Chapter Forty-Four
I WHIPPED AROUND.
Khalifa was standing on the other side of the pavement, sunlight spilling over him like it had been waiting for this exact moment. His hair was a little longer, his scruff darker, his eyes fixed on me with a kind of hesitant wonder that made my heart stutter.
For a second, I couldn’t breathe. The ultrasound photo pressed against my ribs, the echo of our daughter still pulsing in my ears, and there he was—the man who started all of it.
He walked toward me slowly, stopping a few feet away. “Sorry,” he said, stumbling over the apology. “I wasn’t following you, I swear.”
I opened my mouth to tell him a dozen things—about boundaries, about communication, about the idiocy of appearing when your doctor-wife’s life is a fragile soap bubble—but the thought caught in my throat because a horn cut through the air suddenly.
Both of our heads turned. A car, too fast and too close, barreled toward us down the lot. Before my brain could process the physical threat and move, he shoved me out of the way.
I hit the ground with all the grace of a sack of laundry dumped from a moving truck. Pain flared across my back, bright and immediate. I rolled onto my side and then pushed up, because survival instincts still outranked melodrama.
“Ow, Khalifa,” I gasped. “There was definitely a version of that move that didn’t involve mild assault.”
I sat up, fingers going over my ribs, my pelvis, the side of my belly—an inventory of abrasions, all present and apparently non-deadly. I was fine. Fine-ish. Adrenaline buzzed through me like bad coffee.
“What, no comeback?” I asked, looking around for his usual sarcasm.
He wasn’t there.
“Khalifa?” My voice dropped to a thread.
Ahead of me, the car had stopped, and a man lay beside it.
“Oh my God.” I ran and then paused, because my knees were suddenly cotton and my mouth wouldn’t make a clean sound.
He was a crumpled human shape on the asphalt, head at an odd angle, eyes closed, glasses broken.
I sank to my knees beside him and checked for a pulse, a reflex drilled into me from med school. Two fingers on the carotid. There—quick, urgent. He was alive. Alive and very much not alarmingly dead. I almost laughed at the absurd relief.
“Is everything okay, ma’am?” A stranger’s voice hovered behind me, well-meaning and useless.
“Does it look like everything is okay?” I snapped. “Some maniac just hit him with a car. Go inside and get a damn gurney!”
A crowd formed with the speed of inevitability. People’s faces blurred into a collage of shock and helpfulness. A woman in scrubs produced a cervical collar as if by magic; another man—hands steadier than mine—uttered instructions that cut through the panic.
As they prepped him, the unreasonable muscle of my fury kicked in.
I grabbed his shoulder when they tried to move him and said, “If you die, I will spend the rest of my life figuring out how to bring you back so I can murder you.” I scoffed, shaking my head.
“What the hell is wrong with you? You don’t push me out of the path of cars—you push me in front of cars.
Just as I was about to forgive you, you find a new way to piss me off. ”
“Ma’am, maybe don’t yell,” a volunteer suggested timidly.
“Yelling is my love language. If I’m quiet, he’d probably die of shock.”
They lifted him onto a stretcher with the ceremonial care reserved for collapsible things.
I followed, feet disobeying my brain. They took him into the emergency bay and then, mercilessly practical, insisted on checking me out.
I let them; fetal monitoring and a quick abdominal exam confirmed two stubborn heartbeats—one very large and furious, one very small and very Khalifa’s.
I was cleared. Shaken and scraped, but intact.
They wheeled him away, and I had to let him go because protocol was cruel and everyone in a hospital was trained to be efficient, where heartbreak was not.
When I finally found his room hours later, I pushed the door open roughly. He lay propped on the bed, hair mussed, a hospital gown hanging loose. He had a plastic spoon in his hand and a tiny cardboard cup of pudding on his tray.
I froze in the doorway. “What are you doing?”
He looked up with chocolate smeared on his lip and something like mischief in his gaze. “Eating pudding,” he replied with solemnity that might have been deliberate.
My body eased with such visceral force it almost felt obscene—raw, sizzling relief that he was alive and whole. For a second, I forgot to be annoyed; for a second, I only registered that other than a few scrapes and a steri-strip on his temple, he was breathing and therefore, improbably, fine.
