Page 3 of The Wife He Accused

"Melody."

"It's fine. Really."

"Has someone said something to you?"

Not tonight. The tabloids had been cruder in the early days —small-town girl catches billionaire heir; Winters romance: real or strategic?— but the people in this room had refined the same content into something more deniable. Polite questionsabout whether she wasadjusting. Compliments on hownaturalshe still seemed. Observations from women in pearls about howrefreshingit was that she still sounded like she wasfrom somewhere.

She had told him about it once, six months ago, on a Sunday morning in the upstate kitchen with the orchard outside. He had listened, his face going hard in the way it went hard when one of his deputies brought him bad numbers, and then he had said:I'll handle it.As ifitwere a vendor missing a deadline.

She had not brought it up again.

"Nothing I can't handle," she said now.

"That isn't an answer."

"Please don't start a war in the middle of your own gala."

"If someone is disrespecting you —"

"Someone is always disrespecting me here. That's part of the deal."

His jaw set. "That is not a deal you agreed to."

He believed that. He believed it the way he believed in markets and gravity. He believed that he could draw a line around her and the world would stop at it because he had drawn it. The sincerity in his voice made her chest hurt in the way it had been hurting a lot lately, the way that was part love and part loneliness, because the loneliness was inside the love and she did not know how to explain that to him without sounding ungrateful.

"Well," said another voice, "if it isn't the couple everyone is still talking about."

Vivienne Langley.

Blonde hair swept up into something architectural, the small unbothered smile of a woman who had been told her whole life that rooms belonged to her and had not yet found a room willing to disagree. Alexander's former fiancée. Old Greenwich money. The understanding, before Melody, had been that Viviennewould eventually become Mrs. Winters, in the same way one understood that a building permit would eventually become a building.

"Vivienne," Alexander said. Neutral. Too neutral.

"Alexander." Her gaze slid to Melody, frank and unhurried. "You look beautiful. I was just saying to someone — no one wears color in this crowd anymore. It's all soinherited."

It was, Melody thought, almost a compliment. Vivienne, at least, did not pretend.

"How generous of you."

"I hear the foundation committee is expanding. That must be exciting. It's wonderful what can be done with the right resources."

Look what you have access to now.

"It is," Melody said evenly. "Though I've found resources don't do much without the right intentions behind them."

A flicker of something crossed Vivienne's face. Surprise, maybe. Then it was gone, smoothed back under the gold silk.

"Intentions are everything," she agreed. A man across the room called her name. She touched Alexander's sleeve once, briefly, the way you touch the doorframe of a house you used to live in. "Do try to enjoy yourself."

When she had drifted off, Melody let out a breath.”

“I hate her," Alexander said.

That startled a small laugh out of her. "No, you don't."

"I do."

"You wereengagedto her."