Page 102 of A Manny for Christmas

I feel completely violated.

Now I know how women must feel every day.

Daisy sleeps in till nine, and I may or may not make good on my promise to myself to monitor her temperature every five minutes or so. In fact, I bring my phone into her room and sit myself on her bedroom floor. There’s no way I’m leaving her alone when she’s ill. I take her temperature so often that I could plot a graph with readings nought-point-one degrees apart.

As it comes down to a level my fevered browsing of the Mumsnet website deems ‘safe’, I allow myself to relax a little. And by the time she’s awake, she’s well enough rested that it takes the edge off however crap she’s presumably feeling.

Not to mention, the realisation that she’s avoided a day of school and the prospect of a day in front of the TV have her ecstatic.

‘I’m staying at home?’ she asks for the fourth time. ‘Wiv you?’

‘Yeah. That okay with you, princess?’

‘It’sgoodwiv me,’ she tells me before coughing chestily all over me.

Nice.

We have a pyjama day, and it’s fun. Daisy’s on decent form, all things considered. She’s happy but clearly wiped out, so we turn on the tree lights in the living room, and put the TV on in there instead of the den, and burrow under her pink-and-white duvet as she nibbles half-heartedly on the buttered toast she insisted she wanted.

We watch Encanto.

Twice.

And, when Molly gets home with Toby, she finds me on the sofa, watching re-runs ofGrand Designs, an unconscious Daisy sprawled over my chest.

I’m pretty content, actually, and if the barn refurb on screen wasn’t so compelling, I would have been tempted to take a nap myself. Daisy’s keeping me cosy, and her body temperature has stayed low enough that I’m not too worried about our bodily contact overheating her.

She’s so relaxed, so innocent in her sleep, that it makes something warm and right unfurl in my chest. I stare in awe at her tiny face, so alike her mother’s. I map the blue veins on her eyelids. The thick golden-brown eyelashes fanning her cheeks. The impossibly fine baby hairs at her temple. She’s so tiny. So fragile. And yet resilient as fuck.

This is all so new to me. I don’t know how to do this. How to enjoy her without freaking the hell out every time she gets a cough or her body temperature spikes. How to straddle that exhausting emotional whirlwind of adoration and gratitude and terror.

And yet, today’s felt like a test that I’ve passed. I’m sure, given Molly’s reasonably blase attitude to Daisy’s fever on the phone earlier, that most experienced parents would consider it a minor test, but I feel like a champion. A little girl was sick on my watch, and we made it through.

Molly clocks our little scene, and her eyes go feral.

I raise my eyebrows in question as Toby clatters in behind her. ‘You okay?’

‘Yeah.’ She swallows. ‘You just look very… sweet with her, that’s all.’

I grin. I haven’t even had a chance to shower today, but I have a feeling I’m doing it for my girlfriend right now.

‘How about you, mate?’ I ask Toby in a whisper. ‘How was your day?’

He trudges towards me, head down, and throws himself into my free side with enough force that I let out a softoof.

‘Fine,’ he mutters into my armpit, his voice muffled.

My eyebrows wing up again, and Molly hesitates. ‘I don’t think he’s having a great time with the nativity rehearsals.’

That gets my attention. I poke him in the side. ‘That true, mate? Is that little dickhead giving you a hard time again?’

‘Max!’ Molly says, shocked, but it gets a small giggle out of Toby.

‘Tell me,’ I say to him.

He stays where he is. ‘He’s being mean to me,’ he tells my armpit.

‘Mean, how?’

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