I swiped up his chart, scanned the vitals with the speed and professional irritation of a woman who had very nearly had a coronary in a parking lot and almost killed herself with sarcasm.
Blood pressure stable. CT scan negative for intracranial bleed.
Concussion noted, but apparently of the non-deadly variety. No fractures. Neurological exam solid.
I threw the chart onto the bed, teeth clenched. “Are you kidding me? I almost had a heart attack over a concussion?”
He shrugged in that helpless, gorgeous way that made me want to throttle him and kiss him at the same time. “You’re being dramatic.”
“Me? Dramatic?” I snatched the pudding cup and hurled it at him.
He caught it with a smirk. “And yet I still chose to save you.”
I ignored that and stormed into the tiny bathroom. I grabbed a washcloth, dampened it under hot water until it steamed against my palms, and came back out with more purpose than grace.
He watched me with wary amusement as I sat on the edge of the bed, fingers knotting, breath coming in rattled lines. “You could’ve died, Khalifa.”
“I could have,” he agreed. “And you would’ve murdered me in due process.” His expression shifted—softer, uncertain, threaded with regret. “Are you okay?” he asked. “I’m sorry for pushing you like that. I just saw the car, and I panicked.”
“I’m fine,” I said, even though fine felt like a generous interpretation.
I lifted the warm cloth and gently dabbed at his forehead, smoothing it along his hairline, wiping away the sweat and remnants of tragedy.
His eyelids fluttered, and he leaned into it, like he forgot how it felt to be cared for. “Don’t ever do that again.”
A small chuckle rumbled from him. “Okay.”
Silence stretched out, thick and electric, as we stared at each other like we were rediscovering something we’d both tried to obliviate.
It struck me, suddenly and a little too acutely, that this was the first time I’d seen him in months.
And beyond the scrapes and bruises coloring his skin, he looked.
..unwell. Hollow. His eyes were ringed with shadows so dark they almost looked painted on, and he was thinner than I remembered, as if someone had been secretly scooping pieces out of him.
My chest tightened. He’d once said to me, “I don’t know how to go about my day, or sleep, or breathe without you.
” I’d brushed it off as a beautiful exaggeration, but looking at him now—at the exhaustion, the weight he’d clearly been carrying alone—maybe he hadn’t been exaggerating at all.
Maybe he’d been achingly, devastatingly honest.
“Why were you here,” I said quickly, desperate to hear his voice again, “if you weren’t stalking me?”
He toyed with his pudding cup, scraping the spoon against the bottom. “I, uh...had an appointment.”
“An appointment?” I raised an eyebrow. “Are you sick? Please don’t tell me you have a concussion and a rare disease. I can only handle one medical emergency per husband per day.”
His jaw tensed before he said, barely above a whisper, “I’m not sick. I just had...therapy.”
I blinked. “Like...court-mandated therapy? Did you break the law? Is this your villain origin story?”
He shot me a look. “No, not court-mandated, Lillian. Voluntary therapy.”
“You? Talking about feelings without a gun to your head?” Then it clicked, and I smiled, slow and incredulous. “Wait—did you start going to therapy...for me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he quipped, but the corner of his mouth softened.
“Yeah...I did.” He hesitated, meeting my eyes like he was bracing for impact.
“I am...” he started, his throat working.
“I am so sorry, Lillian. Regardless of my reasoning, nothing excuses what I did. I spent the last ten years blocking everything that happened, and I—I need to start dealing with it. I want to be the best possible person I can for you—and for myself.” He drew in a shaky breath.
“And I hope that you’ll...be with me while I do that.
But I understand if you...if you can’t right now.
Or...ever. I just...” A muscle jumped in his jaw, like the next words hurt to even form.
“I’ll give you a divorce if that’s—if that’s what you want.
” He swallowed hard, voice breaking on the last part. “I’ll...I’ll let you go.”
He spoke for a living, yet I’d never heard him struggle so much for words, never heard his composure waver like that, his voice betray him so completely.
This was the version of him I’d wanted to see all along—not just the man made of calm lectures and measured breaths, but also the one made of messy emotions and stuttering sentences.