Chapter Eight
WHEN MY PHONE BUZZED, I didn’t think much of it—probably an email from the scheduling system or a pharmaceutical rep trying to sell me miracle vitamins for female burnout. Then I saw the sender.
From: Khalifa Nasser
Subject: Dinner tonight
For a second, I just stared at the screen, like maybe if I waited long enough, it would autocorrect itself into Kevin or Sarah. But no. It was him. And it was the first time he’d ever emailed me since before our wedding.
Khalifa: My colleagues found out I got married. They invited us to dinner to celebrate.
I read it three times. Not Do you want to go? Not Are you free? Just a royal decree, stamped and sealed by His Majesty, Professor Nasser.
After an embarrassingly long internal meltdown, I typed:
Me: Tonight?
A text would’ve come back in seconds. His email made me wait two full minutes—just long enough to question every life choice that led me to marry a man who treated communication like a research paper.
When his reply finally arrived, it was predictably concise:
Khalifa: Yes. 7:30. They chose the place.
The lack of emojis, the lack of greeting, the absolute nerve of the man writing “They chose the place” like a Victorian telegram.
I sighed, hovered over my keyboard, and typed again before I could talk myself out of it:
Me: Serious question—are you allergic to texting? Or just such a fob that you haven’t figured out how yet?
I hit send without giving my dignity time to intervene.
Ten minutes passed. Then my inbox pinged.
Khalifa: Outlook has the option of filtering unwanted messages to spam.
I stared at the screen, offended on multiple levels.
Me: So I’m spam now?
Khalifa: If the shoe fits.
My jaw dropped. The audacity. The grammar-checked audacity.
I set the phone face down on my desk, exhaled hard, and muttered, “Great. A double life speedrun.”
WHEN I FINALLY DRAGGED myself home to change, the sky outside the window was melting into shades of orange and lavender, that particular hour where the world looked both exhausted and breathtaking.
I paused in the living room, keys still in hand, and pressed my nose against the glass, just to watch it for a minute.
I never got to see sunsets anymore—too many shifts that bled into nights, too many surgeries that ended with me stumbling home under fluorescent streetlights.
And standing there, staring out at the fiery horizon, I felt the unfairness of it nip at me.
The world could be so beautiful, and I was missing it while I pulled out tiny humans.
A voice behind me broke the spell. “You’re going to make us late.”
Khalifa was leaning against the wall like he had nowhere better to be, though his appearance said otherwise—shirt buttoned neatly, slacks pressed, hair pushed back and still damp from the shower.
He looked surprisingly put together, which was rude, considering I looked like I’d crawled out of a laundry basket.
“Do you ever stop being on time?” I lobbed at him.
“Do you ever start?”
I opened my mouth to retort, but then my gaze focused on his outfit. “What,” I said carefully, “are you wearing?”
He glanced down, then back at me, expression blank. “Clothes. Why?”
“Why?” I repeated, the word breaking into a strangled laugh. “Because none of the colors match.”
He straightened a little, suddenly on guard. “What are you talking about? I’m wearing navy blue and green. Perfectly normal combination.”
I just...stared at him for a second. “No,” I said, like I was explaining photosynthesis to a toddler. “You’re wearing navy blue and burgundy.”
His brows pinched. “It’s green.”
Groaning, I spun toward the kitchen, grabbed the reddest apple from the fruit bowl, and held it up as Exhibit A. “What color is this?”
He didn’t even hesitate. “Brown.”
The apple slipped from my hand, thunking back into the bowl, and I pressed my palm to my forehead. “Oh. My. God. You’re color-blind.”
He looked genuinely affronted. “No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.” I jabbed a finger at him. “Trust my medical degree on this one. If we’re debating world history, I’ll sit down and let you educate me. But when it comes to rods and cones, Professor, I win.”
He blinked, slow and suspicious, like I was trying to swindle him in a card game.
“Unbelievable,” I muttered, brushing past him toward his room. “You’ve survived your entire ancient life not knowing you’re color-blind? That’s a miracle. A genuine, Prophet Musa-parting-the-sea miracle.”
