Page 19 of The Wife He Accused

"Car."

"Yes, sir."

CHAPTER 7

MELODY

Angelica's apartmentalways smelled like something warm.

That evening it was garlic, butter and something baking in the oven that Melody had not been able to identify when she walked in, her brain still ringing with the echo of a door slamming somewhere forty floors above Fifth Avenue. The place was small in the way Brooklyn apartments were small — everything close, everything within reach, the couch angled toward the window, the kitchen only half-separated from the living room by a narrow counter cluttered with mail and a bowl of lemons that had gone soft at the edges.

It should have felt like relief.

Instead, it felt like waiting.

She had spent the morning on Angelica's couch in the same jeans she had slept in, the pothos on the windowsill where the light was best, her phone on the coffee table as if that might make it ring sooner. At some point Angelica had pressed a mug of coffee into her hands and said, gently, "Eat something," and Melody had nodded, taken a bite of toast and tasted nothing.

He'll come,she had told herself.

By mid-afternoon the certainty had thinned into something more fragile. By evening it had arranged itself into patience,which was the thing certainty became when it had been left alone too long.

Angelica moved around the kitchen, opening and closing cabinets. The television was on low, some cooking show murmuring in the background, the host laughing too brightly at something no one in the room found funny.

"Mel."

"Hm."

"I'm not going to ask you what happened."

"I know."

"But I am going to say one thing, and then I am going to make pasta, and we are going to watch a woman on television make a tart with too much butter in it, and you do not have to respond to the one thing. Are we agreed?”

Melody looked up at her sister's back. Angelica was at the stove, not turning around.

"Agreed."

"The one thing is this," Angelica said. "If he comes over here tonight, and he says the right words in the right order, and you go home with him because the words were in the right order — I am not going to stop you. I want to be clear about that. I am not going to stop you. You are a grown woman and he is your husband. But I am also going to tell you, right now, while you still have a chance to hear it: the words being in the right order is not the same thing as the words being true. Do you know the difference?”

Melody was quiet.

"Mel."

"I know the difference."

"Okay." Angelica turned on the gas under a pot and did not look around. "That's the one thing. I am making pasta now."

Melody sat with her hands folded in her lap and looked at the back of her sister's head and understood how much Angelica already knew without having been told.

Angelica had been at the wedding. Angelica had watched Melody across a church full of people in wine-country Connecticut and had seen, somewhere in the middle of the vows, a thing she had not mentioned to Melody for the better part of two years, a thing she had been holding for this exact day in case it was needed. Angelica was the kind of older sister who let you make your own mistakes and then showed up at your door with wine and an open kitchen without ever once sayingI told you so.

"Do you want me to stay?" Angelica asked, at some point. Not turning around.

"No. I'm fine."

Angelica turned then, and studied her face for a second longer than necessary, and nodded. "I'm going to run downstairs for wine. Text me if you need me."

"I won't."