Chapter Thirty-Eight
I LAUGHED.
I actually laughed, a sharp, disbelieving sound that bounced off the walls and felt too loud in my own ears.
“Okay,” I said. “Did Khalifa put you up to this? Because—credit where it’s due—this is creative. But he’s never been good at pranks. You’ll have to do better than the whole ‘I’m his secret wife’ routine.” I crossed my arms. “How do you actually know him?”
Somewhere behind me, the bedroom door opened, and her eyes flicked past my shoulder, her expression breaking into a relieved smile. “Khalifa?”
He was standing in the hallway, dressed, hair still damp, tie loosely wrapped around his neck. When he saw her, the color drained from his face like someone had pulled a plug.
“Dalal?” he whispered.
It was that single word—her name—that did it.
My stomach dropped. The air shifted, thickened, as realization clawed its way through my ribs. I looked between them—his wide eyes, her faint smile, the silent, awful familiarity hanging in the space between them—and felt the world tilt.
“It’s true?” My voice came out calmer than I expected, but each word trembled under its own weight. “You’re...married to someone else?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The truth was carved all over his face, in the idleness of his body, the way his lips parted, but no sound came out.
For a heartbeat, everything was still. Then my chest constricted, heat rising in my throat, and the loft started to blur.
“I’m going to be sick,” I whispered.
And then I was moving—stumbling through the living room, my pulse pounding in my ears—until I reached the kitchen. I barely managed to hold my hair back before I doubled over and threw up into the trash.
He followed me, his voice shaking around my name. “Lillian? Are you okay?”
I braced both hands on the counter, my stomach convulsing. When I felt his presence behind me—his hand reaching, hovering—I jerked away, dry heaving so hard I could barely breathe.
“Don’t—” I choked, bile catching on my tongue. “Don’t touch me.”
Vomit dripped from my lips, splattering onto the floor. My body trembled from head to toe. Behind us, Dalal’s amused voice cut through the tension. “Looks like your charm still has the same effect on women, Khalifa.”
He turned curtly. “Are you kidding me right now? Where the hell were you, Dalal? I’ve been looking for you for ten years!”
Ten years?
My vision swam, the words echoing through my head. Ten years. He’d been married for ten years.
The bile rose again, and I bent over the trash can, retching until there was nothing left in me.
Dalal’s tone was soft, almost taunting. “Well,” she said, “I’m here now.”
He laughed in disbelief. “You’re unbelievable. You disappear for a decade and then just show up at my door like this? Do you even hear yourself?”
Their voices tangled—anger, incredulity, resentment—and I stood there, shaking, realizing they had the audacity to argue like some tragic soap opera couple while I was still wiping vomit from my chin.
My hand found the coffee mug beside the sink and chucked it at the floor.
It hit the tile and exploded into a dozen glittering pieces.
The silence was instant. They both turned toward me, stunned.
I straightened slowly, breath uneven, and wiped the back of my hand across my mouth. “If someone doesn’t explain what the hell is going on, the next glass I throw is going to be at both of you.”
Khalifa stared at me, his face stained with that guilt-ridden expression I’d come to despise—the one that said he wished the truth could be rewritten.
“She’s right,” he said. “She’s...my first wife. We’re still married.”
The room went askew. My pulse stuttered, then roared in my ears. Grief hit first, then betrayal, then heartbreak, each emotion lacerating its way through my ribs, fighting for space. But I didn’t let them win. I refused to let either of them see me crack.
“So when you said you didn’t want to hurt me, you were referring to another wife?” He flinched, but I kept going. “God,” I scoffed, shaking my head. “And here I was thinking you were hiding a secret toe fetish, or that early-onset balding ran in your family.”
Dalal’s laugh had the polite veneer of amusement and the teeth of a knife. “Shallow and anger issues? Your taste in women has obviously plummeted after me.”
I watched her, ridiculous and small and furious all at once, and chose not to give her the satisfaction of a reply. My hand slammed the door in her face before she could widen that smile into a victory pose.
I turned back to Khalifa and stacked my anger into a voice so quiet it might have been a thread. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you’d keep something this huge a secret.”
