4. Kenneth
— ? —
Kenneth
Weeks Later
My mother’s name appears on my phone screen while I’m reviewing the Hong Kong deal for the fourth time, trying to find the error I know I made somewhere in the numbers. It’s late here. Later in Newport. She never calls without reason.
I almost let it go to voicemail. The meeting is in ten minutes. Six months of negotiation riding on my focus. Numbers that need my attention, details that demand precision, the kind of work that used to feel like breathing and lately feels like drowning.
But Josephine Sinclair never calls without reason.
“Mother.”
“Kenneth.” Her voice is strange. Tight in a way I don’t recognize. “I need you to sit down.”
“I’m in the middle of-”
“Sit down.”
I sit.
The leather chair creaks beneath me. Outside the window, Hong Kong glitters like a circuit board, all those lights representing all those lives, all those people who have no idea that something is about to break in this office on the forty-seventh floor.
“What is it?” My voice sounds strange to my own ears. “Is someone hurt? Is it Beatrice?”
“It’s about Beatrice.” A pause. “Kenneth, I’m so sorry. I wish I didn’t have to tell you this.”
She sends the first piece of evidence within the hour.
A photograph. My phone buzzes with the notification, and I stare at the screen for a long moment before I can make myself open it.
My wife. In the arms of a man I don’t recognize. Framed in my own doorway - I know that doorway, know the exact pattern of the wood grain, know the brass fixture of the porch light casting its warm glow over both of them. Her head is on his shoulder. His hands are on her waist.
She’s smiling up at him like he hung the moon.
This was taken last month, my mother’s text reads. While you were in Hong Kong. I happened to check the cameras while I was away.
I stare at the photo. Tell myself there’s an explanation. Beatrice isn’t like that. She wouldn’t. She’s not the kind of woman who-
But the man’s hands are on her waist. Familiar. Comfortable. And she’s leaning into him like she belongs there.
I close the photo. Open it again. Study every pixel as if some detail will reveal itself, will prove this is a misunderstanding, a trick of the angle, anything other than what it looks like.
The meeting. I’m supposed to be in a meeting. Six months of work. Numbers and details and the careful architecture of a deal that could-
I don’t go to the meeting.
The second piece arrives the next day.
A video clip this time. The same man arriving at the house. I watch it three times, four times, five. He walks up the driveway alone. No other cars visible. The timestamp says 10:47 PM.
He was there for hours, Kenneth. My mother’s voice on the phone is gentle, sympathetic, everything a mother’s voice should be. Look at the departure time.
I look. The video jumps - she’s edited it for length, she explains, the full footage was hours long - and suddenly it’s 2 AM and the man is leaving, and Beatrice is standing in the doorway waving, and she looks happy. Happier than I’ve seen her in months, maybe longer.
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know yet. I’m working on it.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“I don’t know that either.” A pause. “I’m so sorry, darling. I know how much you trusted her.”
Trusted. Past tense.
I hang up and watch the video again. His easy stride up the driveway. Her smile when she opens the door. The hours in between that I can’t see, can only imagine, each imagination worse than the last.
The third piece arrives three days later, and it breaks something in me.
Screenshots of text messages from a phone I didn’t know existed. The conversation damning in its simplicity:
Can’t wait to see you again. Last night was incredible. Does he suspect anything?
My hands are shaking so badly I nearly drop my phone. I’m standing in my Hong Kong hotel room, the blackout curtains drawn against a morning I can’t face, and my wife’s words are searing themselves into my brain.
Does he suspect anything?
“Mother.” My voice doesn’t sound like my own when she answers. “Where did you get these?”
“I have sources. It doesn’t matter.” Her tone is brisk now, efficient, the businesswoman who raised me. “What matters is that your wife has been making a fool of you in your own home.”
Making a fool of me. In my own home. While I worked eighteen-hour days on the other side of the world, while I sent flowers and texts and tried to be a good husband from ten thousand miles away, she was-
“Kenneth?” My mother’s voice cuts through the spiral. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“There’s more. I didn’t want to send it all at once. I thought - I thought it would be too much.”
“Send it.”
“Kenneth-”
“Send it all.”
The fourth piece is a hotel receipt. The Chanler at Cliff Walk, one of the most expensive hotels in Newport. Two nights. The date stamps match up with last week, nights when Beatrice said she was working doubles at the hospital.
“I checked the hospital schedule,” my mother tells me when she calls to explain. “She wasn’t on shift either of those nights.”
I close my eyes.
My father’s face swims up from memory, unbidden and unwelcome. The way he looked at dinner parties when he’d had too much scotch, that bitter twist to his mouth when he talked about women. About trust. About the fundamental impossibility of fidelity.
Be careful with women, he told me once, the year before his heart attack. We were in his study, both of us too drunk, him on whiskey and me on the wine I’d started drinking to get through family dinners. They’ll make you believe anything. And then they’ll take everything you have.
I hated him for saying it. Hated the parade of women he brought through our house, the affairs he didn’t bother to hide, the way he treated my mother like an inconvenience rather than a wife. I swore I’d never be like him. Never cheat. Never assume the worst about someone I loved.
But my father hadn’t started that way either.
I was twelve when I first understood.
A dinner party at the house - one of my mother’s elaborate affairs, the kind where children were expected to appear for precisely fifteen minutes of polite conversation and then disappear.
But I’d hidden myself in the study alcove, reading a book I wasn’t supposed to have, when my father came in with two of his business associates.
