Chapter 3: The Fever and the Paper Knife
The mastitis struck at two o’clock in the morning on day twenty.
It did not begin as an ache; it hit like an iron wedge driven through my left pectoral muscle. The blocked ducts had become violently inflamed, turning the tissue of my breast into a hard, feverish stone that pulsed with every heartbeat. By four in the morning, my core temperature had spiked to 103.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Violent, involuntary rigors seized my muscles, rattling my teeth so hard that my jaw ached.
I was tangled in two heavy down quilts, shivering as if I were marooned on an Arctic floe, yet sweat was running in dirty rivulets down my ribcage.
Beside the bed, Lily was screaming with hunger, while Rowan was clawing at his swaddle, his face purpling with infant rage. I reached out an arm, trying to leverage myself toward the edge of the mattress, but the room tilted violently on an invisible axis. My head crashed back against the headboard, bile rising in my throat.
The bedroom door clicked open. Harrison stood in the frame, immaculate in his charcoal suit, his silk tie knotted with mathematical precision. His briefcase hung from his left hand.
He looked down at me, his gaze dripping with disgust.
“What is this pathetic display now?” he sneered. “Playing the invalid so you can miss the eight-thirty appointment at the lab? You think if you lie in bed looking like a corpse, I’ll forget about the eight hundred dollars I spent?”
“Harrison…” I gasped, my throat so parched the word sounded like sandpaper on pine. “Please. I have an acute infection. Mastitis. My fever is nearly one-hundred and four. I need… I need you to bring the antibiotic from the downstairs cabinet… or call the clinic. I can’t stand.”
Harrison laughed. A dry, rattling bark that had no humor in it.
“I am an executive, Chloe, not your orderly. If you can’t feed them, give them tap water. I have booked an executive car for seven-forty-five sharp. If you are not in that backseat with those two children and their sample requisitions, do not bother being here when I get home from the office.”
He reached into the breast pocket of his tailored jacket. He withdrew a crisp, legal-sized white document, folded neatly in thirds. With a flick of his wrist, he slapped it directly across my fevered face.
The paper cut my lower lip. The tang of fresh blood joined the dry taste of bile in my mouth.
“The uncontested petition for marital dissolution,” he said coldly. “I’ve already signed page twelve. If you fail to appear at the lab today, sign it and leave your keys on the island. My mother will pack your things and deposit them on the front lawn.”
From the hallway behind him, Eleanor’s voice floated in, sugary and poisonous. “Don’t be too hard on her, son. If she’s terrified of the truth, it’s only natural her body would fake a fever. Come down and have your eggs, Harrison. Let the guilty stew in their own bed.”
They left. The front door clicked shut. The house fell into an icy, hollow silence, punctured only by the ragged cries of my hungry twins.
I lay there for five minutes, staring at the white legal paper resting on my chest. The Circuit Court of the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit, DuPage County, Illinois. In re the Marriage of Harrison Vance and Chloe Vance.
A strange, unnatural calm washed over me, lowering my heart rate despite the raging fever. The shivering stopped. The desperation died. A cold, diamond-hard clarity crystallized in the center of my chest.
He had already signed it.
I forced my legs over the side of the mattress. Every movement felt as if someone were driving railroad spikes into my pelvis and breast, but I did not stop. I crawled to the en-suite bathroom, swallowed three ibuprofen from the medicine cabinet with water cupped from the sink, and ran a washcloth under scalding water. I pressed the steaming terrycloth against my inflamed chest, gritting my teeth until the tears ran silent and clean, working the blockage until the milk began to flow in hot, steady drops.
I nursed Rowan. Then I nursed Lily.
With both infants finally resting against my lap, I grabbed my smartphone from the vanity. My hands were perfectly steady now.
I opened my private banking portal. Before our wedding, my father had insisted on keeping my premarital inheritance—money left from my grandmother’s estate—in a separate credit union account in Terre Haute. The balance stood at $31,420.00. It was not an empire, but it was an escape hatch.
