It’s a pill.

“Drink,” he orders.

A cool glass is pressed against her lips and she takes the gulp of water, swallowing down the pill.

“This will make you feel better,” he says. An empty promise.

He clenches his teeth together, muscles protruding from his jaw. His fingers run through the strands of her golden waves.

Hearing his words and feeling his body pressed against hers lessens the torment twisting inside of her. Or perhaps she swallowed some of it down. She takes deep breaths, trying to manage the agony. He holds her, rests her head on his chest, and dabs the sweat from her forehead with a towel. He pays no mind to the fact that contact with her skin soaks his nice silk shirt. That her sweat drenches the mattress and seeps into the foam, ruining her bed. That the blood spilling from between her legs stains his pants and sets his stomach on fire.

Of all the possible worries in the moment, he only wants her pain to stop. He wants her to be okay. He wants to fix her. But she is crumbling in his hands.

All of his work . . . his love . . . crumbling.

He traces his fingers down her neck and shoulders but feels no further movement, her heartbeat slow and her breath steady. Her skin is yellow, reminding him of a jaundice patient in a ward. She has been sick for a while now, rotting from the inside out before his very eyes.

(Because her body is rejecting you.)

He curses himself. And the signs were all there. Despite the onset—the slow heart rate, the wet, heavy breathing, the cramps (the damn cramps)—he thought the symptoms would abate. That continuing his treatment would eventually cure her. His damn hubris. It didn’t. She hasn’t been getting better. Only devastatingly worse, as if she is relapsing, collapsing into herself like a dying star, her health now far out of his reach, shriveling away inwardly to a place he cannot go.

And he can’t fix what he does not understand: How she can be cured from her original ailment only to self-destruct years later.

(Because her body couldn’t grow with you inside.)

The sickness began as a slight cough, the ones that harbor in the depths of your chest, scratching at your throat when it is just a bit too cold outside.

“Daddy?” she started one day as they were sitting together, him fixing her hair back up into pigtails, her sucking on a lollipop. Her golden locks had become so long and unruly, these appointments were doubled to twice a week.

“Yes, my sweet?” he replied, focusing his eyes on the part of her scalp.

Her hands were gliding over her stuffed blue dog, her fingers ripping ever so slightly into the fabric.

“I don’t feel too well.” She coughed.

“What do you mean?”

He finished and dropped the brush, alarmed that she could feel ill at all.

“I feel . . . cold.”