by Holly Rayner
Amie nodded, leading him to the door. “Of course, of course. I’m glad you came to see me at all!”
Rami turned to leave, nodding a last goodbye to his future mother-in-law.
At the last moment, Amie grabbed his wrist, detaining him. “Before you go, I have to thank you.”
Rami stared at her in confusion. “Thank me? For what?”
Amie looked down at the floor for a moment before meeting his gaze, blushing slightly. “For—for helping me get well,” Amie said, almost stuttering. “I know it was you who donated the money to the hospital,” she explained, as Rami’s eyes widened in shock. “I understand that you probably wanted to stay anonymous, but I just can’t go through the rest of my life and not thank you for what you did for me.” Words were tumbling out of the woman’s lips as if she couldn’t get through them fast enough;
Rami shook his head, taking Amie’s hand and giving it a squeeze. “Wait, Amie, wait.”
Mia’s mother looked up at him, flustered.
“I didn’t donate the money. Of course I would have if I could have, but I barely had enough to keep the household expenses at that point. Where did you get the idea that it was me?”
Amie stared at him in silent surprise for a moment. The next instant, she blinked and gave herself a shake. “Well, when I was there, getting treated,” she explained, “I tried to get some information from the hospital. They said that they couldn’t help me, but I kept bugging them—especially once I got home and started recovering.” She smiled slightly.
“Somehow I think I know where Mia gets her stubbornness from,” Rami said, mirroring her smile.
“Well, I finally got to someone who would tell me something,” Amie told him. “But all they could give me was the name of the charity: Hope. That was it; not ‘Hope for Treatment’ or anything like that. Just Hope.”
Rami nodded, frowning. “So how did you come to think it was me, if there was a specific charity?”
Amie grinned. “Well, once I had the name I was able to do some digging,” she explained. “And what I found out was that the charity that donated to fund my treatment was a subsidiary of your father’s largest corporation.”
Rami blinked, staring at Amie blankly. “But that’s impossible,” he said, shaking his head. “I was in the process of selling the company then. There was no money to spare.” But even as he spoke, details began to come together in Rami’s mind. He thought he might have an idea of how the miraculous charitable donation could have happened without him being aware of it.
Quickly, Rami decided not to share the information with his future mother-in-law. He wasn’t sure how Amie would feel about his suspicions, and he wasn’t sure if the source of the donation—the true source—would want him to reveal their involvement. Instead, he shrugged. “You know, it was probably just a coincidence,” he said, patting Amie’s hand. “Maybe the new corporate owners looked up my affiliations and found out about you; they might have wanted to look good to the current employees or something. Don’t worry about thanking me—and definitely, please don’t feel like you owe me anything.”
Amie’s mother looked at him for a long time, but she let him go, and Rami hurried away from the house to his car, trying to look as though he wasn’t running away from the surprise disclosure.
EIGHTEEN
As Rami drove home from Amie’s house, his half-formed conclusion about the source of his future mother-in-law’s benefit began to solidify more and more. He was fairly certain that he would never be able to confront the benefactor in person, but realizing who he believed had made the donation warmed his heart. Rami knew that he had to discuss it with Mia; he just hoped that she would be willing to avoid disclosing to Amie. Rami whistled a little tune to himself, shaking his head and smiling at the truth that he strongly suspected he knew.
Arriving at home, he found most of the family in the kitchen. His mother was overseeing dinner preparations, while Mia held their four-month-old son in her arms, dancing him around out of the dangerous part of the kitchen. Rami’s sisters were playing a new album from one of their favorite performers, and for a moment, in spite of his momentous news, Rami couldn’t help but watch the domestic scene with satisfaction. While he was anxious to move out on his own, to be with Mia and Aziz away from the constant supervision of his siblings and mother, there was something to be said for the close-knit relationship the family had taken on when they had lost their wealth.
“There’s my future husband,” Mia said. Her voice stirred Rami out of his thoughts, and he grinned at her, crossing the room to give her a quick kiss on the lips.
“You two had better be planning an actual wedding,” Rami’s mother said with half-joking sternness. “Especially now that you’ve had a baby together, it has to be really official. None of this running off to the courthouse business.”
“Don’t worry, Ma, we’re going to have a real wedding,” Rami said, hugging his sisters before stopping to kiss his mother on both cheeks. “I promise, you’ll be able to wear a beautiful dress and tell everyone that it was you who convinced us to get married. It will be your shining glory moment.”
Amal chuckled as she checked the progress of the stews. “As long as you have some kind of real ceremony, and a real reception, I’ll be happy,” she said. “But for right now you should give your poor wife a break from entertaining your son and let her rest before dinner.”
Rami laughed, only too happy to take his mother’s advice. He had important information to give Mia—information he couldn’t tell her in front of his other family members.
Rami draped his arm around his fiancée’s waist and they walked out of the kitchen together, moving as one to their bedroom where they would have the most privacy. “I need to talk to you about something,” Rami told her, as soon as they were out of earshot.
“What?” Mia looked at him concerned. “There aren’t any new problems with your father’s businesses, are there?”
Rami shook his head. “No, it’s something good, don’t worry.” He smiled at her and then at his son. Aziz grinned back, reaching out to grab at Rami’s face. Rami led Mia into their bedroom and closed the door behind them.
“So what’s going on?” Mia settled Aziz on his back on the bed, freeing him of the swaddling to kick and twist around.
“I went to see your mother this afternoon,” Rami said, his mind still spinning with the news he had learned from Amie.
“That’s awesome! How is she doing?”
Rami smiled slightly. “She’s doing very well,” he told her. “The interesting thing, though, is that she told me she was able to get some more information on the charity that funded her treatment.”
