18. Beatrice
— ? —
Beatrice
Kenneth has been making amends.
Not the grand gesture kind - he learned that lesson. The quiet kind. The showing-up kind. The kind that doesn’t make headlines or require billboards.
He reached out to Dr. Patterson at Saint Anne’s. Had a meeting I wasn’t invited to, came back looking drained and humbled.
“What did you tell him?” I demanded.
“The truth. All of it.” He ran a hand through his hair.
“I brought the retraction. Signed statements from your friends confirming they were at the party. Your badge records from the hospital system - every shift you worked that your mother claimed you missed. I told him that my family’s lies had damaged an innocent woman’s reputation, and that Saint Anne’s was punishing you for something that never happened. ”
A week later, I got an official letter: my administrative leave had been lifted. Dr. Patterson included a handwritten note at the bottom: “The board reviewed the evidence. We were wrong. We’re sorry.”
It wasn’t a real apology. It was liability management - the hospital covering itself in case I decided to sue. But I’d take it.
“I didn’t want you to feel like I was buying your job back,” he said when I confronted him about it. “I just wanted to fix what my accusations broke. Patterson needed to hear the truth from me directly. What he did with that information was his choice.”
He reached out to my parents. Met with my father alone, at Dad’s request, in some diner in Warwick where no one would recognize either of them. Kenneth came back looking like he’d been through a war.
“Your father has a very creative vocabulary,” he told me afterward, wincing as he lowered himself onto Celia’s couch. “I didn’t know some of those words could be combined in those particular ways.”
“What did he say?”
“Things I deserved.” He paused. “And a few things that are probably anatomically impossible. But he shook my hand at the end. Said he wasn’t forgiving me yet, but he was willing to watch me try.”
And now, today, he’s reaching out to Ralphie.
The café on Spring Street is crowded for a Saturday.
Families with strollers, couples sharing newspapers, the comfortable bustle of people with nowhere urgent to be.
I claimed a corner table early, wanting to watch both of them arrive, wanting to see their faces before they had time to compose themselves.
Ralphie gets there first. He slides into the chair across from me, eyebrows raised.
“You sure about this?”
“No.”
“Comforting.” He steals a sip of my water. “What exactly is the goal here? World peace? Male bonding? A fistfight I can film for posterity?”
“Ralphie.”
“I’m serious. The last time I saw Kenneth Sinclair, I told him he was the villain of this story and he should probably just live with what he did. Not exactly a foundation for friendship.”
“I’m not asking you to be friends. I’m asking you to let him apologize.”
“He already apologized. At the house. Remember? Very dramatic. Lots of meaningful eye contact.”
“That was different. That was him taking responsibility. This is him trying to make it right.”
Ralphie studies me for a long moment. His expression softens into something I recognize from a thousand late-night conversations, a thousand moments when he saw through my defenses before I even knew I had them up.
“You’re really doing this, aren’t you? Taking him back?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing.” I trace a pattern on the tablecloth with my finger. “But I’m tired of being angry. And he’s been… different. Really different. I want to believe it’s real.”
“And if it’s not?”
“Then I’ll have you to say ‘I told you so.’”
“Damn right you will.” But he’s almost smiling. “Fine. I’ll play nice. But if he pulls anything-”
“He won’t.”
The bell over the door chimes. Kenneth walks in.
He looks nervous. Actually nervous, in a way I’ve rarely seen from a man who runs a billion-dollar company without breaking a sweat. His hands are in his pockets, his shoulders slightly hunched, and when he spots us in the corner, he hesitates before approaching.
“Thank you for coming,” he says to Ralphie.
“Bea asked.” Ralphie shrugs, deliberately casual. “I’m not doing this for you.”
“I know. I wouldn’t expect you to.”
They sit. The silence is excruciating. A waitress appears, takes our orders - coffee for Kenneth, tea for Ralphie, decaf for me because the baby has decided caffeine is the enemy - and vanishes again.
“So.” Ralphie leans back in his chair. “What do you want?”
“To apologize. Properly.” Kenneth clears his throat.
“What I accused you of, what I believed about you - it was wrong. Unforgivable. You’ve been Beatrice’s friend for over a decade.
You’ve supported her through things I wasn’t even aware of.
And I treated you like a threat because I was too much of a coward to question what my mother was telling me. ”
“You’re right. You did.”
“I know it doesn’t fix anything. Words can’t undo what I put you through.
