Page 5 of The Wife He Accused

And inside Melody, behind the smile she had been keeping in place for ninety minutes and the careful, careful body of thewoman who had learned how to exist in this room … something tilted.

She would remember, later, that she had felt it. She would remember that she had been standing exactly here, with her mother's pearls warm against her jaw and her husband's hand at the small of her back, when she had first understood that the worst thing in her marriage was not going to be a thing he did to her.

It was going to be a thing he believed about her.

CHAPTER 2

MELODY

The drive home was quiet,but it was the wrong kind of quiet.

Alexander did not do tense the way other men did tense. If anything, he was more contained than usual, his attention divided between the city sliding past the tinted glass and whatever calculations were running themselves out behind his eyes. He looked, to anyone glancing in from another car, like a man having a perfectly civil ride home with his wife.

But his hand was resting beside hers on the seat.Besidehers. Two inches of leather between his knuckles and the back of her hand. He was not closing the gap, and Alexander always closed the gap. Alexander reached for her in elevators, in the back of cars, in restaurants under the table, in the kitchen while she was making toast. Six months ago, in Paris, he had taken her hand on the street without looking up from his phone, and she had thought,He doesn't even know he's doing it,and the thought had made her almost cry on the rue de Rivoli.

Tonight, his hand stayed where it was.

She watched the headlights smear past on Park Avenue and tried very hard to be a reasonable person. She had asked an unfair question, in a context already loaded, after two glasses of champagne she should not have had. She had set him up andthen read meaning into the way he had answered. That was what had happened.

That was probably what had happened.

The two inches of leather between their hands held their position.

"Say it again," Alexander said suddenly.

She turned her head. "What?"

"The question."

There was nothing in his voice she could grip. Just that flat, level focus he brought to a problem he intended to take apart.

"It doesn't matter."

"It mattered enough for you to ask it."

She let her head rest back against the seat. The car was making the slow easy turn onto the side street where their building was, the one with the maples that had gone the color of cognac last week and were starting now to drop their leaves in slow drifts across the sidewalk.

"I was tired," she said. "Your mother and Vivienne in the same room should qualify as a Geneva Convention violation."

"That isn't what you asked me."

"No. It isn't."

He turned toward her then, his shoulder shifting against the leather, his face half in the gold spill of the streetlights and half in shadow. She could see the small scar at the edge of his eyebrow. She loved that scar. It was the only part of his face that did not look like it had been negotiated for.

"Ask me again," he said.

She did not want to. She wanted to be upstairs in soft clothes with her makeup off and the conversation a thousand miles behind them. But Alexander, when he wanted to solve a thing, did not let the thing be put back in the drawer.

"If you had met me somewhere else," she said, lower this time. "Without the Winters name. Without the company. Just somewhere. Would you have trusted that I loved you."

The pause this time was smaller. She watched it.

"Yes," he said.

The answer was correct, it came at the right speed, and his eyes did not move off her face when he said it. By every measure she had ever been taught to apply to a sentence, it was the answer she wanted.

And still —still— there was something in her chest that did not unclench. Some small animal part of her was sitting up with its ears back, watching him the way her mother's old dog had used to watch the door before a thunderstorm, when nothing in the air had changed yet that any human could name.