Through Thin Walls

The Singapore humidity clings to my skin like an accusation as Melissa signs the marriage certificate. Her hand trembles—she thinks I can't see it, but I've spent forty years reading tremors. Amy's hands shook like that on our wedding day, when she believed I'd make her happy.

I'm dying. Six months, maybe less. The tumor presses against the parts of me that remember guilt.

Last night, I stood outside Melissa's hotel room and listened to her call her mother in Mandarin. My Mandarin is rusty, but good enough: "He promised me everything, Mama. A life in America. Partnership on his research. I deserve this."

Deserve. The word hung like a verdict.

I almost knocked then, almost told her the truth: the American life exists only in my imagination, the research partnership is worthless without my name attached, and I'll be dead before she can claim any of it. But I didn't. I never do.

Instead, I walked back to my room and reviewed the accounts one last time. Forty years of careful theft, all channeled toward this moment. Drake thinks he knows about the embezzlement, thinks his silence makes him complicit. He has no idea how deep it goes. The company we built together—his designs, my name, our fortune—is mortgaged three times over. When I die, it will collapse like a house of cards.

But Melissa will have her money. Ten million, carefully hidden in Singapore accounts she doesn't know exist yet. My final gift to her, purchased with Amy's future.

"Kevin?" Melissa looks up now, pen suspended. "Are you sure about this?"

"I've never been more certain," I lie.

The lie comes easily. I discovered Drake's letters to Amy years ago—left my briefcase in his office, came back, found him writing. "My dearest Amy, you deserve someone who sees you." I watched through the cracked door as he filed it with dozens he'd never send.

That's when I knew I owned him.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, raining. I remember because the water streaming down the window blurred his reflection as he wrote. I stood in that hallway for fifteen minutes, reading over his shoulder as he poured out forty years of longing onto paper he'd never have the courage to mail. "Today you wore that green dress from our Yale days. You're still the fiercest woman I know, even if Kevin has convinced you otherwise."

I'd bought Amy that dress. Told her it made her look matronly. She never wore it again.

The next day, I transferred Drake's name off the key patents. He signed without reading, trusting me the way he'd always trusted me. By the time he realized what he'd done, I had leverage: his unrequited love for my wife, his complicity in my affairs, his name on documents that would implicate him in fraud if anyone looked closely enough.

Mutually assured destruction, I called it. Brothers in crime.

But we were never brothers. Brothers don't weaponize each other's weaknesses. Brothers don't steal each other's futures and call it partnership.

The registrar hands me the certificate. Seventy-two hours before my death. Melissa will find the money eventually. She thinks it's love. It's insurance.

Three weeks ago, I picked up the landline and heard Amy on the other line, talking to her sister. "I know he's having an affair, Linda. But if I confront him, he'll leave, and then what happens to the kids' inheritance?"

I listened to her cry.

"I've become someone who chooses security over dignity."

Linda said something I couldn't hear, then Amy again: "You don't understand. I gave up my research for him. I gave up my career, my independence, everything. If I leave now, I have nothing. No money, no prospects, no identity beyond 'Kevin Mack's wife.'"

"You're a doctor, Amy," Linda said. "You could—"

"Was a doctor. Twenty years ago. Before Kevin convinced me the kids needed me home. Before I let him make me small enough to fit inside his plans."

I should have hung up then. But I couldn't move. This was Amy—my Amy—talking about me like I was a disease she'd contracted. A parasite she'd learned to live with.

"The worst part," Amy continued, voice breaking, "is that I'm not even angry anymore. I'm just tired. Tired of pretending. Tired of being the perfect wife while he's probably with her right now, wherever 'Seoul' actually is."

Seoul. She knew I wasn't in Seoul.

I hung up quietly, went to my office, transferred another sixty thousand to Singapore.

"We should celebrate," Melissa says. "Dinner at Raffles?"

Amy wanted Raffles for our thirtieth. I said we couldn't afford it, then spent twice as much on this conference.

At dinner, my phone buzzes. Drake: "Call me. Urgent."

Instead, I call Amy's voicemail, listen to her voice—warm, steady—before I taught her doubt. I hang up before the beep.

Drake calls again. I step outside.

"Amy's asking about Singapore," Drake says.

"Handle it."

"Kevin, I can't—"

"Remember who signed those patents." Through the window, Melissa's returning. "Remember who owns what."

Silence. "You're a bastard."

"I'm a dying bastard. Are we clear?"

He hangs up.

I return to champagne already poured. The headaches have gotten worse. Sometimes I forget which lie I told to whom.

Last month, I heard Alice through her door. "No, Dr. Leung, I haven't been eating."

I stood there listening to my daughter describe her anxiety, the control she needed. "Dad says I need to be stable. He doesn't know I throw up after every family dinner."

She was crying. My perfect daughter, the one who never caused problems, who got straight A's and planned the perfect wedding and took her beta blockers in secret so no one would know she was falling apart.

"I can't tell Mom," Alice said. "She's dealing with enough. Dad's always traveling, they barely talk anymore, and I'm supposed to be the stable one. The one who has it all together."

