Page 31 of The Wife He Accused

The way you line your shoes up by the door, toes facing out, like you're preparing to leave even when you're not.

The day after that.

Blueberry pancakes on our fourth date, and the fact that you ordered them without apologizing.

He didn't wait for responses. He didn't check if they had been read. He didn't vary the format. Each one began the sameway. Each one contained something specific. Small. Private. Undeniable. He wasn't building a case. He wasn't trying to prove anything. He wasn't asking her to come back.

He was telling her, in the only language that had any chance of reaching her now, that he had seen her. That he had always seen her. That the failure had never been in the seeing. It had been in the believing.

Days passed. The messages accumulated.

The way you laughed through the hotel door, and the fact that I recognized it immediately, even when I chose to pretend I didn't.

He sent that one last. He looked at it for a long time before pressing send. Then he did.

The phone remained silent. The apartment remained empty. There was no audience for any of it, and no guarantee that any of it would matter, but Alexander Winters continued anyway.

CHAPTER 11

MELODY

Melody tried very hard notto think about her husband.

It was not a successful project. The thinking happened anyway, in the small unguarded moments when her hands were busy and her mind was not: washing a mug at the sink, folding a dish towel, standing at Angelica's front window looking down at a slice of Brooklyn street that did not contain anyone she knew.

He arrived in those moments the way sunlight arrived in a room you hadn't realized was cold. Uninvited. Complete. She would be holding a mug and she would suddenly be thinking about the way he had rolled up his cuffs at the wine bar on Crosby Street on their second date. The sound of his laugh when she had said something funny. The thought that had arrived in her at that exact moment:oh. I am going to fall for him.

She had been right.

She made herself call the lawyer whose name Angelica had given her. The lawyer was a woman in her sixties named Fiona Bellinger who had an office in a brownstone on State Street and a voice that sounded, over the phone, like someone's aunt with a master's in hand-to-hand combat.

Fiona listened to Melody's account of the previous week without interrupting, asked six questions, and at the end ofthe conversation said, "Mrs. Winters, I can have a retainer agreement to you by Wednesday. I would suggest that you don’t sign it for a few days after that. I would suggest you sit with it. I’ve handled enough of these to know when a woman is coming to me with a fresh wound versus when a woman is coming to me with a decision. Decisions like this one deserve time before they get signed. It’s the only advice I give every client. Do you understand?”

"I understand."

"Good."

Melody hung up. She told Angelica about the retainer that evening, over leftover pasta.

Angelica said, "Fiona is the right choice. You're doing this correctly, Mel."

"Am I?”

"Yes. You are moving at exactly the speed this deserves to be moved at."

On Tuesday Melody went to the literacy program office. She had not planned to. She had woken up thinking about it; she had sat with the thinking for an hour before she had understood thatthinking about itandgoingwere the same motion separated by a cab ride.

She took the cab. She walked into the office through the front door, and Marissa at the reception desk looked up.

"Natalie is in with the ten o'clock session. Do you want coffee?”

"Please."

Natalie, the program director, came out of the classroom twenty minutes later and stopped in the doorway of the small staff kitchen where Melody was standing with a mug of bad office coffee in her hand. Natalie was a broad steady woman in her late forties who had been running programs like thisone since before Melody had finished college, and Melody had always trusted her.

"Come into my office. There are some things I want to tell you."

Melody followed her in. Natalie closed the door.