Page 10 of The Wife He Accused

It's not surveillance,he told himself.It's diligence.

The line was so thin he could not see it from where he was sitting.

He told himself one more thing, and this was the one that mattered, because this was the one that he meant:if it comes back clean, I will throw the report away unread, I will take her to dinner tonight, and I will never tell her I made the call.

He believed himself when he thought it.

His assistant's voice came through the intercom. "Mr. Winters. London in two minutes."

"Thank you, Darcy."

He pulled the contracts back toward him. He looked down at the top page. The words were in English; he could read them and he could not read them. Somewhere in the middle of the second paragraph he became aware that he had not turned the page in a long time and that his hand on the contract was not perfectly steady.

He set his palm flat on the page to still it.

In the bottom drawer of his desk, behind a folder of insurance documents he had not looked at in two years, was a small framed photograph he had taken of Melody on their honeymoon in Greece. She was on a white beach in a white shirt of his. Her hair was salt-tangled and the green of her eyes was almost the color of the water behind her. She was laughing at something he had said, head thrown back, the kind of laugh he had never been able to coax out of her in front of a camera before or since. He had printed it himself. He had not shown it to her. He had not, in fact, ever told anyone it existed. It lived in the bottom drawer because he liked the privacy of knowing she was there, his, when no one was looking.

He thought about opening the drawer.

He did not open the drawer.

The intercom buzzed again. "Mr. Winters. London."

"Patch them through."

He picked up the call. He said the right things to a man named Patterson about a position on a Singaporean carrier they were both circling. He sounded, to himself and to Patterson, like a man who was paying attention. Some functioning part of his brain did the work and the rest of his brain stood off to the side and watched his hand on the contract not be perfectly steady.

When the call ended he sat for another minute in the silence of his office.

He told himself, for the third time that morning,this is Melody.He waited for the thought to land the way it usually landed, with the warm settling certainty of something true. It did not land. It hovered an inch off the surface of his mind like a leaf on water that has not decided yet whether to sink.

His phone buzzed on the desk. A text. From her.

lunch? i can come to you. i miss your face.

A photograph followed it a second later: her, in the elevator of her foundation's building, making a face at her own reflection in the polished steel, her mouth twisted up in the goofy private expression she only ever showed him. She was wearing the green coat he had given her last Christmas. Her hair was up. She looked like herself. She looked like the woman who had laughed on a beach in Greece in his white shirt.

He looked at the photograph for a long time.

Then he typed back:can't today, sweetheart. drowning over the London deal. tomorrow?

He watched the three dots come up. They lingered. They went away. They came back.

tomorrow. love you.

love you too.

He set the phone face down on the desk.

In the bottom drawer, the photograph from Greece sat in its small frame in the dark.

He did not open the drawer.

Rivera's reportcame back in the late afternoon.

It came back exactly the way Alexander had told himself, all morning, that it would not. There was a David. There was only one David in any of the public-facing material attached to Melody's foundation, and the only place his name appeared was on the masthead of a hospitality consultancy that had done a small piece of catering work for an event in May. The photograph attached to his bio on the consultancy's website was the photograph of a man in his middle thirties who had the kind of face that women used the wordcharmingabout. There was no contract on file with Melody's foundation in the current quarter,there was no record of a David anywhere in the discretionary line.

But there was a hotel reservation in his consultancy's corporate name at a small discreet hotel in the East Forties for tonight, beginning at eight, and the room had been booked, according to the front desk's notes,for two.