9. Kenneth
— ? —
Kenneth
The taillights disappear around the corner.
I stand in the doorway until there’s nothing left to see. Until the street is empty and dark and silent. Until the cold seeps through my shirt and into my bones.
Then I go back inside.
The house has never felt like this before. Hollow. Echoing. Every room saturated with her absence. Her coffee mug still in the sink from this morning - was it only this morning? - when she still lived here, when I still thought I knew what betrayal looked like.
Her cardigan draped over the back of the couch. The one she wears when she reads. The one that smells like her shampoo and the lavender lotion she puts on before bed.
The orchid she loves, sitting in the window. The one my mother said was dying. The one that’s still blooming, purple and defiant, proving my mother wrong about at least one thing.
My feet carry me to the study without conscious thought.
I sit at my desk. Stare at my computer. The photos I went looking for after she left are still open on the screen.
Priya, Morgan, Jenna. Names I should have known. Faces I should have recognized. Women laughing, drinking wine, celebrating their friend’s return from four years away.
My wife. Surrounded by people who love her. In a house where I left her alone.
You became exactly what you always hated about your father.
I reach for my wine glass.
My fingers close around the stem.
And then I’m throwing it at the wall.
The sound it makes when it shatters - that’s not enough. Not nearly enough. The red wine runs down the wallpaper like blood, and I watch it drip, and something inside me cracks wide open.
Another glass. The one Beatrice used at dinner, the one she barely touched before everything fell apart. Against the bookshelf.
Another. Against the window frame.
The crystal bowl my mother gave us for our wedding. The one she insisted we display prominently. The one Beatrice never liked but kept anyway because she was trying, always trying, to make peace with a woman who was never going to accept her.
I hurl it at the fireplace. It explodes into a thousand glittering shards.
The decanter from the bar. The Macallan 25, a gift from a client I don’t remember. Against the floor. Amber liquid pools across the hardwood.
My watch.
I stop.
The Rolex sits heavy on my wrist. My father’s watch. The one he left me when he died, along with a company I never wanted and a legacy of bitterness I swore I’d never inherit.
His mistake was spending his whole life punishing everyone for something one woman did to him decades ago.
I tear it off. The clasp bites into my skin, draws blood, and I don’t care. I throw it into the wreckage of crystal and wine and broken promises.
It lands face-up. Still ticking.
I stare at it for a long moment. Then I bring my heel down on the glass face.
The crack is satisfying. The silence that follows, when the ticking stops, is even better.
I tear through the room until my hands are bleeding and my chest is heaving and there’s nothing left to break. Until I’m standing in the middle of destruction that mirrors the destruction inside me.
Then my legs give out.
I collapse against my desk. Let my head fall into my hands. Feel the blood from my palms smear across my face and don’t care, can’t care, can barely breathe around the weight crushing my chest.
She’s right.
God help me, she’s right.
Five years ago.
A construction site on the waterfront. A piece of glass I didn’t see. Blood everywhere, running down my wrist, dripping onto the concrete.
My assistant wanted to call a plastic surgeon. Someone discreet. Someone who wouldn’t talk.
I told her to take me to the nearest ER.
Saint Anne’s was fifteen minutes away. I walked in holding a towel to my hand, blood soaking through the white cotton, and a nurse directed me to a bed in the corner.
The resident who treated me had blue eyes like the ocean. Dark hair pulled back in a practical ponytail. Hands that were steady and sure as she examined the wound.
“This is deep,” she said. “You’re going to need stitches.”
“I figured.”
She looked up at me then. Really looked. I watched her take in the expensive suit, the blood-stained cuffs, the watch that cost more than she probably made in a month.
“Hold still,” she said. “This will sting.”
It did. I didn’t flinch.
She noticed. “You’re not going to look away?”
“I want to see what you’re doing.”
A small smile. Private. Like I’d said something that surprised her. “Most people don’t.”
“I’m not most people.”
“That’s what they all say.” She snipped the thread, tied off the final stitch. Her fingers brushed my palm as she examined her work. “There. Good as new.”
But I wasn’t looking at my hand anymore. I was looking at her.
The voice in my head - my father’s voice, the one that whispered constantly about betrayal and weakness and never trusting anyone - had gone quiet. For the first time in years, there was silence.
“You fixed me,” I said.