He opened his mouth, ready to charm his way through a confession, but I cut him off before he could even inhale his next lie.
“Just to clear up any confusion,” I said, enunciating every syllable, “when I told you I didn’t want to be anyone’s first wife, I wasn’t suggesting that second or third place were open enrollment. ”
He blinked at me—slowly, dumbly, as if his brain needed a reboot—but I kept going. “And of course she’s perfect, and beautiful—”
“You’re perfect and beautiful,” he interjected.
“—and five-foot-four, and roughly the width of a breadstick.”
“Who said I wanted that?”
I arched a brow. “By marrying her, you kind of made that clear, Professor.”
“It was arranged—”
“Our marriage was arranged.”
“It was arranged by my mother, not me,” he said quickly, like that detail somehow made it better. “She wanted me to marry her friend’s daughter, and she had just gotten sick—”
“Oh my God,” I groaned, throwing my head back. “So your cure for every mommy health crisis is marriage? Medical school 101, Khalifa—matrimony is not a treatment plan.” I stared at him, incredulous. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
He sighed with the weary resignation of someone admitting to a stupid, terrible thing. “I know, Lillian. I know it was wrong. But my brother had just died and...I couldn’t say no to her.”
The admission was small and ragged and human, and it should have softened me, but it didn’t. I felt for him, but he still dragged me into a life built on lies and then expected me to accept it with a polite smile.
I moved toward my room. He reached for my arm. “Lillian, wait. Just let me explain what happened.”
I wrenched free, words falling out of me like glass. “You really don’t want me in your presence right now because I might murder you, and I’m a doctor, so I know how to make it look like an accident.”
I shut the door and locked it. For a moment I just stood pressed against the wood, breaths loud in my ears, my knees beginning to tremble, the curtain pulling tight around my chest, the bounds of my composure fraying.
Twenty minutes ago, I woke up the happiest I had ever been.
How was it possible that I couldn’t even recognize that girl anymore?
I mouthed the mantra like a litany: Don’t let him see you break. Don’t let him see you small. Don’t let him see you cry. I didn’t want him to have power over my weaknesses. I had given people that power for years and watched them use it like currency. Never again.
I threw on the first scrubs I could find, the blue too bright, the fabric rough against my skin. My hijab was a mismatched scrap—an apology to aesthetics I didn’t have time for. I checked my reflection once, feeling ridiculous at how crushed my face looked, then yanked the door open.
He was there, in the hallway, hands out as if he could physically stop the world from shattering. His face had that rueful, broken expression people wore when they thought apologies could be measured in words. He started to speak, to reach, to explain, and for a brief second, I almost let him.
But I forced myself to walk past him, my steps steady, my shoulders a set of defiance I’d practiced wearing for decades. I didn’t look back as I left; I couldn’t give him the image of me undone.
As the door clicked shut behind me, a part of me wanted to fall apart on the stairwell and let the city catch my pieces.
Instead, I straightened my hijab with hands that did not shake, inhaled, and marched toward the day waiting, with its tiny, unglamorous demands and the one place where I could still be indestructible.
By the time I made it to work, Khalifa had blown up my phone to the point of no return, and I’d rehearsed exactly zero versions of what I’d say if anyone asked how my morning was going. Mostly because “I found out my husband had a secret wife” didn’t pair well with small talk or coffee.
Kevin was at the front desk, humming and looking far too cheerful for someone whose hair was gelled into compliance before eight a.m. “Good morning, beautiful—”
“Kevin,” I snapped, not slowing down. “I need you to order me a new desk, chair, monitor, armoire, and anything else in my office that’s remotely breakable. Same-day delivery and installation.”
He blinked. “Uh...redecorating?”
My office door slammed behind me, echoing off my ribs, and I hurled my bag to the floor like it had personally betrayed me, too.
Kevin appeared in the doorway, hesitant. “Dr. T, are you—”
I grabbed the succulent on my desk and threw it against the wall. It exploded into dirt and shards.
“—feeling okay?” he finished weakly, taking a cautious step back.
