Page 11 of The Wife He Accused

Alexander sat back in his chair and looked at the river. He thought, very clearly,if I open the drawer right now I am going to lose the thread of this, and I am going to have to spend the rest of my life wondering if I let it go because I was a fool or because I was a coward,and he did not open the drawer.

He picked up the desk phone again. Not Rivera this time. The car.

"I'll be downstairs at seven thirty. East Forties. I'll give you the address in the car."

He found himself standing in a hotel hallway; he knew the suite number because Rivera had given it to him in the report. He stood outside the door for the longest five seconds of his life and listened.

Through the heavy soundproofing of an East Forties hotel he could hear almost nothing: the small distant murmur of a man's voice, the smaller distant sound of his wife's laugh. The sound of his wife's laugh through a closed hotel door was the worst sound he had ever heard in his adult life, because it was the laugh she only ever did in private. The unguarded one.

He raised his hand and knocked once. Sharp. Precise.

The door opened.

Melody was on the other side of it. She was wearing a soft black wool dress he did not recognize, her hair was loose around her shoulders. She had a glass of something in one hand and her shoes were off, lined up neatly by the inside of the door the way she always lined her shoes up in their own apartment when she meant to be in a place for a while. Her face when she saw himwent through surprise, then a small startled flicker of something almost like pleasure.

Over her shoulder Alexander could see the rest of the suite. It was a corner suite. It had a king bed against one wall, made up and turned down, the small chocolate on the pillow placed by housekeeping. There was a low couch by the window, and on the couch was a man Alexander had never seen in person but recognized at once from the photograph on the consultancy's website: middle thirties, dark hair. He was in his shirtsleeves. His jacket was draped over the arm of the couch. There was an open bottle of wine on the low table in front of him and two glasses, one of them half-empty, and a leather folio on the cushion next to him with a few loose pages spilling out of it. The man was sitting forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands loosely clasped between them.

He looked up. He saw Alexander. Some small careful thing in his face shut down the way the faces of certain kinds of men shut down in the presence of certain kinds of husbands.

"Alexander," Melody said. Her voice did not sound quite like her voice. "What are you doing here?”

CHAPTER 4

MELODY

The hotel wasthe kind of place Melody had not known existed until she had married into a family that used places like it.

There was no sign on the building. No awning, no doorman in livery, nothing on the discreet brass plate by the entrance but a street number in a font so small you had to already know what you were looking for. The lobby, when she stepped into it, smelled faintly of bergamot and old money, and the woman at the desk looked up at her with a smile that meantwe will pretend we have never seen you, and you will pretend you have never been here, and that is the service you are paying for.

David had picked it. David picked everything like this. He was a fundraising consultant her foundation had hired in September on the recommendation of a board member, and he was good at his job in the slightly unnerving way that men who had grown up rich were good at jobs that involved separating other rich men from their money. He knew which hotels. He knew which restaurants. He knew which suites had the kind of soundproofing that made a donor feel important enough to write a seven-figure check.

Tonight's donor was a man named Howard Tendal who owned a shipping concern in Houston, multiple ex-wives inseveral different states, and a foundation of his own that he was looking to wind down into something morelegacy-shaped, which was David's word, not Melody's. Howard had agreed to meet, finally, after six weeks of polite refusal, on the conditions that the meeting be private, that no one from the Winters name be in the room, and that the conversation happen in a suite at this hotel because it was the only place in Manhattan he trusted not to leak.

Melody had not loved any of the conditions. She had agreed to all of them anyway, because the gift, if it landed, would fund three years of the literacy program she had built from a single line in a board meeting years ago. She had learned, the hard way, that when a foundation was attached to her last name, every dollar she raised felt like the only thing in her life that was indisputably hers.

She had told Alexander she had a meeting tonight. She had not specified where, because Howard's discretion clause had been explicit, and because telling AlexanderI am meeting a Texan in a hotel suite his consultant pickedwas the kind of sentence that, said in the wrong order, sounded like a different kind of sentence altogether. She had planned to tell him the whole story tomorrow, over the lunch he had rescheduled twice, when the gift was either signed or dead and she could laugh about Howard's mustache.

She had not, in the end, gotten the chance to plan around the part where her husband knocked on the suite door at eight twenty-seven.

The room around her, in the long fifteen seconds before that knock came, had looked exactly like a room a husband should not walk into without warning.

Howard was not due until nine, and Howard had requested wine in the room —a halfway decent red, none of that hotel-bar nonsense, sweetheart, I'm a Texan, not a tourist— so Davidhad ordered a bottle from room service forty minutes ago and had poured two glasses. And then, because Howard was not yet in the room and David had been working through the deck, the second glass had ended up on the low table in front of him, half-finished, while he ran the numbers one more time.

Melody was wearing the new black wool dress she had bought two weeks ago for exactly this kind of meeting: soft, expensive, the kind of wool that signaledserious womanwithout signalingWinters wife,a piece she had paid for with her own foundation salary and had not yet shown Alexander. Her shoes were off. She had taken them off the moment she walked in because Howard was a man who would respond, and she knew this from David's prep notes, to a hostess who looked relaxed in her own meeting room.

She had been telling David a story about a donor in Boston who had once asked her to name a wing of a library after his dog. They had been laughing, and that was when the knock came.

Melody had thought it was Howard, early. She had crossed to the door already smiling.

She had opened it and seen her husband.

For a long second neither of them said anything. Alexander was in the charcoal suit he had worn to the office that morning, his tie still knotted, his hair still combed, his face composed in the way it composed itself when something underneath it was very far from composed. Behind him, the hallway was empty and lit in that low gold light that fancy hotels used to make their guests feel cinematic. Melody's hand was still on the door.

"Alexander?"

He looked past her, into the room.

She watched his eyes find David by the window. She watched David, who was a man with very good instincts about other men, which was part of why he was good at his job, go still in a way that civilians did not know how to go still.