Chapter Seventeen #4
“It is up to a point.” He shrugged. “I mean, what’s the point of taking life too seriously? We aren’t here for very long. Why not take some risks and have a good time?”
I considered his words. “Good point. Maybe the rule follower in me was envious that you did whatever you wanted.”
“You married very young. Was that because you wanted to follow the rules?”
“Totally. God forbid I become an old maid. I was almost twenty-two.”
He whistled low. “I could barely take care of myself at that age.”
“I can’t even begin to imagine Ayla getting married right now.
She has so many plans for her future.” At least she had before Ali died.
Worry zipped through me. I needed to call Ayla, and Adam, to check up on them.
“She’s always insisted that she’s not getting married until her late twenties at the earliest.”
“She has a good head on her shoulders. You and Ali did a great job raising those kids.”
Any mention of the children put a smile on my face. I was so proud of them. Ali and I did do a good job with Ayla and Adam. But I agonized about what they might soon face. “What do you think Ali was up to?”
He avoided answering directly. “I always thought you and Ali were the perfect couple.”
I guffawed lightly. “Believe me, there is no such thing.”
“You weren’t happy?”
“I was, but no marriage is perfect. For the most part, Ali was great. He was easygoing about most things, but sometimes dealing with him was like suddenly hitting a brick wall. Especially around issues related to money. And I would have liked to have socialized more as a couple. Ali was more of an introvert.”
“Hmm. You and Ali made me believe in marriage. Watching how you two were together got me thinking that maybe it was something I could do. That I would actually want to do.”
“We couldn’t have been that convincing,” I pointed out. “You’re still not married.”
He shrugged. “I haven’t found the right woman.”
“Have you ever come close?”
“There was a girl once, a long time ago, but she was already spoken for.”
“You’re running out of time. What are you? Forty-six? You don’t want to be an old dad.”
“Whoa,” he said with a smile. “I didn’t say anything about having kids.”
“You don’t want kids?” I thought everyone wanted children. It felt like the natural way of things.
“I used to think I did. I would be open to having kids if I married a woman who wanted them.” Most of Nasser’s family still lived in Ohio, where he was born. But he’d stayed in the DC area after finishing law school in the city.
The elevator pinged. I didn’t immediately tense up. We’d been standing in the corridor for over an hour, and the elevator pinged a lot.
A woman in her forties with blondish hair emerged.
She wore a sporty outfit yet still managed to look expensive and put together.
Not super slim, she was obviously in good shape.
Her face came into focus as she approached.
I’d never met the woman, but I had seen her face before.
As she walked by, a shadowy image from another lifetime crystallized into a real person.
I straightened abruptly, shock taking my breath away. The expression on my face prompted Nasser to look over his shoulder to see what I’d reacted to.
“Lizzie?” I spoke her name just loud enough to be heard.
Lizzie Martins did a double take, looking at me with a quizzical expression. Her eyes were big and blue. “I’m sorry. Do I know you?”
“No.” My strained voice sounded alien to my ears. “But you knew my husband.”
Her gaze flitted over to Nasser. It took a moment for recognition to flicker in her face. “Nass?” she said to Ali’s cousin. “What is—?” She looked at me again, her eyes widening.
“Is she—?” Lizzie directed her questions at Nasser. “You’re her lawyer?” she said as if Nasser had betrayed her.
She’d know a thing or two about betrayal. My God. Had the old girlfriend Ali supposedly gave up to please his parents been in the picture this whole time?
“Lizzie?” Nasser wore a stunned expression. “Where’ve you been all these years?”
“Are you Samantha Price?” I asked, my pulse slamming so hard in my ears that I could barely hear myself.
“I’m sorry, but my talking to you is not part of our deal.” She looked like a deer caught in the headlights. “Please leave me alone. Take your money and go away. Please.”
I lashed out at her. “It would have been nice if you’d left my husband alone for the past twenty years.
” My shock exploded into the outrage and fury that had been gathering force inside of me since I’d learned about the secret house.
“I can see why you wouldn’t want to talk about being my husband’s sidepiece for twenty years.
But I’m honestly curious. Did you even care that he was married? That he had children?”
“Please leave me alone,” she said shakily, scurrying toward Perkins’s office.
I reflexively went after her. She was pulling the glass doors open. I was losing my chance to speak to her. “Wait! I need to ask you—”
Nasser caught me. “You can’t follow her in there.” He looked as rattled as I felt. “You know that.”
“That bastard.” It had been Lizzie all along.
She’d been like a jinn, invisible but always there, tainting my marriage.
“What a liar Ali was.” I didn’t recognize my own voice.
The guttural noises that escaped me sounded like they came from a wounded animal.
My knees gave out. Nasser caught me. Strong arms closed around my waist, keeping me from crashing to the floor.
“Yalla,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
“What a piece of khara.” I tossed my keys on the island with more force than necessary, still shaking from seeing Lizzie Martins in the flesh. “Do you think he had kids with that woman?”
“What? No!” Nasser slipped his shoes off and followed me into the kitchen. “No way.” But he didn’t sound totally convinced. He didn’t know any more than me. And I didn’t know anything anymore. Upstairs, Binti barked madly in her crate.
“It would make sense for him to leave one house to each of his families.” I almost gagged at the thought.
