Two days of fragile peace. That's what we manage.
Forty-eight hours of circling each other like animals sharing a watering hole during drought — wary, deliberate, both pretending the truce is strategy rather than exhaustion. We eat meals together now. The three of us at the kitchen table, passing salt, making small talk about nothing that matters while Elliot tracks our faces with the focus of a boy who's learned to read weather systems before they break.
He knows something shifted. He just can't name it yet.
Then Elliot wakes up burning.
The cry cuts through my sleep at three in the morning — not a nightmare cry, not the I-need-water whimper. Something rawer, more animal. A sound that bypasses every conscious thought and puts my feet on cold floorboards before my brain comes online.
His room is dark except for the nightlight — a glow-in-the-dark planet Vivian bought him, Saturn with lopsided rings. He's curled tight under his blankets, face flushed and damp, small body shaking with sobs that come from somewhere deeper than tears.
My hand finds his forehead and recoils.
"Mama." Cracked. Thin. "Everything hurts."
"I know, baby. I know." The thermometer lives on his nightstand because this isn't my first three-a.m. rodeo. My hands shake hard enough to fumble it twice before the button clicks. "Open up for me. Under the tongue."
He whimpers but obeys. The seconds drag like they're being pulled through wet concrete. The beep.
103.4.
I stare at the number. Somewhere in my head is a filing cabinet labeled SINGLE MOTHER EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS — six years of midnight fevers, stomach bugs, croup so bad I sat with him in a steaming bathroom at four a.m. reading Goodnight Moon for the forty-seventh time. I know what to do. I always know what to do.
My hands won't stop shaking.
A knock. I flinch hard enough to jar the bed.
Dominic fills the doorway. T-shirt twisted from sleep, sweatpants low on his hips, hair wrecked. Those mismatched eyes find Elliot first — reading the flushed face, the shaking, the thermometer still in my grip — then me. The assessment takes two seconds.
"How high?"
"103.4."
"Children's Tylenol?"
"I think we're out. I meant to restock last week but —"
He's already turning. "Twenty-four-hour pharmacy on Greenfield. Twenty minutes."
"Dominic, you don't have to —"
"Twenty minutes."
Footsteps on the stairs. Keys off the hook. The front door. The sedan engine — not the old obscene one, the Honda he'll end up buying when the bank takes everything else — firing in the driveway. Gravel. Gone.
I press a cold washcloth to Elliot's forehead and he flinches, then melts into it with a sound that unknots something between my shoulders.
"Where'd he go?" Elliot's voice is thin as steam.
"To get you medicine. He'll be right back."
"He doesn't have to do that."
"I know."
"But he's doing it anyway?"
"Yeah, baby. He's doing it anyway."
His eyes drift shut. I hold the cloth in place, cycle it for a fresh one when it warms, hold that one too. Watch the clock on his nightstand count minutes like it's being paid by the second.
Eighteen minutes. Not twenty.
He comes through the door with a pharmacy bag and something else — a small stuffed stegosaurus, green, slightly lopsided, the kind of impulse buy that lives in a bin next to the register.
"Tylenol, Pedialyte, and —" He holds up the dinosaur. "The cashier said stegosauruses have the best immune systems."
"That's not true," Elliot whispers, but he reaches for it with arms that barely have the strength to lift. Pulls it against his chest next to the original dinosaur — two ridiculous reptiles standing guard. He looks up at Dominic with fever-glazed eyes. "Thank you."
Something crosses Dominic's face that I've never seen on it before. Not the CEO mask. Not the charm. Not the calculated boardroom composure. Something cracked open and terrified and so unguarded it feels like watching someone step outside without skin.
"You're welcome, buddy."
We work through the dark hours without discussion.
I measure Tylenol into the dosing cup. He holds fresh cloths to Elliot's forehead, cycling them when they warm, keeping rhythm without being told. When the fever holds and Elliot can't settle — too uncomfortable, too restless, legs kicking at blankets he simultaneously needs and can't stand — Dominic pulls a book from the shelf.
The Knight and the Dragon. Elliot's favorite at four. He's outgrown it twice and refuses to let me donate it.
Dominic does every voice wrong. The knight sounds like a news anchor. The dragon sounds like he's gargling gravel. The princess sounds inexplicably like a pirate, and Elliot's mouth twitches — barely, a flicker — so Dominic leans into it harder, making the pirate princess increasingly unhinged until my son's cracked lips curve into something that could, in the right light, pass for a smile.
He reads it twice. Starts a third. Somewhere in the middle of the princess commandeering the dragon's cave, Elliot's eyelids drop and stay.
Five a.m. Fever down to 101 — still high but no longer the number that makes your vision narrow to a tunnel. His breathing has evened into that particular rhythm of deep child-sleep, the stegosaurus tucked under his chin, the original dinosaur wedged against his ribs.
Dominic hasn't moved from the chair beside the bed. His body angles toward Elliot the way a compass needle angles north — involuntary, absolute. His hand rests on the blanket near my son's shoulder. Close but not touching. Ready.
I lean against the doorframe. Every bone in my body weighs twice what it should. I watch him watching our son and something cracks in the structure I've been maintaining for six years — the load-bearing wall labeled I DON'T NEED ANYONE.
He hasn't checked his phone. Hasn't complained about lost sleep. Hasn't performed a single second of this for an audience. He's just been here. Doing what needed doing. The way parents do.
"Go sleep," I whisper. "I'll take over."
He shakes his head without breaking his vigil. "I'm good. You go."
I should argue. Should insist — I've handled worse on less, I don't need backup, I've run this operation solo for six years and the system works fine without a co-pilot. The words assemble on my tongue in their usual formation.
They don't deploy.
Instead I stay in the doorframe, watching my son's chest rise and fall, watching the hand on the blanket that's close enough to comfort but careful enough not to wake. Two ridiculous stuffed dinosaurs standing sentinel.
Something shifts behind my ribs. Not breaking — opening. A lock turning that I didn't know had a key, in a door I bricked over so long ago I forgot it was there.
I'm not ready to walk through it. Not tonight.
But I feel the draft. And it's terrifying and warm in equal measure.