The assumptions I made. The things I said to Beatrice about you.
” Kenneth’s jaw tightens. “I’m not asking you to forgive me.
I’m just asking you to know that I understand what I did wrong. And that I’m trying to be different.”
Ralphie doesn’t respond immediately. He picks up his tea, takes a slow sip, sets it back down with deliberate precision.
“You know what bothered me most?” he finally says.
“It wasn’t that you thought I was sleeping with her.
People make stupid assumptions all the time.
It was that you didn’t even consider asking her.
You had this whole narrative in your head - the cheating wife, the secret lover, the betrayal - and you never once thought maybe you should just talk to her. ”
“I know.”
“She would have told you. Immediately. Without hesitation. Because that’s who she is. She doesn’t lie. She doesn’t hide things. But you didn’t give her the chance.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” Ralphie’s voice sharpens. “Because I’ve watched her rebuild her entire life from the wreckage you made of it.
I’ve held her while she cried. I’ve listened to her wonder out loud what she did wrong, what she could have done differently, how she could have made you trust her more.
And every single time, I wanted to find you and make you understand exactly how much damage you caused. ”
Kenneth doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t look away. Just absorbs it, the same way he absorbed my anger that night in his study, the same way he’s been absorbing everyone’s justified fury for months.
“I can’t undo it,” he says quietly. “I wish I could. I would give everything I have to go back to that dinner and handle it differently. But I can’t. All I can do is try to be better. Try to earn back some fraction of what I destroyed.”
“And if you can’t? If she decides she can’t forgive you after all?”
“Then I’ll have to live with that. But I won’t stop trying to be worthy of her. Even if she never takes me back, I want to be the kind of man she deserved all along.”
Something shifts in Ralphie’s expression. Not forgiveness - not even close - but maybe the faintest acknowledgment that Kenneth isn’t the same person who stood in that house months ago, defending himself with weak excuses.
Slowly, Ralphie picks up his menu.
“The lobster bisque here is good,” he says. “You’re paying.”
“Fair enough.”
The lunch goes better than I expected.
Stilted at first, every exchange careful and measured.
But Ralphie has never been able to stay guarded for long - it’s not in his nature - and eventually his usual sarcasm starts creeping back in.
Kenneth meets it with something approaching humor, self-deprecating and wry, like he’s finally learned that he’s not above being the butt of a joke.
“So let me get this straight.” Ralphie gestures with his fork. “You bought the restaurant where you had your first date. Just… bought it. Like a normal person buys a bottle of wine.”
“It was going to be demolished.”
“And that gave you the right to purchase an entire building?”
“I prefer to think of it as historic preservation.”
“You would.” Ralphie looks at me. “And you actually went on a date there? After he admitted to buying it specifically for that purpose?”
“I was trying to give him a chance.”
“That’s not giving someone a chance. That’s rewarding extremely problematic behavior with romantic gestures.” But he’s fighting a smile. “What’s next? He buys the hospital where you met so he can rename the ER after you?”
“Don’t give him ideas.”
“Too late,” Kenneth says. “I’m already making calls.”
I kick him under the table. He grins at me - actually grins, open and unguarded - and something in my chest loosens.
This. This is what I missed. Not the grand gestures or the expensive gifts or the lifestyle that came with being a Sinclair.
Just this. Easy conversation. Laughter that doesn’t feel forced.
The sense that we’re all on the same side, building something together instead of defending against each other.
“So,” Ralphie says, setting down his fork. “Gender reveal is tomorrow, right?”
“How did you know about that?”
“Bea tells me everything. We have a pact.” He waves a hand. “The point is, what are you hoping for? Boy or girl?”
Kenneth glances at me. “I don’t have a preference. As long as they’re healthy.”
“Cop-out answer.”
“It’s the truth.”
“It’s what people say when they don’t want to admit they have a preference.” Ralphie points at him. “Come on. Be honest. If you could choose, what would you want?”
Kenneth is quiet for a moment. Then, softly: “A girl. I think I’d want a girl.”
“Why?”
“Because…” He hesitates. “Because maybe I could do better. My father wasn’t exactly a model of healthy masculinity.
I don’t know how to be a good father to a son when my only example was a man who cheated on his wife and taught me that women couldn’t be trusted.
But a daughter…” He looks at me. “A daughter, I could learn. I could let Beatrice teach me. I could get it right.”
The table goes quiet.