Page 39 of The Wife He Accused

"Go on up." He did not reach for the house phone. He simply opened the door for her and stepped back.

The elevator took its forty-two floors in its usual discreet silence. She didn’t look at her reflection in the polished steel. She was in her own jeans, her own gray sweater, her own boots, and she did not need the mirror to tell her what she looked like. She knew. She looked like the woman she had always been, finally standing up straight inside her own body.

Melody stood in front of the door for a moment. Her keys were in her coat pocket. She could let herself in. She knocked instead.

There was a pause: a beat in which she could hear, through the heavy soundproofing, the soft quick sound of a man moving across a floor.

The door opened.

And there he was.

For a second she did not recognize him. She recognized him — she knew his face the way she knew her own hands — but the man in front of her was not the Alexander Winters she had last seen in her sister's living room in a navy suit in the cold procedural voice of a corrected report. H

e was in a soft gray sweater she had bought him last Christmas, the cuffs pushed up once, the collar crumpled. His hair was out of place. He had not shaved in days. There was a shadow along his jaw she had not seen since the week after her mother died, when he had stopped paying attention to things about himself because he had been paying attention to her. His eyes were tired in a way his eyes were almost never tired. And when he saw her in his hallway his face did a thing she had seen it do exactly once before — on a balcony in Capri, at one in the morning, the night he had first told her he loved her.

"Melody."

His voice was a desperate, hopeful whisper.

"Alexander."

"Come in. Please."

She walked past him into the apartment.

It was different. The lights were low: a single lamp in the living room, the under-counter lights in the kitchen. Dishes in the sink, which she had never seen in the whole of her marriage because Agnes had always gotten to them first. A book face down on the coffee table. A cheap blue tumbler on the counter, half an inch of coffee still in it, one of the ones she had brought from Cobble Hill, the ones that had lived pushed to the back of the cupboard for the whole of their marriage.

Her eyes went to the entry console. In a small silver frame she had never seen, was a photograph of her on a beach in Greece.

She stopped walking. "What is this?”

"A picture I took of you on our honeymoon. I never showed you. I have been keeping it in the bottom drawer of my desk at the office for almost two years. I wanted to put something there. So I put you."

She looked at the photograph — the white shirt of his, the white beach, her dark hair salt-tangled, her head thrown back in the way she had not laughed in almost two years. Seeing it was like seeing a piece of herself she had forgotten she had left in a drawer at the office of a man who had not, in the end, forgotten it either.

"Come sit down. Please."

He led her to the two armchairs by the window. She sat. He sat across from her. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped loosely in front of him.

"I don't know where to start,” he said.

"Start at the beginning."

He looked at her for a long second. "The beginning is a desk drawer in my father's study when I was sixteen."

She did not speak. She had suspected that there was a version of her husband's life she had never been shown. She had been waiting for him to show it to her. She had not been sure, until this moment, that he ever was.

"I was looking for a pencil. I opened the drawer and I found a letter. The letter was from a man I did not know to my mother. It was not the only letter. There were years of them in that drawer. I was sixteen. I sat on the floor of my father's study and I read them. I understood, about halfway through the third letter, that my mother had been running a parallel life under the roof of our house for more than ten years, and my father had not noticed. Imade a vow in that study. I did not say it out loud. I did not need to. The vow wasI will not be that man. I will not be the last to know.I have been protecting the sixteen-year-old on the floor of that study ever since. I did not know I was doing it. I did not know he was still in the room with me. I thought I was a grown man who had built a company and married a woman he loved. I did not know that the whole time I was doing those things, the sixteen-year-old had been running me."

He paused, looking at his own hands.

"I want to tell you about the half-second. At the gala. I paused for half a second before I answered your question because the sixteen-year-old was in my mouth with me and he was sayingno.He was sayingnobecause the only way never to be the last to know was to start fromnoand work backward, and he had been starting fromnoabout every woman I had ever been in a room with since I was sixteen. The fact that I was giving you ayeson the surface of every day of our marriage did not change thenohe was giving you underneath. He was the one who wrote the sentence I used in the suite.A woman who came from very little, and married into a great deal, and it still wasn't enough.That sentence was my mother's before it was mine, and it was his before it was yours, and I handed him the microphone. I let him use it. I let him use it on you."

Melody's hands were shaking a little in her lap. She made them stop.

"I am not asking you to feel sorry for the sixteen-year-old. He is mine. He has always been mine, and I failed to do his job for the whole of my adult life, and I am doing it now. I want to tell you what I have been doing this week, and then I am going to stop talking."

"Okay."