Next, I dialed a number I had memorized during my sophomore year at Northwestern.
The call connected on the second ring.
“Chloe?” The voice was crisp, authoritative, yet immediately warm. Valerie Vance-Montgomery—no relation to Harrison, an ironic twist of fate—had been my sorority sister and was now a senior partner specializing in complex family law at a boutique firm in the Loop. “Chloe, it’s seven in the morning. Are you alright? How are the twins?”
“Valerie,” I said, my voice steady, stripped of all tears. “I need you to listen to me carefully. I am in an active hostile domestic environment. I am being subjected to emotional coercion and systematic slander regarding the paternity of my children. My husband has just served me with signed dissolution papers while I am suffering from acute postpartum mastitis.”
A pause on the line. I could hear the rapid clicking of a high-end ballpoint pen on Valerie’s desk.
“Are you safe physically?” she asked, her voice dropping into litigation mode.
“Physically, yes. Mentally, I am fully armed. I need to know the statutory custody defaults for infants under twelve months in Illinois.”
“Section 602.7 of the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act,” Valerie rattled off without hesitation. “Unless the mother is demonstrably unfit, actively institutionalized, or addicted, the courts will not separate nursing infants from their primary caregiver, period. Furthermore, Cook and DuPage county family courts will never split twin siblings. Paternity disputes do not negate your primary custody presumption. What is Harrison’s adjusted gross income this tax year?”
“His base salary is two-hundred and twenty thousand. With executive performance bonuses, his W-2 was nearly three-hundred and ten thousand.”
“Then under the revised Illinois income shares model,” Valerie said, her voice turning razor-sharp, “he is looking at an absolute minimum statutory child support baseline of three to four thousand dollars a month for twins, plus mandatory health insurance coverage and fifty percent of all un-reimbursed medical expenses. If he is pressuring you, Chloe, do not sign a single sheet of paper until I review it.”
“He already signed the petition, Val,” I whispered, looking down at the legal document on the carpet. “He gave me the knife. He just doesn’t know I’m going to use it.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“Draft a formal custody and child support agreement. Make it ironclad. Full legal and residential custody to me. Monthly child support fixed at thirty-five hundred. I will surrender my interest in the Naperville house if he signs away all parental dispute claims without contesting. And Val? Keep your phone near you today.”
“Done,” Valerie said. “Chloe? Destroy him.”
I hung up.
I walked into the nursery, dressed Lily and Rowan in their warmest cotton sleepers, and strapped them into their infant carriers. Then, while waiting for the car service, I walked into the hallway and placed one more call.
Down in Indiana, the phone rang four times before my father’s deep, baritone rumble filled the receiver.
“Hello, Chloe girl?” Elias Miller sounded like he was standing in the middle of a soybean field, the autumn wind rustling against the microphone. “Why are you calling before eight? The babies okay?”
“Dad,” I said, keeping the tremor out of my tone. “I need you to drop whatever you’re doing. Go into the spare bedroom on the second floor. Open the bottom drawer of the antique oak dresser where Grandma kept the tin lockbox.”
“The old heirloom box?” Elias asked, his tone shifting into confusion. “What in heaven’s name are you looking for, Chloe?”
“The photographs from the summer of 1954,” I said, my voice tightening. “The ones taken down by the Wabash River before Grandpa enlisted. Find the photograph of him shirtless, hauling the timber off the flatbed. The clearest print you can find.”
There was a long silence on the line. My father was a quiet man of the soil, but he was far from slow.
“Chloe,” he said softly, his voice dropping an octave into pure paternal gravity. “Is that boy Harrison acting up about the babies’ looks?”
“Dad. Please. Just find the picture. Put it in an overnight express envelope and send it to the address I’m about to text you. Don’t tell Mom yet. Just get it to me.”
“It’ll be at the Naperville post office by ten tomorrow morning,” my father said, his voice hard as quarry stone. “And Chloe? You remember whose blood runs in your veins. You don’t let those city people make you bow your head.”
“Never, Dad,” I whispered, and disconnected.
