I Woke Up at the Altar and Said No to the Mob Heir Who Let Me Die, but He Remembers Too novel · Chapter 33 of 40

Chapter 33: Snow Day

We both reached the stairs at the same time.

He let me go first.

Nessa was sitting up in bed with her rabbit, her cheeks bright and her eyes glassy.

I put my hand on her forehead. It was like touching a radiator.

"Thermometer," I said. "Bathroom cabinet. Top shelf."

He was back before I'd finished saying it.

A hundred and three point four.

"Is that bad?" Nessa asked. "Is that a lot?"

"It's a lot of hot," I said. "We're going to cool you down."

I called the nurse line from the edge of her bed.

The nurse asked me questions in a calm voice. Was she drinking? Was her neck stiff? Could she look at the light?

Cormac stood in the doorway and listened to every word.

"It sounds like the flu that's going round the schools," the nurse said. "Fever reducer, fluids, cool cloths. If it goes over a hundred and five, or she won't wake up properly, you go in."

"The roads are closing," I said.

"Then call an ambulance. They'll get through."

I hung up.

Outside, the storm had come in properly. The streetlight on the corner was a blur of white.

The radio downstairs said every road in the county was closed until morning.

"You can't get back to the yard," I said.

"I wasn't going to try."

We took shifts.

Two hours each, by the clock on her nightstand.

One of us sat with her and the other one lay down on the couch in their clothes and didn't sleep.

At midnight she was at a hundred and three.

At two she was at a hundred and four, and she started crying because her legs hurt.

He held a cold cloth to her forehead and another to the back of her neck.

I made her sip water through a straw. She bit the straw flat.

"I don't like being hot," she said. "I want to be a snowman."

"You're halfway there," Cormac said. "You just need a carrot."

She laughed and then coughed for a long time.

At three I heard him singing.

I was on the couch with my eyes open. His voice came through the open door, very low.

He was singing my mother's song. The girl at the harbor.

He had all the words wrong.

He had her waiting for a bus instead of a boat. He'd made the second verse about a dog.

I didn't know where he'd learned even that much of it.

Then I knew.

Nessa sang it on the phone to him on Sunday nights, in Dorchester, when she couldn't sleep. She'd never once got the words right either.

I lay on the couch and listened to him get it wrong, and I put my hand over my mouth.

"That's not how it goes," Nessa said, faintly.

"How does it go?"

"There's a boat."

"I don't know about a boat."

"Orla knows."

"Then Orla can fix it in the morning."

"Okay," she sighed, and I heard her fall asleep.

At six, the window went gray.

I was in the chair by the bed. He was asleep sitting up against the wall on the floor, with her hand in his.

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