10. Melody
— ? —
Melody
The house sits on a bluff an hour north of the city, all cedar and glass, and I stand at the gate for a full minute rereading a text I already know by heart.
Leo: Ask your new boyfriend how he knew about the inheritance. Ask him why a man like that talks to a nobody at a bar. He also knew, Mel. He’s known the whole time. You’re a payday to him same as you think you are to me. At least I married you first.
Three days that text has been sitting in my phone like a splinter.
Three days in a rented Airbnb with beige walls and someone else’s dishes, not answering Jessica’s calls, not answering Noah’s either, until last night, when I finally picked up and he said please in a voice I’d never heard from him, please, just talk to me in person, I’m flying in, I’ll be at the house, come or don’t.
And here I am. Come or don’t. I press the intercom before I can choose don’t.
The gate swings open, and he’s already walking down the drive to meet me, no shoes, sleeves rolled, three days of not sleeping written all over his face. He stops six feet away. Neither of us knows what we’re allowed to do with our hands anymore.
“You came.”
“I almost didn’t. Four separate times.” I hold up my phone with Leo’s text on the screen and watch him read it.
Watch his jaw go tight. “I need to ask you something, and I need you to tell me the truth. The whole thing. No parts, no complications, no tonight-I’ll-explain.
If you lie to me, I will know eventually, because I always find out eventually, that’s the one gift this year has given me. So just answer.”
“Okay.”
“Did you know? About me. About the inheritance. That first night at the bar, when you sat down next to me, did you know who I was?”
“No.” He doesn’t blink, doesn’t shift his weight, doesn’t reach for me.
“I didn’t know you existed until you were crying, staring at a candle at my bar.
I heard about the inheritance standing in that lobby, when you said it to Leo.
” He exhales. “And before you ask the next one, no, Leo never mentioned you. We’re not that kind of family.
I skipped the wedding invitation that never came, and he skipped the last two funerals.
I knew he’d gotten married. I never knew to whom - and I never saw him.
I’d landed from Bali the night before I found you at that bar, and for two weeks I had eyes for exactly one guest in the whole place.
My staff kept you in wine and towels because I asked them to; it never crossed anyone’s mind to tell the owner that the crying bride’s husband was three doors down.
Why would they? None of us knew he was family. ”
“Your bar.”
“What?”
“You said crying at my bar.” I take a step closer, watching his face the way he’s always watched mine. “That’s the rest of it, isn’t it? The other part.”
He holds my eyes, and I see him let go of something he’s been gripping for a long time.
“Melody, I own a hotel chain. Eleven properties. I own the resort in Thailand, the bar, the terrace, the hidden café, the hammock, all of it. The staff who kept refilling your glass that first night and finding you towels on the beach weren’t being kind, they were being employed.
” He gestures back at the cedar and glass behind him.
“This is mine too. I have money. A stupid amount of it. I’ve had it long enough to know exactly what it does to the way people look at me, which is why I didn’t lead with it, and then I liked too much that you didn’t know, and then every day it got harder to say, and then your husband turned out to be my cousin and the whole thing detonated in a lobby.
” He spreads his hands, empty. “So no. I don’t need your inheritance.
I could buy the estate and everything around it.
What I needed was for the woman at seat four of my bar to stop crying like the world had ended.
That’s the entire scheme. That’s all of it. ”
The wind comes up off the bluff and neither of us moves.
I think about the suite that first midnight, the private pool, the art on the walls, and me asking who are you, exactly, and him saying someone who couldn’t sleep.
The guard in the lobby calling him sir in that careful voice.
Ordering whiskey without a menu. Years of coming here.
Business interests. A few properties. I laid every clue out on the table myself and let him hand me a napkin over the top of them.
“The grandmother at the restaurant,” I say. “The one who told you not to mess this up.”
“Owns her building outright. I hold the note on the block. She still scolds me for being skinny.”
“The snorkeling boat.”
“Mine.”