Dr. Leung must have asked a question, because Alice laughed—bitter, broken. "Stable? I haven't felt stable since I was twelve and realized my father was a stranger who came home between business trips. But I can control what I eat. I can control my weight. I can control something."

I walked away. I'd built the pressure crushing her.

The next day, I wrote "Alice needs stability" in the margin notes of my will. As if I had any right to dictate her needs. As if I'd ever asked her what she actually needed instead of what I required her to be.

"To us," Melissa toasts.

I drink. The whiskey tastes like Bangkok, when I introduced Melissa to Drake and watched his face arrange itself into polite interest while his eyes screamed recognition.

That night in Bangkok, I heard voices through my hotel room's adjoining door. Kieran and Harper Hoskins, Drake's son. Drunk laughter. Then silence. Then Kieran: "We can't. Your dad would kill you."

"Your dad doesn't care about anything except himself," Harper said.

I pressed my ear to the door. Heard them kiss. Heard Kieran push Harper away. "This can't happen."

"It's been happening since we were sixteen."

Sixteen. The summer we'd sent Harper to conversion therapy camp. Drake's idea, though I'd supported it. "Fix the boy," I'd told Drake. "Before it becomes a problem."

The boy hadn't been fixed. Neither had Kieran, apparently.

I stood there twenty minutes, listening to my son deny what he wanted, just like I'd taught him. Denial as inheritance. Repression as family values.

They talked for hours. Harper confessed everything—the bullying, the locker rooms, the way he'd pushed Kieran into walls because he wanted to kiss him instead. Kieran confessed his own complicity, his own fear, his own desire.

"I'm getting engaged," Kieran said finally. "To Gabby. It's what Dad expects."

"Fuck what your dad expects," Harper said. "Live your own life."

But we both knew he wouldn't. Kieran was my son, after all. Six months later, he was engaged to Gabby, just as I'd planned.

Drake's been in love with Amy for forty years. I saw him watching her at Yale, moved faster, claimed her before he found courage. He helped me hide everything because he thought if I left Amy, he'd have his chance. His silence was worth more than his friendship.

The truth is, I need Amy. Not for love—I'm not sure I know what that is—but for foundation. Without her, the structure collapses.

And it will. Soon. The tumor eats my ability to maintain deceptions. The lies are failing.

Melissa touches my hand. "You look pale."

I'm dying, but I can't tell her. The money will comfort her later. I've always been good at structuring compensation for betrayal.

"Just tired," I say.

The headache blooms. The room tilts.

I think about Kieran, who will see deception as his inheritance. About Alice, who will starve herself trying to maintain stability. About Harper, struggling with the same dishonesty his father practices.

Two weeks ago, I stood in the hospital corridor after my MRI. A door was ajar—Amy's voice inside. She was with Eduardo, her tango instructor.

"Your husband doesn't appreciate you," Eduardo said.

"My husband is dying," Amy replied. "And I still don't know who he is."

"Then dance for yourself. Not for him."

I heard her laugh—a sound I hadn't heard in years. Free. I walked away before she could see me.

She was already imagining life without me.

The next day, I saw them together at the studio. I'd driven there to pick up Amy's forgotten phone—at least, that's what I told myself. Really, I needed to see it with my own eyes.

Through the window, I watched Eduardo guide her through steps I'd never learned. His hand at the small of her back, her body responding to his lead with a fluidity I'd forgotten she possessed. They moved like they were having a conversation in a language I'd never bothered to learn.

When the music ended, Eduardo kissed her cheek. A simple gesture, innocent. But Amy's face—God, her face lit up like sunrise. Like she used to look at me, forty years ago, before I systematically destroyed every reason she had to smile.

I got back in my car and drove to the airport. Booked a flight to Singapore. Called Melissa and told her I loved her, knowing it was as empty as everything else I'd ever said.

I've infected them all. My lies are viral, replicating through generations.

"Kevin?" Melissa's voice, urgent. "You need a doctor."

But I don't need a doctor. I need a time machine. I need to be the man Amy believed I was, the father my children deserved.

I need to be someone I never learned how to be.

The truth is simpler: I built an empire on secrets I collected like currency. Every overheard conversation, every stolen glance at private letters, every piece of information I weaponized. I stood outside doors and listened to people's pain, then used that pain as leverage.

Drake's unrequited love. Amy's quiet desperation. Alice's hidden illness. Kieran's forbidden desire. I heard it all clearly through thin walls and phone lines. And I used every word.

Instead, I'm this: a dying man with three mortgages, two wives, and one last transaction before the architecture collapses.

The tumor presses harder. I reach for Melissa's hand—or is it Amy's? The champagne glass falls, shattering, and I think: this is what truth sounds like when it breaks.

Three days later, I'll die in Singapore, married to Melissa, owing Amy, leaving Drake to choose between truth and loyalty. I'll leave them the weight of my secrets, distributed like an inheritance they never wanted.

But tonight, in this moment before the collapse, I'm still the architect of my own mythology. Still the man who convinced everyone—including myself—that the structures I built could stand forever.

The headache splits my skull. Melissa screams. The room goes dark.

And I think, with my last coherent thought: I should have loved them honestly.

But I never learned how.