He’d said all he was going to say.
He’d only asked, “Why?”
Why she’d lied. Why she’d kept lying.
She could only ask her own burning question, “How?”
The stranger who now inhabited Fareed’s body said, “Emad.”
She had no idea how Emad had found out, where she’d gone wrong. He couldn’t have gotten it out of Rose. She didn’t know.
“This is why you kept pushing me away, insisting on leaving.”
Statements. She could do nothing but nod.
She’d trapped herself the day she’d withheld the truth from him. And only sealed her fate when she’d grabbed at that one night with him and hadn’t left right afterward, when she’d kept telling herself, just one more night.
“Ryan lahmi w’dammi. Laish khabbaiti?”
Ryan is my flesh and blood. Why did you hide it?
The way he said that, that haunted look in his eyes crushed her. She’d seen him in that videotaped request for her to come forward. He’d looked and sounded wrecked over his brother’s death. He looked like that again, as if he’d lost him all over again.
She still couldn’t tell him why.
But his eyes weren’t only deadened with that grief she’d experienced for as long and as intensely. In them still lay his inexorableness. He’d have an answer.
She gave him all she could. “I was abiding by Hesham’s will.”
The moment she uttered Hesham’s name, Fareed swayed like a building in a massive earthquake.
And if she’d thought his eyes had gone dead before, she knew how wrong she’d been. He now looked at her as someone would at his own murderer.
She couldn’t survive his pain and disillusion. She had to try to alleviate them, with what she could reveal.
“I had to keep on doing what he did. You know the lengths he went to to hide his family’s whereabouts and identity.”
In that same deep-as-death voice, he asked, “Gallek laish?”
He’d always spoken Arabic unintentionally, to express his hunger and appreciation with the spontaneity and accuracy he could only achieve in his mother tongue. He’d usually been too submerged in passion to explain.
Now he spoke Arabic as if he was convinced she understood, wanted more proof of the depth of her deception.
Her heart twisted until it felt it would tear out its tethers. “He—he was convinced it would ruin his family to have…your family know of…our existence. This is why he hid. This is why I did, too. I—I only sought you out because of Ryan’s problem, thought I’d get your opinion and leave. But things kept snowballing, then things between us…ignited, turning my position from difficult to impossible and I kept wanting to leave, to disappear, so you’d never know, never feel like this…”
“Too late now.”
Silence crashed after his monotone statement.
She waited for him to add something, to restart her heart or still it forever.
He only said, “Tell me everything about the last years since I lost my brother. Tell me about your life with Hesham.”
Gwen looked as if he’d asked her to take a scalpel to her own neck.
Fareed felt he’d be doing the same. Worse. That he’d be cutting out his heart. But he had to know. Even if it killed him.
He no longer recognized that dreadful drone that issued from him. “You met him in that conference?”
She cast her eyes downward. It was an unbearable moment before she nodded.
He felt as if a bullet had ripped through his heart, stilling its last jerking attempts at a beat.
He’d thought she’d recognized him that day, had ended her engagement because she couldn’t be with anyone else.
All that time, it had been Hesham.
“Did you love him?”
She collapsed on the bed, dropped her face in her hands.
She had loved him. The grief he felt from her now was the same he’d felt at first. Her anguish for Ryan seemed an insufficient explanation, if that could be said. It had been due to the loss of Hesham, the father of her son.
And even though it shredded his heart, he had to tell her. “He loved you. He lived for you, and when he was dying, his only thoughts were of you. Even though he gave up his name and family and whole life to be with you, he thought you deserved more. His dying words were that he was sorry he couldn’t give it to you.”
Tears came then. Hers. He wished he could shed any.
He bled instead, dark torrents of loss.
Two things had been sustaining him. The hope of finding Hesham’s family. And finding her and Ryan.
But they were one and the same, and his hopes for a blissful future for all were doomed to be forever tainted by the past.
It wasn’t because he believed the ulterior motives Emad had assigned her secrecy. He wished he could. It would have been a far lesser blow to believe her a self-serving manipulator. He would have been relieved Hesham had died clinging to his false belief in her and at peace. As for his agony at losing his faith in her, it would have been ameliorated if he could have coveted her knowing what she truly was.
But she was everything he could love and respect, the answer to all his fantasies and needs. And that she’d been the same to his brother, had been his in such an abiding love that she’d become a fugitive to be with him…that was despair.
For even if he could survive the guilt—and may Ullah forgive him, the jealousy—how could he survive knowing she might never feel the same for him? What did she feel for him? Beyond physical hunger? Had he been unable to fathom her emotions because they didn’t exist? Had she been unable to deny her body’s needs, while her heart remained buried with Hesham?
If it had, had everything she’d had with him been an attempt to resurrect what she’d had with Hesham? Had she found solace in their minor resemblances, taken comfort in sensing the love he had for him?
Had she ever felt anything that was purely for him?
He had to get away from her before whatever held him together disintegrated.
He found himself at the door, heard himself saying, “I’ll be at the center. Don’t try to leave.”
He couldn’t make this a request. It could no longer be one.
Even if it would kill him, she was staying. Forever.
Gwen raised swollen eyes to the door that had closed behind Fareed. Heartbeats fractured inside her chest as she expected him to walk back, take her with him where he could keep an eye on her.
After moments of frozen dread, she tried to rise.
She sagged back to the bed. The bed she’d never share with Fareed again. In the apartment she’d realized wasn’t his.