Page 15 of The Wife He Accused

She took out the small overnight bag from the top shelf instead. The one she had not used since they had gone upstate a few weeks ago. Into it she put her own things: the jeans she had owned since before she met him, a couple of soft sweaters she had bought herself, her toothbrush, her face cream, the small amber bottle of perfume her sister Angelica had given her for herlast birthday, the soft cotton pajamas with the blue flowers her mother had given her in the hospital.

She put in the book she was reading, which was a novel about a woman in postwar Naples, and the small leather notebook she carried for the foundation, and her passport, because some animal part of her saidtake your passport,and she had learned in the last several hours to listen to her animal parts.

Twelve minutes. The whole of her real life in this apartment fit in twelve minutes of packing.

She zipped the bag.

Melody walked back through the long bright living room with her overnight bag in one hand. She did not turn off the lights. Let him come home and find them on. Let him come home and find every single one of the lights on in his beautiful empty apartment, the way Agnes had left them, the way he had told Agnes to leave them —finished and gone before midnight, so the apartment would be empty when he got home.

Empty.The word was a small bright knife in her chest.Empty.He had used the wordemptyabout an apartment that contained his wife.

In the foyer she stopped at the entry console.

The pothos sat in its terra-cotta pot, the new pale leaf still tightly furled against the older ones. She had bought it for nine dollars at a bodega on Atlantic Avenue the month before her wedding. It had lived on a fire escape in Crown Heights, and then on the windowsill of a sublet in Cobble Hill, and then in the back of the moving van that had brought the last of her old life into Alexander's apartment. It had sat on this entry console the whole of her marriage without being inventoried by anyone, because no one in the Winters family had ever considered a nine-dollar pothos to be an asset.

Melody picked it up. Pot and all. It was heavier than she'd expected.

She balanced it against her hip, took her keys with her free hand, and opened the door.

In the hallway, with the door still ajar behind her, she paused for one second and looked back into the apartment. Every light was on. The marble was very bright. From here you could see the long living room and the cream sofa at the far end of it, the cream sofa where she had sat in her husband's lap with the city behind her and let him saythere you are.

She closed the door.

CHAPTER 6

ALEXANDER

He did not go home.

The decision was not made so much as defaulted into. By the time the elevator doors closed on the forty-second floor and the quiet of the corridor settled around him, the shape of the night had already fixed itself: the office, the desk, the chair that did not recline far enough to be mistaken for rest.

Inside, the lights were still on from the afternoon. Darcy had left a neat stack of briefing folders aligned to the right edge of the blotter, his pen set perpendicular to them, the way Alexander had once mentioned he preferred it.

He closed the door behind him and stood there for a moment longer than necessary. Then he took out his phone and called Agnes.

She answered on the second ring, breath already arranged into professionalism. "Mr. Winters."

"I need you to pack Mrs. Winters' things."

There was a pause. "Of course, sir. Shall I —"

"Everything she would need for a week. Two." He looked at the wall opposite his desk and saw the inside of a hotel suite on East Forty-Third. The shoes by the door. The dress. The bed turned down. "Prioritize what's hers."

"Yes, sir."

"And be finished before midnight. I don't want her there when I get back."

He ended the call.

For a moment he remained standing in the center of the office, phone still in his hand, the city spread out below him in planes of black glass and white light. There was a version of this moment — he could see it, almost, like an alternate line on a graph — where he went home. Where he stood in the doorway of the bedroom and waited for her to look at him and say his name and he said,I'm sorry. I got it wrong.

That version did not survive contact with the sentence already forming in his head.

She has been in that room before.

It was a clean sentence. It fit the available data. It explained the details in a way that did not require revision of any underlying assumption.

He put his phone down and sat.