Page 2 of The Wife He Accused

"Then yes."

And there it was. The small, secret smile that belonged only to her, the one that did not exist in any photograph the press had ever published. For a few seconds the room loosened its grip on her and she remembered,oh right, this is why.

This was the part outsiders did not understand. They saw the surname, the company, the apartment, and they assumed that whatever they could see was the whole of him. They did not see the man who had once driven forty minutes through traffic to bring her a soup when she had a cold, and had pretended not to know it was inconvenient. They did not see the way he texted her terrible coffee jokes during mergers, or how he remembered, from a single offhand comment six months ago, that she hated lilies because they had been at her father's funeral. They did not see him at three in the morning the night her mother had a stroke, his hand on the back of her neck as she sat on the bathroom floor, sayingI've got you, I've got you, I've got youuntil her teeth stopped chattering.

He loved her. That had always been the part that made the rest of it survivable.

"Alexander." The voice cut through the moment. Catherine Winters, smooth, cool, her voice pitched to carry exactly as far as it needed to and no farther. "There you are."

Catherine approached as if the room had been built around her path, midnight silk moving in one unbroken line from hershoulders to the floor, the diamonds at her throat catching the light and throwing it back as if the light owed her interest. She kissed the air beside her son's cheek, and Melody felt Alexander's posture adjust by half a degree: straighter, more contained, the small private version of him folding itself away like a letter she had been allowed to read and now had to give back.

"Melody." Catherine's gaze turned on her, polite and assessing. "You look lovely."

Three words. Spoken, somehow, in the cadence ofI'm impressed you cleaned up.

"Thank you," Melody said. "The room is beautiful."

"It should be. I've only been planning it eight months." A flick of attention down the silk. "That color is striking on you. Very brave."

Brave.She turned the word over in her head the way she sometimes turned over a coin she'd found on the sidewalk back home in Ohio: was it real, was it worth anything, or was it just something somebody had dropped because they could afford to. Brave meantno one else here would have worn it.Brave meantI noticed.Brave meantI want you to know I noticed.

"Thank you," she said again, because the only winning move with Catherine was to refuse, gently, every invitation to escalate.

"You'll need to find the Van Alstons before dinner," Catherine said to her son, already moving on. "Oh — Mrs. Pierce was asking about your little foundation, Melody. She seems quite taken with your little initiative."

The italics were silent and perfect.Little.Initiative.The two words hung in the air after Catherine had drifted away, like perfume that had been worn too long.

Alexander was very still beside her.

"Ignore her," he said.

"I do."

"You're clenching your jaw."

"I'm ignoring herwith tension."

His mouth almost moved. Almost. She loved that almost more than she loved most actual smiles.

He guided her toward the terrace doors, where the air was thinner and the perfume of the room could not reach. The city stretched below them in black glass and gold light, and Melody set the rim of her champagne flute against her lower lip without drinking, just to have something to do with her hands.

"Your mother is very talented," she said. "She can insult someone in under ten words."

"She's like that with everyone."

"That isn't true. She's charming with the people she approves of."

"You are someone I approve of."

It was meant as a joke. He even almost-smiled when he said it. But it sat oddly in the air between them, the way some sentences did when they were technically the right words and yet not, somehow, the answer to the question that had actually been asked.

She looked out over the park.

"Sometimes," she said, "I think that matters more to you than it does to anyone else."

She felt him still beside her. "What does that mean?"

"It means I'm tired and your mother makes me want to commit small, elegant crimes."