On the day my daughter turned one month old, Janet Shelton called me to her office to deliver some documents.
The temperature inside was unbearable—114.8 degrees Fahrenheit. I reached for the air conditioner, but her male assistant stopped me.
"Sir, I’ve had a cold body since childhood. I can’t handle the cold. Please leave the air conditioner off," he said.
I glanced at my daughter, her cheeks red from the heat. I couldn’t risk her getting heatstroke. Without saying a word, I turned the air conditioner on.
Later that evening, Janet returned from a social event. As soon as she walked in, she asked coldly, "Hector is sensitive to cold. Did you know that 38 minutes and 19 seconds of cool air gave him a high fever and landed him in the ICU?"
"Janet, really? Half an hour of air conditioning and he ends up in the ICU? Do you think I’m an idiot? My daughter is one month old. If she had a heatstroke, it could’ve killed her. What were you drinking—bootleg wine?"
She gave a tight smile and nodded. "You’re right. I wasn’t thinking."
That night, as usual, she gently coaxed us to sleep.
But when I woke up, I found myself and my daughter trapped in a cold storage room. glass walls on all sides, while people circled us, laughing.
Outside the cold storage, Janet leaned casually against Hector’s arm, flashing me a cruel smile. “Worried about heatstroke? Don’t be. You and your daughter can cool off now.”
My chest tightened. I stayed calm, pulled out my phone and took pictures of every single one of them. Then I made a call. “Dad, I don’t want any of these people to see the sunrise tomorrow.”
——
The moment I ended the call, silence fell, then came the laughter, loud and mocking.
“Yoseph, your father was dumped into the sea and fed to sharks half a year ago. You gone mad from the cold?”
“Still think you’re the Gardner Family’s heir? Wake up, you can’t even pull that off in your dreams.”
Janet stood there, soaking in the jeers, her eyes filled with smug satisfaction.
She gently placed her mink coat on Hector’s shoulders, took his hand and walked slowly to the cold storage.
Tapping her finger lightly on the glass, she looked at me and spoke sweetly. “Yoseph, are you cold? Feeling sorry yet?”
The glowing red thermometer behind her read -58 degrees.
I curled my body around my daughter, trembling in the thin pajamas I had worn to bed.
Where my skin met the frozen floor, it had turned numb and purplish.
Sharp stabs of pain rippled through me. My daughter sobbed uncontrollably in my arms, her tiny body wracked with cold.
I stumbled toward Janet and Hector, slamming my fist against the glass. “Janet, what did I do wrong?! Isn’t it normal to turn on the air conditioner when the room is burning hot? Newborns can’t handle that heat. If they get heatstroke, they could die!”
My sudden outburst made my hand tremble, and in that moment, my daughter’s tiny hand brushed against the edge of the cold storage.
From the rough movement, a piece of skin was torn from her delicate little hand in an instant.
Panicked, I immediately shielded her in my arms and crouched down, holding her close.
I stared at Janet with bloodshot eyes. “Janet, let us out. You know how much she means to me. I can’t lose her.”
For a second, something flickered in Janet’s gaze, something unspoken. She, of all people, knew what it meant to finally have a child.
Years ago, an accident left her nearly infertile.
We’d sought out thousands of renowned doctors. For eight long years, she endured hundreds of egg retrieval procedures, needles as long as a forearm piercing into her body again and again.
Eventually, we had this one child. She once broke a servant’s arm just because the milk heated for our daughter was one degree off.
And now, for Hector… she didn’t hesitate to lock me and my daughter inside a freezing cold storage unit.
She was truly out of her mind.
