when I was finally out of sight, I slipped my phone from my pocket and typed a message to my mother.
I’m sorry we fought. I didn’t mean what I said. I love you, Mama.
Three dots appeared immediately.
Then disappeared.
I stared at the screen until it went dark, my reflection ghostlike against it, before tucking the phone away and walking back into a room still thick with sorrow.
But then, in the middle of all the chaos—murmured prayers, the clinking of tea glasses, the low buzz of sobs—his voice came from behind me in a breath, barely audible.
“Thank you.”
And somehow, that two-syllable whisper broke me more than if he’d cried.
THE NEXT MORNING FELT suspended in some strange, tranquil gravity. Beirut was awake, but subdued, moving on as if a woman hadn’t just left it.
The janaza prayer was held at a small masjid near the hospital.
The building was old, with paint peeling in corners, but it smelled faintly of jasmine and ancient books.
The imam’s voice carried through the space, and I watched the rows of men shift into formation while the women gathered behind, in the upper level, whispering du’as.
Khalifa stood at the front, a shadow of himself. He didn’t look back once.
I kept my eyes lowered, hands trembling slightly at my sides, reciting words I knew by heart but barely understood. It struck me then—how grief stripped people down to their most private selves. I had no claim to his heartache, no right to reach for him, and yet I burned with it all the same.
When the prayer ended, people moved like a tide.
Outside, cars lined the streets, sunlight spilling over windshields.
I followed them to the cemetery, my hijab pulled tight around my neck, dust clinging to my shoes as we stepped through the iron gates.
Men took turns with the shovel. I stayed back, watching the movements blur together, my heart pounding.
And then I saw her.
A woman standing near the far side of the crowd, face half-hidden beneath oversized sunglasses.
She wasn’t from his family—I’d memorized every person that had moved through the house in the last forty-eight hours.
Nor did she belong to the cluster of neighbors and family friends.
There was something different about her—something unsettling in how her gaze clung to Khalifa, then to me.
Our eyes met briefly before she turned away, disappearing behind a row of mourners.
I told myself it didn’t matter, that I didn’t care, but the feeling lingered as the men began to lower his mother into the ground. And when Khalifa finally stepped forward, lips moving, I couldn’t shake the image of that woman watching from the corner, as though she knew something I didn’t.
A FEW DAYS LATER, THE house finally exhaled. The guests had gone, the condolence trays had stopped arriving, and the smell of Turkish coffee and bukhur incense had thinned into the walls. What was left was a heavy, respectful, unbearable quiet.
We were all sitting around the dining table, the kind meant for large families, that could hold generations and arguments in equal measure.
Khalifa sat beside me, his hand resting on the table, fingers drumming soundlessly against the wood.
Across from us, his father spooned lentils into his bowl, silent for most of the meal.
Until he wasn’t.
“Have you decided when you’re moving back, Khalifa?”
The question landed with the subtlety of a thunderclap. I felt Khalifa’s body still beside me. My fork hovered midair.
Moving back?
In the days since we’d arrived, I’d barely seen his father. When I did, his words were clipped and formal—the same tone my mother used when she was disappointed in me but wouldn’t say it outright.
“I don’t remember saying I was moving back.”
His father didn’t look up from his plate. “You’ve been gone long enough. It’s time to come home. Your mother would’ve wanted that.”
A muscle jumped in Khalifa’s jaw. “My life is in Canada.”
“Life?” His father scoffed. “You call that a life? Sitting behind a desk, teaching Western children about things that don’t matter?”
“I’m a history professor, Baba. It’s not nothing.”
“History,” his father repeated, as if the word itself were offensive. “Instead of becoming a real doctor like Keenan, you ran away and became the only one in the family who was too weak to stay.”
Keenan? Who was that?
Khalifa’s fingers tightened slightly on the table’s rim. The irritation prickled beneath my skin, rising like static. I told myself to breathe, to keep my mouth shut; he didn’t need me to fight his battles.
I looked around the table, waiting for someone else to step in, to defend him, to stand in his corner the way family was supposed to.
But all I saw were lowered eyes, glasses clinking and indifferent utensils scraping plates.
They all kept eating like his father hadn’t just taken a swing at him five seconds after losing his mother.
And that’s when it hit me, that this was what it was like for him. This silence, this absence, this awful, practiced stillness. This room full of people who loved him in theory, but never in practice. Who expected him to keep holding everything together, even as they willingly let him fall apart.
