Chapter Thirty-Nine
MY HEAD SNAPPED UP.
Dalal stood in the doorway like she belonged in glossy magazine lighting—her hair perfect, her blouse untouched by sweat or disgrace, her expression a mirror polished to reflect only what hurt most.
For a moment, I just stared at her. My brain needed time to process that this was real, that the woman who’d detonated my entire life during breakfast had sauntered into my office like she was here for a consultation.
It was hard not to notice how she was the opposite of me in every conceivable way.
Soft, where I was hard. Effortless, where I was exhausting.
Khalifa said their marriage had been arranged, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t eventually developed feelings for her.
Did he love her? Hold her hand? Cook for her?
Share a bed with her? Touch her? Kiss her?
I wanted to scream, or cry, or do something equally unflattering, but Dalal didn’t look like she ever screamed or cried.
She looked like the kind of woman who floated through life without ever smudging her lipstick, and suddenly, I was acutely humiliated by the mess I’d made of myself, by how easily I’d let her shake me.
Now she knew who I was, knew that Khalifa’s second wife was an emotional whack job with a bad poker face and a worse temper.
The thoughts hit like sucker punches. I shoved them out of my mind and forced my tone indifferent.
“Oh,” I said finally. “The homewrecker herself. Come to check if the destruction is up to code?”
Her lips curved, not quite a smile, more like the ghost of superiority. “Technically, I’m the home. You’re the wrecker.”
I laughed. It wasn’t a pretty laugh—it was the type that tasted like blood and old shame. “That’s good. Did you practice that one on the drive over? Or does condescension just come naturally to you?”
She walked further into the office, heels crunching on broken ceramic. “You really made a mess in here.”
“Yeah,” I replied, pushing a shattered photo frame into the trash with my shoe. “It’s funny what betrayal does for your interior design inspiration.”
Dalal tilted her head. “You’re angry.”
“Wow, add ‘observant’ to your list of redeeming qualities.”
Her gaze flicked toward my desk—upturned papers, a mug with half its enamel missing, a pen bleeding ink like it wanted to join the tragedy. “You don’t strike me as the type to lose control.”
I shrugged carelessly. “You don’t strike me as the type to crash funerals or marriages, and yet—here we both are. Surprises all around.”
Her expression faltered, just a hairline crack, but I saw it. She crossed her arms, her voice tightening. “You think you know me?”
“No. And I’m not interested in knowing you, either.”
She didn’t flinch. Instead, she sank gracefully into the chair across from me, like this was some casual chat instead of emotional arson. “Listen,” she said, smoothing an invisible wrinkle from her skirt. “Khalifa isn’t my favorite person, but I owe him this much.”
“Owe him what?”
“Me explaining what happened.” Her voice softened. “Khalifa is an idiot for thinking he could get away with keeping me a secret, but he’s not a bad person.”
When she didn’t say anything more, I gave her a pointed look. “Continue. I’m not here for fun, I actually have a job to get back to.”
She sighed, looking briefly human for the first time. “We got married in Lebanon. We were young, it wasn’t what either of us wanted, but we’d known each other since we were kids, and I thought...maybe love would come later. Like it did for our parents. Like it probably did for yours.”
I said nothing, my jaw stiff.
“After a few years,” she went on, “it was obvious we weren’t right for each other, and so I...” She trailed off, eyes darting to my battered pen holder.
I arched an eyebrow. “You what?”
She exhaled. “I cheated on him.”
The words landed heavy, a quiet bomb in the ruins of the room. “You what?” I repeated, my voice sharper now.
“It wasn’t intentional.”
“Please,” I scoffed. “You’re a grown woman. Every choice you make is intentional.”
Dalal’s mouth twitched. “Fine. It was intentional. I fell in love with someone from work and cheated on him. Happy?”
“Why would that make me happy?” I snapped. “You hurt him.”
Her eyes flicked up to mine, studying me. Then, after a long beat, she said, “You’re actually in love with him.”
My cheeks burned, but I straightened. “You’re not allowed to ask me questions. Keep talking.”
A smirk flitted across her lips, but she obeyed. “I ended up getting pregnant.” She looked down at her hands. “I panicked. Told Khalifa it was his. He was...so excited.” Her voice wavered, barely a whisper now. “And then...my baby died.”
