12. Beatrice
— ? —
Beatrice
The clinic in Providence smells like antiseptic and desperation.
It’s nothing like Saint Anne’s - no state-of-the-art equipment, no gleaming corridors, no teams of specialists waiting in the wings. Just a small building on a tired street, serving patients who can’t afford to go anywhere else.
I love it here.
Dr. Silva met me for coffee the week after everything fell apart.
We’d been friends in medical school, lost touch during residency, reconnected at a conference a few years ago.
When I told her I wanted to open a clinic of my own - somewhere to be useful while my actual career hung in limbo - she didn’t hesitate to help me do it.
“It’s not glamorous,” she warned me. “Long hours, low pay, mostly uninsured patients who’ve been turned away everywhere else.”
“I don’t need glamorous.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “I need to work.”
So I work. Twelve-hour shifts that leave me exhausted in the best possible way.
Patients who look at me with gratitude instead of suspicion, who don’t know or care about society gossip columns.
Children with ear infections whose parents can’t afford the copay at urgent care.
Kids who need vaccines and asthma inhalers and someone who actually listens.
Babies whose mothers remind me, every single time, of what I’m carrying.
The work is hard. The pay is negligible. The facilities are outdated.
It’s exactly what I need.
I’m pulling off my white coat, rolling my neck to work out the kinks from ten hours on my feet, when one of the nurses appears in the doorway.
“Dr. Sinclair?”
I still flinch at the name. Haven’t decided yet whether to go back to Calloway. Haven’t decided much of anything, really, except that I need to keep moving forward.
“Yes?”
“There’s someone outside asking for you.” Rosa’s expression is carefully neutral, the way nurses get when they’re not sure how to deliver information. “A man. He’s been out there for about two hours. Security tried to get him to leave, but he won’t go.”
My stomach drops.
I know who it is before I even look.
“Did he give a name?”
“No. But he’s…” She hesitates. “He looks like he’s been sleeping in his car, Dr. Sinclair. Or not sleeping at all. Security’s getting nervous.”
I move to the window. Push aside the blinds.
Kenneth is standing in the parking lot.
He’s wearing a suit that looks like he put it on three days ago and hasn’t taken it off since.
His hair is unwashed, disheveled, nothing like the perfectly groomed executive I married.
He’s holding something in his hands - a small box - and he’s staring at the clinic doors with the fixed intensity of a man who has nowhere else to be.
Two hours. He’s been standing there for two hours.
In the cold.
Waiting.
“Dr. Sinclair?” Rosa’s voice cuts through my thoughts. “Do you want me to call the police?”
“No.” The word comes out before I’ve fully decided. “No, I’ll handle it.”
I push through the clinic’s front doors.
The parking lot is mostly empty this late in the day. A few cars, a streetlight flickering overhead, the distant sound of traffic from the main road. Kenneth sees me the moment I step outside, and something in his face shifts - hope and fear and desperation all tangled together.
“What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you.”
“For two hours?” I stop a safe distance away, arms crossed over my chest. “In a parking lot?”
“I would have waited longer.”
People are watching now. Rosa at the window. A few patients leaving their appointments, slowing down to stare. A security guard hovering near the entrance, hand on his radio.
“Kenneth, you need to leave.”
“No.”
“People are staring.”
“I don’t care.” His voice cracks on the words. “I don’t care about my image. I don’t care what anyone thinks. I don’t care about any of it anymore.” He takes a step toward me, and I see his hands trembling around that small box. “I only care about you.”
“You should have cared about me before.” The words come out sharp, edged with everything I’ve been holding back. “Before you accused me of cheating in front of my parents. Before you destroyed my reputation. Before you let your mother feed you lies and swallowed every single one.”
He flinches. Takes it.
“I know.” His eyes are red-rimmed, hollow. “And I can’t take it back. I can’t undo any of it. But I’m here now. And even if you never take me back - even if you hate me for the rest of your life - I want to be there for our child. Every appointment. Every milestone. Please.”
I stare at him.
The cold is seeping through my scrubs. I should have grabbed my coat. Should have stayed inside and let security handle this. Should have done anything except come out here and face him.
“Oh, now you call it your child?”
The words hit him like a slap.
“I thought it wasn’t yours.” I can hear the venom in my own voice, can’t stop it, don’t want to.
“That’s what you said, wasn’t it? In front of everyone?
‘I don’t believe the baby is mine.’ That’s what you told my parents.
That’s what you told your mother. That’s what you announced to a table full of people who were supposed to be celebrating with us. ”
Kenneth closes his eyes. His whole body seems to cave inward.
“I was wrong.”
“You were cruel.”
“I was both.” He opens his eyes. Meets mine. Doesn’t look away. “And I will spend the rest of my life trying to make it right. But please, Bea. Don’t punish our baby for my mistakes. Let me be there. Let me be a father, even if I can never be your husband again.”
