SIP HAPPENS: A STORY OF (IN)FIDELITEA
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I'm Kay Goodstadt
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SIP HAPPENS: A STORY OF (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, Tel Aviv, and New Orleans, opening in 2005 as Hurricane Katrina looms—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, SIP HAPPENS 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 ritual and remembrance, and a colloquial term for gossip that erodes trust. This duality threads through every scene, every infused silence, every rupture.
The story centers around a richly diverse ensemble whose biracial identities, sexual orientations, spiritual practices, and intimate histories are rooted in the novel’s interrogation of both lineage and choice. Through tea as ritual and rupture, SIP HAPPENS explores what we inherit, what we conceal, and what we’re willing to redefine in pursuit of love.
What constitutes cheating? Can a marriage under siege survive?
Ciaran Cowan
Actor. Father.
Reluctant celebrity.
Ciaran is fifty, Scottish Presbyterian, 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.
Gardner.
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 religiously 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 ritual on her own terms.
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 traded restraint for risk—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 Arik, 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 klutzy but somehow luminous—mistaken for a cliché. 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 Arik, Sam built a life of ritual, 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 Levin
Attorney. Mentor. Believer by choice.
Jake Levin 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 a racist attack, 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 Arik Kahn, whose angel‑backed video game Gehennom is raking in millions, but that’s not Jake’s aim. Grounded, disciplined, and quietly spiritual, 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.
What they uncover nearly breaks him.
But not quite.
He’s no stranger to affliction. Deliverance, he’s learned, is a lifelong practice.
MEET THE CHARACTERS
Oren Cowan
Avid 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.
Arik Kahn
Coder, Prodigy.
One big hormone—with feet.
Arik 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 Levin’s prodigy — a coder of MMORPGs and creator of Gehennom, a video game where angels and dybbuks battle in a world that pulses with sacred logic.
When logic tells him his sister Abbie needs her confidence boosted, Arik 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 modest 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 her tight‑knit community 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 before she knows.
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’s 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 Kosher Cookery. And if you think that’s just shtick, you’ve clearly never tasted his brisket.
Elias Schechter
Teacher. Traditionalist.
Man in quiet crisis.
Elias Schechter’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 straps he can’t loosen, even as he feels himself failing as husband, provider, and father.
So he clings to ritual, 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 Schechter
Savvy. Survivor.
Shaped by the life she never chose, Jody Pressman Schechter is fiercely intelligent, college‑educated, and shaped by the heavy hand of her family’s expectations. Once bold, impulsive, and unafraid to speak her mind, she learned early that survival in her tight‑knit community required silence, compliance, and a devoutness that masks her pain.
Her marriage to Elias is marked by strain, disappointment, and the quiet erosion of feeling unseen. She carries the weight of compromises she never meant to make and the ache of a life that narrowed around her long before she understood its cost.
Stoic and sharp‑tongued, 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 what she needs to do to keep herself intact.
Izzy from South Philly
Fixer. Storyteller. Mensch.
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 chess hustler, 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 Yiddish wisdom like it’s currency.
Whether he’s pulling desperate friends out of a jam or spinning tales over a knish and a glezele tey, Izzy proves that in South Philly, loyalty and survival are brewed strong—and never go out of style.
About
Kay Goodstadt
Kay Goodstadt, author of SIP HAPPENS: A STORY OF (IN)FIDELITEA, is a novelist whose debut explores intimacy, ritual, and intergenerational legacy. She holds a B.S. in Health Education from Temple University, with a focus on sex education, nutrition, and substance use prevention. Her professional background includes social image management for online dating profiles and public relations—experiences that inform the ensemble dynamics and ethical representation in her fiction. SIP HAPPENS: A STORY OF (IN)FIDELITEA centers a diverse cast and interrogates identity through biracial heritage, fluid relationships, and spiritual complexity. A habitual tea drinker, Kay belongs to The Authors Guild, Society of Professional Journalists and National Writers Union. She is currently developing a sequel and building a long-term career in emotionally resonant, ensemble-driven fiction—supported by a promotional strategy rooted in community, conversation, and the rituals that connect us.
