Page 36 of The Wife He Accused

"Good."

He walked out of the morning room and past Louisa, who was standing very still at the end of the hallway with a folded dishcloth in her hand. He nodded to her once and she nodded back. He went out the front door of his mother's house and down the pale stone steps and across the gravel drive to the car. He got into the car, and the driver, who had been watching him in the rearview mirror, said, "Home, sir?"

"Home."

They pulled out of the drive.

He did not look back at the house.

Halfway down the long curving road between the trees he took out his phone, opened the thread with his wife, and typed.

Reasons I Love You

You have never once, in the whole time I have known you, been cruel to a person who could not return the cruelty. I did not understand until today what a rare kind of good that is. I’m still learning it from you.

He sent it.

And all the way back to the city, in the light over the Hutchinson River Parkway, Alexander understood that becoming a man his wife could come back to was notwinningher. It was the work of becoming a man he himself could live with in the rooms she was not in.

The work was not for her.

The work was so that if she ever did come back, she would be coming back to a man deserving of her love.

CHAPTER 13

MELODY

Melody was softening.

She noticed it first in the small ordinary gestures of the day: the way her hand reached for her phone without her permission in the middle of making coffee, the way she found herself listening for the buzz of an incoming message on the coffee table, the way she caught herself laughing at something on the television and then realizing a half-second later that she had been laughing at it for him. There had been a beat, in the middle of the laugh, where her body had turned toward the space next to her on the couch as if to share the joke with her husband.

She missed him.

It had been simpler, in the first several days, to not miss him. In the first several days, the wound had been too fresh for missing. Missing required a kind of distance, and the distance had been arriving now in small unbidden installments: a morning where she woke without her chest immediately tightening, an afternoon where she went for a full hour without thinking about the suite, an evening where she caught herself wondering what he was having for dinner and then was annoyed with herself for the wondering. The annoyance was not enoughto stop the wondering. The wondering went on without her permission, the way certain other parts of her body did.

She was ashamed of missing him. She also understood that the shame was not quite fair. She had been married to him for almost two years. Her body knew him the way a body knew a house it had lived in, the way you reached in the dark for the light switch on the wall, the way you knew which stair was the creaky one without counting. Her body had been reaching for his for years. It was going to take her body longer than a week to stop reaching.

She had also, she understood, been reading the texts.

Still not replying. But reading them. She had read them again under the quilt on Angelica's couch, and she had read them once more in the morning before her coffee had even cooled. And then there had been another one waiting for her.

Reasons I Love You

The way you make the bed on Sundays upstate with the comforter pulled up crooked on purpose, because you said once that a perfectly made bed looked like no one lived there, and you wanted the room to know we lived there.

Melody had stared at it for a long time. She had not remembered saying that to him. She had said it — she knew she had said it, the words were hers, she could hear the shape of them in her own voice — but she had not known he had been listening when she had said it. She had not known he had filed the sentence away somewhere in the small private cabinet of his head under the headingthings my wife has told me about what rooms are for,and the not-knowing had been doing a thing to her all morning that she did not entirely have language for yet.

Then another one had arrived, and she had been at Angelica's kitchen sink washing a mug when her phone had buzzed on the counter next to her. She had dried her hands and looked.

Reasons I Love You

You have never once, in the whole time I have known you, been cruel to a person who could not return the cruelty. I did not understand until today what a rare kind of good that is. I am still learning it from you.

She had set the phone down very carefully on the counter, as if it were something that might break if she moved too fast.

It was theuntil todaythat had done it.I did not understand until today.Something had happened that had made her husband understand a thing about her he had not understood before, and the thing was about her being cruel to people who could not return it, which meant the thing was about someone whohad beencruel to someone who could not return it. Melody had an uncomfortable suspicion, standing at Angelica's sink with the mug in her hand, about who the someone was.

The buzzer went at four twenty on Thursday afternoon.