Page 42 of The Wife He Accused

He had looked at it.

He had looked at her.

He had set the wooden spoon down on the counter, very carefully, as if the spoon were suddenly the most fragile object in the house. He had crossed the kitchen and taken her face in both hands and looked at her for a long time without speaking.

"Melody."

He had pulled her against his chest so hard she had laughed into the front of his shirt, and she had felt his arms lock around her.

He had cried. She had cried. The pasta had boiled over. Neither of them had noticed for a long time. When they had noticed, they had laughed, and the laughing had turned into more crying, and the crying had turned into him kneeling on the kitchen floor with his forehead against her stomach saying things she could not hear because his mouth was against her shirt.

They had eaten cereal for dinner that night. She had not minded.

Catherine and Alexander were now speaking again, and their relationship had deepened. Melody and Catherine had even tentatively started a relationship. It had not been easy. There had been awkward silences, and a few sentences in the first few months that had caught Melody wrong and that Catherine had, to her credit, corrected herself on before Melody had even had to point them out. Twice, Catherine had sent a small handwritten note afterward that had said onlyI caught that one after I said it, I am sorry.

Catherine was coming up to the upstate house next weekend to see the nursery, and Melody had found herself, the day before, cleaning the guest room and putting fresh linens on the bed the way you did when a person you wanted to be comfortable was coming to stay. She had understood, smoothing the top sheet flat, that at some point in the last several months without her noticing,wanting Catherine to be comfortablehad quietly become a real thing.

Upstairs, the floorboards creaked.

The bedroom above the kitchen had a loose board near the bed that Alexander had been meaning to fix for a year and hadnever gotten around to fixing, because Melody had told him not to. She liked the creak. The creak was the small reliable announcement that her husband was awake, and it had come to be one of her favorite sounds in the world.

She heard him move across the floor. She heard him come down the hall. She heard his bare feet on the wooden stairs.

She smiled into the steam of her tea.

"Melody?"

His voice, from the doorway behind her. She turned in the doorway and looked at her husband.

He was in the soft white t-shirt he slept in and a pair of worn pajama pants that had seen better seasons, slung low on his hips to reveal those enviable abs of his. His hair was sticking up at the back the way it always stuck up in the mornings because he slept on his stomach like a child, and the dark smudge along his jaw was a two-day-stubble shadow. His eyes when they landed on her did the thing they now did every morning when they landed on her: a quiet gladness. He looked at her as if looking at her was the small daily work of his life that he had never, now, been able to convince himself he could take for granted.

"There you are," she said.

He crossed the kitchen in three strides and put one hand on her face, the other on the curve of her belly and he leaned his forehead against hers.”

Good morning, Mrs. Winters."

"Good morning."

His thumb moved on her stomach. The baby kicked, once, underneath it.

"She's saying good morning to you."

"She's sayingI am awake and I would like breakfast," Melody said. "She is a very practical woman."

"She takes after her mother."

"She takes after her mother's sister, who is shameless about breakfast."

"Angelica's coming up this afternoon?"

"Three o'clock. She's bringing the pie she told you about."

"Good." He kissed her, slow and soft, a good-morning kiss that did not have anywhere urgent to be. When he drew back his hand was still on her belly.

"You’ve been up a while."

"Since six."