9. Melody
— ? —
Melody
My suitcase won’t close, and Noah is sitting on it like that’s a solution.
He insisted on helping me with my bags. We haven’t talked much about it this morning, both of us aware that these are our last few minutes together for who knows how long.
The silence between us is heavy with everything we’re not saying.
“You realize this is weird,” I tell him, tugging at the zipper. “A grown man sitting on luggage.”
“A grown man solving a problem.” The zipper gives, finally, teeth grinding shut around the weeks I never planned to have.
He stays where he is, looking up at me from his perch on my overstuffed bag, and some of the play drains out of his face.
“You could stay three more days. The room’s not going anywhere. ”
I pull the suitcase upright between us like a little wall. “You know I have to go back and deal with everything. My whole life is sitting at baggage claim waiting for me, Noah. This isn’t goodbye. You said so yourself at breakfast. Loudly. Over the sticky rice.”
“I did say that.” He stands, takes the suitcase handle out of my hand, and kisses me once, soft, like punctuation. “I meant it, too.”
We walk to the elevator and down through the lobby, and I let myself have it, this last stretch of the dream before the plane.
The marble floors, the orchids, the wall of glass with the sea behind it.
Noah is telling me about the pad thai grandmother, how she asked about me this morning when he passed the alley, how she threatened him in two languages, and I’m laughing, actually laughing, my hand tucked into the crook of his arm like it grew there.
“She said, and I’m translating generously, that if I let the pretty one get on a plane, I deserve everything that happens to me.”
“Smart woman.”
“She is a terrifying woman. She once chased a food critic out with a ladle.”
“I want to be her when I grow up.”
“You’re well on your way.” The concierge had told us the car would be here in twenty minutes when we dropped off my key. Twenty minutes until I leave this place and go back to the wreckage of my real life.
We’re crossing the lobby, heading for the main doors, when the elevator chimes behind us. I don’t think anything of it. It’s a hotel. Elevators open constantly. People come and go. It’s the most normal sound in the world.
The doors open, and my whole life walks out of them.
Leo steps out of the elevator.
With Alexandra.
For a moment, time freezes. The four of us stand there in the marble lobby, arranged like chess pieces on a board, and I have the strange sensation of watching myself from outside my body.
Leo’s face goes white first. Then red, blotchy and rising, the color he turns when he loses at anything.
“You.” His eyes jump from me to Noah, to my hand on Noah’s arm, back to Noah’s face, and something moves behind them, some recognition assembling itself in real time. “What are you doing with him-” He stops. His mouth actually falls open. “Noah.”
“Leo.”
The name comes out of Noah flat and cold, and the floor drops out from under me, because he says it like a man greeting something familiar.
“What?” I look between them. “What is this? How do you two know each other?”
“Melody-” Noah starts.
“He’s my cousin.” Leo’s voice cracks up an octave, loud enough that a family by the fountain turns to look.
“He’s my cousin, and you’re, what, you’re holding his arm?
You’re here laughing with him?” He rounds on Noah, and the red in his face has gone all the way to his ears.
“What the hell are you doing with my wife?”
The word cousin is still falling through me, floor after floor, finding nothing to land on. I take my hand off Noah’s arm. He feels it happen and flinches like I hit him.
“So you’re the husband.” Noah’s voice stays level, but there’s something underneath it now, something with edges.
“Out of every man on this planet. I didn’t know she was your wife when I met her, Leo.
I found her crying at a bar because her husband was texting his mistress on their honeymoon.
” His eyes flick to Alexandra, deliberate and unhurried.
“You must be the mistress. The white’s a bold choice. ”
Alexandra’s chin lifts. “Excuse me?”
“You heard him fine,” I say.
“You don’t even know her.” Leo steps forward, jabbing a finger at Noah’s chest. “She’s using you to get back at me-”
“Unlike you, I don’t need four years to know her.
” Noah doesn’t move back. He doesn’t move at all, which is somehow worse.
“I already know her better than you ever did. I know she gets seasick if she reads on boats. I know she taught herself Thai from a phrasebook because of a calendar she saw when she was twelve. I know she plans everything because nobody in her life ever planned anything for her.” His voice drops.
“You had four years of that woman and you spent them lying to her. So don’t stand there and tell me what I know. ”
“You smug son of a-” Leo grabs a fistful of Noah’s shirt.
It happens fast after that. Noah’s hand closes on Leo’s wrist, Leo shoves, they slam together into the luggage cart and orchid petals go everywhere, and then two security guards materialize out of nowhere and haul them apart.
One guard plants himself between them with both hands raised.
Alexandra has backed all the way to the elevator.
