Chapter 2 - The Red Light
The woman in the doorway was Sarah Miller, Toby’s legal guardian and aunt. She wore an immaculate camel-hair coat, styled hair, and a face carved into a mask of maternal anguish that vanished the second she saw the broth sitting untouched on the bedside tray.
""Cut,"" Sarah muttered, dropping her wrist and lowering the stabilizer. Her voice was flat, devoid of the weeping tremor that usually filled her online broadcasts. ""Toby, honey, we talked about this. You have to say the line while looking toward the lens, not Clara.""
Clara stood up slowly, her uniform rustling in the tense silence. ""Sarah, he has a low-grade fever. Dr. Jennings ordered complete cognitive rest until his labs come back from pathology.""
""And Dr. Jennings isn't the one paying for his experimental immunoglobulin treatments, is he?"" Sarah countered coolly, sliding the expensive phone into her designer handbag. She walked toward the bed, reaching out with manicured nails to wipe a tear from Toby’s cheek. The boy flinched, pulling inward like a beaten animal, before quickly freezing and forcing his eyes downward.
""The livestream reached two hundred thousand concurrent viewers yesterday,"" Sarah said, turning back toward Clara with a brilliant, predatory smile. ""The GoFundMe is fifty thousand dollars shy of the target for the Zurich clinic. People care, Clara. They want to see him. They need to see him fighting.""
""He isn't fighting an audience, Sarah. He’s fighting a bacterial infection,"" Clara said, keeping her tone strictly level, though her fingernails dug into the palms of her scrub pockets.
Sarah smiled faintly, tapping her manicured nails on the footboard. ""Well, tonight is the milestone stream. If he hits one million subscribers, an anonymous donor has pledged to match every dollar."" She leaned down until her lips were inches from the boy’s ear. ""You want to get better, don't you, Toby?""
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Toby swallowed hard, nodding numbly without raising his eyes.
""Good boy,"" Sarah whispered. She turned to leave, her heels clicking crisply against the floor. But as Clara stepped closer to adjust Toby's IV line, her eyes caught something tucked under the corner of his mattress: an empty blister pack of synthetic thyroid hormones, hidden beneath the pastel blue fleece.