“Ancient?” he echoed, following me down the hall with an offended huff. “I’m only four years older than you.”
“Yeah, legally,” I shot back over my shoulder.
“But I have the soul of a whimsical twenty-two-year-old. I’m basically a child bride.
” I threw open his closet and started flipping through hangers.
“I put up with the vegan thing. I put up with the short thing. But I draw the line at going out in public with a man dressed like a clown.”
He stood behind me, still radiating bewildered indignation. “I’m telling you—it’s green.”
“Oh, shut up,” I snapped, yanking out a crisp white shirt and a blazer that actually matched.
I tossed them onto his bed, stormed out, and stalked toward my room, still grumbling under my breath about how I’d somehow ended up as the personal stylist to a husband who didn’t even believe he needed one.
The restaurant was buzzing when we arrived, full of chatter and rattling glasses, the kind of trendy place with Edison bulbs and menus printed on recycled paper that screamed hip but expensive.
Khalifa’s colleagues spotted us immediately—a table of five, waving us over with smiles that were too wide to be anything but nosy.
“There he is!” a man in his forties called, beard trimmed within an inch of its life. “And Mrs. Khalifa, finally revealed!”
“Mrs. Khalifa?” I echoed pleasantly. “Oh, no, I didn’t survive medical school and twelve years of caffeine dependency just to be reassigned like office furniture.
I go by Dr. Lillian Tariq. My friends call me Lilly,” I added lightly, “but based on that charmingly sexist greeting, I’m not entirely convinced you qualify. ”
There was a brief, awkward beat. I could’ve sworn Khalifa coughed to hide a laugh behind me, but that might’ve just been the sound of my dignity trying to escape the room.
Lilly, less chaos, more grace.
“I’m joking, obviously,” I hurried out, lifting a hand in surrender. “Nothing breaks the ice like a minor feminist manifesto before the appetizers.”
A tentative chuckle tiptoed across the table.
Khalifa’s palm found the small of my back, guiding me forward.
The contact startled me, but I didn’t pull away.
His touch was warm, and confusing, and left me caught between hating the intrusion and.
..not hating it. For someone who had always sworn she’d never let a man affect her, it was disorienting how much that single gesture unsettled me.
Introductions blurred together—Amir with the beard, Hannah with the French-tip nails, Yolanda, who taught medieval history, Layla from the sociology department, and Rishi, whose voice seemed determined to fill the entire restaurant.
I caught their eyes sweeping over my silhouette as they spoke—zeroing in on my red sequined skirt, the soft knit sweater I’d thought was chic rather than foolish, the way I didn’t quite match the company.
Hannah and Layla shared a look post-inspection—that familiar, wordless exchange mean girls perfected back when they were deciding whether the newcomer was worth tolerating or neatly dismantling.
“You’re a doctor?” Hannah asked.
“Yup!” I nodded, a little too enthusiastically. “OB-GYN. I love babies—as long as they aren’t mine, of course.”
Her smile faltered. “I’m a mother,” she said, a note of offense grinding her voice. “I have two sons.”
“Oh,” I said quickly, warmth flaring up my spine. “I was just kidding. Moms are awesome. I mean—most moms. Mine’s not, but I don’t generalize.”
I offered a chuckle, but it was met with uncomfortable silence.
“Okay,” Layla said finally.
The bread basket arrived then, and my whole face lit up. “Oh my God, bread,” I moaned, already reaching for it. “All I had today was an expired candy bar I found in my desk after three back-to-back deliveries. Pretty sure it was covered in placenta.”
Amir cleared his throat. “You’re not what we pictured when Khalifa said he got married.”
“I wouldn’t have pictured myself as his wife either,” I said easily, because it was either that or acknowledge the tightness in my chest.
Hannah tilted her head, studying me again. “You’re just so...bright,” she said. “And bubbly. You and Khalifa are basically polar opposites.”
I’d heard that fake compliment enough times to know the translation—bright was code for blinding, and bubbly meant aggressively chipper.
I laughed anyway, breaking off a piece of bread and buttering it with unnecessary focus. “I guess.”
