Page 6 of The Wife He Accused

"Okay," she said.

"You don't believe me."

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to."

The car stopped.

The penthouse,when the elevator let them out into the foyer, was as silent as it always was at this hour. The lights came up automatically, and the apartment lay before her in its long clean lines. After a year and a half of living here, she still sometimes felt like a guest who had been told she could open the refrigerator.

She slipped her heels off near the door. The marble was cool under her feet. The pothos on the entry console, the one plant she had brought with her from her old studio in Brooklyn, hada new leaf unfurling, pale and tender. She touched it with one finger.Hi. I'm home.

"Wine?" Alexander said behind her, already shrugging out of his jacket.

"Please."

He moved toward the bar. She watched him roll up one cuff. His forearms were lean, corded, and sun-touched even in October, because he played tennis on Saturdays at a club whose name she could not remember. She remembered, with sudden clarity, the first time he had unbuttoned a cuff in front of her: at a wine bar on Crosby Street, on their second date, when she had said something funny. He had laughed, pushed his sleeves up to eat, and she had understood that she was going to be in trouble.

She walked to the windows. The park was a long dark shape below, the city around it scattered in gold. From up here you could not see the people. You could not see anything that had a face. She pressed her palm flat against the glass and the cold of it traveled up her wrist into her elbow.

"Melody."

She turned. He was holding out a glass of red. She took it. Their fingers brushed and his did not let go right away.

"Talk to me," he said.

"There's nothing to talk about."

"That isn't true."

"It is tonight."

He stepped a little closer. He was not crowding her. He never crowded her. But the air in the room arranged itself around him the way it always did, and the small distance between them began to feel like a held breath.

"You asked me a question you've been thinking about," he said. "And now you're pretending it didn't matter."

"I'm not pretending."

"Melody."

She set her glass down on the console behind her. The wine sloshed once against the rim and steadied. She needed her hands free, though she did not yet know what for.

"Sometimes," she said, picking the words out of the air the way you pick wildflowers, careful of the thorns, "I feel like I walked into a story that was already written before I got here. And in that story I'm the girl who got lucky. I'm the small-town one. The one everyone is sort of politely waiting to see fail. Catherine. Vivienne. Mrs. Pierce. The woman in emerald tonight, whose name I still don't know, who looked at me twice and then told a senator's husband something that made him look at me like I was a punchline."

She paused. The pothos on the console was very still. She kept her eyes on it because she could not yet keep them on him.

"Melody." His voice was lower now. "No one in that room gets to decide who you are. Not my mother. Not Vivienne. Not whatever cocktail-party version of you they've invented to entertain themselves."

"I know that in my head."

"Then know it anywhere else you need to know it. You're my wife."

It was meant as an answer to everything, and on most nights, it was. On most nights she could let herself fall backward into it and trust the catch. Tonight it sat in the air between them like a closed door, and she could not have said why.

He saw her face. Whatever he saw made him close the last of the distance between them in one step.

"Come here," he said.