Something cracks in my chest.
I turn away.
I can’t look at him. Can’t see the pain in his face without feeling my own heart split open. Can’t stand here in this parking lot, being watched by strangers, having this conversation.
“Go home, Kenneth.”
“Not until you give me an answer.”
“I already gave you an answer. No.”
I walk back toward the clinic.
And then the sky opens up.
The rain comes down like punishment.
One moment the air is cold and dry; the next, water is sheeting from the sky in curtains so thick I can barely see. I run for the overhang, make it under cover with my scrubs already soaked through, and turn back.
Kenneth hasn’t moved.
He’s standing in the middle of the parking lot, rain streaming down his face, plastering his hair to his forehead, turning his wrinkled suit into a second skin. The box in his hands is getting drenched. He makes no move to find shelter.
“Kenneth!” I have to shout over the rain. “Get out of the rain!”
He doesn’t move.
“Are you insane? You’re going to make yourself sick!”
“Then I get sick.” His voice carries across the parking lot, rough and raw. “I’m not leaving until you talk to me.”
I stare at him.
The rain is relentless. Brutal. The kind of downpour that floods streets and cancels plans and drives everyone with any sense indoors. Water is pooling around his shoes. His shoulders are shaking - from cold or emotion, I can’t tell.
He looks nothing like the man I married.
The Kenneth Sinclair I knew was always immaculate. Every hair in place. Every detail perfect. Image was everything - the Sinclair name, the Sinclair reputation, the Sinclair legacy. He would never have stood in a parking lot in a ruined suit, begging, while strangers watched.
That man would have sent lawyers. Written checks. Handled everything from a comfortable distance.
This man is drowning in a rainstorm and refusing to save himself.
Against every instinct, I walk back out into the rain.
The cold hits me like a wall.
Within seconds I’m soaked through, my scrubs clinging to my skin, water running into my eyes. I push my hair back and close the distance between us until I’m standing close enough to see the water dripping from his eyelashes.
“What is that?” I gesture to the box in his hands. “What are you holding?”
He looks down at it like he’d forgotten it was there. Then, carefully, he opens the lid.
Inside, nestled in tissue paper that’s rapidly turning to pulp, is a tiny pair of baby shoes.
Soft yellow. Hand-knitted. Small enough to fit in my palm.
“I saw them in a window.” His voice is barely audible over the rain. “A little shop in the city. I wasn’t even looking for anything, I just - I saw them, and I thought about the heartbeat.”
My chest tightens.
“I thought about the first ultrasound. The one you had without me because I was too busy believing lies to be there.” He holds out the box, and water streams over his hands, over the delicate yellow wool.
“I know it doesn’t fix anything. I know a pair of shoes doesn’t undo what I did.
But I wanted our baby to have something.
From me. Even if that’s all I ever get to give. ”
The rain is soaking through everything. My scrubs, my hair, the tissue paper in the box. The baby shoes are getting wet, and I reach out instinctively to protect them, and my fingers brush his.
He goes still.
I pull the box from his hands. Tuck it against my chest, sheltering it as much as I can.
“The appointments.” My voice comes out hoarse, scraped raw by cold and something else. “That’s all.”
“What?”
“You can come to the doctor’s appointments. For the baby.” I clutch the box like a lifeline. “That’s it. This isn’t forgiveness. This isn’t reconciliation. This is me letting my child know their father. Nothing more.”
Relief floods his face. Transforms it. “That’s enough. That’s more than I deserve.”
“It is.” I take a step back. “Now go home before you get pneumonia.”
“I don’t care about the rain.” He’s still standing there, making no move toward his car. “I don’t care about getting sick. I don’t care about anything except-”
“I know you don’t care.” I cut him off. “But I’m a doctor, and I’m telling you that standing in a downpour for hours is idiotic. You’re no good to anyone - especially not this baby - if you end up in the hospital yourself.”
Something flickers in his eyes. Almost a smile, but not quite.
“The next appointment is Thursday,” I say. “Ten in the morning. I’ll text you the address.”
“I’ll be there.”
“You’d better be.”
I turn. Walk back toward the clinic.
I don’t look back.
Inside, dripping a river onto the linoleum, I stand in the supply closet and try to catch my breath.
The box is still clutched against my chest. I open it again, carefully, and look at the tiny shoes inside.
They’re so small. Impossibly small. Made for feet that don’t exist yet, for a person who’s still just a flutter beneath my ribs.
I think about Kenneth standing in the rain. Waiting. Not caring who saw him or what they thought. Not caring about the Sinclair image or the Sinclair reputation or any of the things that used to matter more to him than I did.
I think about the man who was always so careful with his public face. So controlled. So polished.
That man would never have begged in a parking lot.
Something has changed.
I don’t know if it’s enough.
But for the first time since that dinner, I wonder if it might be.