Chapter Forty-Two
I WAS KNOCKING LIKE a lunatic, pouring all my chaos, desperation, and bad life choices into pounding my fists against Sarah’s door.
When it swung open, she looked startled for half a second before rearranging her face into that perfectly unimpressed expression she’d been practicing since middle school. Arms crossed. One brow raised. Peak judgment.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
I sighed, already exhausted by what I was about to say. “Are you still mad at me?”
“Yes.”
“Can you pretend you’re not mad at me for a few hours?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Because I’m pregnant.”
She froze. Then her arms dropped, her jaw went slack, and she said, very calmly, “Yeah, okay. Officially pressing pause on being mad at you.”
She stepped aside, and I walked in, immediately pacing her living room like a patient in need of tranquilizers.
“Are your parents’ home?” I asked, scanning for signs of other humans.
She shook her head.
“Good.” I nodded, semi-crazed. “Okay, good.”
Sarah perched on the arm of the couch, watching me. “So...” she started slowly. “How did this happen? I thought you guys weren’t in love.”
“We weren’t,” I said, stopping mid-pace.
“In the beginning. He was just this irritating, animal-loving, color-blind grump with commitment issues and an obsession with logical reasoning. And then I married him and discovered that underneath everything I hated about him, he was disgustingly kind and thoughtful and...so hot.”
She snorted. “When did you guys sleep together?”
“The night of the gala.”
“Why didn’t you use protection?”
“Because I didn’t have protection!” I groaned.
“I didn’t plan on sleeping with him. I was fully prepared to hate him until the end of time, but then he ambushed me in the elevator with his heavy breathing and his proximity and his stupid—” I dropped my voice, lowering it into his deep, accented baritone—“‘Do you want this, Lillian? Do you want me?’” I threw my hands up.
“And I—I’m a middle-aged virgin, Sarah! I couldn’t help myself! ”
She burst out laughing, clutching her stomach. “Oh my God. Was that the only time?”
My brain, the traitor, immediately cued a montage of the three weeks after the gala, where we’d basically regressed into two feral, hormonal teenagers who couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
It was like my body had suddenly realized it had spent three decades asleep and was now making up for lost time.
We’d had more unprotected...shenanigans in twenty-one days than I assumed most reasonable people managed across all four seasons.
The only moments I wasn’t touching him were the ones where I needed the bathroom, and even then, I’d briefly considered giving up liquids altogether.
I knew it was stupid, and irresponsible, and blah, blah, blah, but how could I remember protection when my gorgeous husband’s naked body was right there?
My common sense had packed a bag and fled the scene.
All I had access to were frisky chemical impulses and poor decision-making skills.
The thought alone sent a hot, annoying curl of longing through me. God, I missed him.
Heat crept up my cheeks. “Not exactly.”
Her laughter doubled. “You dirty little minx. I wish you could see your face right now.”
“Hey,” I said defensively. “He’s my husband. It’s all perfectly respectable and clean.”
Sarah was practically in tears. “So during those—I'm assuming several—times, you never considered condoms? Birth control? Accidental pregnancies? You are a terrible OB.”
“Yeah, I know,” I muttered, collapsing onto her couch. “The irony is deep and poetic.”
She sat beside me, still chuckling. I pressed my palms over my face.
“This is your fault, by the way,” I said through my hands.
“My fault?”
“You’re the one who said I needed to open up, take risks, let someone in. Well, congratulations. I opened up. I took a risk. Someone got in. Literally.”
Sarah finally stopped laughing long enough to breathe, brushing a tear from her cheek. When she looked at me again, her expression was concerned. “How do you feel?”
“I don’t know.” I sank deeper into the cushions, staring at the ceiling like it might hold an answer. “I never thought about having children. I don’t know if that’s something I ever wanted.”
Her frown shifted into something warmer, thoughtful. “Lilly, you deliver babies for a living. You spend your free time hanging out in the hospital nursery like it’s a spa. If anyone in this world wants to be a mother, it’s you.”
“Then why did I never think about it?” I asked. “Don’t people usually dream about it? About pregnancy and motherhood and...family?”
She paused, like she was choosing each word with care. “You never thought about it because of your mom.”
My throat tightened. I looked down at my hands, twisting the hem of my sleeve until the fabric pinched my skin.
Sarah leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees. “Being a bad mom isn’t genetic, Lillian.”
