The fact she had no one to turn to for advice, for support, even for a good lecture, sliced open the wound of her mother’s death that had barely begun to heal.
This could not be happening. Liyah would not allow it to happen.
She charged back into the room. Yusuf and Sayed stopped talking and faced her, wearing twin expressions of surprise.
“I am not pregnant. Do you hear me? I will not be pregnant.”
Sayed’s dark eyes widened, his features moving into lines of unwelcome sympathy. “It is not something you can will away, Aaliyah, nor do I believe you truly wish to.”
“I was not setting some sort of mantrap,” she all but shouted.
“I believe you. That is not what I referred to.”
“What, then?” she demanded belligerently
“Would you will our child out of existence if you could?”
She staggered back a step, her earlier nausea returning. How could she answer that?
Of course she would never will a child out of existence. She’d spent a lifetime believing her father didn’t want her, no matter what Hena had tried to convince Liyah. She could never visit that lack of acceptance on her own child.
Not even in the womb.
But there was another truth she could not ignore. “I do not want to be pregnant.”
And she didn’t care if those two attitudes seemed to be at odds. In her mind, one had nothing to do with the other.
If she were pregnant, she would make the best of it, but Liyah categorically did not want to be pregnant.
“Why did she have to die?” she asked of no one in particular, knowing only that she wanted to talk to Hena one last time with a pain that was tearing at her.
Sayed laid his hand on her arm. “I know you miss her, but your mother didn’t leave you on purpose, ya ghazal.”
Liyah jumped, not having realized he’d moved so close. She looked up at Sayed, unsure why his words, his very presence, was so comforting. It shouldn’t be. “Everything has been so hard since she left. Everything.”
“It will be okay.”
Confusion, grief and pain a maelstrom of emotion inside her, Liyah shook her head. “No. It can’t be. The Amaris will know they were right to reject me. They’ll want to take my baby away, too. She’ll grow up without her father like I did.”
Liyah’s thoughts spun with dizzying speed, no chance for her to take hold of one.
“But don’t you ever accuse her of blackmailing you,” Liyah demanded fiercely. “Don’t you dare pretend you don’t remember me. You don’t have to acknowledge her, but you won’t treat her like that, like she’s garbage under your shoe. Do you understand?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“PERHAPS I SHOULD get Abdullah-Hasiba,” Yusuf said.
Liyah spun toward him. “No. You won’t tell her. This is my business.”