by Holly Rayner
Chapter 22
Yasin
Yasin shut the door and leaned against it, happy that he was in his own home and not in the war zone that his father’s house had become. Here, there was civility.
He trusted that, by now, Olivia would have calmed down enough to want to talk things through. In the past hour or so, he had begun to smooth things over with his father and sister, enough so that he could bring Olivia back to their home so they could talk about it civilly. Olivia wasn’t hotheaded like his father or brother. Well, save for the coffee incident, he thought with a small smile.
He’d spoken to his father first, addressing him in terms he thought he would understand. The scene played in his head again as he leaned against the inside of his front door.
“You and I both know that she’s a good person, no matter what the paperwork says,” Yasin began. “You’re a good judge of character and you warmed to her right away, just as I did. You’ve never wavered in your trust in me. I’ve never brought any bad clients to the office. They’re vetted well and I’ve never made a mistake. If I inherited anything from you—other than your nose and eyes—it is your excellent judge of character.”
“What is your point?” Maalik asked, sitting in his chair. He looked exhausted and fed up.
“Those photographers that were outside during the wedding and the interviews that we did. They all know that we have a good marriage. You don’t want to tarnish that image. Not after what your second wife did to you. Do you remember how hard it was for you to bounce back from that?”
“What am I supposed to do, then? She stole from you. We don’t welcome thieves into our home,” Maalik said.
Yasin shook his head. “No, she didn’t. But I need you to have an open mind and listen to what we have to say. I want to go home and bring her back here so we can explain together.”
“Explain?” His father’s brows turned upward in confusion. “Explain what?”
“Can you wait?” Yasin asked. “Until I can bring her back here?”
It had taken him a long time, but he’d finally convinced his father to allow them to come back. Now, all he needed to do was to convince Olivia that she could trust him.
His mind drifted to the look on her face. The look on her face when he had been frozen in shock. When she’d told him it was over. He’d thought she had meant that they were over. That she never wanted to see him again. It had broken his heart. He never wanted to go through that feeling again.
“Olivia,” he called. He walked down the hall to her wing and knocked on her bedroom door. “Olivia,” he called again. “Listen,” he said. “I know that you’re upset. I don’t want you to think that you can’t be mad at me because I know that it’ll happen again in the future. I’m not perfect. Especially when it comes to my family.” He knocked on the door again. “I just want to talk to you and explain why I froze like that.”
He listened. Nothing. No sound. She wasn’t on the phone to her sister. She wasn’t crying.
He knocked one last time. “I’m coming in,” he said.
A gasp escaped him as he took in the sight in front of him.
The room was nearly bare. She had taken her clothes and the bags she’d brought with her. The presents he had bought her had been piled onto the bed. The computer he had bought her was still there, but there was a letter sitting on the keyboard.
He walked up to it and looked at the name written on the front of the envelope: “Sheikh Yasin bin Taab.” He wasn’t sure if she had ever said his full name before.
He took the letter and sat down on the floor as he opened it.
Dear Yasin,
This letter is one of the most difficult things that I’ve ever had to write. By the time you read this, I’ll be on a plane headed back to Texas.
I know that I signed a contract with you, and my intention is still to honor it. I’m going to carry the baby to term in America and will return with the baby after he or she is born. I know that this baby is yours and I don’t want to take him or her from you, but I can’t stay here.
I’ve loved being able to get to know you. I learned so much about what I want in a relationship. We really had something special. I loved learning about you and about what makes you happy. There is something deep inside me that always wants you to be happy and, while I’m angry at you and the situation, I’m sad for what we’ve lost.
You’ve been a gentleman. You’re a great person, and despite my sadness that everything took a turn for the worse, I can tell you that I meant everything that I said in my vows.
Below is my address, as assurance that it was never my intention to go back on the agreement we made.
Sincerely,
Olivia
Yasin stared at the letter. He’d known what it was going to say even before he’d opened the envelope, but it still hurt.
The house seemed empty without her. She was one person, but she had made his home feel so much happier and warmer—all she had to do was be there and it felt like a better place. It was colder now. He looked around the room. He thought about the art studio she had created for him, and a tear streamed down his cheek.
I can’t lose her. No matter what, I can’t lose her.
He couldn’t lose yet another woman that he cared about. Especially since, this time, there was something he could do about it.
With the letter in hand, he stood up and walked to the art studio. The light flickered on with a flip of the switch. The notebook that Olivia had used was still on the table.
He picked it up and flipped through it. The drawings that she’d made were beautiful. It was as if he was looking at the world through her eyes. When he found one of himself, he almost didn’t recognize his picture. He was smiling and looking off in the distance. He wondered just what he had been thinking when she was drawing this.
“I was probably thinking of you,” he said out loud. “I was probably thinking of my future with you.” His heart tore in half. “I love you,” he said. The words slipped out of his mouth faster than he could stop them. “I love you, Olivia.”
Why wasn’t she there to hear them?