“We don’t know that,” I whispered. “I can’t bring a child into this world and end up hating it. I can’t bring a child into this world and make it feel the way I felt. Unwanted.”
“You could never do that,” she said simply, as if saying it enough could make me believe it.
“Could never?” I gave a soft, humorless laugh. “Who says it’s conscious—hating your child?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s easier sometimes,” I admitted, “to convince myself she didn’t realize what she was doing.
That she didn’t know what it meant when she’d look at me like I was a mistake she couldn’t take back.
Or when every word out of her mouth seemed to translate to you’re too much or not enough.
She made me think love was conditional—that you had to shrink yourself to deserve it, to be grateful just to be tolerated.
” I swallowed hard. “It’s easier to believe she didn’t know what she was doing than to believe my mother was knowingly, purposefully, cruel. ”
“You could never do that,” she repeated. Then, quieter, “I’m sorry for what I said before—about you not being capable of loving anyone but yourself. That wasn’t fair. You have the biggest heart of anyone I know.”
I smiled faintly. “I’m sorry, too. For lying. I was...embarrassed. And I didn’t think you’d understand my reasoning.”
Sarah shrugged. “It’s fine. I didn’t let you explain and was probably a jerk about it.”
“Well, at least you’re self-aware.”
“Oh, painfully so,” she agreed, placing a dramatic hand over her heart.
“You know,” I said slowly, “I think this was our first actual fight.”
“You’re right. Wow. First fight in twenty-seven years of friendship. How do you think we did?”
“Classic showdown: two-faced liar versus overreaction of the century.”
“Truly iconic work.” She grinned briefly before tilting her head, studying me with that unnerving intuition of hers. “Does Khalifa know?”
“No. I haven’t seen him in a while.”
Her brows knitted together. “What? Why?”
I exhaled, long and tired. “I found out he was still married to another woman in Lebanon. Before he moved here.”
Sarah shot up from the couch. “I’m sorry—what? That asshole!”
“He’s not,” I said quickly, then grimaced. “I mean, he is. A little bit. But it’s more complicated than that.”
And then I told her everything—Dalal, the cheating, the baby, the way he tried to divorce her and she vanished like a ghost who enjoyed causing paperwork-related misery. By the time I finished, Sarah’s eyes were so wide I was worried I’d have to call an optometrist.
“Oh my God,” she breathed. “What a nut job. Poor Khalifa.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So, what happened? Did you ask for a divorce?”
“No,” I murmured. “I just...needed space.”
“And he actually gave it to you?”
I nodded, staring down at my hands. “I’m in love with him, Sarah,” I confessed.
“And it’s not just that. Being with him.
..” I swallowed. “Being with him made me start falling in love with myself. The pieces I spent years calling unlovable, every flaw I stamped as bad—he held as if they were good. Every part I’d labeled broken, he saw as something beautiful.
And the girl I spent years trying to shrink, to silence—he accepted so effortlessly that it made me wonder why I ever believed there was anything wrong with her to begin with. ”
It wasn’t until I said it out loud that I realized it was true.
For so long, I’d molded my personality to fit whatever room I walked into—louder here, smaller there, agreeable when it was safer, razor-edged when I was afraid—that somewhere along the way, I’d collected so many different versions of me I couldn’t remember which one was real.
But with him, I didn’t have to edit. Or translate. Or apologize first, just in case.
With him, I didn’t feel like I was performing. I felt like myself. I felt real.
And maybe that was why I was so terrified of letting him back into my life.
Because once someone saw the real you, they got a kind of power—the power to change how you felt about yourself.
I didn’t want to hand that over to anyone ever again.
But if he was using that power gently, carefully—for me, not against me—then.
..would it really be so awful to let him?
A grin spread across her face like she’d just cracked the case. “Dr. Lillian Tariq,” she said, clutching her chest dramatically. “Queen of cynicism, sworn enemy of romance and rings, patron saint of ‘men are a disease’...is in love. For real. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”
I shot her a look. “Are you done?”
“Not even close,” she said, eyes softening. “Forgive him.”
“What if he hurts me again?”
“He might. And you might hurt him, too.”
“That’s...comforting.”
“That’s marriage, Lilly. That’s love. Sometimes you hurt each other without meaning to. It’s about what you do after. Whether you stay, apologize, change, rebuild. That’s the real part no one writes songs about.”