Adeline was curled into the corner of the couch with a laptop balanced on her knees. She looked up when I walked in, blinkinglike she needed a second to process. Then she scrambled upright.
“Zach? What are you doing here?” She pushed her hair back from her face, which absolutely did not help to make it look less like her immune system was under attack, and frowned. “You didn’t have to come.”
Her voice caught slightly but not because she was emotional. It was more like it just wasn’t strong enough to get through an entire sentence. She looked impressively unwell. Still gorgeous, of course, but there was no polite way to frame it—she was sick and she looked it.
Her eyes were glassy, her skin a little too flushed, and her shoulders half-caved like she didn’t have the strength to hold herself up properly. I took another step into the apartment and immediately sneezed.
It came with no warning and left me with zero dignity, and Adeline sighed, a tiny smile quirking at the corners of her lips. “You’re sick too, aren’t you?”
“Nope.”
She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Of course not, you look incredibly healthy.”
I shook my head. “That was unrelated.”
A soft, breathy laugh slipped out of her. “I told you we were all going to get sick from that pizza place. Welcome to reality.”
I opened my mouth to argue but sneezed again instead. She smiled, her eyes on mine like she was waiting for an admission of guilt.
Finally, I groaned and resigned myself to the fact that for the first time in years, I might actually be sick. “It’s probably just allergies.” I held out the folder. “I came to deliver this. As soon as you’ve signed, I’ll get out of your hair.”
Her smile faded a little, her gaze dropping down to the papers before she looked back up at me. “I’ll get a pen. This is long overdue.”
CHAPTER 16
ADELINE
Maybe it was because everyone in the house was already sick, but Zach went down faster than anyone I’d ever seen. One minute, he was standing in my kitchen pretending he hadn’t just sneezed hard enough to rattle the cabinets, and the next, he was slumped over the counter, reading through my divorce papers while sagging a little more by the second.
I watched him for just one more moment, then walked over and pressed the back of my hand to his forehead. He glanced up at me, those green eyes shot through with red and a bit hazy now.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“I was just confirming what I already knew,” I said. “You’re running a fever.”
“It’s allergies.”
I sighed. “Allergies won’t cause a fever.”
“It’s not a fever. I never get sick.”
I shook my head and smiled, turning toward the cabinet where I kept myarsenal.Children, it turned out, required a level of pharmaceutical preparedness unlike anything I ever could’ve imagined before I’d had them.
“Youneverget sick?” I asked, pulling out a bottle.
“Never,” he confirmed. “It’s been years. It can’t be that.”
“Well, I hate to break it to you, but itisthat. It’s exactly that.” I picked up a bottle of the tablets I’d been taking and turned back to him. “You’ll need two of those now and another two in four hours.”
He glanced at the bottle. “Thanks, but I don’t need it.”
“You do.” I crossed my arms and waited for him to relent, noticing that his cheeks were flushed now, but the rest of his face had gone ashen. “You’re taking the medicine, Zach. We need to break that fever.”
He stared up at me, his lips pursing. He shook his head, then seemed a little woozy for having done it. “It’s not a fever. It’s just cold in here.”
“Then why are you hot?”
He managed a very weak smirk. “I was born this way?”
