Chapter 8 - The Fever
Two weeks later, the winter sky dropped a heavy blanket of snow over Chicago.
It was three o'clock on a Tuesday morning when Emily’s phone rang on her bedside table.
She answered it instantly, her instincts as a nurse waking her in a second. “Hello?”
“Emily,” Mrs. Gable’s panicked voice came through the speaker from down the hall. “Come quick! It’s Lily. She’s burning up!”
Emily threw off her covers, running down the cold hallway in her socks to Mrs. Gable’s apartment.
Lily was lying on the small sofa, her skin flushed dark red, her little body shivering violently despite three wool blankets wrapped around her. Emily pressed her hand to her daughter’s forehead—it felt like a hot iron.
She pulled out her thermometer.
104.2°F.
“Oh, God,” Emily breathed out, her nurse’s training fighting against pure, hysterical maternal terror. “Her temperature is spiking too fast. She’s going into a febrile seizure risk.”
She wrapped Lily in a heavy coat, lifting her limp, hot body into her arms.
“I’m calling an ambulance,” Mrs. Gable cried, reaching for the wall phone.
“The snow is too thick!” Emily said, looking out the window at the blizzard blinding the street. “The city transit is delayed by an hour! It will take thirty minutes for an emergency vehicle to reach West Town!”
Desperation, raw and terrifying, seized Emily’s chest.
She pulled out her phone. She didn't call the clinic. She didn't call Mia.
She dialed a number she had memorized two years ago and had never erased from her heart.
The phone rang once.
“Emily?” Michael’s voice answered instantly, crisp, alert, as if he had been sitting by the phone waiting for her call for twenty-four months.
“Michael...” Emily sobbed, holding Lily tight against her shoulder. “It’s Lily. She’s at 104.2. She’s slipping into lethargy. The snow is blocking the street and I can’t get a cab—”
“I’m three minutes away,” Michael interrupted, his voice dropping into absolute, iron command. “Stay inside the foyer. I’m coming.”
Two minutes and forty seconds later, the roar of a heavy four-wheel-drive SUV tore through the quiet, snow-covered street.
The vehicle mounted the curb in front of her building.
Michael burst through the front glass doors, wearing no coat, his sweater soaked with snow, his face pale with pure terror.
He didn't speak. He reached out and took Lily from Emily’s arms, tucking the small, feverish girl securely against his chest, shielding her body from the icy wind with his own posture.
“Get in!” Michael roared, ushering Emily into the heated leather back seat of the SUV.
Marcus was behind the wheel, driving with terrifying, skilled precision through the snowdrifts toward Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
During the eight-minute drive, Michael sat on the floor of the SUV beside Emily, holding a cold compress to Lily’s neck, his hands steady, his gray eyes fixed on his daughter’s face with a fierce, protective focus that ignored everything else in the universe.
“Stay with me, Lily,” Michael murmured continuously, his voice low, soothing, and entirely devoted. “Stay with Daddy, sweetheart. I’m right here. I’m right here.”
Emily watched him—the billionaire who had once claimed he had no room in his life for chaos—holding his feverish child on the floor of a car, tears streaming down his face as he bargained with God to take the fever from her body and give it to him.
By the time they reached the emergency bay, a team of pediatric specialists was waiting at the doors—summoned by a single call from Marcus.
Lily was rushed into a private room.
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Four hours later, as the morning sun began to turn the snow outside into sparkling gold, the fever broke.
Lily fell into a deep, peaceful sleep, her small hand wrapped firmly around Michael’s thumb as he sat in a chair beside her hospital bed, refusing to let go, refusing to move, refusing to breathe too loud lest he wake her.
