While working as a chaplain in a Bible college in Richmond, Virginia he feels attracted to Birdie Bell, one of his female students.

When he and Moira break up after a few months, he takes a room with Joan Cohen, a rich professional woman of Jewish descent about his own age.

Ken one day sells his company and starts a government-funded project providing affordable accommodation for those in need, which gains him a lot of recognition in the community.

Dinah has an extramarital affair until Ken, despite his lifelong strict diet and his regular exercise, has a heart attack in 1994 at the age of 65.

It is soon discovered that he had been embezzling large sums of money from his non-profit organisation and that a small child has died in one of the houses he is responsible for because he refused to have a faulty furnace repaired.

"[1] Sara Ivry observes that Mrs. Kimble is "a triptych of one person's duplicitous life as seen by his spouses, with their longing and regret, mired in distinct cultural eras.