“The waterfall?”
“God’s, technically. The trail access is mine.”
A laugh gets out of me before I can stop it, horrible timing, half a sob, and his whole face moves toward hope and then holds itself back.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about being lied to for years.
It doesn’t just break your trust in other people.
It breaks your trust in the instrument, in your own gut, the little needle inside that’s supposed to swing toward true.
Mine failed for four years straight. But it also screamed at me down the aisle, and flinched at flat vows, and moved my hand toward that phone on the nightstand.
The needle was never broken. I just kept overruling it.
I look at Noah, sleepless and barefoot on his own driveway, having just handed me every weapon I’d need to hurt him, and the needle swings so hard it nearly leaves the dial.
“I believe you,” I say.
His breath goes out of him like he’s been holding it since Thailand.
“That being said,” I add, “if there is one more secret, one more part, one more complication, so help me, Noah-”
“There’s one more thing you don’t know.” He steps closer. “I’m in love with you. It’s been around three weeks and this is absurd, my own lawyers would advise against it, and I’ve been in love with you since you looked me dead in the eye and defended pineapple on pizza.”
“That’s not a secret. The pad thai grandmother knew. The security guards knew.”
“You didn’t know.”
“I knew.” My voice cracks. “I was scared. I’m still scared.”
“Of what?”
“That I’ll ruin it, that I’m going to screw this up the way I screwed up my marriage.”
“Hey. Look at me.” He takes my face in both hands, thumbs at my jaw, the way he did the night I showed up barefoot at his door.
“You didn’t screw up your marriage. He did.
He walked into it lying and he lied until the walls fell in, and none of that was a test you failed.
And I’m not him. I’m going to prove that so many times, in so many boring, reliable ways, that one day you’ll be sick of the evidence. ”
“I want the evidence.”
“You’ll have it. Daily. I’ll be insufferable about it.”
Then he kisses me.
Deep and slow and certain, nothing held back and nothing hidden anymore, his hands sliding into my hair, and I feel the last locked room in my chest come open.
I grip the front of his shirt and kiss him back the way I’ve wanted to since the airport, since the driveway gate, since I saw him in a bar on the other side of the world.
The wind pulls at us and the lake keeps time somewhere below the bluff and I lean into him until there’s no space left to doubt in.
“I want to try this,” I whisper against his mouth. “Really try. Not vacation-try. Not maybe. The real thing, with the checking-your-pockets phase and the boring evidence and all of it.”
Noah lifts his head, and the smile that breaks across his face is one I’ve never seen before, unguarded all the way down.
“Then let’s do it right,” he says.
He lifts me clean off the ground, my legs wrapping around him out of pure instinct, and carries me up the drive while I laugh into his neck and the gate swings shut behind us.
Inside, the house is warm and gold with late light, and he sets me down only long enough to kiss me again at the foot of the stairs, slower now, a promise being made clause by clause.
His hands find the hem of my sweater. Mine find the buttons of his shirt, and this time there’s no coat, no performance, no armor, just the two of us telling each other the truth without a single word.
Much later, tangled in his sheets with my head on his chest and his heartbeat steady under my ear, I watch the ceiling go dark and let myself feel every ounce of it, the lightness, the terror, the ridiculous joy.
“Stay with me the week,” he murmurs into my hair.
“I can’t.”
“Stay two weeks, then. I’m a skilled negotiator. I have a property near here.”
“Noah.” I prop myself up on his chest, and whatever’s in my face makes his arms tighten around me. “There’s something I have to do first. Tomorrow.”
“Tell me.”
“Tomorrow I have to see Leo.” The words come out calm, and I realize I’ve been building toward them for three days in a beige room, brick by brick.
“At the apartment. Face to face, no lawyers in the room, no warning. He’s never going to sign those papers while there’s money on the table, so I’m going to put something else on the table instead.
” I feel Noah go still beneath me. “Tomorrow I’m going to make him sign. ”