“You cannot worry yourself with these things, Leila. Once you marry, every day you will discover something new about each other. Some things good, some things not so good, but that is the fun of marriage.” My father bobbled his head.

Fun? That sounds frightening.

“It worked for your mother and me because we allowed love to take its course,” he continued. “You have to step aside and trust that love will happen, Leila. Over time, you will learn to make adjustments and come to respect each other. And soon, that respect will turn to like and then eventually it will turn to love. This kind of compromise cannot happen before marriage. It cannot happen overnight. It slowly grows over time and becomes stronger, and that is why it lasts.”

He patted my knee and gently lifted my chin. “Leila, if you want to be truly happy, you must realize that there is no such thing as love before marriage. True love exists only after marriage. Simple as that.” He snapped his fingers, smiling.

I said nothing, just sat there quietly, absorbing his advice. If there was no such thing as love before marriage, then what about all the movies I had watched growing up? What about all the fairy tales I had read? What about all the feelings I had felt for Zain? Who knew if what I experienced with Zain was true love—as my father called it—but it was the closest I had gotten to . . . something. I had spent my entire life wishing for pyaar, prem, ishq, mohabbat—the kind of love that was instantaneous; that didn’t require time or compromise or adjustments to blossom; that just was—and now my father was saying that that didn’t exist? Or at least not in the context that I had always envisioned. I blinked back the tears and looked away. Maybe this type of love didn’t exist for him and my mother, but I refused to believe that it wouldn’t for me. It had to . . . otherwise what was even the point?

Departure

“What are you going to do?” Tania and Liv looked at me curiously. Hannah was out of town at a conference, so it was just the three of us at our Tuesday night ritual.

“I’ve decided I’m going to go,” I said.

“What made you change your mind?” Liv asked.

“I couldn’t get pregnant in time.”

“What?!”

“Never mind.” The truth was I couldn’t come up with a strong enough excuse for why I couldn’t go to Meena’s wedding. At least nothing that would convince my mother, so I decided to just surrender.

“But you have less than a month left!” Liv reminded me. “What about the deadline?”

Deadline. It sounded so final, so uncompromising. I could see the concern in both my friends’ eyes. “The deadline is still there,” I stated matter-of-factly. “But either I stay here and continue going on terrible, dead-end dates, or I try to focus on the silver lining.”