Next went my mug, the one he’d bought me that said Trust Me, I’m a Doctor. It hit the wall and shattered into a million pieces that felt far too symbolic.
“Get out of my office, Kevin,” I said tightly. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
He didn’t move. “Are you sure? Because I’m getting major murderess-on-a-rampage energy right now—”
“Now, Kevin!”
He vanished like a magician, and the second he was gone, the last thread holding me together snapped.
I tore through my office like grief had its hands around my throat.
Papers flew. Drawers slammed. My diplomas—the proof that I was once composed and brilliant and untouchable—hit the floor, frames cracking.
Every crash was a release valve for the pressure building in my chest. Every splinter of glass was a syllable of the word why.
How could he? How could I?
The questions looped until they blurred.
My rage wasn’t just for Khalifa—it was for myself.
For hearing his careful warnings, for seeing his hesitations, and dressing them up as fear instead of truth.
For calling it vulnerability when it was guilt.
For being the kind of woman who heard don’t love me and decided it sounded like a challenge.
I’d spent years piecing myself together after heartbreaks smaller than this, convincing myself I’d learned, that I was smarter now, sharper, immune. But love, it seemed, was my favorite form of self-sabotage. And Khalifa—God, he was the final exam I hadn’t studied for.
A framed photo of us slid off the shelf and landed face down, glass bouncing across the carpet. I stared at it, chest heaving, then pressed my palms to my desk and let the silence swallow me whole.
Somewhere in the hall, Kevin’s nervous voice carried through the door. “So I’m guessing no staff meeting at nine?”
A small, broken laugh caught in my throat. I sank into my chair—my soon-to-be-replaced, possibly haunted chair—and stared at the wreckage of my life’s neatest room, realizing that no matter how many things I smashed, the one thing I wanted to destroy most was still beating in my chest.
Khalifa appeared like bad weather, ducking into my office. Kevin lunged, hand on his arm. “Hey, you really don’t want to go in there.”
He didn’t listen. He stepped over soil and shards, over the mound of a broken succulent and a blanket of paper petals, and took in the carnage as if each shattered piece named a violation. His mouth opened once, closed again, and then his eyes went straight to me.
I stood because my legs wouldn’t let me stay sitting. “First, you assaulted my phone to death, and now you came to harass me at work?”
“Harass is a stretch—” he started.
“Spoken from somebody who needs a stretch,” I shot back.
He drew in an uneven breath. “Lillian—”
“It’s Doctor to you. God, you think you can just waltz in here and fold the truth into nice and neat origami, and try to hand it over as an explanation? I don’t want your excuses, Khalifa. Get the hell out of my office.”
“Not until we talk. You always do this. You form a story in your head before you hear people out.”
My jaw dropped, heat building under my ribs like a pressurized tank. “Are you actually trying to place some blame on me? I’m going to kill you.”
Kevin didn’t wait to hear whether that was a threat or a promise.
He grabbed Khalifa by the elbow like he was hauling a particularly stubborn patient out of an operating theatre.
“Seriously, dude, just leave. I’ve known Dr. T a lot longer than you have, and she isn’t joking.
Go home. Let her breathe. You two can work this out later when no one has to clean up any human remains—metaphorical or otherwise. ”
Khalifa looked at me, at the shards clinging to my shoes, at the way my knuckles were white around the edge of my desk. His face didn’t hold any armor, only remorse and something close to pain.
He nodded once. “I’m going,” he said. “Please, Lillian. I’m not placing any blame on you, but it’s also not what you think. Hear me out before you decide anything, okay?”
I watched him go wordlessly, watched Kevin shepherd him into the elevator, watched the doors close like a punctuation mark I couldn’t rewrite. I sank back into the shambles of my office and counted the scraps.
A groan clawed its way out of my throat as the door creaked open again. “Kevin,” I said without looking up, forehead pressed against the heel of my palm, “I swear on every remaining piece of furniture in this room, I really don’t want to talk to—”
“I’m not Kevin,” a smooth voice interrupted. “Whoever that is.”