Page 13 of The Wife He Accused

His face did not change.

"Oh my God," she said softly. "You don't believe me."

"I am asking you a reasonable question."

"You are not asking me anything." Her voice was shaking now, not with tears, with something colder than tears. "You came here with an answer."

His jaw moved once. He did not deny it.

"Tell me what you think is happening here," she said. "Out loud. I want to hear you say it out loud, because I want to know exactly what my husband thinks of me."

"Melody —"

"Say it."

He looked at her for a long beat. The composure was holding. The composure was the thing she was learning, in real time, to hate.

"I think," he said, slowly, "that you are a woman who came from very little, and married into a great deal. And it still wasn’t enough.”

There it was.

Melody had been waiting for it. She understood that she had been waiting for some version of that sentence since entering Alexander’s world.

She had just not known it would come out of her husband's mouth.

For a moment she could not speak. The sentence kept arriving, in pieces.A woman who came from very little.And it still wasn't enough.

She turned the second half over inside her chest like a sharp object she had picked up without meaning to, and the sharp edges were the parts that did not sayI think you are cheating on me.The sharp edges were the parts that saidI think you are the kind of woman who would.The sharp edges were the parts that saidI have always thought this. I have been waiting, in some careful private corner of myself, for the proof.The sharp edges were the parts that saidI am not surprised.

That was the worst of it. That her husband was not surprised.

Her husband gave her a cold look, one she did not think he was capable of giving her, ever, and then, without another word, without waiting for her to defend herself, without even waiting to see what her face was going to do with the sentence he had just put inside her … he left.

The door slamming shut behind him reverberated like a gunshot, the silence that followed echoing the emptiness in her heart.

CHAPTER 5

MELODY

The whole wayback across the bridge, in the warm dim back of a cab whose driver had not asked where she was going until she was already inside it, Melody told herself that her husband was going to apologize.

Her husband had a mind that processed information in real time. Her husband had walked out of that suite without giving her a chance to defend herself, yes, but her husband was also the man who had read three sentences about a Korean shipbuilder against the top of her wet hair on the sofa the night before. Her husband was the man who had saidthere you are. Her husband, somewhere between the slamming of the suite door and the elevator ride down to the lobby, was going to do the math.

That was what she told herself. He would be waiting. He would not be composed. He would be the version of him that had existed on a balcony in Capri at one in the morning, the one whose voice had cracked on the wordlove.He would say the thing first. He would sayI'm sorry, Melody. I'm so sorry, sweetheart, I don't know what happened to me in that room.She would put her bag down on the entry console next to the pothos. She would let him hold her. She would cry into the frontof his charcoal suit, and tomorrow they would be a couple who had survived one bad night.

That was the version she carried in her chest the entire way home, like a small warm cup of something she did not want to spill. She had even let David pour her into the cab himself. He had appeared at the door of the suite ten minutes after Alexander had slammed it. He had taken one look at her face, and he had said, very quietly,I'll handle Howard. Don't think about Howard tonight. I've got it.

He had walked her down to the lobby.And then the door had shut and the cab had pulled away from the curb. Melody had let her head rest back against the warm leather and started telling herself the story of her husband waiting for her at the window with a drink in his hand.

It was a good story. She held onto it the whole way over the bridge.

It lasted right up until she let herself into the penthouse.

Melody let herself into the penthouse and knew, before she had taken two steps into the foyer, that something in the apartment had been rearranged in her absence.

The lights were on. That was the first thing. The bright overhead lights, the ones the cleaning staff used, the ones that turned the marble cold and showed the room as it actually was, which was a place she had been a guest in without ever being told.

A sound was coming from the bedroom — the soft regularzzzof a zipper being closed and reopened, the small rustle of fabric being folded by hands that knew how to fold fabric.