"So? Nothing wrong with getting a little wet from your mother's happy tears."
Arezoo laughed or at least attempted to. It came out as more of a croak because her throat was so dry.
"Can I have some water?" she asked.
Soraya let go of her face and turned to the side table. She lifted the glass, put a bendy straw inside, and carefully brought it to Arezoo's lips.
Arezoo took a long pull.
The water was wonderfully cold.
"Slowly," her mother said. "Doctor Julian said you can have just a little when you wake up."
"Mhm." Arezoo kept sucking the water up.
"Slowly, my darling."
"Mhm."
She drank until the glass was about two-thirds empty, and then her mother eased the straw away and set the glass back down.
"When did I get here, and why? Am I sick?"
"Ruvon brought you in yesterday morning, so you've been here for about a day."
Arezoo blinked. "A day?"
"Yes,joonam. Do you think I would be crying over a two-hour nap?"
The answer to that was yes because her mother cried over everything, but it was impossible that she had slept for so long.
Thinking back to the last thing she remembered, she had a very hazy memory of Ruvon waking her up to tell her that she had a fever, and something about the doctor coming.
She did not remember Julian arriving or being taken to the clinic.
"What happened to me?"
"You started transitioning."
"No way."
It couldn't have happened so soon. It was supposed to take weeks, not three days.
Her mother brushed Arezoo's hair back from her forehead with both hands, and the familiarity of it made Arezoo's eyes sting. "Ruvon called Doctor Julian to tell him that you were runninga fever, and he came to check on you. He suspected that you were transitioning and had Ruvon carry you to the cart. You lost consciousness on the way, and you've been asleep ever since."
Arezoo tried to assemble these facts into a coherent picture and found that her brain was working at a fraction of its usual speed.
"I lost consciousness?"
"Yes,joonam. We were so worried, even though Doctor Julian told us that we shouldn't be and that you were doing fine."
Arezoo's eyes welled up, but she pushed back the tears because if she started crying, her mother would start again.
"Doctor Julian examined me at the house?"
"Yes."
An alarm went off in her brain.
