Did she really want her mom here, messing in her business?
She closed her eyes. Since when did she consider it messing?
Since Kaleb?
Ping!
The sound came just as she was mulling over the answer to that question.
She shook her head and pushed the wheelchair out of the elevator. And the man she’d been worried about seeing was in the hallway, waiting for her. The air left her lungs in a rush.
It was bad. Just as bad as she expected. Her legs trembled and her mouth went completely dry in the space of a few seconds.
The man did it for her. Really, really did it, in a way that no man ever had, and that included Matthew.
She swallowed and forced as normal a smile as she could, even though her heart was beating out of her chest. “You called for a chariot?”
“I did indeed.” He gave her a smile in return that was a lot warmer than hers had been. “Thank you. I owe you.”
“No, you don’t. Tell me what’s going on.”
Within two minutes he’d filled her in on the situation. He then introduced her to Gloria and her husband. Kaleb hadn’t been exaggerating. The patient’s breathing sounded labored and there was a definite congested rattle to it. They needed to get her to the hospital. The woman was in no hurry to leave, though, despite how hard it was for her to catch her breath.
Maddy sat on the bed next to her. “Tell me why you’re afraid to go.”
Gloria’s eyes tracked away to her husband and then back. “My father went to the hospital. He never came out.”
That she could understand. When she glanced up at Kaleb, he was standing by the big bank of windows looking out over the city.
“What happened?” she asked.
“He had a heart attack. I was just a girl. They wouldn’t let me go into the room.” Her chin wobbled a time or two and she took a gasping breath that was half cry, half cough. “I never saw him again.”
Maddy’s heart ached for the little girl Gloria had once been.
“Are you worried that will happen to you?”
“Dr. McBride said that Clyde could stay with me. Is that true?”
She glanced again at the window, and this time, Kaleb had turned to stare at her. Was he wondering if she was going to contradict him? She would have promised Gloria the very same thing had she been in his position.
“Yes, you’ll be in my department, so I can let the nurses know. He doesn’t have to leave your side except when they take X-rays, but he’ll be right around the corner behind the screen with the technician. Will that be okay?”
Her husband laid his hand on her shoulder. “Tell them you’ll go, Gloria.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I’ll go.”
Within a matter of minutes, they had her loaded up in the wheelchair and Kaleb was pushing her out of the hotel toward the crosswalk. It could have been any family out for a stroll, but it wasn’t. And it was dangerous for Maddy to even allow herself to think along those lines. She had Chloe to think about. Just like Gloria, who had never been able to see her father, her daughter had never seen a real father. Matthew had not wanted to be a father. He’d been an unwilling sperm donor at best. At worst he’d been willing to kill his daughter’s mother, and possibly even Chloe. Who knew what he would have done had he got into her office? Would he have gone to Roxy’s and killed her too, before turning that gun on her daughter and then himself?
Kaleb is nothing like Matthew.
No, but, as good as he’d been with Chloe, there had definitely been moments when he’d seemed uncomfortable around her. As if he couldn’t wait to get away from her.
Thankfully she was soon in the hospital, where she could concentrate on the task at hand: seeing what was going on with Gloria’s breathing. They’d barely got up to the radiology department, though, when Gloria gasped harder, her breathing suddenly going haywire before she slumped over in the wheelchair.
“She’s in respiratory failure. We need to get her flat.” Kaleb was beside them in an instant, lifting the frail woman out of the wheelchair and bodily carrying her to the nearest curtained-off area, laying her on the bed. Maddy yelled for help and several nurses immediately stepped into the cubicle, going to work to get her stable. Her husband was in the room with her, and Maddy didn’t have the heart to ask him to step out. Not yet. She’d promised Gloria that he could stay, and she didn’t want to go back on that if she didn’t have to.
“Do you want to intubate her?”
“Let’s try NPPV, before we do that. She wasn’t febrile?”
“She was, but she took ibuprofen, so her temperature is artificially lowered at this point.”
Maddy nodded, her brain taking in that bit of information. “I still want to get an X-ray, but we’ll have to do it in the supine position.”
They fastened the breathing mask over Gloria’s face, hoping the positive pressure ventilator would help avoid standard intubation. Within a minute, her color looked a little better. “Let’s get her into X-ray and see what’s going on.”
Once they were in the room, they rolled Gloria to the side in order to put the film plate beneath her. They quickly set up the placement for the X-ray, pulling the tube down over the woman’s chest. They got it done in record time. The results were two nasty areas on her lungs, the right worse than the left.
Pneumonia. Just as Kaleb suspected.
“We need to start her on an azithromycin drip stat.” Maddy glanced at Kaleb, who had stayed with the pair throughout everything that had happened. She couldn’t blame him. Gloria had started off as his patient. “Can you get someone to make up a chart on her? Ask them to come up so that Mr. Lowell doesn’t have to leave her side.”
“I’m on it.”
Soon they had Gloria in a room and hooked up to an IV that would pump strong antibiotics directly into her veins and hopefully fight off the infection raging in her lungs. If they didn’t see improvement soon, they’d have to culture the bacteria and make some adjustments. Even as she jotted notes in her chart—with Gloria’s husband seated in a chair next to her bed in ICU—the woman’s eyes fluttered open. She immediately searched the room until her gaze fell on her husband’s face. She gave a small nod as if reassuring herself that he really was there. Maddy wasn’t about to break her promise to the woman.
She went over to the bed and explained what they’d done and what her treatment would be. Gloria seemed exhausted, but relieved. Maddy patted her hand. “You did the right thing by coming.”
Gloria nodded again, her eyelids flickering shut.
“How long will she have to stay here?”
“Let’s wait and see how those antibiotics do, okay? We don’t want her in here any longer than necessary. But we want to send her home healthy.”
Clyde wrapped his fingers around his wife’s. “Can I call my children from here or do I need to step outside?”
“You’re fine. I made a promise to her. Let’s not break it.”
When Maddy had a moment to look around, she realized that Kaleb was no longer in the room. Her heart squeezed with disappointment. Had she really expected him to stick around indefinitely? He had his own job to do. Still. Something wished he’d at least warned her he was leaving.
Why? It shouldn’t matter.
But it did.
With one last goodbye to the husband,