What constitutes cheating? Can a marriage under siege survive...
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I'm Kay Goodstadt
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(IN)FIDELITEA is a stirring portrait of fractured love, inherited silence, and the ache of things unsaid. This 80,000‑word upmarket novel unfolds across London, Brussels, and New Orleans, flashing back to 2005 as Hurricane Katrina gathers offshore—a pressure system that mirrors the slow boil of Ciaran Cowan’s life, steeped in ambivalence and ache.
Ciaran, a globally recognized English actor, is forced to navigate marital fallout, tabloid scandal, fertility trauma, and the quiet reckoning of second acts. When a viral headline accuses him of adultery with Daniya Kahn—a poet with whom he shared nothing more than tea and cakes in the French Quarter—his marriage to Emiya begins to fracture. The fallout is amplified by TEA‑TV, a global media conglomerate that sells gossip as currency and truth as trend.
At its heart, (IN)FIDELITEA traces an intergenerational reckoning. The emotional residue of past choices lingers. Love must be redefined across time, trauma, and perception.
The novel’s central motif—tea—serves as both comfort and catalyst. It’s an aromatic infusion shared in quiet moments and a colloquial term for gossip that erodes trust. This duality threads through every scene, every infused silence, every rupture.
The story centers on a richly diverse ensemble whose identities, orientations, and intimate histories are shaped by the choices they make and the secrets they keep. Through tea as ritual and rupture, (IN)FIDELITEA explores what we inherit, what we conceal, and what we’re willing to redefine in pursuit of love.
THE ENSEMBLE
Ciaran Cowan
Actor. Father. Reluctant celebrity.
Ciaran is fifty and perpetually jet‑lagged, pinging between London and New Orleans, where his hit detective series Heist films year‑round. He plays Alastair “Lucky” Heist, a brooding American sleuth with a trench coat and a cult following. Offscreen, Ciaran is dry‑witted, teetotaling, and quietly devoted to his wife, Emiya, and their two children, Oren and Mairi. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t chase scandal, and doesn’t quite believe in the storm brewing around him—until it breaks. What begins as a flashback becomes a reckoning.
Emiya Cowan
Culinary instructor. Gardener. Quiet revolutionary.
Emiya teaches at London’s Epicure Academy, where she’s known for her precision, her exacting palate, and her refusal to romanticize the work. She’s a whizz with figures, a compulsive puzzler, and a fastidious homemaker who composts with near‑religious consistency and typically sleeps like a rock. Devoted mum and married to Ciaran for nineteen years, she’s younger, sharper, and increasingly weary of his jet‑lagged lifestyle. When the storm brews—literal and emotional—Emiya doesn’t flinch. With the help of a mutual friend, she launches a fleet of Ethiopian food lorries and a specialty tea line, reclaiming her own agency one choice at a time.
But at what cost? Food might be love—but it can’t love you back.
Daniya Kahn
Poet. Mother. Unlikely target.
Daniya Kahn is fifty, carrying a lifetime of restraint she’s finally ready to shed. After years of writing about menopause for women’s health magazines, she’s touring New Orleans with Ripe, her first volume of sensual poetry. Her husband, Sam, a Wall Street bond trader, is not amused. Neither are her grown children, Abbie and Alec, who aren’t sure what to make of this new version of their mother. Daniya arrives in NOLA in sky‑high heels and a little black dress, slightly frazzled but luminous, still. Beneath the curves and carry‑on is a woman far more cerebral than she first appears, one haunted by déjà vu, drawn to a stranger, and maybe, just maybe, remembering something she never knew she forgot.
The storm is coming.
And she is its eye.
Sam Kahn
Bond trader. Stress baker. Rolling in dough.
Tabloid co‑target Sam Kahn is fifty, bald, and impeccably dressed—Wall Street sharp with thick black‑framed Gucci glasses and a weakness for kneading and secrets. He came up on the streets of South Philly, rougher than Daniya, the diamond he married. He’s seen his share of street fights, defended those who couldn’t fight back, and carries a scar near his nape to prove it. Married to Daniya for twenty‑five years, father to Abbie and Alec, Sam built a life of suburban routine and financial precision. But when Daniya’s poetry tour collides with a certain English actor, Sam finds himself branded a “$HAM” in the tabloids—caught between scandal, disbelief, and the slow unraveling of a marriage he thought was stable.
Jake Leron
Attorney. Mentor. Centered by choice.
Jake Leron is fifty, the child of immigrants and a survivor of South Philly’s streets. Raised on Daniya’s stoop, fed and clothed by her parents, he carries the scars of a childhood interrupted—deaf in one ear from an assault in South Philly that left him permanently changed, saved only by Sam. He vowed never to be a victim again. Now a Harvard Law scholarship grad and high‑powered L.A. entertainment attorney, Jake begins each day with intention: to be good and do good. He mentors Alec Kahn, whose angel‑backed video game Gehennom is raking in millions, but that’s not Jake’s aim. Grounded and disciplined, he’s at home in his skin.
His latest job? Salvaging the reputations of Daniya and Sam Kahn, and—unbeknownst to them—Ciaran and Emiya Cowan. The trail leads to the CIYA‑KAHN tabloid source, then to a dead end, until Jake enlists Izzy, an old‑school fixer from the neighborhood.
Oren Cowan
Gamer. Low-key pianist.
Gentle‑souled and deeply cerebral, Oren Cowan is twenty, with blade‑sharp cheekbones and sea‑blue eyes that linger in memory longer than he ever intends. He reads maths at Wallingford, a weekly boarding school in southwest London, and loves music—classical, as a rule. Introspective to a fault and sparing with verbal cues, Oren has never kissed a girl, let alone had a steady. He’s waiting for the one who sets his heart aflame.