They didn’t see me. They were laughing about something, pouring drinks, and then one of them mentioned a woman’s name I didn’t recognize.
“Whatever happened to that one?” the associate asked. “The redhead. Before Josephine.”
My father’s expression changed. Even at twelve, I could see the darkness that passed over his face, the way his hand tightened on his glass.
“She happened to be a whore,” he said. The word was ugly in his mouth. “I would have given her everything. Everything. And she threw it in my face with another man.”
The associates exchanged uncomfortable looks. One of them tried to change the subject. But my father wasn’t finished.
“That’s what they do.” He drained his glass, poured another. “All of them. They make you believe you’re special, make you believe what you have is real, and then they find someone else and you’re left holding nothing but ashes.”
I stayed hidden until they left. Then I crept out of the alcove, heart pounding, trying to make sense of what I’d heard.
My father had been betrayed. Before my mother. By someone he loved.
And it had turned him into this.
The betrayal curdled him into something I spent my childhood trying to escape and my adulthood trying not to become.
He cheated on my mother constantly. Openly. Didn’t even try to hide it. The women would come to our house, to his office, to restaurants where he knew we might see him. As if daring my mother to object. As if proving some point about the nature of love and trust that only he understood.
“She probably does the same,” he said to me once, when I was sixteen and furious about the latest mistress. “All women do. All people do. You might as well get yours first.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“That’s realistic.” He smiled, and it didn’t reach his eyes. “You’ll learn. Everyone learns eventually. The only question is whether you learn before or after they’ve gutted you.”
My mother never said anything. Never acknowledged the affairs, the humiliations, the way her husband flaunted his infidelities like badges of honor.
She just kept hosting her dinner parties and chairing her committees and pretending everything was fine, and I hated her for it almost as much as I hated him.
I swore I’d never be like either of them. Never cheat. Never accept being cheated on. Never let betrayal turn me into something unrecognizable.
But the lessons sank in anyway, deep in the bone, planted like seeds I didn’t know were growing: Trust no one. Everyone betrays. The only question is when.
My father died of a heart attack when I was twenty-six. Alone in his study, surrounded by his wealth and his bitterness and the wreckage of every relationship he’d ever poisoned.
I didn’t cry at the funeral. Neither did my mother. We stood beside each other in expensive black and accepted condolences from people who’d feared him or used him or been used by him, and I felt nothing but relief.
He was gone. I could finally become someone different.
And I did. I built a company. I learned to trust, slowly, carefully. I met Beatrice in an emergency room with my hand bleeding and my guard down, and she stitched me back together - not just the wound, but something deeper. Something I’d thought my father had killed.
You fixed me, I told her the night I proposed. Meant it with every cell in my body.
She made me believe I could be different. That love didn’t have to be a battlefield. That some people were exactly what they seemed.
And now I’m staring at photos of her in another man’s arms, and all I can hear is my father’s voice: I told you. I told you they all do it.
The Hong Kong deal falls apart.
I should care. Six months of work, partnerships carefully cultivated, numbers I knew by heart. But I can’t focus. Can’t think about anything except the footage, the photos, the texts that keep scrolling through my mind on an endless loop.
Last night was incredible. Does he suspect anything?
I fly back to Newport but I don’t go home. Can’t face the house - my house, our house, the house where she-
I stay at the office instead. Sleep on the couch when I sleep at all, which isn’t often. My assistant starts looking at me with concern, offering coffee, suggesting I take a day off. I dismiss her with a wave I don’t recognize as my father’s until after she’s gone.
At night, I watch the footage my mother sends. Over and over. My wife, hugging a stranger in the doorway. My wife, laughing at something the stranger said. My wife, standing in the soft light at 2 AM, waving goodbye with a smile I haven’t seen in months.
A smile I thought I’d lost the ability to give her.
I don’t see the other women arriving. Don’t see the party.
The footage my mother sent has been edited, she explained, doctored for relevance, and the other recordings from that night were apparently deleted - some glitch in the system, she said, so unfortunate, but what remains tells the story clearly enough.
All I see is my wife. And the man. And the space between them that looks nothing like friendship.
I pull off my wedding ring and study the inscription in the dim light of my office.
You fixed me.
She said it first. In the emergency room, after she’d stitched my hand, after I’d made her laugh with some stupid joke about needing a doctor’s note to explain my injury to my board. “There,” she’d said, tying off the last suture. “Fixed.”
“You fixed me,” I told her, and meant more than the hand. Meant the way she looked at me without seeing the Sinclair name first. Meant the way she laughed like it surprised her. Meant the first real thing I’d felt in years.
I proposed two years later with a ring that had those words inscribed inside, a promise I believed I could keep.
Now I stare at the inscription and wonder how long she’s been making a fool of me. How many nights I stayed late at the office while she-
My phone buzzes. Another message from my mother.
What are you going to do?
I think about my father. The bitterness that consumed him. The way he died alone, having pushed everyone away, having seen betrayal in every corner until there was nothing left but the anticipation of it.
I won’t be him.
But I won’t be a fool, either.
Thank you, Mother, I type back. For telling me.
What are you going to do?
I look at my wedding ring one more time. The inscription that used to feel like a blessing and now feels like mockery.
I’m going to handle it.
I book a flight back to Newport for the next morning.
The ring goes back on my finger - not because I still believe in it, but because I need to see her face when I confront her. Need to know if she’ll lie to me directly or if she’ll finally show me who she really is.
My father’s voice echoes in my head as I pack: They’ll make you believe anything. And then they’ll take everything you have.
He was right.
He was right about everything.