Page 40 of The Wife He Accused

“The literacy program is yours, only yours, regardless of our marital status, but you should know that by now. And Iconfronted my mother about how she treated you. I should have done more about that sooner, and I’m sorry. I’ve been sending you texts because I needed you to know that I saw you. I saw you the whole time. The mug from the yard sale, the Ohio in your voice at your mother's funeral, the shoes by the door, the blueberry pancakes, the bed crooked on Sunday mornings upstate. The laugh through the hotel door — Iheardit, Melody. I heard it and I recognized it and I told myself I had not, because the sixteen-year-old was in my mouth. The seeing was never the problem. The failure was in the believing. And the reason it was in the believing is that I had been taught that believing a woman was the thing that had destroyed my father."

He put his head in his hands for a moment. When he lifted it, his eyes were wet. He did not wipe them.

"I love you, Melody. I love you more than I have ever loved another human being. I trust you. I trust you without the file. I trust you without Rivera. I trust you without anyone else in the room to verify you. I am never going to make you stand in a room again and wait for another man to tell me you were telling the truth before I would believe you. I am going to spend the rest of my life being the husband who believed you the first time, and I am going to make mistakes learning how to be him, and I am asking you —I am asking you to know that if you ever do come home, the marriage you come home to is not the marriage you left. The marriage you left was the one where I was protecting the sixteen-year-old. The marriage I am offering, if you ever want it, is to a man who trusts you with his whole heart.”

He stopped.

Melody had to blink back tears before she spoke. “Your mother came to see me today."

He went very still. "What?”

"She apologized to me. A real apology, with the wordsorryin it. She told me about your conversation in Greenwich.And then she told me that I make you happy. That you love me.

His eyes had filled again.

"I called a lawyer. She told me that decisions like mine deserve time before they get signed. I did not sign the retainer. I told myself I was waiting because Fiona told me to wait. I understood this afternoon that I had not signed the retainer because I could not bring myself to. I was never going to sign it, Alexander.”

She was almost laughing through the crying now. The body did strange things when it had been holding a truth for too long.

"I am not here because you said the right words in the right order. I am here because I love you. Because I never stopped. And because I can see it, Alexander. I can see it sitting here in the chair across from me. You’ve become the man who believed me the first time. You’ve been showing it to me. It’s what I needed to see. I love you. So much.”

He was out of the chair before she finished her sentence.

He crossed the table between them and went to his knees on the rug in front of her — Alexander Winters, on his knees — and he took her face in both his hands, carefully. She saw the tears on his face for the first time in her life, and she reached up and put her hands over his.

"Melody. Please say it again."

"I love you. I love you, Alexander."

And because there were no sentences left that were going to be adequate, she leaned forward out of the armchair and she kissed him.

"Alexander. Take me to bed. Please."

He made a sound that was not a word and stood up, drawing her up with him, and he led her past the entry console with the Greece photograph, down the long hallway to the bedroom.

The bedroom was dim, the only light the faint amber glow from the city through the floor-to-ceiling glass. She reached for the hem of her sweater and pulled it off over her head.

His eyes moved across her the way they had on the cream sofa the night of the gala — her mouth, her throat, her collarbones, the tops of her breasts above the plain cotton — but the looking was different now. On the night of the gala, the looking had been a man admiring something he believed was his. Tonight the looking was a man being shown something he understood he had not earned the right to see, and being shown it anyway, and trying very hard not to break under the weight of the showing.

"Your turn," she said.

He pulled the gray sweater over his head. His chest was the same chest she had loved in hotel rooms in Lisbon and on a sailboat off Hydra and in their bed upstate on a hundred Sunday mornings. Her hands knew the shape of him the way a musician's hands knew an instrument. Her hands went to him before her mind had decided whether to allow it. She pressed her palms flat against his chest. His heartbeat was fast under her left hand. She spread her fingers against it.

He made a low rough sound in his throat and his hands found her waist, and he pulled her against him. His mouth came down on hers. She got her hands on his belt. He got his hands on the button of her jeans. They undressed each other the rest of the way in the half-dark with graceless urgency. When the last of it was on the floor she stood naked in front of him and he stood naked in front of her, and for a long second neither of them moved.

He kissed her throat. He kissed her collarbones. He kissed the soft place under her ear where he knew she was undefended, and she made a sound she did not try to contain, because she was done containing sounds in this marriage. His mouth movedlower — her breasts, the hollow between them, the soft skin below her navel — and she arched up into him and said his name in a voice she had not used in this apartment before, a voice that was not the voice of the woman who had learned to be quiet in rooms where quiet was expected.

"Alexander. Please."

"Tell me what you want."

"You. I want you.”

His mouth found hers again and his hand moved down her body with a directness that was new, his fingers sliding between her thighs. When he touched her she gasped into his mouth and her hips moved against his hand without her permission.

He watched her face, his fingers moving in her with a slow deliberate rhythm, his eyes on hers.

"Don't stop," she gasped.