The apartment feels smaller now, like the walls are closing in on me with every breath I take.
I stand in the doorway of what used to be our bedroom, staring at the unmade bed where Damien's cologne still clings to the pillows, and I wonder how something that once felt like home can suddenly feel like a prison. The silk sheets he bought me last month are tangled from restless nights of waiting for him to come home, waiting for explanations that never came, waiting for promises he never intended to keep.
My suitcase lies open on the bed like a mouth waiting to swallow what's left of my life.
I start with the closet, pulling out dresses and blouses and the professional skirts I wore to work every day when I still believed I had a future worth dressing for. Each piece of clothing feels heavier than it should, weighted down with memories I wish I could leave behind along with everything else.
The red dress from our first anniversary dinner. The blue blazer I wore to the Morrison & Associates Christmas party when Damien introduced me as his "special friend" to people who probably knew exactly what that meant. The white sundress from last summer when we spent the weekend at his lake house and he told me he loved me while we watched the sunset, his wedding ring glinting in the fading light like a warning I was too blind to see.
I fold each piece carefully, mechanically, trying not to think about the woman who wore these clothes, the woman who believed in fairy tales and second chances and men who promised to move mountains for love.
That woman was an idiot.
The jewelry box on the dresser catches my eye, and my stomach drops when I remember what's inside. I walk over and lift the lid, and there they are—the diamond earrings he gave me for my birthday, the gold bracelet from our six-month anniversary, the pearl necklace he surprised me with just because it was Tuesday and he said I looked beautiful in the morning light.
Each piece probably cost more than most people make in a year, but now they just look like expensive chains, pretty little bribes to keep me quiet and compliant and hidden away like a shameful secret.
I take off my wedding ring, the simple gold band that meant everything to me until three days ago, and drop it into the jewelry box with a sound that echoes too loud in the quiet room. The weight of it leaving my finger should feel like relief, but instead it feels like losing a part of myself I'll never get back.
I'm reaching for the pearl necklace when my fingers brush against something at the bottom of the box, something I'd forgotten was there. I pull it out and my breath catches in my throat.
It's a photograph, old and slightly faded, of me and Baba on the day I got hired at Morrison & Associates. I'm wearing my best interview suit, the one Hana helped me pick out, and Baba's arm is around my shoulders, his face split wide with the kind of pride that makes your chest ache with how pure it is.
"My architect daughter," he'd said that day, his voice thick with emotion as he looked at the job offer letter in my hands. "Allah has blessed us with such good fortune. Your mama would be so proud to see you now."
I can still hear his laughter echoing through our small kitchen, the way he called every relative we had to tell them about my new job, how he insisted on taking me out for the most expensive dinner we could afford to celebrate. He was so happy, so certain that his youngest daughter was going to conquer the world with her blueprints and her dreams.
If he could see me now, packing to run away from the mess I made of everything he taught me to value, would he still be proud? Or would he look at me the way that boy did three days ago, like I was something disgusting that needed to be scraped off his shoe?
The photograph blurs as tears start falling, and I press it against my chest like it might somehow connect me to the person I used to be before Damien Cross walked into my life and turned everything upside down.
I was twenty-four when we met, fresh out of graduate school with a degree in architecture and stars in my eyes about changing the world one building at a time. I had plans, real plans, for my career and my life and the kind of man I wanted to marry someday. He was supposed to be kind and honest and devoted, someone who would love me openly and proudly, someone who would stand beside me at family gatherings and business functions without shame or hesitation.
Damien was none of those things, but he was charming and successful and when he looked at me it felt like being chosen by the sun itself.
"You have the most beautiful dreams," he told me on our third date, his fingers tracing the architectural sketches I'd shown him over dinner. "I want to help you build every single one of them."
I should have known then that men who make promises that big are usually the ones who break them the hardest.
The wedding photograph is next, tucked between the pages of the Quran Baba gave me when I graduated college. It's a simple picture, just me and Damien standing in front of the imam who married us, but looking at it now makes my chest burn with something that might be anger or might be grief.
I'm smiling in the picture, radiant in the white dress Hana spent weeks helping me choose, my henna still fresh and dark on my hands. Damien looks handsome in his dark suit, but now I notice things I missed before—how his smile doesn't quite reach his eyes, how he's standing just a little too far away from me, like even on our wedding day he wanted to keep some distance.
Hana had tried to warn me, in her careful way that never quite sounded like the criticism it actually was.
"It's unusual," she'd said the night before the wedding, sitting on my bed while I tried on my dress one last time. "For a man his age, with his background, not to have any family at his own wedding. No parents, no siblings, not even a close friend to act as his witness."
"He explained that," I'd said, defensive in the way you get when someone points out something you've been trying not to think about. "His parents died years ago, and he's not close with his extended family. He's a private person."
"Private is one thing, Zahra. But completely isolated? That's something else entirely."
