Chapter Ten
Michael listened groggily to the beeping and the clock ticking. Right away he knew he was back at the hospital. He heaved a heavy sigh. In response, someone started strangling his arm again with the blood pressure cuff.
“Good morning, sleepyhead.”
Kelly. Michael opened his eyes and saw a dimpled smile. His tongue hurt.
“Welcome back.”
He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to be back.
“I will go get you some breakfast,” she removed the cuff.
He must have dozed off because Kelly was back with a tray almost instantly. He ran a hand over his face and tried to remember what had happened.
There was the wedding.
Ann. Ann was engaged.
He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Despair danced in his chest. Maybe they could just put him out of his misery.
“How about I just help you sit up?” Kelly used the foot peddle and the bed obeyed.
“I have got the walker here just in case you need to make a trip to the washroom. You are going to be very tired, so you need to call me using the call button if you need to get up. Otherwise, we will be picking you up off the floor.”
He ignored her. Kelly could call him cranky pants all she wanted. He was tired and wanted the world to go away.
She pushed the table over his legs. “You will feel better once you eat something.”
No, he would not. Michael sighed and opened his eyes, dropping his hand.
There was no point in arguing with Kelly.
He drank the coffee and ate what he could stomach from the breakfast before pushing it away and going back to the sweet oblivion of sleep so that he could forget about Ann and her engagement to George Stapleton.
∞
Max and Piaget were the first to arrive. They brought a ridiculous plant. It was small and fernlike. Michael had no idea what to do with it. He supposed FenLei would look after it.
“You scared us Michael,” Max sat on the chair and Piaget perched on his leg. It seemed to be one of their favorite ways to sit.
Michael waited. He didn’t even know what had happened. The doctor had not been by yet to tell him his prognosis.
“Has anyone told you what happened?” questioned Piaget.
Michael shook his head no.
“You had a seizure,” she explained. “The doctor says you are going to be okay, but you will be on some new medication.”
A seizure. Michael heaved a sigh. No wonder his tongue hurt. He had probably bitten it when he fell.
“Hey, you made our wedding the talk of the season,” Max tried to lighten the mood.
Michael sent them a look of apology.
Piaget gave her husband a look of exasperation. She leaned over and gave Michael’s hand a squeeze. “We are just glad you are okay.”
Weren’t they supposed to be on a honeymoon? Michael mimed an airplane with his hands.
“That is what trip cancellation insurance is for. We will go later,” Max said.
Michael nodded.
Elle and Noah came next with the twins. They set both the boys on the bed and Michael endured their hugs and pats. Thankfully, they did not bring a plant. He wondered if it had been Piaget’s idea.
“Michael, please do me a favor and never do that again,” Elle shuddered.
He could not promise that. He did not remember being on the terrace at all. Elle filled him in on the details. He was sorry that he had upset her.
His mother came. She did not bring a plant. She did however, get the chair from Max and Piaget. They all chatted around him, and Michael let the noise wash over him. He fell asleep again because they were gone when he woke up and Kelly had appeared with lunch.
She followed him to the bathroom. It was humiliating.
Michael managed better with lunch, but his tongue still hurt.
Dr. Hemmond came, pulling up the chair. “Well Michael, it is good to see you again even if the circumstances are not what we would wish.”
Michael nodded.
“The seizure was unfortunate, but we knew it was a possibility,” he said in his heavy accent.
“We have put you on a course of medication which should prevent further seizures once we have the levels adjusted to what your body needs. I am also going to give you some pills that will act as a sedative. Did you feel the seizure coming on? Did you feel odd, or different before the seizure happened?”
Michael nodded. He had felt off for most of the evening.
“Good. That means there is a chance that you will likely know when a seizure is coming on. You can take one of the sedative pills and lie down in a dark room. This may stop a seizure from happening at all. We are going to keep you for the rest of today and I expect you will sleep a lot during your stay. Tomorrow you may be discharged and go home,” he looked at Michael over his glasses. “No headache? Any dizziness?”
Michael shook his head no and Dr. Hemmond wrote his response down.
