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“The answer to that is far too complicated for my current caffeine level.” I stand as he laughs. “Maybe we will have that conversation one day. But not now.”

“Don’t wait too long, doc. I might be in prison before long.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I leave the office on weak knees.

It’s not that I’m still in love with Lupo. I’m not. Can’t be. It’s just… there’s that connection I’ve felt with him since the hotel in Boston. Like he’s the only key that fits inside my lock.

Okay, that’s way more sexual than I meant it to be.

But Lupo gets me in ways that I’ve never felt seen before. Even as I try to get Sarah to work on her piano lessons or clean broccoli for dinner or just take a quiet moment to myself, he’s in my thoughts. Probably because I haven’t left his home in days. That’s all it is. Exposure.

When Sarah’s better, and we hit her milestone, and I head to my next destination, I’ll be fine. I’ll get him out of my system when I leave, and that’ll be that. This will be a strange chunk of my memoirs, nothing more.

At dinner, Sarah barely touches her broccoli and pasta.

“Everything okay? I didn’t make it too lemony, did I? I followed Nonna’s recipe⁠—”

“It’s good,” Sarah says, her voice small.

Lupo says, “I like it lemony.”

But Sarah won’t meet my eyes, so that’s all I see. “Sarah, look at me.”

She does, and I know it before the thermometer confirms it, because there’s a flush too high in the cheeks. Her eyes are glassy too.

I grab the thermometer, and it reads 38.9 degrees Celsius. By the time I’ve read it twice, it’s 39.2, climbing, and every alarm I own goes off at once. Febrile neutropenia.

A common maintenance-phase emergency, the one that turns a normal childhood fever into a life-threatening event in hours or less. When a body has a suppressed white cell count, we can’t do anything at home. This is the thing that kills too many people, because they blow off the fever, thinking it’s only a fever.

I have never once had to face it with a child I tuck in at night.

“Sarah.” I keep my voice the bedside voice, the calm-because-she’s-watching voice. “We’re going to take a little trip to the hospital, sweetheart. Right now.”

“It’s bad?”

“It’s a be-careful, not a be-scared. But we go fast, okay?”

“Okay.”

I override the household’s panic by staying calm, even as I want to scream at everyone to move faster. Lupo has the car up before I finish the sentence. I call ahead as he drives.

His jaw is tight, his own healing wound forgotten. He keeps glancing at a sleeping Sarah in the mirror and then at me, reading my face for a number I won’t say out loud in front of her.

But I didn’t hold anything back from her. That’s not how he does things with her, so I don’t either. “It’s exactly as I told her. This is a be-careful, not a be-scared. It is unlikely to be nothing at all, but it could be. Regardless of what it is, they have the tools to help her.”

He takes that and refocuses on the road ahead. “Thank you.”

There’s more in that thank-you than either of us will ever say out loud.

He drops us off at the emergency bay, and I carry Sarah inside. Sarah isn’t triaged—since I called ahead, the antibiotics are already hung, and there’s a room ready for her. Blood cultures, broad-spectrum, saline drips, cold packs, all thrown at her because in febrile neutropenia you do not wait for certainty. You treat the instant you suspect. Fluids. Monitoring. Sarah, small in a big bed with a line in her arm, holding Pip and holding my hand, trusting me the way she always has. She falls asleep that way, and I don’t budge an inch all night long. Neither does Lupo, sitting in the corner of the room, monitoring every change, every beep.

At some point, he leaves to inform Diana about Sarah, and soon, she wheels into the room. She’s been here almost a week, and she looks thin. Thinner when she brushes her hand over Sarah’s cheek. She mutters something in Italian, then, “Thank you, Veda.”

“She will be better soon. We caught it⁠—”

“You caught it,” Lupo gently corrects me.

“Soon, Diana.”