Nasser noticed. “Sit down.” He made sure I was seated on a counter stool before pulling the iced tea out of the fridge and pouring me a cup. “Drink this.”
I was unsettled in a way I’d never experienced. As if my insides were untethered, flying haphazardly around within me, wild and out of control. Not even yoga breathing, which I tried on the car ride home, could calm my internal chaos.
“This has to mean that she never left. That lying, treacherous hamar,” I hissed. “I was an idiot virgin bride who believed every lie that jackass ever fed me. I was a faithful wife. For twenty-three years, I never even looked at another man while he—he—”
“Ali always said he made the right choice by marrying you.”
“But he didn’t make a choice, did he?” My contemptuous laugh was shrill in my ears. “Or, I guess he did. He chose both of us. Me in this house. His girlfriend, his true love, in her stupid cozy house in North Carolina.”
“You have every right to be upset. I know it looks bad. But we still don’t know exactly what went on with—”
“Oh, shut up!” My body felt like an overfilled balloon that was about to burst. “Don’t you dare defend him!
” I hurled the glass, tea and all, at the nearest surface.
It clunked against the cabinet and landed on the floor with a satisfying shattering noise.
The tea splashed my arm, the ice-cold spray a welcome shock.
“I wasn’t defending Ali.” Nasser moved to pick up the glass shards. “We just don’t know everything yet.”
“Fuck him.” I rose and went to the fridge to pull out the pitcher of iced tea. “Fuck him, and fuck his fucking girlfriend, and fuck his fucking iced tea.” I pulled open the sliding glass door and flung the pitcher over the side of the deck. “I will never drink that crap again.”
“Hopefully you didn’t hit anyone,” Nasser murmured.
He pulled some paper towels off the roll and patted my neck and arm dry.
I stood obediently still, like a child being toweled off by a parent after a bath, hurt and rage simmering through me.
I studied him with a new perspective. My husband’s playboy cousin.
“You’ve dated a lot of women.”
He stayed focused on drying me off. “I wouldn’t say a lot.”
“Tell me honestly. What’s wrong with me—from a man’s perspective? I’m reasonably attractive, aren’t I? Why wasn’t I enough?”
He paused, bunching the paper towels in his fist. “You are incre—”
“Forget I asked,” I interrupted. “It’s an awkward thing to ask considering that I was married to your BFF cousin for twenty-three years. Besides, you’d never be mean enough, or rude enough, to say no.”
“You’re enough,” he said quietly. “More than enough. Any man would be lucky to have you.” He spoke with more depth of feeling and sincerity than I’d ever experienced from him. “It’s just that Ali won the toss.”
“What?”
“Ali won the toss.”
I didn’t understand. “What toss?”
He sighed. “We were both at that wedding when Ali first saw you.” He paused. “I thought you were pretty hot too.”
“Wait.” I blinked. “You were there?”
“I was. But we were cousins, and we couldn’t both go after you. That could’ve created a conflict between us, between our parents.”
“How did I never know about this?” I was stunned. The story of Ali spotting me at a wedding was part of our lore as a couple. Nasser had never been part of that narrative.
“We flipped a coin. Ali won. He got to court you first. If he struck out, I would have my shot.”
“You flipped a coin.” As his words sank in, my vision went fuzzy at the edges. “Unbelievable.”
“I always thought everything worked out for the best,” he said. “You and Ali seemed happy together.”
The air went out of my lungs. “All of our futures, our lives, determined by a coin toss.” How many years had I lived my married life without context? Without knowing the whole story? Here was yet another thing that Ali had kept from me. What else didn’t I know?
Nasser studied me. “You were happy with my cousin, right?”
“I thought I was.” I stared at him, for the first time really looking at Nasser as a man who might have been my partner. My lover. Not someone from Ali’s world, but a man who might have been central to mine.
“So, you see,” he spoke into the awkward silence, “I have always thought that you were, and are, way more than enough. Ali was a very lucky man.”
Somewhere inside me, a switch turned off.
The lever that had always relegated Nasser to the friend zone deactivated.
For the first time since meeting him more than two decades ago, I really observed Nasser as a man, a physically attractive man who’d apparently always wanted me, when perhaps my own husband hadn’t.
I took in the dark eyes and thick lashes, the wavy hair now liberally speckled with gray.
A new awareness tingled through me. I became acutely aware of my skin hunger—of being deprived of touch, of missing a man’s emotional and corporeal companionship for months. Longing crashed through me. I craved physical contact and comfort.
But not from Nasser—even though he was appealing enough. I wanted it from the one person who could no longer give it to me. Tears stung my eyes, a crushing sensation bearing down on my chest.
I wanted Ali.
I needed my husband. Not the liar who left a secret house to his girlfriend. I craved the man I thought I knew, an extraordinary but normal guy with a tender touch and quiet, reassuring smile—a man Nasser could never measure up to.
Had that version of Ali ever been real?
Awkwardness stirred in the air. No matter what the truth about Ali was, whatever Nasser wanted from me was never going to happen. I needed to be alone, to wrap my head around everything I’d learned today. If that was even possible. Binti was still barking. I needed to take her out.
“Thanks for seeing me home,” I said to Nasser. “I know you must have lots of work to do.”
“Gotcha.” Nasser took my abrupt dismissal for what it was. A rejection. A door firmly being shut. “Call if you need anything.”