Chapter 3: Something’s Wrong

The fever came on fast, the way fevers do in small children — nothing at breakfast, nothing at lunch, and then somewhere in the middle of a perfectly ordinary Tuesday afternoon, Cissy went from playing to listless in the space of an hour, curled on the Roberts’ living room carpet with her cheek against the cool wood floor instead of the rug, which she never did.

Liam noticed before either mother did. He’d been building something out of blocks a few feet away, and Étaín, dropping by after her shift to collect him for dinner, watched him go still mid-reach for a block he never picked up — a stillness she’d learned, over the better part of a year now, to feel the weight of before she understood why.

He didn’t go to Cissy first.

He came straight to Étaín instead, crossing the room fast, none of his usual unhurried confidence in it, and grabbed two fistfuls of her scrub top — she’d come straight from her shift, hadn’t even changed yet — and held on.

“Mama.” His voice had none of the flat, careful control she’d heard from him during the sleepover standoff months before. This was smaller, and younger, and afraid in a way she hadn’t heard from him since Shamus died. “You’re a nurse. You have to look at her. Something’s wrong. Really wrong, not — not like the other times.”

“Liam, what other times, what do you—”

“I don’t know what it is,” he said, and that alone stopped her cold, because in nearly a year of watching him know things before anyone told him, she had never once heard him say those five words. “I just know it’s bad. Please, Mama. Please go look at her right now.”

Étaín was on her knees beside Cissy before Bea had even fully turned around from the kitchen doorway, two fingers already finding the pulse point at the girl’s throat while her other hand pressed flat against a forehead that was burning even before the thermometer confirmed it — a hundred and four point two, and climbing.

“Bea.” Étaín’s voice had gone into the register she used at work, calm and utterly without room for argument. “Get the car. We’re going to Hopkins, not urgent care. Now.”

Behind her, Liam hadn’t moved from where he stood, both hands pressed to his own chest as though he could feel, radiating up through his own ribs, exactly how bad the thing was that he had no name for.

The emergency room at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center moved with an unhurried urgency Étaín knew from the inside of her own hospital — nothing dramatic on the surface, no raised voices, and underneath it a machine working exactly as fast as it needed to. A triage nurse took one look at the numbers on the chart and Cissy was back in a room within minutes, an IV started, blood drawn into a small forest of vials before Bea had even finished filling out the intake forms with hands that weren’t quite steady.