No wonder his walls were sky-high. No wonder he treated vulnerability like it was a foreign concept. He’d spent his whole life being the reliable one—the one who got called, not chosen. The one who kept everyone else afloat while quietly learning how to drown gracefully.
I realized then that Khalifa and I were both haunted by the same generational curse. That we were just two sides of the same culturally inherited coin. I couldn’t become the daughter my mother wanted, and he couldn’t become the son his father dreamed up.
I wondered if he felt embarrassed sitting here, exposed like this. I hoped he didn’t. I hoped he knew that none of this was his fault. That the ugliness in the room belonged to everyone else, not him.
As much as I appreciated the way his family had made me feel welcome since the moment I arrived, I couldn’t help but resent them for never offering him the same.
For chewing him up, savoring every good thing he had to give, and then spitting him back out when he finally ran out of sweetness they could take credit for.
His father’s voice honed again. “You’ve always been stubborn, just like your mother. She spoiled you.”
“Okay, enough.”
Every head turned toward me.
“Lillian—” Khalifa started, but I held up a hand.
“No.” I turned to his father again. “What is your problem? His mother just died. She died, and you think now—only a few days later—is the time to have this conversation?”
His father opened his mouth, but I barreled on.
“He doesn’t want to live here. He has a life in Canada, a career—an amazing one, by the way.
” My words came out faster. “And with the amount of time you spend ridiculing it, you could actually learn what it is he does. He’s not just a professor.
He’s shaping the minds of young adults, the future of society.
I tried to go to one of his lectures once, and there wasn’t a single empty seat in the room.
It was filled with hundreds of students who enrolled in the course just to hear him speak because he inspires them.
” I exhaled, my pulse roaring in my ears.
“And he is a real doctor, whatever the hell that means. So just...stop. Stop talking down to him. Stop acting like his hard-earned success doesn’t sustain your lifestyle.
Stop insinuating that he’s less of a man because he chose a path that has nothing to do with you.
The way I see it, it actually makes him more of a man than anyone else here. ”
For a long moment, no one said a word. Then, his father leaned back slowly, lips curling into a sneer.
“Not only can you not be the man of this family,” he said, his tone smooth but venom-laced, “you’re not even man enough to control your wife’s tongue.”
Khalifa’s head snapped up. “Don’t speak about her that way.”
He was on his feet before I could blink, his chair scraping harshly against the tile. His hand found mine, and he tugged me from the table. I barely had time to grab my phone before he pulled me down the hall, into his room, slamming the door shut behind us.
He started pacing, running a hand through his hair, muttering under his breath in Arabic.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted. “I know you told me not to defend you, but I seriously could not sit there for another second and listen to him talk to you like that. The nerve of that guy—he’s more of an ass than my mother, which I didn’t even think was possible—”
The words barely left my mouth before he moved.
He crossed the room in a blur, and then his arms were wrapped around me—firm, certain, unyielding.
The anger that had been burning through my veins evaporated at his touch, and a gasp left me in a rush as he pulled me in, the thud of his heartbeat slamming through my palms, trying to sync with mine.
It startled me how familiar it felt, like a rhythm I’d been chasing without realizing it.
The world narrowed to the space between us.
My pulse rioted against my ribs, heat flooding my skin as his scent—coffee, musk, and sleepless nights—filled my lungs until I wasn’t sure I was breathing at all.
The warmth of him crept through every barrier I’d built until I could no longer tell where he ended and I began.
He held me like it wasn’t a choice. Like something in him had finally cracked open.
And God, I felt it. The peaceful collapse of every wall I’d constructed—carefully, methodically, brick by bitter brick—coming undone by his hands with terrifying ease.
My body went taut, caught between resistance and surrender, and then, traitorously, it softened, melting into him as if gravity itself had chosen sides before my mind could protest. My hands found his back, sliding up instinctively, fingers curling in the fabric of his shirt, pulling him closer, closer still.
Neither of us spoke. There was no need. Words would have ruined it. Everything that mattered lived in the silence, in the breath that left him, uneven, like he was trying not to feel too much and failing.
For the first time since we’d signed the marriage papers, I stopped pretending I didn’t want to be touched by him. And when he finally sighed into the crook of my neck, something in my chest loosened so completely it almost hurt.