Though he cannot foresee it, when he finally finds her, she will upend his world—and his fate.
Mairi Cowan
Equestrian. Underdog. Muck‑born strategist.
Mairi Cowan is nearly eighteen, a bubbly, ponytailed barn lass who loves anything that eats, sleeps, breathes, and poos—which is why she’s nearly always found sweeping out her boarded horse stall in rank wellies. People rarely take her seriously, but Mairi is clever enough to use that to her advantage. When things get muddy—truly muddy—she’s the one who spots the way through.
She may smell like hay and hoof oil, but don’t let that fool you.
Mairi knows exactly what she’s doing. And why.
Alec Kahn
Coder. Prodigy. One big hormone—with feet.
Alec Kahn is twenty, preppy, gangly, and shy. A tech entrepreneur graduating early from Penn State with his MBS in coding, securities, and risk analysis, he practically hides under the brim of his Phillies cap. Beneath the awkward layers is Jake Leron’s prodigy — a coder of MMORPGs and creator of Gehennom, a video game where rival forces battle in a world that pulses with its own internal logic.
When logic tells him his sister Abbie needs her confidence boosted, Alec sets out on his own personal quest.
But he doesn’t yet know that more than worlds will collide. And the storm gathering around him is bigger than his algorithms can predict.
Abbie Kahn
Designer. Iconoclast.
Abbie Kahn is twenty, a credits‑shy sophomore at The Eco Arts in Center City Philly, where she fashions a salvaged clothing line and rebuilds herself stitch by stitch. A former goth girl who winnowed her body to bones, she’s healing after a stint at rehab, keeping to herself, drawing strength from the art that needles the status quo as much as it roots her. Frail on the outside, her spine is steel — and somewhere, an ocean away, someone senses the truth of her long before she does.
Fletcher "Stew" Stewart
Auteur. Satirist.
Fletcher “Stew” Stewart is fifty, semi‑retired, and still sharper than your best carving knife. Once rounder in frame and quicker in tongue, he met Ciaran and Emiya on the Uni steps back in the day and never quite left their orbit, becoming the guncle their children would grow up adoring. An English rogue with a Romanesque nose and a now‑trimmer torso, he’s built a CV that spans telly, cinema, and BBC broadcasts. More recently, Stew has penned The Poof Cook, his cult‑favorite culinary tome, along with a series of satirical novels and unsparing memoirs that leave no sacred cow un‑grilled. Possessed of a Wildean wit and a sixth sense for spin, he’s hosted chat shows, quiz shows, and nature documentaries with the kind of cheeky gravitas that makes producers swoon.
These days he’s settled into his most beloved role yet: the Gay Queen of Classic Cookery.
And if you think that’s just shtick, you’ve clearly never tasted his pot roast.
Silas Mercer
Teacher. Traditionalist. Man in quiet crisis.
Silas Mercer’s marriage is coming apart in slow motion, and he can’t quite keep it together. A man who’s spent a lifetime relying on structure and certainty, he now finds himself estranged from the former Jody Pressman, their relationship buckling under the emotional and financial fallout of infertility, mounting pressure, and the exhaustion of raising two‑year‑old fraternal twins.
He leans on others more than he likes — small kindnesses, quiet help, the sort of support that soothes one problem while deepening another. The habits he once trusted have become the patterns he can’t shake, even as he feels himself failing as husband, provider, and father.
So, he clings to the familiar weight of routine — searching for meaning in the margins while everything he relies on begins to seep under the pressure. His anxiety manifests in stalling, indecision, and the quiet hope that if he waits long enough, the world will tilt back into place.
But when what grounds him shifts, then gives way, he does what anyone does—he braces for impact.
Jody Mercer
Wife. Mother. Savvy observer.
Jody Pressman Mercer is fiercely intelligent, college‑educated, and shaped by the heavy hand of her family’s expectations. Once bold and impulsive, she learned early on that survival in her world meant absorbing pressures that usurped her future.
Stoic and guarded, Jody is deeply loyal to her friends—especially Daniya, her lifelong bestie—yet beneath that loyalty lies a quiet, simmering resentment of Daniya’s freedom to inhabit her own life without fear.
And when the strain becomes too much to contain, Jody does whatever she needs to do to keep her life intact.
Izzy from South Philly
Old-school. Fixer. Storyteller.
Izzy is a cigar‑chomping octogenarian with pinstripes in his past and South Philly in his bones. Sharp as a switchblade and twice as tough, he’s part private eye, part neighborhood sage — and always the guy who knows a guy.
A holdover from the old neighborhood with ties that run deeper than the El, Izzy greases wheels, trades secrets, and dispenses wiseguy wisdom as currency.
Whether he’s pulling desperate friends out of a jam or spinning tales over chess matches and cups of spiked tea, Izzy proves that in South Philly, loyalty and survival are brewed strong—and never go out of style.
(IN)FIDELITEA
About
Kay Goodstadt
Kay Goodstadt writes upmarket fiction defined by a grayscale atmosphere and quiet detonations. Following a career as a freelance writer and PR consultant, she brings to her narratives a sharpened instinct for visceral precision, ensemble dynamics, and the subtle ways people curate their own stories.
In her prose, silence is a force, relationships are weather systems, and the smallest gesture can shift the entire landscape. Since completing her debut manuscript, (In)fidelitea, she is crafting a companion novel set within that same evocative ecosystem—a story rooted in emotional physics, intergenerational legacy, and the pressures that shape how we love and who we become.
