Love After Him: A Novel

Leen believed a good marriage simply required patience. Then patience became a habit of disappearing. On the night of her twenty-eighth birthday, she sits alone at a table for two, waiting for a husband who is already an hour late, and lies to her own mother rather than admit it. It is not the last lie she will tell to keep the peace. It will be one of the last. LOVE AFTER HIM follows Leen through the year she stops shrinking: the apartment she rents in secret, the promotion she almost apologizes for, the address her husband tries to reclaim through a mutual friend, and the slow, unglamorous work of learning what she actually wants once no one else is allowed to decide it for her. When Samer enters her life, he offers something she doesn't recognize at first: a man who asks before he assumes, who can be angry without punishing her with silence, who accepts a canceled dinner without turning it into a debt she owes him. But wanting him means risking everything she has only just learned to protect. A quietly devastating, ultimately hopeful novel about the difference between love that asks you to disappear and love that asks you to stay exactly, entirely yourself. For readers of contemporary women's fiction who want their romance to earn its happy ending - through boundaries, honesty, and the hard work of rebuilding a life, not just two people who happen to fall for each other