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“Hello?” Farren answered.
Before Gramma said a word, she could hear Harley’s desperate screams in the background. It wasn’t a cry she recognized. Farren’s eyes widened with concern.
“Farren, honey, you need to come home,” Gramma said, her voice a little more frazzled than usual.
“Gramma, what’s wrong?”
“It’s Harley. I can’t console him. I’m worried he’s sick,” Gramma explained.
“I’ll be right there!”
Farren threw her phone in her bag without even checking that it had hung up and shot up out of her seat.
“I’m sorry, Raphe, I have to go.”
She left him sitting in the booth of the coffee house. She could just barely hear him calling to her as she ran out the door, “What’s going on? Is everything okay?”
She ran across the street and through the vast parking lot of the Convention Center to get into her Chevy Spark and rushed as quickly as she could back to Gramma’s.
*
Harley was still crying when Farren walked into Gramma’s apartment a short time later. She rushed over to him and took him in her arms.
“He’s running a fever,” Gramma exclaimed, pressing a cool, wet washcloth to Harley’s tiny forehead. “I put him in a lukewarm bath that seemed to help for a little bit, but he just seems to be getting worse.”
Farren could feel the heat radiating off his little body as she held him to her chest. She felt panicked and wished that Rogan was here. She got her phone out and scrolled through her numbers until she located the one for Harley’s pediatrician. She dialed the number and reached an after-hours nurse.
She let them know what was going on and asked what she should do. They advised her to go ahead and get him to a 24-hour clinic to have him looked at. The nurse on the phone seemed so calm and patient, but Farren felt anything but. She was frantic, wanting to act but not knowing what to do.
When she hung up the phone, she started gathering Harley’s things.
“Gramma, I’m sorry, I have to go. Thank you so much for watching him for me tonight. I’m sorry about this,” she exclaimed in a disorganized string of sentences.
“Everything will be fine, honey,” Gramma assured her.
She nodded, pressed a quick kiss to Gramma’s cheek, and then hurried out the door to get Harley down to the car.
Just as she was fastening his carrier into its base in her back seat, she heard footsteps walk up behind her and a man’s voice startled her.
“Princess?”
She turned to see who had approached, and the feeling of dread amplified within her.
“Dad,” she acknowledged with surprise, irritated that he would call her that as though all these years hadn’t gone by without him being here.
“I was hoping I’d run into you here. Is everything okay there?” he asked, jutting his chin towards the back of the car where Harley was now buckled in.
Farren was too frazzled to stop and hear what he had to say.
“No, I’m sorry, but I have to go.”
He put an arm up blocking her passage. It sent a worried chill through her as she looked up to search his face. What was he getting at? She wasn’t above kneeing him in the groin if it meant getting her baby the help he needed right then.
“Here,” he said as he handed her a folded up scrap of paper. “I was hoping we could talk. Call me.”
She took his number from him, and without a word, she rushed around to the driver’s side and got in. Before she closed her door, he called out to her.
“I really wanted to talk to you,” he repeated.
