Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I draw the line at bungee jumping. I’m a doctor. I know exactly how bones break.”
He turned off the engine and faced me, completely unbothered. “Good thing we’re not here for the bones. We’re here for the fun.”
“I don’t do fun that involves physics.”
“You’ve spent all day punishing yourself for something that wasn’t your fault. You need to stop thinking.”
“By throwing myself off a bridge?”
He shrugged. “Preferably with a rope attached, but ultimately, the choice is yours.”
I stared at him, torn between horror and humor. “You’re crazy.”
He smiled, that slow, aggravating, melt-you-from-the-inside smile. “Maybe. But I promise, when it’s over, you’ll feel better.”
I stayed seated, clutching my seatbelt.
He opened my door and said, “Come on, Dr. T. Time to trade in grief for adrenaline.”
And for reasons I didn’t understand yet—maybe because of the way he said it, or the way the sunlight hit his eyes—I followed.
Minutes later, two waivers were signed, and I found myself in a harness, staring down at the canyon as a gust whipped around my scarf. I could hear my pulse in my ears, could feel the tremor in my hands that I hoped no one else noticed.
“You’ll be fine,” Khalifa said, his voice calm in a way that only made me want to punch him.
“Easy for you to say. You don’t have a paralyzing fear of dying midair.”
“They don’t let you die midair,” he assured me. “That’s bad for business.”
I squinted at him. “I’m surprised you’re doing this. You can’t handle turbulence on a safely secured plane, but free-falling off a cliff tied to a glorified shoelace is fine?”
He perked up like he’d been waiting his whole life for this exact accusation. “Okay, think of it like this. Remember how you told me flying was like being in a cup of Jell-O someone shook at a kid’s birthday party?”
I made a face. “That’s not how I—”
“Well,” he barreled on, “bungee jumping is like...being trapped in a soda can. You’re the bubble. But like, the lead bubble. The one that guides the other bubbles to—no, wait. You’re not the bubble. You’re the carbonation. Or gravity is the carbonation? Actually, hang on, you might be—”
I pressed a finger to his lips, shushing whatever bizarre, life-altering metaphor he thought he was on the verge of inventing. “Stop talking.”
He froze, eyes widening, his whole mouth going still beneath my fingertip like I’d just hit his personal off-switch. Then he nodded—very solemnly, very seriously.
The instructor came over, double-checking our gear. “You’re tandem,” he said cheerfully. “So you’ll be attached together—super close. One of you has to lead the jump. Who’s braver?”
We both said, “Me,” at the same time.
I arched a brow, and he conceded. “Ladies first.”
“I’m starting to think you want me dead.”
“If I wanted that, I wouldn’t be jumping with you.”
We were strapped together now, every inch of his solid frame against my back. His hand found mine, weaving our fingers together.
“Ready?” he murmured, his voice right beside my ear.
“No.”
“Good.”
And then we jumped.
The world dropped out from under us. My shriek tore through the gorge, piercing and wild, consumed by the wind. His arm wrapped tighter around me, securing me to him as the earth blurred and the river spun below.
And suddenly, it wasn’t terrifying.
It was freeing.
The air tore past me, its roar swallowing every sound I’d ever carried.
The ground tilted out of existence, and for a suspended second, I couldn’t tell if the scream in my throat belonged to me or to the sky itself.
The world turned upside down, and so did I, and maybe that was the point.
Maybe I needed to see it all from a different angle to finally understand how small I was compared to everything I’d been trying to hold together.
The wind clawed through me, stripping away every terrible thing I’d been hoarding in silence—the weight of my mother’s rejection, the sterile hum of hospital corridors that had begun to sound like confessions, the ghosts of the three lives I couldn’t save.
I felt them all loosen, piece by piece, ripped free and flung into the open blue.
Her voice—the one that had lived in my head like a second conscience, too tall, too loud, too much—dissolved into the wind until it was nothing.
Mr. Thompson’s face vanished next, his fury, his grief, the words that had carved themselves into my ribs: you killed them.
The way he’d looked at my hijab and saw a monster instead of a doctor, a person.
The way he’d gripped it—gripped me—fingers closing around my property, my beliefs, my identity, as if ripping off my scarf could rip out my faith.
As if my religion lived only in the cloth on my head and not in the chambers of my heart.
Gone.
And then the memory of last night—the alarms, the chaos, the blood that refused to leave my hands no matter how many times I scrubbed.
I could still feel it, phantom and sticky, like guilt had a texture.
But as the trees screeched around us, I understood something that no textbook or tribunal could teach: maybe it had never been my fault.
Maybe I had done everything right, and the universe had still decided to say no.
For once, there was no one to prove anything to. No titles, no accusations, no endless revisions of the same story where I tried to save everyone but myself.
I wasn’t a doctor or a daughter or a defendant. I was just a body, unbound and weightless, falling through the endless blue.
And for the first time in years, it didn’t feel like falling at all. It felt like flying.
When the cord finally caught us, the world yanked back into focus. My head fell against Khalifa’s shoulder, raw and breathless laughter bursting out of me effortlessly. His chest shook against my back, warm and solid and impossibly alive, and I realized he was laughing too.
They reeled us up, but the wind tugged at us like it wanted to keep us hanging there—halfway between sky and earth.
Once we were unhooked and standing again, I turned to look at him, his hair adorably mussed, cheeks flushed the prettiest pink, adrenaline still sizzling through our veins. “That was...”
“Insane?” he offered.
“Maybe the most insane thing I’ve ever done,” I said, still smiling. “And yet you didn’t even make a sound.”
“I was distracted.”
“By what?”
He hesitated, the kind of pause that could hold a thousand words. Then he just said, “By making sure you didn’t fall.”
And I didn’t know what to do with the way that made my chest burn.