Page 35 of The Wife He Accused

"Darling."

"Mother."

"Sit down. Let Louisa bring you —"

"I sent Louisa away. And I am not going to sit."

Something in her face adjusted.

"Alexander. I do not know what you think is happening, but —"

"I know exactly what is happening. I’m going to speak for a few minutes and I am going to ask you not to interrupt me, and after I’m done you can say whatever you need to say. And then I am going to leave this house, and we are going to find out together whether you are capable of having a relationship with your only son on the terms I am about to give you. Are we clear?”

"Alexander —"

"Are we clear?”

A long pause.

"Yes."

"Good."

He did not sit down. “I do not care what Genevieve said at lunch. I do not care what Viviennethoughtor what conversations have been had about me. I want to be clear with you about something I have not been clear about. The part of me that was ever going to marry Vivienne Langley died the moment I fell in love with my wife, and any sentence that ever comes out of your mouth again that includes the wordViviennein relation to my life is going to be the last sentence I hear from you for some time."

Her hand tightened on the desk.

"Alexander. You are upset."

"I am not upset. I am clear. There is a difference, and the difference is thatcleardoes not go away when you wait it out."

He took a breath.

"Melody is the best thing that has ever happened to me. She is the best thing that has ever happened to this family, and this family does not know it yet because this family has refused to look at her long enough to find out. She came into a room full of people who had already decided she did not belong in it. She kept her posture, learned the names, and built a literacy program out of a single line in a board meeting years ago that has served adult learners in five boroughs. When I broke her heart she left our apartment at midnight with a nine-dollar plant and she did not take a single thing I had ever given her, Mother. Do you understand what I am telling you?Not one thing."

Alexander’s voice cracked.He did not try to hide it.

"I love her. I love her more than I have ever loved another human being. I love her the way my father should have loved you, and the way you should have let him love you, and the way neither of you was capable of because neither of you was ever going to let a marriage be a thing that was bigger than the Winters name. I love her, and if she decides to come back to me — if she decides to come back to me, I am going to spend the rest of my life being the husband she deserved from the beginning. And I need you to understand that whether or not she comes back … the marriage I had with her is the only marriage I am ever going to have. There is no other version. There is no Vivienne. There is nonext.There is Melody, and then there is the rest of my life lived as the man who was married to Melody. That is the only arrangement on offer."

Catherine was very still.

"So. Here is what I am asking of you. I am asking you to accept that my wife is my wife, and that she is not an acquisition I have made from beneath the Winters family's appropriate social altitude, and that your opinions about her background are no longer welcome in any room I am in. For the time being,you are not going to call me. You are not going to send me things through Louisa or through Rivera or through Genevieve Langley or through any other intermediary. You are not going to be invited to any event I am attending. You are not going to be invited to the upstate house. You are not going to be told where I am having Thanksgiving. You are on a quiet sabbatical from me. Do you understand?”

Catherine was looking at him the way a woman looked at a piece of furniture in her own house that had just stood up and spoken.

"Alexander. You cannot be serious?”

"I am serious. I am more serious than I have been in my adult life. I would burn this family down to the foundations before I ever let you hurt my wife ever again. Do you understand me?”

"Alexander."

"Do you understand me?”

A long silence.

His mother's faceshifted.The careful warm arrangement she had put on for the phone call this morning slid half an inch to the left on the planes of her face. What was underneath it was a woman who had just understood that she was not going to be able to manage him back into the shape she had been managing him into.

"I understand."