Page 37 of The Wife He Accused

Melody was on the couch with her feet tucked under her, reading a novel Angelica had pressed into her hands the day before. Angelica was at work. The apartment was quiet. The pothos on the windowsill had put out another pale new leaf in the morning light, the third new leaf in a week, and Melody had noticed it when she had come back from the kitchen with her tea and had felt, for a small second, a kind of stupid warm pride in a plant.

The buzzer went.

She looked up. She was not expecting anyone. Angelica would not be home for another two hours. The only people who had the address were Angelica, David, Natalie, Fiona the lawyer, and her husband, but her husband had agreed not to come back unannounced. It occurred to her, with a small cold flash, that he might be breaking the agreement.

She got up and crossed the apartment to the intercom panel. She pressed the button.

"Yes?"

A pause.

Then, smoothly and carefully and unmistakably: "Melody. It's Catherine Winters."

Melody stood very still.

"Catherine."

"Yes. I am downstairs. I would like to speak with you. I understand if you say no. If you do say no, I will not try again. This is the only visit. I wanted you to know that before you decided."

Melody closed her eyes.

She thought about their last contentious phone call. The voice on the intercom this afternoon was not the voice from that call. She could not say yet exactly what was different about it. But something was different. Something had arrived in her mother-in-law's voice that had changed the temperature of the sentences by a degree or two.

"Come up."

She pressed the unlock.

Melody stepped back from the panel. She was in jeans. A cotton sweater. Her hair was loose on her shoulders. No lipstick. No earrings. She was, she understood, about to receive her mother-in-law in exactly the clothes her mother-in-law had been quietly judging her for owning, and she was not going to change. Catherine was not going to get the silk version. Catherine was going to get the Carroll Gardens version of Melody Carter, because the Carroll Gardens version was the real one, and if Catherine had come here it was going to be on the real one's terms or not at all.

The knock came.

Melody opened the door.

Catherine Winters stood in the hallway in a camel coat and a pair of leather driving gloves, her hair done the way it was always done, her diamond studs the way they were always done,her mouth set in the careful line it was always set in. Her face, underneath all of it, was not the face Melody had been bracing for.

Her mother-in-law looked older.

That was the first thing. Catherine always looked flawless. The lines at the corners of her mouth were slightly deeper. The eyes were slightly tired. There was a faint roughness at the base of her throat that Melody had never seen before, the skin of a woman who had either not been sleeping or had been crying, and crying was not a thing Melody had ever associated with Catherine Winters.

Melody stood aside. Catherine stepped into Angelica's parlor-floor apartment, and Melody watched her mother-in-law take in the room without commenting on any of it. That was also different. The Catherine of a week ago would have commented on the quilt, or the couch, or the pothos, with a single small sentence designed to diminish the room by half. Today's Catherine did not say anything.

"Thank you for letting me in. I know I don’t deserve to be let in."

Melody did not answer. She gestured to the couch.

Catherine sat. She did not take off the coat. She didn’t ask for anything. She set the driving gloves in her lap, folded her hands on top of them. She looked at the pothos on the windowsill for a moment, and then at her own hands, and then, slowly, up at Melody.

“I’ve come to apologize. I want to say that first, before anything else, because I understand that if you decide in the next minute that you don’t want to listen to the rest of what I have to say, you will at least know that the apologizing was the reason for the visit. I am sorry, Melody. I’m sorry for the phone call. I am sorry for every time I have said something in your presence that was designed to make you feel … small.”

Melody sat down, slowly, on the edge of the armchair across from the couch.

She did not trust her face yet. She kept her hands flat on her thighs and looked at her mother-in-law in the careful camel coat and did not speak, because she did not yet know what her own voice was going to do if she tried to use it.

Catherine looked at her hands again.

"My son came to see me. I don’t know if he’s told you. I don’t think I’ve been spoken to in that way in my adult life. I’m not complaining about it. I’m telling you because you should know what happened in that room. My son told me —"

Catherine's voice did a very small thing. It was not a crack. Catherine Winters did not crack. But something in the steady cadence of her voice adjusted by a quarter-degree. Melody, who had spent her life in rooms with women who were holding themselves together, noticed it.