He Left My Fever for His Ex, So I Took Our Daughter novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: 104 Degrees
Leah collapses with a fever, her daughter calls the ex-wife, and her husband walks into the hospital the next morning with a lie.
The paramedics carried me out of my own house on a stretcher while the whole street watched.
Two hours earlier, my husband had kissed my forehead and told me he had to work late.
Tobin had his good coat on and a folder of papers under his arm.
I was sitting on the edge of the couch, shaking, with a thermometer that said 104.2.
"You're burning up," he said. "Go to bed, drink some water. I'll be back when I can."
"Tobin, I can't stand up."
"I know. I'm sorry. Quarterly numbers."
He kissed me again, on the same spot, and the front door closed behind him.
Maisie was asleep upstairs. She was two years old and I was the only adult in the house.
I made it to the kitchen for a glass of water.
The floor tilted, and the glass hit the tile before I did.
I woke up with my cheek on the cold floor and Maisie's face an inch from mine.
"Mama up," she said. "Mama up, up."
I tried. My arms wouldn't hold.
She patted my face with both hands, then ran out of the room.
I heard the tablet chime in the living room, the one Tobin had set up so she could video call people.
A voice came through the speaker, small and tinny.
"Maisie? Sweetheart, where's your daddy? Why are you in the kitchen?"
It was Ingrid.
Tobin's ex-wife. The woman he'd never fully let go of in five years of marriage.
Her face filled the screen Maisie was dragging back across the tile.
She saw me on the floor.
Her expression changed at once. "Leah? Leah, can you hear me?"
I made a sound.
"Okay. Okay, don't move. Maisie, is the front door locked? Can you go and pull the little lever for me?"
Maisie went. I heard the lock turn.
Ingrid was already talking to somebody else, fast and level. She gave my address without looking it up.
I don't remember the rest until the neighbors on the sidewalk and the cold air on my face.
At the hospital, a doctor with a tired voice told me my kidneys were infected and my temperature had been high enough to put me in danger.
"Whoever called this in probably saved you a seizure," he said.
I lay under two blankets with an IV in my arm, and a nurse brought Maisie in from the waiting room wearing a hospital sticker.
My sister Britt works the night shift in this ER.
She had come in on her day off and was sitting by the bed with her arms crossed.
"Where is he?" she asked.
"Work."
"At two in the morning."
I looked at my phone.
Nine missed calls from me, all to Tobin. Nothing back.
I opened the app that shows where our phones are. We'd turned it on after Maisie was born so we could always find each other.
His dot sat on Linden Court, across the river.
I knew that address.
It was Ingrid's building.
Britt looked at the screen and said a word I won't write down.
"Don't call him," she said. "Let him walk in on his own."
At seven in the morning, he did.
He came through the ER doors with a paper cup of coffee in each hand and the folder still under his arm.
He looked rested.
He kissed Maisie's head first. Then he came toward me with a smile ready.
"There she is. They said it was a fever? I got here as fast as I could."
"Where were you?" I asked.
"The office. I fell asleep at my desk, my phone died."
The nurse at the station stopped typing.
Britt didn't say anything. She just held up my phone with his dot on it.
Tobin looked at the screen, and the smile stayed on his face a little too long.
"Leah. It's not what it looks like. Ingrid had a pipe burst. I was helping her."
"A woman called the ambulance," the doctor said from the doorway. "She stayed on the phone with your daughter until we got there."
"That was her?"
"That was her."
Tobin said nothing.
He looked at the floor, and then at the coffee in his hands.
I had spent five years telling myself he was just a kind man who couldn't say no to a woman in trouble.
I sat up in the bed.
"I was on the floor, Tobin. Your daughter had to call her to save me."
"I didn't know it was that bad."
"I told you I couldn't stand up."
Nobody in that room looked away from him, and he knew it.
I took the IV tape off my arm myself and told the nurse I was ready for the discharge papers.
"Leah, don't," Tobin said. "You're sick. Come home, we'll talk."
"I'm not going to that house."
"It's your house."
"Then I'll visit it."
I took Maisie out of his reach and put her on my hip.
So I left my husband standing in the ER with two cups of coffee going cold.
In the doorway, his phone lit up in his hand.
I read it over his arm before he could turn it face down.
It was from Ingrid. "Is she out of the hospital? Come see me now. We have to talk about Friday."
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