Page 41 of The Wife He Accused

"I'm not going to stop."

"I want — Alexander, I want you inside me. Now. Please."

He withdrew his hand and she felt the loss of it and then he was above her, his forearms braced on either side of her head, his hips between her thighs, and he paused there — one second, looking at her face in the amber city light.

And then he was inside her. She was looking at his face, and she understood that the man above her was not the man who had stood in a hotel suite and told her she came from very little. The man above her was the man who had understood what he had broken. The man above her was the man who had sent her texts titledReasons I Love You. The man above her was the man whose voice cracked on her name.

He moved with a raw uncontrolled need that she had not felt from him in the whole of their marriage, as if he had understood, finally, that the control had been part of the problem. He moved in her and she moved with him, her legs wrapped around him, her hands gripping the muscles of his back, her mouth againsthis shoulder. The sounds she was making were the sounds she had not allowed herself to make in the careful restrained bedroom of a woman who had been performing a version of herself.

"Look at me," he said, ragged. She looked at him, and his face was open and beautiful. The wave started to build, in long slow breaking pulls. She said his name once, sharp; her back arched off the bed and her hand found the back of his neck and gripped. Melody came with her eyes open and his name in her mouth and his face filling her whole field of vision.

Alexander followed her. His hips stuttered, his breath broke and he pressed his forehead hard against hers and saidMelody, Melody, Melody. The voice he was no longer trying to control.

They stayed like that for a long time. His weight on her. Her arms around his back. Both of them breathing.

After a while he shifted to the side, pulling her with him, arranging her against his chest the way he had arranged her against his chest on a hundred Sunday mornings. His arm settled across her lower back. His lips pressed against the top of her head.

He tightened his arm around her. She pressed her cheek against his chest and listened to his heartbeat slow, except this time the pulse under her ear was not the pulse of a man who had saidyou're minein the possessive voice of a man who believed ownership was the same thing as love. This time the pulse under her ear was the pulse of a man who had learned, the difference between holding a woman and holding onto her.

She did not need to tell him the difference. He had found it on his own.

"I love you," he said.

"I love you, Alexander."

Melody lay with her cheek on his chest, his arm around her lower back, and his heartbeat slowing against her ear. Sheclosed her eyes and let herself truly be home … which was in her husband’s arms.

EPILOGUE

MELODY

One Year Later

The orchard wasin early bloom.

Melody stood at the kitchen window in a gray t-shirt of Alexander's that no longer quite closed around her middle and a pair of his running shorts she had claimed the summer before and never given back. She watched the morning light move slowly across the tops of the apple trees the way it had been moving across the tops of apple trees since before her husband's family had ever heard of the place. The trees were not the Winters orchard. The trees had come with the land. The trees predated everyone, and would outlast everyone, and Melody liked them for it.

It was a Saturday morning. The light in the kitchen was the pale green light of a country morning before the day had made up its mind what it was going to be, the kettle on the stove was just beginning to click itself toward a whistle, and on the windowsill in front of her there was her pothos plant. It had gotten enormous. Its vines trailed down the front of the cabinetunder the sink and curled along the baseboard and had, over the last several months, developed a stubborn leafy confidence.

Melody laid her hand flat on the small curve of her stomach under the soft worn cotton of Alexander's t-shirt, and the curve moved, very slightly, against her palm.

"Good morning," she said quietly to her daughter.

Her daughter, who had been kicking for about a week now, kicked once in response. Melody had been told by everyone who had ever been pregnant that the kicking was not a response to anything, that it was just the baby doing her own unrelated business at her own unrelated schedule, but Melody had decided early on that she was going to take every single kick as a response whether or not it was one.

Her daughter, she had explained to Alexander one night in bed, was going to be raised by two parents who assumed she was listening even when she was not. It was the opposite of how he had been raised. It was the opposite of how she had been raised too, in a different way.

The kettle began to whistle.

Melody turned off the gas and poured the water into the small chipped mug on the counter — the one from the farm stand in Hudson, the one he had mentioned in the first of theReasons I Love Youtexts — and dropped a teabag in. She watched the water go brown the way it went brown when you were not hurrying. She did not rush mornings anymore. Mornings had become the part of the day that belonged to her.

Alexander had made structural changes, the first of which had beenyou get to wake up before me, and you get to have the kitchen to yourself, and you get the first cup of whatever you want to drink in silence, and I will come down when you are ready for me to come down, not before.It was the kind of arrangement she had not known she wanted until he had offered it.

Melody had found out about the baby in the small upstairs bathroom with the door closed and the afternoon light coming in gray through the frosted window. She had been late by ten days. She had not said anything to Alexander because she had not wanted to say the words out loud until she was sure, and because some small private part of her had understood that the saying of the words was going to change the shape of their life in a way that could not be un-changed, and she had wanted to hold the not-yet-changed version of it in her hands for one more afternoon before she let it go.

The test had taken two minutes. She had sat on the edge of the bathtub with her hands on her knees and watched the small window on the plastic stick fill in, and when the second line appeared she had put her hand over her mouth and sat there for a long time without moving, because her body had understood before her brain had caught up that the second line was not just a line. It was a person. It was a person she and Alexander had made.

She had told him that evening. He had been in the kitchen, making pasta — badly, the way he always made pasta, with too much water and not enough salt, one of the domestic incompetencies she had come to love about him. She had come down the stairs with the test in her hand and stood in the doorway of the kitchen. He had turned around with a wooden spoon in one hand and a look on his face that saidI am concentrating very hard on not ruining dinner,and she had held up the test without saying anything.