But he'd known that acting that way would only make her resent him, eventually. That he could tell her a thousand times not to stick her finger into a lightsocket, it would be the time that he didn't catch her in time and she actually did it that stuck in her memory. And that no matter how carefully he tried to keep her safe, she would inevitably find ways to get herself in trouble that he'd never even imagined, and as an author it wasn't like he was lacking in creativity. That was just the way children were.
So he had loved her, cared for her, and watched over her, but never let himself get too carried away.
Then he had lost his daughter too, and suddenly if felt as if the way he'd done things had been wrong all along, even though he knew logically that there was little he could have done to change the way things had turned out in Silent Hill (aside from perhaps not listening to the obviously insane woman, and tossing the Flauros into the first trashcan he'd seen after getting it, but who could say if things would really have turned out better if Alessa had been able to complete her own plan, whatever it had been?).
Which was why when he saw the tiny baby he'd been given as a replacement (not a good enough one, nothing could ever be a good enough replacement, though with each day that passed by he realized that it became less and less likely that he'd be able to bring himself to harm her if it turned out she was only a trick of that thing) for his Cheryl had a touch of pink in her cheeks, even though she felt perfectly fine to his hand, he went running for his emergency kit when in the past he wouldn't have thought anything of it.
Rationally he knew that there probably wasn't anything to worry about. She felt fine, she was acting fine, and there wasn't a single other sign that anything was wrong. Even if she was sick badly enough to freak out about it, there wasn't anything he'd be able to do about. If he took her to a doctor they'd take one look between the papers that all said his daughter was seven and the almost newborn baby he had now and the next thing he'd know he'd lose her too. And probably be thrown in jail as a kidnapper, but that wasn't nearly as terrifying a threat. If she ever got really sick or injured he might just need to do what he'd told himself he never would and take her back to Silent Hill, back to Alchemilla hospital, and hope that Lisa's monster or ghost or whatever she could be called was still haunting its hallways and had enough of her mind left to do her job, because any living medical practitioners would have to be criminally negligent not to call the police on him.
Rationally he knew all of that. But logic had little to do with his thoughts as a father who had just recently lost his daughter and who would do anything to hold onto the part of her he had left. So it was in a near-blind panic that he tore through the contents of the emergency kit, at last finding the rectal thermometer that he'd thought he would never need to use again once Cheryl was old enough to hold the regular one that he kept in his medicine cabinet under her tongue.
As he dabbed Vaseline onto the end, hoping that it wasn't possible for it to have gone bad since the last time he'd needed it, he thought back on the way his first Cheryl had used to react to having her temperature taken and smiled wryly. "I'm sorry, honey," he said as he settled the baby across his lap and tugged down her diaper. "You aren't going to like this."
He twisted his watch on his wrist until he could see its face and waited until the second hand was exactly on the twelve to slide the thermometer in. Immediately she began mewling plaintively, a sound that reminded him of a lost kitten calling out for its mother, and began to squirm.
"Shh, shh," he hushed her, stroking her back with one hand, trying to hold her as still as possible with the other, and keeping his eyes glued to his watch so he'd know the moment two minutes was up. He wished that he'd been able to push his worry out of his mind, that he wasn't doing something she disliked to her for the very first time for what he knew would probably turn out to be nothing, but he had to know that for sure. "Hold on, just a little more and it will be over."
As if she understood him, she quieted until she was just whimpering softly, and he was struck for the first time by how quiet she always was when she was hurting. Always had been, even when she'd been another girl. He'd noticed, of course, that she never screamed when she was upset, that she never wailed at the various bumps and booboos that came with being a toddler in a body she hadn't quite gotten the hang of yet, that when she had a scrape that would need a bandaid she'd hold it up for him to see with solemn eyes and stay mostly quiet even when he painted iodine over it to make sure it was clean, but when she'd been his first Cheryl he'd never thought anything of it except to feel lucky at having such an unfussy child.
It was only now, knowing all that he did, if it was a sign of that other girl in this baby. If it had been a sign of their connection to each other in his other Cheryl. Because when he stopped to think about it, what hurt could possibly compare to being burned alive, even if the memories of it were buried somewhere deep in her subconscious (which he wasn't always entirely sure they were, when she looked at him with eyes that seemed much too knowing for a child only a few months old). How much pain would it take to make someone who had spent seven years with their body caught and held in the moment before what should have been their agonizing death scream?
Two minutes passed and he removed the thermometer. As he'd suspected, the faint pink in her cheeks turned out to be nothing; she was less than a degree warmer than average, within the margin of error the instructions told him to allow.
But he found that that was little comfort, with the thoughts that were now troubling him.