Page 129 of Redline Baby

That’s the only thing I know how to do when Maren looks at me like that.

I sit beside her while Rue is treated and monitored. I get water when Maren forgets she hasn’t had any. I answer questions when she’s too tired to remember what time Rue last ate. I let Rue hold two of my fingers when she wakes up frightened and doesn’t want another stranger touching her.

Slowly, the situation stops feeling like an emergency. Her breathing eases. The fever begins to come down. The tension in Maren’s shoulders releases by degrees instead of all at once. By a little after five, the doctor is comfortable sending them home with instructions, medication, and strict directions about what would mean coming back.

I drive them home.

On the way, we stop at a twenty-four-hour pharmacy to fill the prescription. While Maren handles the paperwork at the counter, I wander into the small toy aisle near the back.

There are stuffed animals on one shelf. Cheap ones. Too bright. A pink unicorn with one eye slightly higher than the other. A bear wearing a heart-shaped shirt. A round dusty-blue bunny with long ears. I pick up the bunny. Some part of me thinks immediately of Kit. I buy it.

By the time I make sure Maren and Rue are settled, make Rue promise me she’ll rest instead of building submarines, and finally leave, dawn is starting to gray the sky.

It’s after six when I unlock my own front door.

Nearly four hours since I left.

Nearly four hours during which I did not check my phone even once because all of my attention was on Rue and Maren, and because I assumed—wrongly, stupidly—that Kit would sleep through the whole thing the way he usually does.

He hasn’t.

The moment I step inside, I see him.

Kit is on the couch.

Awake.

His knees are pulled to his chest, the blanket from our bed wrapped around his shoulders. His eyes are red. Duffy is clutched against his chest with both hands.

He is staring at the blank television.

I set the pharmacy bag and the small paper bag from the toy aisle on the kitchen counter.

Kit looks at me. His jaw is set. He does not look happy. I can’t blame him.

“Hey,” I say quietly, already crossing the room. “I’m sorry it took so long.”

He doesn’t answer immediately. And in the silence before he does, I get my first real look at him. Not merely tired. Not merely awake too early. Wrecked.

I know instantly what those hours must have been like for him: waking to an empty side of the bed with my half-asleep explanation too blurred in his memory to hold onto.

“You left,” he says.

The words are small.

“I did.”

“I don’t—”

He stops. Swallows hard. “I woke up and you were gone, and I couldn’t remember if you actually told me or if I dreamed it. I lay there for like twenty minutes staring at the ceiling trying to figure out if that conversation actually happened.”

His voice catches.

“It didn’t feel real. It felt like…”

He presses his mouth shut.

“Like what, baby?”