Chapter Forty-Five #2
He sighed. “I knew her since we were kids. She was...familiar. We were friendly, that’s all.
” He paused, staring at the blanket like he could rewrite the past into something gentler.
“We got married so quickly after Keenan died, I barely had time to process it. One day I was grieving my brother, and the next, I was someone’s husband.
” His voice cracked slightly. “I didn’t hate her—not at first. Not until I found out what she’d done.
But I wasn’t in love with her either. I didn’t even understand what that word meant until I met you.
” He turned his head toward me, eyes raw and unguarded.
“The feeling was so new, so alive, I spent half the time wondering if there was something wrong with me. But that’s only because I didn’t know what right felt like. ”
My chest stuttered, his honesty hitting me in places I hadn’t realized were still tender. I reached out, my fingers tracing the space until they found his hand.
“When she told me she lost the baby,” he continued roughly, “I...I blamed myself. The same way I did when Keenan died. I thought maybe I hadn’t cared enough, or maybe she could feel that I wasn’t in love with her—and that somehow, that absence had seeped into everything.
” He rubbed a hand over his face, exhaling a shaky breath.
“It wasn’t indifference. I tried, in the only ways I knew how.
But the guilt was unbearable. I kept thinking if I’d just been more—more present, more feeling, more everything—it wouldn’t have happened.
And then finding out it was all a lie...
there isn’t even a word for that. It wasn’t relief, or even anger.
It was something deeper. Like mourning a ghost you didn’t know you’d invented. ”
He scooted lower until he was eye-level with my belly. His palm found its place there, warm and certain, before planting a fierce kiss against my skin.
“I’m so sorry, Khalifa.” I swallowed hard. “What she did to you was...terrible. I don’t know how you—”
My voice buckled. Just snapped clean in the middle. And then I was crying—out of nowhere, like my eyes had been waiting for the signal to leak.
“Hey, hey,” he said quickly, sitting up, cupping my cheeks so he could see my face. “What did I say about crying over me?”
“I’m not crying over you,” I sniffed. It came out defensive, ugly, glass-throated. “I’m crying for you.”
“Same difference,” he chuckled, thumbs sweeping under my eyes.
Then his mouth followed—pressing softly into my cheek, my chin, the corner of my eye, catching tears as they fell, kissing them away like he could undo them one by one.
His lips moved slowly, steadily, patiently, until the sobs came less like a storm and more like a tide pulling back.
“Whatever.” I wiped my nose with the back of my hand, secretly mortified that I’d already cried three times in the last twenty-four hours. “I’m hormonal. I can cry if I want to cry.”
“That’s true.”
“I slapped her, you know.”
He stilled. “You what?”
“Yeah,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean to. She just kept talking—defending herself—and I just—” I offered a helpless gesture. “There was this snapping sound, and suddenly my palm was burning, and I realized I’d...hit her. Not my brightest moment.”
He stared at me for half a second before exploding into this loud, messy, glorious laughter—wild, unrestrained, like his chest couldn’t contain it.
My body shook with him, and maybe I was laughing too, but that felt ordinary compared to his, unremarkable, instinctive, like breathing.
And as he laughed, I wondered if I would ever get used to the sheer abandon of it, the way joy seemed to pour out of him so easily now, so freely.
My heart wanted to keep expanding, even though it was probably impossible to hold any more of him in its chambers.
I didn’t think I ever could get used to it.
I hoped I never would.
“I wish I could’ve seen that,” he said between gasps, still grinning. “I bet you looked incredible doing it—tall, fierce, and beautifully powerful.”
“I think it was less fierce heroine and more emotionally unhinged woman.”
“A hot emotionally unhinged woman.”
“I always look hot.”
“Mmm,” he hummed appreciatively. “Yes, you do.” His mouth curved against my temple as he pulled me against him, my face tucked into the space beneath his jaw.
“For what it’s worth,” he murmured into my hair, “how I felt after what she did—it’s nothing compared to how I’ve felt the last few months.
Wondering, and agonizing, and not knowing if I was ever going to see you again.
” His arm tightened around me. “You filled my lungs so completely, I forgot what it felt like to breathe without you.”
A knife-twisting pain hit my gut. “I’m sorry.”