“That’s great!” Mia beamed. “What was she able to find out?”
Rami licked his lips. “The charity is a subsidiary of one of my father’s former companies,” Rami said quickly. “And before you say it—no, it wasn’t me.”
“Yeah, now that I think about it,” Mia agreed, raising an eyebrow, “It wouldn’t make sense for it to be news if you’d done it yourself.”
Rami nodded. “I think—the only thing I can think of—is that it must have been my mom.”
Mia’s eyes widened. “What makes you think it was her?”
Rami sat down on the edge of the bed, careful not to jostle his son.
“My mom didn’t know a whole lot about my dad’s businesses, but there were a few companies she had some personal connections with.” Rami paused. “So what I think she did was funnel the last of the money she had in her savings through the company to a one-off charity subsidiary. She must have invented the name ‘Hope’ to try and throw us and Amie off the scent.”
“That seems like a lot of effort to go to just to make an anonymous donation,” Mia said, sounding skeptical. “Did you even tell her about what was going on with my mom?”
Rami shook his head. “No, but I think she must have overheard us talking about it. I mean we saw her in the next room almost right after, you know?
” Mia considered that point and nodded. “What I want to get your opinion on is whether we should talk to her about it—or if we should tell your mom.”
“You didn’t tell her today?”
Rami shook his head. “I said it must have been a coincidence of some kind—or that maybe someone at the company wanted to do a good deed for the family, as a parting thing before they changed hands, something like that.”
Mia chuckled softly. “Well if she went to that much trouble keeping it anonymous, do we really have the right to go and tell my mom about it?”
“What I don’t understand,” Rami said, “is why she’d want it to be anonymous at all.”
Mia shrugged. “Maybe she didn’t want anyone to worry about it, or try and talk her out of the donation.”
“But why would she still want no one to know now the treatment is over?” Rami watched as Mia caught up her bottom lip between her teeth and worried it for a moment.
“Maybe she just doesn’t really want the credit for it,” she suggested finally. “Remember a while back when she said she wanted to make amends for how she treated me when you introduced me to her. Maybe she felt like something like this goes towards making it even—but she doesn’t want to make a big deal about it? Especially since we told her we didn’t want anything.”
Rami considered the possibility. Even after spending years of his life as her child, Rami felt he didn’t really know his mother well enough to say whether a such a gesture would be in character for her. Certainly, every time she’d ever given him a gift, Amal had made sure that Rami had known where it had come from. But he hadn’t known anything about his mother’s charity work. He sighed finally, resigning himself to the only option at hand.
“If she doesn’t want anyone to know, it’s not our place to tell on her, is it?” He said, and Mia nodded slowly in agreement. “I guess if she ever wants your mom—or anyone—to know about it, she’ll tell them. In the meantime, we can’t confront her about it.” Rami sighed again, reaching out to play with his son’s kicking foot.
“It does kind of suck that we can’t thank her until and unless she’s ready to admit that she did it,” Mia said, leaning down onto her side next to the baby. She frowned, and Rami knew that his fiancée was trying to think of some way that she could thank his mother without telling her what the thank-you was for.
“You’ll think of something,” Rami reassured her. He picked Aziz up off of the bed and held the infant securely in his arms, despite the way the baby squirmed. “In the meantime, you should get some rest. I’ll play with our little boy in the living room.
Mia frowned again. “And here I was hoping we could put our little boy in his nursery for a little while and you could show me how much you love me until it’s time for dinner,” Mia said with mild protest in her voice. Rami chuckled lowly, picking up Aziz carrying him to the crib in the adjoining room. They would still be able to hear the baby if something happened to him, but if Aziz wanted to play with the colorful attached toys, or take a nap for a little while, he would be very welcome.
Rami put the baby down and rejoined his fiancée, quickly sliding under the blankets with her as they immediately started to tear at each other’s clothes. They might only have fifteen minutes before it was time to go eat dinner and Rami wanted to make sure each one counted. As his hands wandered over his lover’s body, Rami kissed her over and over again, glad that he had managed to turn his life around enough to keep Mia in his life—even if their current circumstances were less than perfect.
NINETEEN
Mia’s stomach felt as though it had been tied in knots, but despite her nerves, she felt she was happier than she could remember being in a long time. As she sat at the hair and makeup station, obediently closing and opening her eyes and tilting her head under instruction, she couldn’t help but feel relieved that her big day had finally arrived.
It had taken months of planning, and even though the ceremony and reception were relatively simple, they had required saving up some money as well. Rami hadn’t wanted Mia to pay for any of the wedding costs; he had wanted to earn the money himself since he had proposed to her, and since he had promised to take care of her for the rest of her life. The few businesses Rami had managed to keep going out of his father’s once-vast empire were beginning to stabilize, and they had turned enough profit to be able to justify taking home a little more money.
“Oh my God, Mia, you’re already looking so beautiful, and you aren’t even ready yet.”
Mia resisted the urge to open her eyes at Karima’s comment. Rami’s eldest sister was her maid of honor, while his younger sister and Becky, one of Mia’s few long-time friends, and her five-year-old daughter, completed the bridal party. At ten months old, Aziz was not quite old enough to walk dependably yet, but his uncle, one of Rami’s groomsmen, would help him down the aisle as the ring bearer.
“Oh my God, she does,” Becky agreed. “Oh—can you imagine how she’s going to look when she gets the dress on?”
Mia felt her face heat up and tried to make herself breathe slowly to still the jumping nerves in her body and slow her pounding heart. “Guys, I don’t know why we’re all making such a big deal out of this,” she said in between dabs of makeup being applied her face.
