Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 61

Chapter 56: The Fever Dreams

Cameron’s POV

The observation window became my entire world for forty-eight hours.

Frank had been right about the critical monitoring period-the first two days after taking on the experimental treatment were when a patient’s body either accepted what had been done to it or rejected it violently.

I’d read the documents that he’d given me, studied the statistics, understood logistically what we were watching for.

Understanding it intellectually did nothing to prepare me for watching my sister fight for her life through a reinforcer glass keeping me away from her.

The fever started six hours after the infusion ended.

I watched her temperature climb on the monitors-98.6, then 99.4, then 101.2, climbing steadily despite the ice packs the nurses kept rotating, despite the cooling blankets they’d wrapped around her, trying to get her temperature back to normal..this was normal, it was listed but seeing it happen real life was another source of pain.

By midnight of the first night, she was at 103.8 and delirious, thrashing against the restraints they’d had to use to keep her from pulling out her lines.

“This is normal,” Frank kept saying, appearing every few hours to check her vitals, but mainly, to reassure me with words that was beginning to sound hollow as the hours went by.

“Her body is mounting an immune response. This is actually what we want to see-evidence that her system is engaging with the treatment.”

“She looks like she’s dying,” I said flatly, watching through the glass as two nurses worked to get her still enough to take a blood draw.

“She’s not dying. She’s fighting.” Frank put a hand on my shoulder. “I know it doesn’t look like it, but trust me-I’ve seen this before. The fever is her immune system going to war with the cancer cells. It’s brutal but it’s working.”

My parents arrived around 2 AM, despite my instructions to stay home and rest. They didn’t need to be here for this stage and I wanted to keep the worse from them but My parents were as stubborn as miles which was where we had gotten it from.

My mother took one look at Sedona through the glass and had to sit down, what she saw having shook her than she expected.

“This is normal?” she asked, her voice thin, filled with fear as she gripped my hand as an anchor.

“Cameron, she looks-”

“I know what she looks like. Frank says it’s expected.”

13

< Fever Dream…

“Expected doesn’t mean it’s not terrifying to see her like that.”

She wasn’t wrong about that.

Claim

We settled into a vigil-my parents in chairs I’d dragged from the waiting area, me standing by the window because I couldn’t make myself sit down, couldn’t make myself look away for more than a few seconds at a time.

Rachel and Enzo came by in the morning, Enzo taking Molly home after she started to fuss, Rachel staying to sit with my mother.

The fever continued climbing. 104.2. 104.7. 105.1.

“That’s too high,” I said to Frank when he appeared for his next check. “That’s brain damage territory.”

“We’re managing it. She’s on maximum cooling protocols and antipyretics. If it goes above 105.5, we’ll take additional measures.”

“What additional measures?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

But he looked worried, and that worried me more than the numbers on the screen.

The second night was worse than the first.

Sedona’s fever had gotten higher than it was before, sitting at 105.3. it was not climbing anymore but not falling either, her body was stuck in a battle that we couldn’t see from within, only from the outside.

She’d stopped thrashing, which the nurses said was good, which was a sign that the worse had happened and that meant they could take off the restraints.

But she was too still, quiet, not even looking at anything. I couldn’t tell if she was asleep or awake.

And then, around 3 AM, she started talking.

It wasn’t coherent sentences first, just fragments of a conversation that didn’t connect to anything that would make sense.

Something about tennis practice. Something about being late.

And then: “Nick. Where’s Nick? I need to check on Nick.”

I was on my feet immediately, pressed against the glass. “Sedona-”

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