Chapter Nineteen
THE HOSPITAL SMELLED like antiseptic and death—the same smell that clung to my scrubs long after I’d leave.
I hated it instantly. The sterile lights, the drone of machines, the shuffle of nurses who looked like they’d forgotten how to rest. It was too familiar, too close to my own world, yet entirely different.
Khalifa walked ahead of me, shoulders squared, hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket. He didn’t say a word the entire drive there, and I didn’t press him.
His mother stirred when we entered, her eyelids fluttering open at the sound of the door. The faintest smile tugged at her lips when she saw him.
“Habibi,” she whispered, voice thin beneath the hiss of the oxygen. He went to her side instantly, his fingers trembling as he smoothed a strand of hair from her cheek.
She whispered something to him, motioning toward me. Khalifa hesitated, his eyes flicking to mine. Then he leaned close and kissed her forehead.
“I’ll be right outside,” he murmured and slipped from the room.
I walked to her bedside. She looked so frail up closely, her skin pale and papery, her eyes still full of an impossible kind of light.
She reached for me, and with visible effort, lifted the oxygen mask away. I started to protest, but she only shook her head.
“Take care of him for me, habibti,” she rasped in Arabic, her accent lilting, the endearment tender enough to break my heart.
It took me a second to understand. “Khalifa?”
She nodded weakly, her eyes glistening. “I know he can be stubborn sometimes,” she said, pausing for breath. “But he’s in so much pain. He went through so much. Be patient with him, habibti. Love him.”
Love him.
The words hung there, too big for the small space, making my throat tighten.
I didn’t know what to say, what kind of vow she was asking me to make.
I barely knew how to process the fact that I liked him, and now she was asking me to love him?
But something in her eyes—something pleading and full of trust—made me nod anyway.
“I will,” I promised.
Her hand relaxed in mine, her lashes lowering.
Then she replaced the mask, her breathing shallow, and I stood there for another long moment, watching her chest rise and fall.
When I finally stepped out into the hall, Khalifa was leaning against the wall, arms folded.
His expression was unreadable again, but his eyes searched mine, trying to gauge what she wanted to tell me, before going back into her room.
I hovered near the door, not wanting to intrude.
Khalifa moved to her side and took her hand, his thumb brushing over her wrist like he could will her pulse to stay steady.
He said something softly, his voice breaking halfway through, and I looked away.
It felt wrong to see him like that—vulnerable, human, heartbreakingly helpless.
I focused on the machines instead, the slow beeping, the IV drip.
Things I understood. Things that didn’t hurt.
After a while, Khalifa stood. “We should go. She needs rest.”
The evening air was cooler now, the city whizzing in the distance.
I followed him, neither of us speaking. Halfway down the street, he stopped and braced his hands on the roof of a car, his head bowed, the muscles in his back taut like he was fighting to hold everything in.
I took a step closer before I could think better of it.
“Khalifa,” I whispered.
He didn’t look at me, just shook his head once. “Please, Lillian. Not right now.”
The way he said my name—it was almost...pleading.
So I didn’t say anything else. I stayed close, letting him know I wasn’t going anywhere, hoping it would be enough.
ONCE WE GOT BACK TO the house, the sun had long since dipped below the horizon, the sky a dusky lavender that clung to the mountain peaks.
Dinner passed in a blur. There wasn’t much talking as grief sat at the table with us.
Khalifa barely said a word, retreating into that suppressed part of himself I still hadn’t figured out how to reach, but his family—they made space for me.
One of his aunts kept piling food onto my plate like she was on a mission to fatten me up, and every time I tried to refuse, she’d say, “You’re too skinny.
Eat.” And I did, because saying no felt rude and, honestly, because the food was incredible.
I wasn’t used to people insisting I eat more.
Dinners were usually a divided occasion—my brothers and father at the table, me at the counter with a separate plate, a subtle reminder that appetite was not a feminine trait.
My mother never had to say it outright—even though she often did—but sometimes her glances did the work just fine: smaller portions, smaller voice, smaller presence.
So when his family handed me seconds with a smile instead of a side-eye, it felt like some micro, healing act.
His cousins asked me about my career, if I liked Beirut, and Amina smiled at me like she already knew the answer.
The cold awkwardness between us during my wedding was gone, and we were kind of, sort of, friends.
I kept waiting to feel like an outsider, but somehow, I didn’t.
Everyone spoke freely over one another, voices layered in warmth and pain and humor.
It felt so natural to laugh, to help with the chores, to be up to my elbows in suds, to be part of something that wasn’t mine but also didn’t feel borrowed either.
After one day in this house, I felt more welcome here than I’d ever felt living under my parents' roof.
There were a few teasing comments about my broken Arabic, which I laughed off, leaning into the role of the white-washed Canadian who forgot her roots.