She laughed. Thought I meant the stitches.
I didn’t.
I drag myself off the floor.
Glass crunches under my shoes. Wine soaks into my pants where I knelt. Blood drips from my palms onto the hardwood, and I think about Beatrice’s hands, steady and sure, stitching me back together.
Some things don’t stitch back together.
My phone is somewhere in the wreckage. I find it under an overturned chair, screen cracked but still functional.
I call her.
Voicemail.
Again.
Voicemail.
Again.
“The person you are trying to reach-”
I text: Please let me explain. Please.
Nothing.
I know you’re angry. You have every right to be.
Nothing.
I’ll do anything. Whatever you need. Please just talk to me.
Nothing.
Ten more calls. Ten more times her voice, recorded and distant, telling me to leave a message after the tone.
I stop leaving messages. There’s nothing I can say that will matter.
Finally, desperate, I try something else. Block my number. Call the hospital.
“Saint Anne’s, how may I direct your call?”
“I’m trying to confirm that Dr. Beatrice Sinclair left safely from her shift tonight.”
A pause. The sound of typing. “I’m sorry, sir, Dr. Sinclair isn’t currently on shift.”
“But she works there. She’s an ER attending-”
“Dr. Sinclair is on administrative leave. I can’t provide any additional information.”
The words hit me like a fist to the stomach.
“She… what?”
“Sir, is there an emergency? I can connect you with-”
I hang up.
Administrative leave.
Because of the story. Because of my mother’s lies. Because I believed fabricated evidence and let my wife’s reputation burn.
I took her job from her. The thing she loved most. The thing that made her feel useful when I made her feel invisible.
At least at the hospital, people needed me.
And now she doesn’t even have that.
I don’t remember getting in my car.
I don’t remember the drive.
I just know that suddenly I’m standing on the sidewalk outside Celia’s apartment building, staring up at a lit window on the third floor, and my hands are shaking so badly I can barely press the buzzer.
“Who is it?” Celia’s voice, suspicious and sharp through the intercom.
“It’s Kenneth. Please. I need to see her.”
A long pause.
“No.”
“Celia, please-”
“She’s asleep.” The words are clipped, furious. “She cried herself to sleep. After what you did to her, you don’t get to show up here and demand anything.”
“I made a mistake-”
“You made a choice.” Her voice could cut glass. “You chose your mother over your wife. You chose to believe the worst about someone who has done nothing but love you for five years. And now you want forgiveness? Now you want access?”
“I just want to know she’s okay.”
“She’s not okay.” The words hit like blows. “She’s devastated. She’s humiliated. She’s pregnant and alone because you threw her away like garbage.”
“I didn’t know-”
“You didn’t want to know. There’s a difference.”
The intercom clicks off.
I press the buzzer again. Nothing.
Again. Nothing.
I step back. Look up at that lit window. Imagine Beatrice behind it, curled up in someone else’s guest room, crying herself to sleep because of me.
My reflection stares back at me from the building’s glass door. Unshaven. Wild-eyed. Blood smeared across my cheek. Pathetic.
My father looked like this at the end.
I remember visiting him in the hospital, those final weeks.
His skin gray, his eyes hollow, his voice a rasp of bitter accusations.
Everyone had betrayed him. Everyone had failed him.
Everyone had proven exactly what he always knew - that trust was weakness, that love was a lie, that the only safe choice was to strike first.
He died alone. Surrounded by money, by power, by a legacy of companies and properties and investments.
But alone. Because he’d pushed everyone away.
Because he’d spent sixty years proving himself right about human nature, and in the end, the only thing he proved was that paranoia is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I swore I’d never become that man.
I’d rather die than become that man.
And here I am anyway.
Standing on a sidewalk in the middle of the night, bleeding from self-inflicted wounds, begging for access to a wife I destroyed because I believed my mother’s lies over my own wife’s character.
You became exactly what you always hated about your father.
I sit down on the curb.
The concrete is cold. The night is cold. Everything is cold, and I deserve it, and I don’t move.
I don’t know how long I sit there. Long enough for the bleeding to stop. Long enough for the sky to start lightening at the edges. Long enough for an early-morning jogger to give me a wide berth and a concerned look.
She doesn’t come down.
Of course she doesn’t.
She’s not going to.
And I have no idea how to fix what I’ve broken.