“What is it?” he demanded.
She stammered, paling, obviously afraid of him.“Je m’excuse, monsieur, je pensais que vous etiez—”
“I know who you thought I was,” he interrupted abruptly. He noted her pallor, and the fact that although her hijab was slipping, revealing thick black hair, she made no attempt to fix it. Instead, she squeezed the baby to her chest almost frantically.
A loud wail erupted, a shrill that sounded so agonized that he became afraid. Instinctively, he knew something was wrong. “I asked you what the problem was, Samia!”
“It’s Benji. He has been crying all afternoon, and he is hot. So very hot.”
“Did you take his temperature?”
She looked like she was about to cry.“Oui. C’est quarante—”
“Fortydegrees?” he echoed. “How is that even possible?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“And where the hell is his mother?”
Samia glanced down at the doorway. “She left to go into town to get some baby ibuprofen. We are out of it. When she left, he was only 38 degrees. But now, in a matter of minutes, it’s gone up.”
Nathanael felt his legs go weak. He didn’t know much about medicine, but he was sure that a fever of a hundred and four Fahrenheit was enough to kill a child of that size. They needed to do something immediately. He had medical staff on standby, but they were based in town, on contract only to respond if there was an emergency. He did a quick calculation. In the time it would take them to get here, the child could be lost. The only solution was for him to take the baby to the hospital himself.
“Get a baby seat,” he barked. “We leave now!”
Panting, frantic, she shoved the blanketed bundle into his arms and ran off to do as she was told. He had to shift his weight to regain his balance so that he didn’t drop the baby.
He tried not to look down at the bundle in his hands, but he couldn’t keep his eyes from averting to the wiggling, crying infant.
And for the first time, he looked into the face of his son. Really looked. The face was crunched and crumpled, distorted by hours of screaming. Eyes screwed tight, sweat pouring out of the dark brown curls.
It crushed his heart to think of this tiny creature in so much pain. Pain he couldn’t even communicate because he was so young.
Nathanael felt fear and desperation. He didn’t know what was wrong with his son, but he knew that these next few hours would be crucial. He needed to get his child to the hospital.
His child.His son.
The words echoed in his skull.
He didn’t know what he had expected to feel when he looked upon this child, but it wasn’t the feeling of absolute loving surrender that overcame him. He was assaulted by emotions he had never felt before, a combination of tenderness and fierceness that told him that he would kill or die to protect this child. He would slay, destroy with his bare hands, anyone or anything that got between him and this precious baby.
Samia emerged from the nursery bearing an infant seat, clutching it to her as if it was a baby, too. She was out of breath, panting hard.
“Let’s go,” he ordered. He began taking the steps two by two, headed back outside to the waiting vehicle.