My chest pulsed with a sudden ache. For her, for him, for all the damage that love left behind.
Dalal’s eyes glistened, but she blinked them away. “Khalifa was devastated. More than when his brother died, more than when his mom got sick, more than when his father made it clear he’d never measure up.”
I swallowed hard.
“Anyway,” she said finally, her tone brittle again, “he found out I cheated and that the baby wasn’t his. He asked for a divorce. I said no...and disappeared. I guess he told his family that the divorce went through, but this is the first time he’s heard from me in ten years.”
The silence that followed was jagged and buzzing and full of ghosts.
Somewhere inside me, I felt the slow, painful shift between fury and understanding—like heartbreak and pity were two hands fighting over the same pulse—and through that thin fracture, I saw Khalifa, not as the man I knew, but as all the versions he’d ever been.
I could suddenly see every shade of him, every grey he’d kept tucked between his strict routines and carefully contained emotions.
I saw a boy, kneeling beside his brother, trying to save him, only to feel his heartbeat fade under his palm.
A boy who spent years trying to be good enough for his father to treat him like a son, and always falling short.
A boy who watched his mother’s numbered days slip through his fingers and tried to fill each one with enough joy to make up for all the years she wouldn’t get.
And then finally, a man—tying himself to a woman to make his mother happy, only to have his heart broken over and over again until he stopped believing any part of him could ever be loved.
But there was another part, invisible to everyone but me—a small spark of sunlight, flickering beneath the surface.
The part of him that cared if I ate enough, if I was safe, if I felt welcome in his home, or if the world had been unkind that day.
The part that paid attention, even when he pretended not to.
The part that saw me, believed in me, that became my voice of confidence when mine couldn’t make it out of bed that morning.
The part that witnessed every fragment of myself I’d always hated—the ugly, the tainted, the messy—and never flinched, never tried to edit me into someone easier to be around, or silence the pieces that were loud and inconvenient.
The part that stayed steady when I wasn’t, that softened without asking for credit, that existed only to remind me I was more than the things that broke me.
The part that loved me unconditionally, without reason or restraint, through every chaos and collapse, that crept into the frozen places inside me and made them bloom again.
I’d spent so long wanting to know everything about him, to see the things he didn’t let the world see. And now that I finally did, I couldn’t decide if it felt like relief or heartbreak.
“You are a horrible person,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
I met her gaze. “You lost a baby—and that’s awful, I can’t even imagine. But what you did to him?” My throat tightened. “You cheated on him. You made him think he had a child, and then you let him believe that his child died.”
Her lips parted, but I didn’t stop.
“You broke him. He was already broken, but somehow, you still managed to shatter what was left.”
A single tear slipped down before I could stop it. I wiped it away quickly, hoping she hadn’t noticed, but her eyes softened—just a flicker—before she pushed it away.
“Do you think he wanted to marry you?” I asked. “He only did it for his mother, out of duty, out of guilt. But at least he remained faithful in an unhappy marriage.”
Dalal scoffed, but there wasn’t much strength in it. Her hands tightened on the ridge of the chair, white-knuckled.
“He loved you,” I whispered. “Or tried to. Even when you probably made it impossible.”
She shot me an unimpressed look. “Oh, whatever. Don’t make this into a bigger deal than it needs to be. It wasn’t that bad, okay? What I did wasn’t—”
A crack bounced off the walls, slicing her sentence in half. Dalal’s head snapped to the side. It wasn’t until my palm flared with heat that it registered—the sound had come from me.
I’d slapped her.
Dalal gasped, her fingers flying to her cheek, shock widening her eyes. I stared at my trembling hand, heart hammering, just as stunned by myself as she was. But I didn’t regret it. Not even a little bit.
“It was,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt. “It was that bad. Worse, even. And if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have disappeared for ten years. You wouldn’t have left him to carry the burden of you alone for ten years.”
Dalal’s jaw clenched. Neither of us spoke. The air between us felt too heavy for words, filled with everything he’d lost, everything she’d taken.
“I didn’t come here for your judgment,” she said finally.
“No,” I said, standing, “you came here for absolution. But you don’t get that from me. Now get the hell out of my office.”
Her breath hitched as she stood too, smoothing her blouse like it could erase the sins of her past. For a heartbeat, she looked smaller, haunted. Then she walked out the door.