Layla smiled thinly, and the conversation lurched forward again, but the feeling lingered—that sense of being slightly too vivid for the room. Like I’d shown up in highlighter yellow to a world that preferred soft grays and respectable neutrals.
“So, how did you two meet?” she asked, chin propped in her hand.
“A mutual connection,” Khalifa said.
“Wow, mysterious. Sounds romantic.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “just like a fairy tale. Minus the fairies. And the tale.”
The group chuckled, but Hannah’s brows arched. “You’ve got a quick tongue. Does she always have the last word, Khalifa?”
Heat crept up my neck. I could already feel it coming—the sigh, the deflection, the embarrassment. He’d brush me off, smooth the moment, make me look like the noisy, brash wife.
But Khalifa just shrugged and said, “She’s right.”
The table hummed, the tension dissolving into clinks of silverware and conversation.
They forgot about me for a while, which I appreciated.
I attempted to listen, nodding along like a functional adult, but after hearing accreditation standards and postgraduate funding models in the same sentence, my attention clocked out entirely.
I frowned down at the leafy greens on my plate, pushing them around like they might rearrange themselves into something more appetizing.
My mind drifted to the fridge at home instead—wondering what kind of unholy but comforting concoction I could scrounge up once this ridiculous dinner was over.
Something with cheese. Definitely something reheated.
Possibly something eaten straight from the container, standing in front of the open door like a raccoon.
“Tell us more about you, Lilly,” someone said. “What’s it like being married to Khalifa? He’s always so quiet.”
Well, you know what they say, I thought absently, watching vinaigrette flood my salad. If he’s quiet in the streets, he’s a freak in the sheets.
It wasn’t until the silence fell with a thud that I realized I’d said the thought out loud.
I stopped pouring and looked up. Every head turned.
Across from me, a fork hovered halfway to Hannah’s mouth.
To my left, Layla blinked slowly, buffering.
To my right, Khalifa looked...genuinely alarmed.
Horrified, even. Like he was mentally drafting a resignation letter.
“I mean—” I rushed in, words tangling as they tripped over each other. “Because he wears socks to bed. Crazy, right?”
No one spoke. Khalifa’s ears were actively turning red.
I lifted my drink in what I hoped read as casual elegance and what probably looked more like defensive maneuver, whispering into the rim of my glass, “I’m sorry.”
As I waited for the weirdness to fade, that awful clarity of all our differences, of the room, of myself began to set in.
I was surrounded by exceptionally intelligent and accomplished professors—suits and blazers and pressed ties, people who said words like methodology and tenure track without irony.
And then there was me, in my sequins and color, drowning a salad and making wildly inappropriate jokes like I’d stumbled out of a circus and completely forgotten how civilized humans behaved.
“She’s had a long day,” Khalifa said evenly.
The group collectively came back to life, awkwardness evaporating into cautious laughter and the safe refuge of small talk.
His palm brushed my back, and I braced, certain it was to silence me, to rein me in.
The shock of it rippled through me, and suddenly I was standing in front of my mother again, her voice ringing in my ears: too tall, too loud, too much.
Words meant to shrink me, to fold me into corners until I was neat and unremarkable, until no part of me spilled over the edges.
I swallowed hard and moved his hand aside. The air cooled in the space where his skin had been.
“So, Lilly,” Layla leaned in, smirking like she knew exactly what she was doing, “what’s the most annoying thing about him?”
“How much time do you have?” I asked dryly.
He inched closer, lowering his voice so only I could hear. “You talk about female bodily fluids at dinner and casually announce what I’m supposedly like in bed, but I’m the annoying one?”
“I didn’t announce,” I muttered. “I implied.”
“That doesn’t help your case.”
I tipped my head. “Are you denying that you wear socks to bed?”
His mouth twitched, giving him away.
I snickered. “I knew it.”
“Lilly?”
The sound of my name, rolling off those lips, jolted me. I turned, my bread bite suddenly lodged in my throat.
Malik.
The first and only person I’d ever allowed myself inch toward feeling for, the one who cracked my heart and helped convince me marriage was a doomed institution—stood there, impossibly real, hand in hand with someone else.