5. Beatrice #2
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t open his arms. Doesn’t do any of the things that a husband does when he sees his wife after weeks apart.
“How was the trip?” I ask, still moving toward him, still hoping. Still foolish.
“Fine.”
One word. The same flat tone he uses with vendors who’ve disappointed him.
“Are you hungry?” I stop a few feet away, close enough to touch but not touching. “My parents will be here tomorrow for dinner, but I could make you something now-”
“I’m not hungry.”
I study his face. The tension in his jaw. The way his eyes keep sliding past me, like he can’t quite bring himself to look directly at me.
“Kenneth.” My voice comes out smaller than I intended. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Something’s wrong. You’ve been distant for weeks. You barely call, you barely text, and now you’re looking at me like-”
“Like what?”
The challenge in his voice stops me cold. This isn’t Kenneth. This isn’t the man who brought me coffee in bed on Sunday mornings, who laughed at my terrible jokes, who once flew home from Singapore a day early just because I mentioned I was having a hard week.
“Like you don’t recognize me,” I finish quietly.
Silence stretches between us. The chandelier hums. The house settles around us, full of rooms we don’t use and furniture we didn’t choose and a distance that feels bigger than Hong Kong ever was.
Kenneth turns away. Heads toward the study.
“I need to make some calls.”
“Kenneth-”
The door closes behind him.
I stand alone in the foyer, the sapphire earrings suddenly heavy in my ears, and try to understand what just happened.
I can’t sleep.
Kenneth stayed in the study for hours. I heard his voice through the door sometimes, low and intense, but I couldn’t make out words. When he finally emerged, I was curled up on the bed pretending to read, and he barely glanced at me.
“I’m going to bed.”
“Kenneth, can we talk? Please?”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
He turned away from me when he got into bed. Turned his back like a wall, like a door slamming shut, like every rejection I’ve ever swallowed compressed into one gesture.
I lay beside him in the dark, listening to his breathing that I knew wasn’t sleep, and felt the baby I haven’t told him about, the baby I thought would fix everything, and wondered if I was wrong.
Now it’s 2 AM and I need water. Need to move. Need to do something besides lie here looking for all the ways my marriage is falling apart.
I slip out of bed without waking him - or without him acknowledging that I’m leaving, which might be the same thing - and pad barefoot down the hall.
The study door is open.
Light spills across the hardwood floor. I pause, confused, because I watched him come to bed, watched him close his eyes, thought he was finally sleeping.
I step closer. Look inside.
Kenneth is at the desk. My phone is in his hands. He’s scrolling through my messages with the intensity of a man looking for evidence, jaw tight, eyes scanning, thumb moving with deliberate purpose.
“Kenneth.” I stand in the doorway, heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat. “What are you doing?”
He doesn’t startle. Doesn’t have the grace to look guilty. Just looks up at me with eyes I don’t recognize - cold, calculating, the eyes of someone who’s already decided I’m the enemy.
“Oh, worried I’ll find something I’m not supposed to?”
The accusation lands like a slap.
“What?” I take a step into the room, then another. “Kenneth, you’ve never gone through my phone. We’ve always trusted each other.”
Trusted. The word hangs between us, and something flickers across his face. Something that looks almost like pain before it hardens back into stone.
“What is happening?” I’m begging now, I can hear it in my own voice, but I don’t care. “Please talk to me. Whatever this is, whatever you think-”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“That’s not nothing.” I gesture at the phone, at the desk, at the whole impossible scene. “You’re going through my messages in the middle of the night and asking if I’m worried you’ll find something. Talk to me, Kenneth. Please.”
He sets the phone down carefully. Stands. His height has never felt threatening before, but something about the way he’s looking at me makes me want to step back.
I don’t.
“I’m tired,” he says. “I’m going to bed.”
“Kenneth-”
“We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“You keep saying that, and we never do. Something is wrong with you, with us, and I can’t fix it if you won’t tell me what it is.”
He walks past me. Close enough that I could grab his arm, stop him, force him to look at me. But the coldness radiating off him keeps me frozen.
“Kenneth.”
He pauses in the doorway. Doesn’t turn around.
“Please,” I whisper. “I love you. Whatever this is, we can figure it out together.”
For one moment, I think he’s going to turn. Think he’s going to be my husband again, the man who held my hand like he was drowning and I was the only solid thing in the world.
“Good night, Beatrice.”
He walks away.
I stand alone in the study for a long time.
My phone sits on the desk where he left it. I pick it up, scroll through my own messages, trying to see what he was looking for. The group chat with the girls, full of jokes and party planning. Texts from my mother about Saturday’s dinner. Work schedules. A reminder about my dentist appointment.
Nothing. There’s nothing here that could explain the way he’s looking at me.
Something has changed. Something has broken between us, and I don’t know what, and the not knowing is worse than anything he could actually accuse me of.
Tomorrow, I tell myself as I climb the stairs. After the dinner. After the surprise. After he sees how happy we’re going to be.
I’ll tell him about the baby. I’ll watch his face transform. And whatever this coldness is, whatever poison has crept into him during those weeks in Hong Kong, it will melt away in the face of our future.
We’ll talk then. We’ll fix it. Whatever this is.
I crawl back into bed. He’s already turned away, facing the wall, breathing too evenly to be asleep.
I lie in the dark with my hand pressed to my stomach, to the secret I’m keeping, to the hope I’m clinging to with both hands.
Everything will be better tomorrow.
It has to be.