Chapter 23
Yasin
He woke up the next morning clutching the letter against his chest. He had fallen asleep in the studio, on the floor next to Olivia’s sketchbook. He stood up and unkinked his neck. Rolling his head from one side to the other, the room seemed to spin. If he was going to be dizzy and wake up with a headache, he might as well have spent the night drinking, he thought bitterly.
But instead of feeling sorry for himself, he dusted off his shirt and pants and left the studio for the kitchen. He needed to move forward. If he lost a client at work, he wouldn’t just wallow.
He thought about it. No. This isn’t like that at all. If I lost a client at work, I would just look for a new client. But Olivia isn’t a client. She isn’t an employee. This isn’t about work. This is about love.
With his mind a little clearer, he set the letter on the kitchen counter and poured some water into the coffee maker. He fumbled with the grounds. His neck still hurt. His nose was congested from crying the night before. He wasn’t used to this feeling—this feeling of failure.
“I have to get her back,” he said to himself as he stretched. “There’s no other choice. I can’t live the rest of my life like that. Curled up in a ball, on the floor, crying all night.”
He thought of what Olivia might be going through at that moment. The possibility that she had done the same thing that night broke his heart.
The coffee maker gurgled in the background as he rested his elbows on the counter and hung his head. What if I did that to her? What if I made her cry? With my inaction yesterday… The previous day’s events came flooding back to him. Why had he frozen in front of his father and brother? What had caused him to leave his wife hanging out to dry like that?
It couldn’t just be because I’m afraid of my father, is it? He thought about the possibilities. It’s because I was going to be caugh
t. I’ve never done anything to warrant getting in trouble before.
That was his brother’s job. When they were growing up, it was his brother who was always getting in trouble. He remembered the look on Rashad’s face as he pointed at Olivia and accused her of stealing from him. It didn’t come from a place of concern for his brother. It came from a darker place. Jealousy and bitter anger. Rashad had done it to hurt him. That snarky smirk on his face was going to be forever ingrained in his mind.
Yasin pulled his phone out of his pocket. Before he mended things with Olivia, there was something else that he needed to do.
“Thanks for meeting with me, Father,” Yasin said. Rashad and Nylah sat on the couch across from him. His father was sitting upright in his chair. They all looked like they’d had a pretty rough night. “I know that I have some explaining to do.”
“Where is she?” Maalik asked. “Where is Olivia?”
“I’ll explain that in a minute,” Yasin said. “First, I need to explain how we met.”
And with that, his story began. He started with the night of his birthday. He’d needed to find a wife, fast, and when he’d heard about the job listing the company had posted, he’d gotten what he thought, at the time, to be a brilliant idea.
“The idea,” he said. “Was that I would hire a woman to be my wife. We would get married and we would be a wonderful couple as far as you and the public were concerned; however, she would live her life separate from mine.
“I had no interest in having a wife, and yet I wanted to be a father. So, I asked her to help me achieve that, too. Through insemination, we would get her pregnant with my child, and she would bring the child to term. After that, I would raise the child on my own, while she lived her life as she wished, only coming back to pose as my wife when necessary.”
“That’s so cold,” Nylah gasped.
Yasin shrugged. “I didn’t think of it that way,” he said. “I thought it was a perfectly fine plan. Until I met Olivia. Meeting her changed my life, and I fell in love with her. By the time I had realized what had happened, we had already signed the contract. She was to be my wife and bear my child.” He choked back tears. “I don’t know how she felt about me. We never talked about it. It wasn’t professional.” He scoffed. “But who was I kidding?”
“We could tell,” Nylah said.
Yasin looked up at her. “You could tell?”
She nodded. “We could tell that you loved her.” She shrugged. “Or, at least, I could.”
To his utter surprise, it was his father who spoke next.
“You can’t hide that amount of chemistry,” Maalik said. “Nor can you fake it. She loved you, too.”
Nylah nodded. “She lit up whenever she talked about you. It wasn’t just a job for her. I think she fell for you, too.”
“Oh, son,” Maalik said. “You should have said something to her.” He took a deep breath. “I’m afraid that we scared her away.”
Nylah started to cry. “I like her. I like her a lot.” She got up from her seat and gave Yasin a hug. “Yasin,” she said, pulling away. “You need to go after her.”
“Yes,” Maalik said. “Go tell her everything you just told us.”
The three of them looked at Rashad, who looked solemnly at the ground. “This is all my fault,” he said. “I didn’t realize that you were in love. I just knew you were hiding something.”
“It is my fault,” Yasin said. “I’m sorry to have misled all of you.”
“Yes, yes,” Nylah said. “Go after her already.”
Yasin let out a chuckle as he wiped the tears from his eyes. He stood up and moved to leave.
“Tell her that I’m sorry,” Rashad said. “For how I treated her and what I said. Or, better yet, bring her back here and I’ll tell her myself.”
Yasin nodded and smiled.
Rashad stood up and gave his brother a hug before Yasin left, determined to win back the love of his life.
Chapter 24
Olivia
“Olivia,” Jennifer said. “I love you dearly, but we need to talk.”