I'd brushed off her concerns because I was twenty-six and in love and convinced that love was enough to overcome any obstacle, even the ones I couldn't quite name or understand.
Our wedding night comes back to me in pieces, fragments of memory that cut like broken glass.
Damien carrying me over the threshold of the apartment he'd bought for us, his lips on my neck as he whispered promises about our future together, about how he was going to take care of me and love me and give me everything I'd ever dreamed of. His hands were gentle when he undressed me, reverent almost, like I was something precious he'd been waiting his whole life to touch.
"I'm going to be the best husband you could ever ask for," he murmured against my skin, and I believed him with every fiber of my being because I wanted to, because the alternative was too terrifying to consider.
I fell asleep in his arms that night thinking I was the luckiest woman in the world.
I woke up alone.
The shower was running in the bathroom, and I could hear Damien humming something under his breath, happy and content, probably already thinking about his day ahead. I stretched and smiled, sore in all the right places, still floating on the cloud of new marriage bliss.
That's when I saw it.
His phone was on the nightstand, face up, and the screen had lit up with a text message. The preview was enough to make my blood freeze in my veins.
Victoria: The kids are asking when Daddy's coming home. Should I tell them you'll be back for dinner?
My hands shook as I picked up the phone, telling myself there had to be some explanation, some reasonable reason why a woman named Victoria was talking about kids and calling Damien "Daddy" twelve hours after he'd promised to love and honor me for the rest of his life.
I scrolled through the messages, each one hitting me like a physical blow. Pictures of two beautiful children, a boy and a girl, both with Damien's dark hair and strong jaw. Photos of family dinners and birthday parties and school events, all featuring the man I'd just married and a stunning blonde woman who wore her wedding ring like she'd never had a reason to doubt it belonged there.
The bathroom door opened and Damien stepped out with a towel wrapped around his waist, still humming, still glowing with post-wedding happiness until he saw me sitting on the bed with his phone in my hands.
The silence stretched between us like a chasm, and I watched his face change from shock to something like panic to a kind of resigned sadness that told me everything I needed to know.
"Zahra," he said, and my name sounded different coming from his mouth, careful and guilty and wrong. "I can explain."
"You have children," I whispered, because it was the only thing my brain could process in that moment. "You have a wife and children."
"It's not what you think—"
"It's exactly what I think." I set his phone down on the nightstand like it might explode if I held it too long. "You're married. Really married, to someone else."
He sat down on the edge of the bed, close enough to touch me but smart enough not to try. "Victoria and I... we've been separated for years. We only stay married for the children and for business reasons. There's no love there anymore, Zahra. There hasn't been for a long time."
"But you live with her. You have dinner with her. You take family photos with her."
"For the kids," he said, and his voice was pleading now, desperate. "They need stability, they need to see their parents together. It doesn't mean anything beyond that."
I stared at him, this man I'd given everything to, this stranger who'd been lying to me from the moment we met, and tried to find some piece of the person I'd fallen in love with.
"What does that make me?" I asked quietly. "What am I in all of this?"
"You're my wife," he said firmly, reaching for my hands. "You're the woman I love, the woman I chose to spend my life with. Victoria is... she's the mother of my children, but that's all. You're my heart, Zahra. You're my future."
And because I was young and naive and desperately in love, because the alternative was admitting that I'd made the biggest mistake of my life on what was supposed to be the happiest day of my life, I let him convince me.
He told me about arranged marriages and loveless partnerships, about men who took second wives to honor women who needed protection and support. He painted himself as a hero rescuing me from a life of loneliness, and painted Victoria as a cold, calculating woman who cared more about his money than his heart.
"In some communities, this is normal," he said, stroking my hair while I cried against his chest. "Men take care of multiple wives, love them equally, provide for them all. There's nothing shameful about it when it's done with honor and respect."
But I wasn't a struggling single mother who needed rescue. I was a successful architect with my own career and my own income, pure and untouched and full of dreams for a future that included a husband who would love me and pamper me like a queen.
I just couldn't see that then, blinded by love and his smooth words and the way he made me feel like I was the center of his universe during the hours he spared for me.
Now, sitting in this apartment that never really belonged to me, holding the photograph of the woman I used to be, I can see how easily I let myself slip, allowed to be manipulated, desperately wanting to believe his lies because the truth was too painful to accept.
The truth that I was never his wife. I was his mistress, his dirty little secret. A fresh, easy lay, to change up his taste.
And Victoria was never the villain in our story. She was just another woman trying to hold her family together while her husband betrayed her over and over again with someone young and stupid enough to believe his promises.
The suitcase is almost full now, stuffed with clothes and books and the few personal items I can't bear to leave behind. Everything else—the furniture he bought, the jewelry he gave me, the life he built around me like a beautiful cage—stays here.
I'm zipping up the second bag when I hear footsteps in the hallway outside, heavy and familiar, followed by the sound of a key turning in the lock.
My heart stops.
He's early. He's not supposed to be back for another two hours.