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He smiles, though the bags under his eyes betray how tired he is. It’s like 8 a.m. in Karachi, so he must have just woken up. “Hey,” he yawns.
I smirk. “Yeah, that’s exactly how you should greet your fiancée the eve before your wedding.”
Imtiaz snorts. “Technically our wedding isn’t for another week or so,” he reminds me. “So it’s not really the eve.”
“True.” I pad over to the stairs. “Why are you awake so early?”
“My mom wants me to go looking for some clothes.” He rubs his cheeks. “She said that since I arrived early to Pakistan, they might as well take advantage of it and host some dholkis. I need more outfits for them. Can’t be caught wearing the same thing twice, after all.”
Imtiaz is in his third year of his general surgery residency, with the eventual goal of specializing in pediatrics, but that won’t happen for another three years, at least. He went early to help finalize some last-minute details, and then the plan is to fly to Cancun the day after the wedding to spend five days there for our honeymoon. It’s not ideal to go right after the wedding—I’m worried we’ll be too tired from all the festivities to actually enjoy the trip—but it was either that or wait months for our honeymoon, and I didn’t want to do that. “That sounds like...fun.”
He gives me a look. “There’s no way you believe that.”
I snort. “Yeah, I don’t. Sorry.”
I reach my room, and another pang hits my chest at how bare the place is. My room has always reflected whatever obsession I had at the time—from Twilight posters covering my walls to my own artsy paintings to photos with childhood friends—but now, the only things staring back at me are the bare lavender walls. My three bookshelves are empty; I packed away the books I wanted to take with me and then donated the rest because I don’t have room for them in the new apartment. My drawers are bare, as is my closet. I’ve been mostly living out of a suitcase these past couple of weeks, and today I’ll drop off the rest of my stuff at the apartment.
I swallow back my emotions and sit down on my bed. I zoned out before, but I tune back into the conversation as Imtiaz says, “In a few weeks, we’ll be at our own house and settling into our new life.”
My stomach churns. “Yeah!” I say, a bit too enthusiastically. “It’ll all be great. We’ll be able to make our own choices. I can decide what I want to have for dinner without having to get my mother’s input.” I lean back against the headboard. “I’ll cook all your favorite meals. Aloo gosht, daal, chicken pulao. You can call me Gordon Ramsay, except I promise I won’t curse at you.”
Imtiaz’s smirk falters, and I scrunch my face. “What? What is it?”
“Nothing, it’s just...” He awkwardly clears his throat. “I don’t really like those dishes, especially daal.”
“Oh.” These are dishes I like. I assumed he liked them, too. “But didn’t you have, like, two servings of daal at my house when you came over for the Baat Pakki?”
“Yeah, I only ate it to be polite,” he says. “And I did tell you that later, because you mentioned how green I looked afterward.”
“Right,” I murmur. I clear my throat to dispel the tension. “I’ll have plenty of time to learn your favorite meals when we go on the honeymoon. I know I was pretty disappointed when you said you didn’t want to go to Switzerland, but now that I’ve gotten used to the idea, I’m warming up to Cancun, especially because it’s nice this time of year—”
As I speak, Imtiaz’s face contorts, hesitation creasing his forehead. I stop. “What?”
“I thought we talked about the honeymoon.”
Dread twists my gut. “What do you mean?”
“You know Dr. Sun?” he starts. “The doctor who I was getting to cover me while I’m in Pakistan?”
I nod, already not liking where this is going.
“Well, she got an offer to attend a medical conference with her mentor and now she can’t cover me anymore,” he explains. Regret lines his mouth. “I thought I told you. I guess with all the chaos, it slipped my mind.” He rubs his ragged face. “I’m sorry, Maya. We’ll have to postpone it.”
I nod again, not trusting myself to make a noise that isn’t squeaking. Disappointment wraps itself around my throat. I shake it off. “Okay,” I begin, proud of the way my voice doesn’t break. “When do you think we’ll be able to go?”
“Maybe later in the year?”
The lines in my forehead deepen. “How am I going to do that? I have work. I can’t take two weeks off during the school year.”
“We can reschedule to the winter break,” Imtiaz suggests.
“You mean during the holiday season?” I splutter. “When it’s incredibly expensive to travel to hot climates? We’re renting a space in Toronto, not to mention my pay as a teacher is terrible and you’re still paying off student loans.”
I can tell by the way Imtiaz opens and closes his mouth and runs his palms along his pants that he’s panicking. I don’t get worked up very often, but when it does happen, all he can do is stammer until I calm myself down. I close my eyes and inhale deeply three times, a strategy Dr. Khan and I came up with for when I feel myself starting to spiral. When I open them again, my chest is much looser. “It’s okay,” I tell him. “We can figure it out later.”
Imtiaz’s shoulders deflate. “Yeah, cool, that sounds like a good idea.” He scratches the back of his neck. “Oh, hey, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
I hate the way alarm immediately rises in my throat at those words. They’re the same ones Ammi said right before she told us Baba left in the middle of the night and wasn’t coming back. I squish the rising fear and struggle to keep my composure. “What’s up?”
