Page 49 of Scandalously Yours

Kristopher

Iseemed to spend more time over at my old place than anywhere else and it was starting to drain on me. Today, I was supposed to take the children out for a few hours, and no matter how tired I was, I would never pass up any time I got to spend with them. I’d always been used to seeing them every day, and while their mother had always been aloof to some extent, I cherished the times I got to spend with them. I wanted to take them to the Chelsea Piers where Karter could practice at the batting cages, and Kaylee could get in a gymnastic lesson. I then promised to take them to their favorite pizzeria before spending the rest of the afternoon at Central Park.

I rode the elevator up to the penthouse, and expecting to see the children ready and waiting, it seemed odd that no one was inside once I got there. I placed my phone and keys on the foyer table and called out to them. “Karter... Kaylee... Hayley...”

I was about to go upstairs when Myrtle walked into the room with a broom. The housekeeper had been with the family since Karter was a year old. When she saw me standing there, she jumped as if she was surprised to see me.

“I’m sorry if I scared you,” I apologized. “Do you know where the children are?”

“You don’t know?” she asked, and I shook my head.

“No. Know what?” There was something in her voice when she asked that question, and it gave me pause.

“Little Kaylee got sick and was rushed to the hospital again.”

“What?” I scrubbed my hand down my face, unable to believe that Hayley would keep something like this from me. I grabbed my phone to see if I had inadvertently missed any messages, and I hadn’t. There wasn’t a single one from the mother of my children. I dialed her number immediately, but it went straight to voicemail. I cursed softly, then looked over at the other woman. “What was wrong with her?”

Her facial expression softened even more. “She had a seizure, Mr. Simon, and was unconscious when they took her from here.”

“Do you know which one?”

She shook her head. “Mrs. Simon just told me to finish cleaning, then she left with Mr. Karter in tow.”

“Thanks,” I told her.

I had a good idea of where she would’ve gone so I hurried out of the penthouse. It was daytime, so the traffic was atrocious. My baby girl had a seizure, and her mother hadn’t thought to even tell me. I wanted to believe it was the stress of the moment, but why hadn’t she called since. Her threats about keeping my daughter from me did cross my mind, but I refused to believe that she meant like this. Even she wasn’t this kind of a monster.

I finally made it to the Children’s Hospital, and as I suspected, it’d been where she had been rushed. The triage nurse gave me the room number. When I got there, no one was inside but a nurse, and my daughter, who was still lying unconscious in bed. I stood over her as the nurse notated her chart, and I noticed the pale coloring of her skin. I picked up her hand, which was abnormally dry and not soft like her skin usually was.

“Is she stable?” She appeared so, but I wanted to know from someone who had checked her out personally.

“She is, Dr. Simon. It was touch and go in the beginning, but we’ve gotten both her blood sugar and blood pressure back under control. Your wife mentioned that she’d had a seizure before arrival, and the EMTs stated that she’d had another in the ambulance.”

None of this made sense. I asked to see the chart, and after the nurse notated one more thing on it, she handed it over to me. I skimmed through the lab results that had been done so far, and while I was worried she had possibly gone into a diabetic coma, her blood sugar seemed just slightly elevated and certainly not at a level that would’ve caused that. Her blood pressure had been abnormally high; however, the last few readings were starting to look a lot better. I glanced over at the machines beside the bed, then breathed a sigh of relief that it was back in a normal range.

There were diabetic seizures, but I still wasn’t convinced that whatever was going on with her involved high blood sugar. All of her readings were practically normal which didn’t fit the symptoms. There had to be something else, potentially something underlying that no one had ever caught before. I tried to think as a doctor and not as her father to determine if there had been any negligence on the staff’s part. I couldn’t think of anything.

“Will you have the doctor come in here when he has a moment?” The nurse nodded, before leaving me alone with my daughter.

I moved to the chair and sat down. I then pulled up her online pediatrician records because I wanted to compare her lab results from her last check up to the numbers today. I had trusted she simply had a stomach bug before, but it was more than that now, and I intended to get to the bottom of it. As I continued to read though pages of notes from the doctor, I couldn’t help but wonder what was so different now.

I matched up almost every test, and outside of the high blood pressure, the one thing that kept coming back to me was the sodium levels in her blood. The last time that we were here, they were just barely elevated, but today, it was much higher. What was causing the excess salt in her body? And was that what sent her body into shock?

I was about to place a call when the door opened, and my ex walked in. She seemed surprised to see me, and almost nervous. The look of disgust I gave her didn’t even accurately express my true feelings for this woman. How was it possible to hate someone so much? I didn’t know, but I despised this woman with a bloody passion.

“What are you doing here?” she finally asked.

Even her voice sounded shaky. I looked between the chart, mobile medical records, and our daughter before shaking my head. “Were you even going to tell me that our daughter almost died?”

If I thought I had shaky control the other night, it had nothing on what I was feeling right now. Just the thought of our daughter dying had my own blood pressure rising. I wasn’t even just mad. I was scared. Well, terrified was a better word. Kaylee was five years old and so dependent on the two of us. We had a responsibility to her, and with her diabetes, that burden was even greater.

“It wasn’t that bad. I just didn’t want to hear anything from you about not getting her checked out. I—”

“She had a fucking seizure, Hayley.”

My ex appeared very nonchalant about it which only infuriated me more. She had never taken a big interest in the lives of our kids, depending on hired help to raise them when I wasn’t there. I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t just give them to me since she obviously didn’t want to be bothered with them. I then remembered everything she had done, and was still doing, was because of money. She wanted a sum well outside of what we’d agreed upon before getting married, and I wasn’t going to let her use our children to milk me out of more.

“It wasn’t that big of a deal. She looks fine now. You can go ahead and go home, and I’ll let you know when she wakes up from her nap.”

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