She’d been back home in Texas for just over a week. It had been long enough to disrupt her sister’s schedule—increasingly packed, as Jennifer was healthier and more active than she had been in years—but short enough that Olivia hadn’t yet developed a healthy routine for herself. She spent most of her time on the couch watching TV. She’d taken to channel surfing, flicking between shows in the hope of finding something comforting.
At first, she’d found comfort in the arms of her sister, who had welcomed her with open arms. But as the days went on, Olivia didn’t feel better and could feel that her sister’s patience was waning. She knew that she needed to focus on something productive, but as of that moment, she just wanted to wallow.
“How long is the appropriate time to wallow?” Olivia asked.
“I wouldn’t say more than 24 hours,” Jennifer replied, holding out a spoon. She stuck the spoon in the pint of ice cream that Olivia was clutching.
“Hey,” Olivia said. “I’m eating for two.”
Jennifer scoffed. “Doctors proved that saying to be false, you know. You don’t have to double your caloric intake to—”
“Don’t be a Debbie Downer,” Olivia said.
“Good thing my name is Jennifer, then,” she said, her voice snarky. She took a spoonful of ice cream and stuck it in her mouth.
“Jenny Downer,” Olivia amended, pouting.
Jennifer rolled her eyes. “So, tell me,” she said. “Has Yasin called since you’ve been here?”
Olivia nodded. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and flipped to the call list. Yasin’s number was the only one to show up—his name filled the screen. Next, she pulled up her text messages and showed them to Jennifer. He had been texting her nonstop as well.
“I think he misses you,” Jennifer said.
Without saying anything, Olivia put the phone back into her pocket.
“Oh, Liv,” Jennifer said. “Don’t be like this.”
Olivia shrugged. “I just don’t feel like talking to him just yet,” she said. “I’m still mad at what he did.”
Jennifer nodded. “Yes, I can imagine how difficult that was to go through. Seeing him sitting there, not defending you.”
“I was being attacked and he just threw me under the bus. Over his big fancy plan, too. I was just going along with it, like he told me to. I was just following the contract.”
Olivia had spoken these exact words a number of times in the past few days. Jennifer knew them by heart.
“You know,” Jennifer said. “Maybe he did end up telling his family the truth, after all.”
Olivia rolled her eyes. “I don’t care. It’s too little, too late,” she said. She stuffed a spoonful of ice cream in her mouth, hoping that the lie wouldn’t crawl back into her mouth if it was full of chocolate cherry vanilla ice cream.
As she contemplated on whether or not she should put on real clothes to go out and get a pint of chocolate, the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it,” Jennifer said, getting up from the couch. She set her spoon in the pint of ice cream before leaving to answer the door.
Olivia used the opportunity to fully recline on the couch and rest the pint on her now enormous belly. From her position, she could just barely see the TV past her belly so, instead, her gaze fell upon the design on her shirt: a cup of coffee with captions surrounding it, announcing her love for her favorite morning beverage. Of course, at this part of her pregnancy, she had cut out caffeine, so the shirt only served to remind her of how miserable she was.
“Olivia?” Jennifer called from the other room. “Did you read any of those text messages from Yasin?”
“No,” she said, not bothering to raise her voice too much. “Why?”
Jennifer poked her head into the living room. “Because,” she said. “You might want to dust yourself off a bit. You have a visitor.”
Olivia raised an eyebrow at her sister. “What?”
From behind her, Yasin peered around the corner of the wall, into the living room where Olivia sat with the ice cream sitting on her belly. Olivia bolted straight up, dropping the ice cream on the ground.
“Oh!” she yelped, staring at Yasin. Her gaze fell on the floor, and the pint of ice cream that was now sitting there. “Oh.” She tried to bend over to pick it up, but her belly was starting to impede her everyday motions.
“I got it,” Jennifer said. She picked the pint up from the ground, along with the two spoons.
“Why don’t you take that into the kitchen?” Olivia said, shooing her sister.
Jennifer snickered as her sister pushed her toward the kitchen. Jennifer eyed Yasin and smiled. “Good luck,” she whispered.
He nodded and mouthed the words, “Thank you.”
Olivia dusted herself off and tried to move some of the clothes from the couch so Yasin could have a seat. “Sorry for the mess,” she said. “It’s been a little rough since I’m getting so big.” She motioned for him to sit down.
He did as he was told and Olivia followed him to the couch, sitting next to him.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry. About leaving like that. I’ve always hated the idea of leaving someone with just a letter. It seems so cliché, but I really did feel like that was the best thing to do.”
“I agree,” he said.
“What?”
He took a deep breath. “I mean, I’m not glad that you left. I missed you so much. But at the same time, you leaving made me realize just how much you meant to me. Not only that, I worked up the nerve to talk to my family. I cleared your name. I told my family everything: from the job interview all the way to the baby. I mended that family bond. My siblings and I are now closer than ever before.”
“Oh,” was all she could manage to say in her shock.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” he said. “Because of what I did—or rather, what I didn’t do—you felt like you lost your trust in me.” Tears welled in his eyes. “You left.”