Page 1 of The Wife He Accused

CHAPTER 1

MELODY

The first timeMelody Carter Winters heard the wordgold digger, it had been disguised as a compliment. A woman in a sage-green Oscar de la Renta had touched her wrist at a charity luncheon and said,You must feel like you've won the lottery, sweetheart. Melody had smiled and saidsomething like thatand gone home, stood in the shower until the water ran cold, because she could not work out which part of the sentence had hurt more. Thelotteryor thesweetheart.

That had been months ago. She had gotten better since then. Or quieter. She wasn't always sure those were different things.

Tonight, no one would be that careless.

Tonight the Winters’s autumn gala spilled across the upper floors of a Fifth Avenue building that had never known a recession, all veined marble, museum-loaned Rothkos, and tall windows opening onto Central Park like a private painting hung for the evening's pleasure. A string quartet played Vivaldi from the mezzanine, badly enough that Melody knew it was on purpose: Catherine Winters considered technically perfect musictry-hard. Champagne moved through the room in glittering circuits carried by waiters who had been instructed not to make eye contact. Every woman wore diamonds the way otherwomen wore weather, as a fact about themselves they had no reason to comment on.

Melody stood in the middle of it in wine-colored silk, with her mother's pearl earrings, the only jewelry in the room that hadn't been appraised, and Alexander Winters’s hand steady at the small of her back.

She had learned the rules. How to smile without showing too much eagerness. How to sip champagne without ever finishing a glass, because finishing implied thirst, and thirst implied need. How to sayI read it, yes, it was wonderfulabout books she had not read, because admitting she hadn't read them would be treated as charming the first time and pitiable the second. How to let a silence sit without rushing to fill it the way she used to, back home, where silence had meant somebody's father had lost his job or somebody's mother was sick again and you had to talk fast and bright to keep the bad thing from settling.

What she had not learned, what she suspected she would never learn, was how to stop calculating. Even now, with Alexander's palm warming the silk against her spine, some part of her was tallying.That's the third time the woman in emerald has looked at me; that's Senator Hollis's wife, and she pretended not to recognize me last time too; that pause before the waiter offered me champagne was longer than the pause before he offered Catherine.A running ledger she could not put down.

Alexander leaned in. His mouth brushed her temple, barely contact, the kind of gesture other people would not even register as one.

"You're doing that thing again."

"What thing?"

"Disappearing while standing still."

She turned her head. His face was close enough that she could see the small scar at the edge of his eyebrow, the one he'dgotten at twelve falling off a horse he'd been told not to ride. She had asked about it on their second date, and she had thought,He's used to people not asking.

"I'm right here," she said.

His eyes moved across her face the way they moved across a contract. Alexander had built a reputation on reading rooms in under thirty seconds and being right about them. It was one of the things the financial press loved about him. It was also, Melody had come to understand, one of the things that made it dangerous when he got it wrong, because he so rarely did, and when he did, he had no practice noticing.

"Stay with me," he said.

"I always do."

His thumb shifted half an inch against the small of her back. To anyone watching he was still the man on the cover ofForbeslast March — composed, unbothered, the heir who had earned the company twice over. But she knew that thumb. She knew what it meant when it moved.

"Forty minutes," he murmured. "Then I'll get you out of here."

"Forty?"

"Three board members. One donor who thinks he's a friend."

A laugh slipped out of her despite herself. "You make it sound so romantic."

"It is romantic. I'm suffering in public for you."

"For me."

"For us." A small pause, and then, the way he always offered the things he most wanted her to say yes to, so casually it could be mistaken for an afterthought: "We could go upstate this weekend. You said you wanted somewhere quiet."

The pull in her chest was immediate and embarrassing.Upstatemeant the house in Columbia County with the kitchen that opened onto the orchard, and the bed where he read toher on Sunday mornings from whichever novel she'd left on the nightstand. The walk to the pond where, last spring, she had cried about something she could not remember now, and he had not asked her to explain it, only put his coat around her and waited.

"Are you bribing me?" she said.

"Is it working?"

"Possibly."