It was easier that way—easier than explaining that I hadn’t grown up speaking Arabic because the people who were meant to teach me barely spoke to me at all.
Home had never been a place of stories or shared language.
The only space where I could exist without feeling choked by silence and the relentless, pick-you-apart criticism was alone in my room, shut away from family conversations that never seemed meant for me.
I knew almost nothing about where I came from—about my parents’ childhoods, the places they left behind, or the lives my brothers lived during their yearly visits before my grandparents died.
It felt like a past everyone else had inherited naturally, and I’d somehow been left without the translation.
I was too Middle Eastern for white spaces and too white for Middle Eastern ones. I existed only as a contradiction caught in the narrow space between, belonging nowhere, claimed by no one.
When the dishes were finally done and Khalifa had disappeared down the hall, I wiped my hands and went to find him.
His room was empty. I hesitated in the doorway before stepping in, curiosity winning out.
There were books everywhere—history, poetry, fiction—and framed photos of him with his family.
There were a handful where he stood beside another man I didn’t recognize but looked enough like him to raise questions—same dark curls, same familiar tilt of the mouth—and in those, his smile was the brightest.
Along one entire wall were model ships. Dozens of them.
Different kinds, different eras, different materials—wood, metal, canvas masts stretched tight—each one built with painstaking care and displayed like they belonged in a museum rather than a bedroom.
They were lined in neat rows, their sails so precise they looked ready to catch wind at any second.
“Secret hobby,” I murmured, smirking.
Despite his obvious love for them, there wasn’t a single model ship in his loft back in Canada.
Probably because he still didn’t consider it home.
Before I could talk myself out of it, my hand had already claimed the tiniest one.
I knew exactly what I was doing. That little beauty was coming with me, and yes, a few pairs of shoes were going to get sacrificed in the process, but it was worth it if it meant he could have something he enjoyed.
I jammed it under my clothes, snapped the suitcase closed, and strutted back to snooping.
I wanted to take my time searching through his things, to uncover all his secrets piece by piece—the pages he’d dog-eared, the old ink stains on his desk, the half-finished notes tucked into drawers.
I wanted to understand him not through what he refused to say, but through what he left behind.
I wanted to know who grew up in this room—the baby Khalifa who reached for his mother’s hand, the child who asked too many questions, the teenager who probably learned too early how to hide his pain.
I wanted to know which version of him still lingered here, trapped between the cracks of the floorboards, that remembered more than he’d ever tell me.
Being here—in Lebanon, in his home—made the contrast between us feel almost architectural, like our differences were carved into the blueprints before we were even born.
He was the one everyone turned to, the name that rose first on every tongue, the cemented presence people trusted to catch whatever they dropped, never once asking if his hands were already full.
And me? I was the one they forgot the moment I moved out. If I was honest, they barely remembered I existed even while I lived under the same roof, drifting through rooms like a light they kept meaning to switch off.
But maybe that was why we worked—strangely, inconveniently, against whatever logic governed the rest of my story. I was pretty sure I’d be satisfied with whatever part of himself he handed me, even the smallest sliver.
And Khalifa...he remembered me even when I wasn’t there.
He found me everywhere he looked—in the grocery store, on his way home from work, in the mundane, throwaway moments that stitched together his day.
Somehow, I’d become his background music, the soundtrack to his life, without either of us noticing when it started playing.
I turned, still grinning faintly, and froze.
Khalifa stood in the doorway, shirtless, water dripping from his hair, a towel slung around his neck. The air shifted, sharp and electric, my brain short-circuiting.
He jolted when he saw me. “Oh—sorry, Lillian, I didn’t realize—” His voice cracked awkwardly, and before I could find mine, he was crossing the room in a flurry of movement, tugging a shirt from his closet.
But it didn’t matter. The damage was already done.
His bare chest, his shoulders, the faint glisten of water against his skin, the sculpted lines of muscle tapering down into low-rise, grey sweats that had absolutely no right to sit that low—it all branded itself into my memory so vividly I could feel the heat of him from across the room.
I turned away, face burning, pulse stuttering, trying to collect the remaining pieces of my composure.
A soft rustle of fabric, and then his voice again, deep and a little ragged. “You can...look now. I’m decent.”
No, you’re utterly indecent, I thought, my heart doing somersaults. But I looked anyway, keeping my gaze fixed anywhere but him.
“Right. Great. I’m—uh—going to shower,” I blurted, snatching my toiletries and pajamas from my bag.
He nodded, still standing there like he wasn’t entirely sure what just happened. “Yeah. Sure.”
Once I reached the bathroom and saw myself in the mirror—wide eyes, pink cheeks, damp palms—it hit me just how badly I was losing control of this whole zero feelings thing. Because no amount of pretending could erase the visceral way my body had reacted to him just now.
And I hated him for it.