Half the lobby is watching now, phones out, and I’m standing in the middle of it with my suitcase, invisible again, always the last to know.
“Sir, you need to calm down,” the guard tells Leo. Then, to Noah, quieter, with a deference I don’t have time to think about, “Sir, are you all right?”
“Fine.” Noah straightens his shirt. His eyes find me over the guard’s shoulder, and whatever he sees in my face makes him go pale. “Melody. Let me explain.”
“Is this it?” My voice comes out steadier than I have any right to. “The complication. The thing you were going to tell me tonight. Is this it?”
“No, I didn’t know this either. This is not what I wanted to-”
“So there is more to this.” I laugh, and it sounds broken even to me. “There’s more. Of course there’s more. There’s always more.”
“I swear to you I didn’t know. He’s family I see twice a decade, I wasn’t at your wedding, I’ve never heard your name from his mouth-”
“I can’t do this right now.” My car is outside. My whole ruined life is on the other side of that glass, waiting, and suddenly I want it, I want the wreckage, because at least the wreckage doesn’t keep changing shape. “I have a flight.”
But I don’t walk to the door. Not yet. Because Leo is standing there smoothing his shirt with that wounded look he wears when the world catches him, and there’s one thing I came into this lobby carrying, and I’m not hauling it home in my chest for twenty hours.
I walk up to him. Close. Close enough that only he and Alexandra and Noah can hear.
“And you... I know about the letter, so don’t bother pretending.”
Every muscle in his face stops working at once.
“What letter,” he says, but it comes out with no air in it.
“The one from Patterson. Seven weeks ago, addressed to me, about my great-grandmother’s estate.
” I watch the blood leave his sunburn. “Don’t start with your acting games.
I know you took it. And I know you called him back and told him we both knew.
I know why you keep saying we can work through this.
” I look at Alexandra, and I let the pause sit there, long and cold.
“And I know you and your little... friend? Lover? Mistress? I never know what to call the help. I know you two were planning to wait me out. Stay married, stay patient, wait for the money to land, and then take your cut.”
“Melody, that’s insane, I never-”
“Nice try.” I lean in one inch closer. “But you needed to be smarter. You needed Patterson to be less of a family friend, or me to be less of a planner. It’s not going to happen, Leo. Not one dollar. Not ever.”
“Baby, listen to me-”
“You told her I’d never know.” I pick up my suitcase handle. “You keep getting that part wrong.”
I walk out through the glass doors into the heat, past the fountain, past the bellhops, and I don’t look back at any of them.
Not at Leo, gray-faced and sputtering. Not at Alexandra, doing arithmetic behind her eyes.
Not at Noah, who is desperately calling my name, in the country I dreamed about for twenty years, where absolutely everything, it turns out, was too good to be true.
The car door shuts. The resort slides away behind me, palm by palm.
I make it four minutes before I can finally cry.
***
Noah
She’s gone through the doors and I’m two steps into following her when Leo’s hand clamps around my arm.
“Let go of me.”
“Did you tell her?” He’s got his voice down low now, the public performance abandoned, and this close I can see he’s shaking. “Did you tell her you own all this? The resort, the whole chain? Is that it? That’s how you seduce her, flash the empire at the sad little bride-”
“I said let go.”
“Because think about it, cousin.” He hangs onto the word like a weapon.
“Think about the timing. A woman finds out about a nine-figure family estate and lands in your lap the same week? Crying at your bar, in your hotel, all alone and helpless?” His mouth twists into something he probably thinks is a smile.
“Stay away from her. She’s using you. She heard the name Carter and did the math.
She doesn’t want you. She just wants your money. ”
I pull my arm free hard enough that he stumbles into the luggage cart a second time.
And I almost laugh, standing there in the middle of my own lobby with orchid petals on the floor and my staff pretending not to watch, because the accusation is so perfectly, poisonously backward. She’s using you for your money.
She doesn’t even know I have it.
I never got to tell her. That was tonight.
Tonight was the plan, dinner on the private beach, the whole truth, the resort, the chain, all of it laid out where she could inspect it.
Instead she’s in a car to the airport believing the only real thing that’s happened to her all year is another trap, and the man who set every actual trap in her life is standing in front of me, telling me she’s the con.
“You know the difference between us, Leo?” I keep my voice quiet, because quiet has always frightened him more than loud. “When she finds out what I’m worth, she’s going to be angry with me. When she found out what you’re worth, she had to call a lawyer.”
I leave him there with his mistress and his ruined face, and I’m pulling out my phone before I reach the doors, because there’s a twenty-hour flight between here and Chicago, and I have exactly that long to figure out how to tell a woman who’s been lied to by everyone that one more secret is the last one.