But he shook his head. “No. You have nothing to apologize for.” His voice broke—barely, but enough. “I deserved it. I deserve worse. But this—having you, holding you, loving you—healed every single part of me.”
The words hung between us, heavy and unyielding, like they’d been waiting years to be spoken. I tilted my head back and stared at him, at the self-loathing in his eyes, and something inside me snapped under the unbearable pain of watching him harbor a guilt that should’ve never been his to hold.
“You have to stop punishing yourself.”
He blinked, disoriented, like I’d yanked him out of a thought he’d been drowning in. “For what?”
“For Keenan’s death,” I said. “You’ve spent years carrying that guilt around like it’s a penance.
You married someone you didn’t love because your mother asked you to, because you thought it would make up for losing him.
You let your father talk to you like you’re twelve, let him tear you down and still, you drop everything to fix his problems from across the world. ”
His jaw tensed, eyes hardening, but said nothing.
I pressed on. “He says you’re not a man, that you don’t do enough for your family, but you’ve been holding that family together from another continent. You’ve done more for them than they ever did for you. And still, he acts like you owe him something. Like you owe him Keenan.”
He swallowed, his throat working as if the words had lodged there.
“It was an accident,” I said softly. “You know that, right? You can’t keep letting him make you believe you killed your brother just because he can’t face losing him himself. You can’t live your whole life trying to atone for a tragedy that wasn’t your fault.”
His eyes shimmered faintly in the dark, the confession pressing against his lips but refusing to surface.
I pulled him closer until his head rested on my chest, his body heavy with exhaustion, his breath warm on my skin.
My fingers slid into his hair, combing through the velvet curls that always refused to behave.
“What are you doing?”
“Comforting you,” I said. “You never let me do that when your mom died. So stubborn.”
A small laugh rumbled through him, the sound vibrating between my ribs. “You did comfort me,” he murmured. “Without even trying. Just being there—helping with everything, getting along with my family, asking me ridiculous questions, making fun of all my answers...”
I smiled, my hand still moving through his hair, each strand like silk between my fingers.
“It comforted me more than you can ever know.”
My throat tightened. I looked down at him, this man who carried everyone’s pain like it was his own and still thought he didn’t deserve kindness. My heart burned with how much I loved him, how much I wanted to keep being the place he rested when he forgot how to breathe.
“Good,” I whispered, planting a kiss into his hair. “Because I’m not planning on stopping anytime soon. I’ll never stop loving you. I’ll never stop proving to you that you deserve love.”
He went still against me, his breath catching just enough for me to feel it. I smiled faintly and kept going, because stopping now would’ve broken the spell.
“And when our daughter comes with my beauty and brains, and your...nothing, hopefully.”
He lifted his head, eyes glinting, nipping lightly at my ear. “Nothing?”
I grinned. “Yes, nothing. God forbid she inherits your inability to eat meat or your tragic fashion sense.”
He chuckled again, his forehead dropping against mine.
“She’s going to love you,” I said fiercely. “We’ll have a family that reflects real love, not whatever toxic crap we were raised in. The kind that heals instead of breaks.”
His hand slid up to cradle my face, his thumb tracing the corner of my mouth. “Then she’s already lucky.”
I kissed his finger. “No. We are.”
He leaned in, his lips finding mine. It felt like the culmination of every almost, every ache, every word we hadn’t been brave enough to say until now.
“Do you have a name in mind?” he asked.
I blinked, dazed, everything beyond him fading out of frame. “Noor,” I said.
He smiled. “Light,” he murmured, testing its weight on his tongue. “It’s the perfect name.”
“You think so?”
“You’re my light,” he said simply. “And now you’re creating more of it. There’s going to be another piece of you in the world, and somehow, it feels like the darkness never stood a chance.”
Something inside me cracked open—gentle, not shattering, just making room.
For him. For her. For the version of me that finally accepted I could be loved without conditions.
I pressed my forehead against his, breathing him in, and thought how wild it was that the same person who once felt like chaos could now feel like home.
How impossible it was that a love like this could exist in the same world that once tore us apart.
And maybe that was what love really was—transforming the darkness you’d inherited into something you could finally see by, until all that remained was a light someone could find you by.