Page 12 of The Wife He Accused

"Mr. Winters," David said. Pleasant. Neutral. Already gathering his tablet and reaching for his jacket. "I think I'm going to step out."

"Yes," Alexander said. "I think you are."

David did not look at Melody as he passed her. That was a kindness, and she registered it as one. He picked his jacket up off the back of the chair, slung it over his arm, and walked out of the suite the way a man walks out of a room he understands he is no longer part of. The door clicked shut behind him.

Melody turned to face her husband.

"What are you doing here?”

Alexander did not answer. He walked past her, into the room. He did not take off his coat. He stopped in the middle of the soft thick carpet and turned a slow half-circle, taking in the suite: the writing desk, the sofa, the low lamp David had been working under, the window with its view of the East River.

Melody watched him cataloguing it all, his face going harder by degrees.The couch where David had been sitting, the leather indentation in the cushion still warm and visible, the loose pages of the proposal abandoned on top of it. The low lamp David had been working under, the two glasses of red wine on the side table, the turned-down bed. Melody watched him cataloguing it all, his face going harder by degrees, and she understood with a small sliding nausea what he was seeing.

"Alexander."

"How long?” he asked, his voice clipped.

"How longwhat?”

"How long has this been going on?”

The floor of her stomach dropped out so cleanly that for a second she thought she might actually have to sit down. She put her hand on the back of the writing chair instead and gripped it.

"How long haswhatbeen going on?”

"Don't." His voice was very even. That was the part that frightened her. She had seen Alexander angry exactly twice in two and a half years and both times he had gotten quieter, not louder, his sentences shortening down to single syllables until you understood that the storm was inside the room and not outside it. "Don't do that. Don't make me say it."

"Alexander." Her own voice was rising. She could hear it rising and she could not pull it back down. "I have no idea what you think you are looking at. This is ameeting.David works for the foundation. We are waiting for a donor named Howard Tendal, who is going to walk through that door inthirty minutes,and who is —"

"Stop."

"— who is going to be very confused —"

"Stop,Melody."

She stopped.

He took a breath. He let it out. She watched him do the thing he did in board meetings, the thing she had seen him do once in a deposition and twice over the dinner table with his mother: the small invisible work of putting his face back where he wanted it. When he looked at her again his eyes were the eyes of a man reading a report.

"I had Rivera run the booking," he said. "The suite is reserved under a corporate account I do not recognize. There is no Howard Tendal registered at this hotel tonight. There is no Howard Tendal on any of your foundation's filings. There is no Howard Tendal on your calendar. David has no foundation contract on file. David does not appear on any of your board materials. David —"

"David is aconsultant.We pay him out of the discretionary line. Howard hasn't checked in yet because he isn't due for another half hour, and the booking is in his attorney's corporate name because Howard does not put his own name on hotelregisters, ever, anywhere, which isliterallyone of the things David was hired to navigate —"

"Stop."

"—Alexander."

"Stop." It came out of him with a small ugly crack down the middle of it, and Melody understood in that crack that her husband was not interrogating her.

Her husband had already finished interrogating her. Her husband had walked into this room with the verdict in his pocket and had come here to watch her face when she heard it.

She took her hand off the chair.

"You don't believe me."

"Don't make this about —"

"Look at me, Alexander. Look at my face. I am telling you the truth.”