Chapter Text
Cam’s cough deepened over the next twenty-four hours.
What had started as dry and occasional had become ragged, wet, almost animal in its desperation. Arastoo sat beside her through the worst of it, wiping sweat from her brow with a cool cloth, helping her sip electrolyte water, coaxing her to take slow bites of rice or spoonfuls of broth. The rash had begun to spread, first down her chest, then around the sides of her neck—and her breathing had grown tight and shallow, as though her lungs were collapsing beneath the weight of her fever.
The doctor still didn’t have answers. Blood tests were running. The antibiotics for her confirmed UTI were working slowly, but Cam had been nearly too weak to walk the first evening they arrived. And now, she was in pain again, low, dull, unrelenting.
“It burns,” she whispered hoarsely from bed, eyes fluttering shut between breaths. “It’s like... glass.”
Arastoo stroked her back, helpless.
“It’s the infection, joonam. You’ve barely had any sleep. Let the meds work.”
Cam nodded faintly, but the tears behind her eyes never stopped pooling.
Later that evening, she rose quietly from bed and slipped into the master bathroom, turning the shower on as hot as she could stand. Arastoo let her go she needed to feel like herself again, needed to reclaim her skin from the sweat and discomfort of illness. He started down the stairs, intending to brew mint tea, and barely made it past the landing when he heard the scream. The scream tore through the house like something unnatural.
Arastoo didn’t even think. He dropped the mug he’d been holding, the shatter on tile barely registered, and sprinted up the stairs two at a time, heart slamming in his throat.
“Cam?!”
He didn’t wait for a reply. He knew that scream. He’d never heard it from her before, not like that, but he knew it in his bones.
When he burst into the bathroom, he found her collapsed half in, half out of the shower, her body curled and trembling under the pounding heat of the water. Her hands were pressed between her legs, streaks of bright red trailing down the tile and her thighs. Her mouth was open but soundless now, like the scream had torn her raw.
She looked up, and the expression on her face gutted him.
Terror. Not just fear, but annihilation. As if her world had ended and left her standing in its dust.
“There’s blood,” she gasped, the words tumbling over each other like broken glass. “Arastoo, there’s blood. I’m bleeding. Why am I bleeding?!”
Arastoo rushed toward her, already kicking off his sweats, stepping directly into the shower in his soaked T-shirt and boxers. She was naked, shivering and flushed and glowing with fever, but he barely saw that. He dropped to his knees, grabbing for her hands.
“Shh, Cam. Baby, you’re okay. You’re bleeding from the UTI, remember? The doctor said it might happen. The antibiotics are going to work, just give it”
But she wasn’t hearing him.
Her body convulsed suddenly, breath hitching, then shattering into sobs so jagged it sounded like she was choking. Her hands clawed at her stomach, her hair, her face. She began to shake uncontrollably.
“She’s dead,” Cam whispered, as if the words were a truth that had just risen from some pit in her chest. “She’s dead inside me.”
“No, Cam”
“I killed her,” she cried. “I let this happen, why didn’t I rest more, why did I go into that damn autopsy room, why was I working a double shift at the lab like I’m not—” Her chest heaved. “I’ve spent decades pulling babies out of mothers. Broken babies. Tiny fingers and crushed skulls and missing hearts”
Arastoo’s stomach turned.
“I have cut fetuses out of murder victims and now someone is going to cut one out of me,” she sobbed. “They are going to rip me open, Arastoo. Please don’t let them rip me open.”
“Cam,” he whispered, devastated.
“I’m not a mother. I’m not meant to be. My body’s a crime scene, I’m not a mother, I’m a coroner”
“Cam, look at me.”
But she was already gone again. Her hands clutched at her abdomen, smearing the blood across her skin in red streaks, her sobs rising in volume.
“I don’t want to meet my baby in a morgue, I can’t, I can’t”
Her words broke off in a scream as her muscles seized and she curled forward, wailing.
Arastoo felt his chest physically ache, like his ribs were splintering. He hadn’t known she’d been holding all this inside. Hadn’t realized how close the line between mother and medical examiner had become in her mind. And now it was consuming her.
He reached for her hand, quickly bringing it to the soft curve of her lower belly. He pressed it there, firm.
“Feel that,” he said, hoarse. “That’s her. She’s kicking, Cam. She’s here. She’s alive.”
Cam froze.
Then: a slow, insistent flutter against her palm. A kick.
“Oh” Her eyes filled with fresh tears. But this time, they were different. “That’s her.”
“That’s her,” Arastoo echoed, voice breaking, his forehead pressed to hers as the water beat down on both of them.
“I thought” she choked. “I thought I’d already failed her. That I don’t know how to be a mom.”
“You’re already a mom,” he whispered. “You love her. You’re carrying her. You felt that something was wrong. That’s what being a mother is.”
“I just want her to be okay,” Cam sobbed.
“She will be. She is. And so are you.”
Her body sagged into his arms then, boneless with exhaustion. The fever was still burning through her, but the worst of the panic had broken like a fever of its own. She buried her face into his soaked chest, breathing in short, soft shudders.
“I’m so tired,” she whispered.
“I know, pretty girl,” he murmured, brushing the wet hair from her face. “I’ve got you.” He dried her off gently, slowly. Carried her to bed.
She lay naked on the sheets, skin flushed and trembling, her breathing still shallow. When she was finally asleep, Arastoo reached into the nursery drawer beside the bed and pulled out one of the disposable pee pads he’d bought in a bulk pack for the baby’s future changing table. He slid it beneath Cam’s torso, moving softly so she wouldn’t wake.
He had done this for three nights now, quietly, gently, because she always cried when she woke up soiled. Too proud to admit it, too broken by the loss of control to pretend it didn’t hurt her.
She was asleep now. Soft and quiet and safe, the fever still clinging but no longer raging.
Arastoo crouched beside the bed and rested his head lightly on her belly, eyes fluttering shut.
“Are you doing okay in there, baby girl?” he whispered. His hand splayed across the curve of Cam’s abdomen. “You don’t know it yet, but you have the strongest mommy in the whole world.”
He stayed there a long time, listening. Not for movement, he’d felt enough to trust, but for silence.
He wanted his wife back.
But he knew what she needed more than anything else right now was rest. So he stayed on the floor, hand on her belly, guarding both his girls while they slept.