The Wedding She Survived novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: The Fever

Willa's POV

Poppy woke me at two in the morning, burning against my arm.

I knew before I touched her forehead.

The thermometer said a hundred and four, and she wouldn't open her eyes.

"Mom!" I shouted down the hall. "Mom, I need the keys!"

My mother came out of her room in her robe, took one look, and went white.

"The car's been dead since Tuesday," she said. "I told you the battery was going."

"Call an ambulance."

"It'll be twenty minutes, baby. Twenty minutes."

I stood there with my daughter shaking in my arms and my phone in my hand and nothing in my head.

Then I saw it through the window.

Across the street, a phone screen glowed in the dark rental.

Somebody over there was awake.

I had told him he couldn't come inside.

I had told him Saturdays, at the park.

I went down the porch steps in my bare feet and crossed the street at a run.

I hit his door with my fist, and he opened it before the second knock.

He was dressed.

He looked at Poppy, and he didn't ask a single question.

"My car," he said. "Go."

He drove the way I would have wanted to, fast and flat, and he never took his eyes off the road.

I sat in the back with Poppy's head on my lap and counted her breaths out loud.

"Four more blocks," he said. "Three."

At the emergency entrance, he stopped the car in front of the glass doors and left it there with the engine running.

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