Page 4 of The Wife He Accused

"A mistake."

"Careful. That sounds like a confession."

"It is."

And he meant it. She could see he meant it. This was the man she had fallen in love with. The one who chose her, every day, in the small ways and the large. The one who, on their fourth date,had taken her to the diner under his apartment because she had said, half-apologetic, that she missed pancakes, and had eaten a stack of blueberry pancakes in a four-thousand-dollar suit and not once made it weird.

Across the room, a woman in emerald leaned toward two men and murmured something. One of the men glanced over at Melody and his expression flickered briefly into something curious, then knowing. Melody had spent enough time in this room to know that look. It was the look of a man being told a story about her that he was choosing to enjoy.

"How much longer?" she asked.

Alexander followed her gaze. His jaw moved. "Half an hour."

"I might survive that."

"I'll make it worth your while."

She smiled. The edges of the night had sharpened again, though, and the smile would not come all the way up.

"Alexander," she said, after a moment. The champagne flute was warming in her hand. She had still not had a single sip. "Do you ever get tired of this?"

"Of what?"

"All of it." A small gesture toward the room. The Vivaldi. The diamonds. The endless invisible measuring.

He considered the question seriously, as he considered everything. "No."

She nodded. She had known he would say no.

"I get tired of what it costs you," he added. "That's different."

That caught her under the ribs. He did see it.

She turned the champagne flute slowly between her fingers. The pearl in her left earring shifted against her jaw, cool as river-stone. Her mother had worn these earrings to her own wedding in a Methodist church basement in Ohio, with a sheet cake and a borrowed dress. Her mother had given them to her on the morning of her engagement and said,Don't lose yourselfin there, baby. Promise me.Melody had promised. She thought about that promise more often than she liked.

Something small and dangerous slipped out of her before she could close her hand around it.

"Alexander," she said, keeping her voice light, the way she had learned to keep her voice light in this room, "if you had met me somewhere else — before all of this — would you have trusted that I loved you?"

His brows drew together. The question had taken him by surprise, which was rare enough that she registered it almost as a separate event.

And then.

The pause.

Less than a second. So small that, played back later, she would not be able to swear it had existed. A pause that lives in the space between a heartbeat and the next, the kind a person can tell themselves they imagined, the kind you would never bring up in court because no jury would convict on it.

But she felt it. She felt it the way you feel a draft in a closed room and look around for the open window.

Then his face cleared. "Of course I would have."

He even smiled.

"Of course," she echoed.

A waiter passed. Alexander's hand moved on her back. A small reassurance, automatic, the kind of touch that meantwe're still here, we're still us.

Across the room, the woman in emerald laughed at something a senator's husband had said. The Vivaldi finished a movement and slid into the next. Catherine Winters was at the far end of the room, holding court.