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Underneath the blanket, Zoe was wearing a long T-shirt, and that was it.
“Right,” I managed. Then my gaze snapped back to her face. “I’ll be in her room.”
I jogged back to the house and took the stairs two at a time, then paced Mira’s room with my arms crossed until I heard Zoe coming up the steps.
My heart was racing.
She came into the room, and I moved out of the way. Zoe leaned over the crib and gently pushed Mira’s hair out of her face, making a small humming noise as she pressed the backs of her fingers to Mira’s forehead. “She’s a bit warm, yeah.”
“A bit,” I barked out. “That fucking little thing was flashing red at me when I scanned her. Red lights are never a good thing, Zoe.”
She gave me a tiny smile.
Why the fuck was she smiling? This was an emergency, for fuck’s sake.
When she exhaled a laugh, I realized a bit too late that I’d said it out loud.
With a small shake of her head, Zoe picked up the thermometer and scanned Mira’s forehead again.
One-oh-one point nine.
I punched a finger in the air. “That thing is full of shit; it was higher for me.”
“How much higher?” Zoe asked.
“One-oh-two point five.” I tucked my arms tight against my chest again. “Shouldn’t we take her in or something? There’s an emergency room not far from here. I can go put that fucking car seat back in if you want me to drive, because I refuse to drive that shit little car you’ve got.”
Zoe stared at me for a few moments, and there was this soft fucking look in her big golden eyes.
“Why the bloody fuck are you looking at me like that?” I said. Yelled. Whatever.
Mira stirred a little, and Zoe rubbed her back for a moment before she motioned me out into the hallway.
Before coming over, she’d tugged on some black joggers, but her feet were still bare. Her toenails were painted a muted pink. It was so much easier to stare at her feet than to meet her gaze, because I did not like what I saw there.
And because it felt like my insides were about to combust.
“Liam, kids get fevers. She’ll be fine, I promise.”
I lifted my head, pinning her with a glare. “You can’t promise that. I told you how high it was.”
She smiled again, seeming secretive and sweet and so fucking irritating. I wanted to punch a wall.
“And she probably doesn’t feel great, but letting her sleep is the best thing we can do. If she wakes up, we can make sure she drinks water, and we’ll take her temp again, but one-oh-two isn’t anything we need to worry about. A couple more degrees—”
“Acouplemore degrees? You have lost the plot, Valentine.” She was mad. Absolutely nutters. And here I had thought she was the responsible one.
But she was completely unfazed. “A couple more degrees, and we want to make sure medicine brings that fever down, but we don’t need to bring her in. Her body is doing its job.”
My jaw was clenched tight while I measured the truth of what she was telling me. When I spoke again, my voice sounded like it had been scraped bare by rusty razor blades. “How are you so sure?”
“I worked at a hospital for over a decade, Liam.”
“Inaccounting,” I said. “It’s not like you were interviewing the bloody doctors.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Fine. My best friend had a kid, and I was always over here, and I remember her talking about this any time Mira got sick. Is that better?”
I conceded that with a grunt.