“Then I think, unless something changes, we should not be meeting again.”
Michael held out a hand and Dr. Hemmond shook it.
“Good luck, Michael.”
After the doctor left, Michael slept some more.
∞
Ann looked at herself in the mirror. She was pale and washed out.
She had slept fitfully throughout the night and so decided to stay in bed until well past noon.
She looked every bit of her forty years.
Ann pulled her hair back into a sloppy bun and listened to George berate her over a voicemail message.
She had humiliated him, publicly embarrassed him.
He railed at her lack of manners. He didn’t care about her connections to the Ramesly family.
He was going to sue. The engagement was over.
What? Wait a moment. What had he just said, besides the vulgar language?
Ann hit the replay button. There it was, between her connections to the Rameslys and suing her.
George said it was in today is papers. Ann ignored the rest of the message and raced to her front door.
She grabbed today’s edition of her subscription newspaper off the floor from the hallway and began flipping through it.
It had made the business news and the front page of the society section.
There were wedding pictures someone had leaked to the press, Michael looking so handsome in his suit with his brothers.
There was a picture of Ann and Michael dancing.
There was her, throwing off her ring as the ambulance attendants rolled Michael away on the gurney.
The society page made a gossipy splash, discussing so many of the private details of their lives.
Her engagement, alluding to the possible twenty-year romantic relationship between her and Michael. Michael’s resignation from the company.
The business section merely showed Michael’s photo, the brothers cropped away and a photo of her on George is arm.
It discussed how Michael had stepped down and now she was the largest controlling shareholder of Ramesly Pharmaceuticals.
It speculated on what medical condition he might have and made a suggestive comment about why he had left all his shares to his secretary.
Ann flushed red and buried her head in her hands.
Michael was going to be mortified. She was mortified.
It made her look mercenary at best and a slut at worst. It made him look like so many other men banging their secretaries.
The only thing the paper could not say was that his wife had turned the other cheek, since he was not married.
What had David Ramesly said to her once?
She had been very young and perhaps had worked for Michael for two or three years at that point.
Ah, yes. David said men who wanted to excel in their careers did not have affairs with their secretaries.
He thought her crush quaint however it would be better if she saw someone else.
She never liked Michael’s father. David had never liked her.
Ann knew Michael was a grown man who made multimillion dollar decisions every day, but David had still pulled strings in the background.
He did that in everyone’s lives, a master puppeteer and manipulator.
At the time she had been humiliated and simply tried her best to contain her feelings better.
Now she wondered if David had given Michael the same talk.
It did not help that David had unsuccessfully hit on her later, insinuating that Ann could fast track her career if she had an affair with him.
Well, the cat was out of the bag now and even if most of it was speculation and even fabrication, there was no stuffing it back in. Ann got dressed and went to the local café. She needed something more than a regular coffee this morning. She was about to order when a woman grabbed her arm.
“Excuse me? It is you, isn’t it?!” She was excited.
Ann looked at her blankly. “Pardon me? I am not sure what you are talking about.”
The stranger held up a gossip tabloid and there Ann was, throwing the ring front and center.
The headline read ‘move over Kardashians, Meet the Rameslys’.
The sub headlines were ‘something wrong with bachelor Michael’, ‘wild wedding for Max’ ‘twins for Noah, pregnant with another set?’.
At the bottom it said in bold letters ‘just how long have boss Michael and secretary Ann been having an affair?’.
Ann grabbed the paper out of the woman’s hands and opened it to the inside article.
Photos were splashed across the page in all their colorful glory.
It detailed everything, only in a graphic garish way.
They had not just run with the story, it now flew with lurid suggestions and speculations.
One paragraph enquired if Ann was sporting a baby bump and asked if she even knew who the father was.
“Will you sign it?” the woman grabbed a pen out of her purse, holding it up.
“No!” An aghast Ann pushed past her and rushed out of the shop.
“Hey! That is my paper!”
Fortunately, the woman did not follow her. Ann spotted a magazine stand and could see that this tabloid was not the only one that had decided they were front page sellers. She dug her cell phone out of her purse and called Elle.