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.
Beside hers. 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 and then 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.
"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, had a 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.
His hand came up to her jaw, his thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone, the touch she had loved for two and a half years, the touch that had pulled her out of a hundred bad evenings. Her eyes closed in the old reflex of trust.
"I love you," he murmured. "Do you understand me? I love you."
And here was the thing about Alexander Winters that the press did not know, Catherine did not know and Vivienne, thank God, had never gotten to find out: when he said I love you in his own apartment with no audience, his voice cracked very slightly on the love.
It had cracked the first time he had said it to her, on a balcony in Capri at one in the morning, and it had cracked every time since.
She had never told him she could hear it because she was afraid that if he knew, he would learn to control it.
It cracked now.
"I love you," she said back, and meant it the way she had always meant it, and let him kiss her.
He kissed her, his hand at her jaw and his other hand finding her waist through the silk and resting there as if it had a reservation. Her body, which had always been honest with her about Alexander, leaned into him before her mind had decided whether to allow it.
His mouth moved to the corner of hers, then to the soft place under her ear where he knew, from two and a half years of practice, that she was undefended. She made a small sound she did not mean to make. He smiled against her skin.
"Bedroom?" he murmured.
"No," she said, surprising herself. "Here?”
He drew back half an inch to look at her. There was a question in his face, and an interest, and a slow private pleasure that she had asked. Alexander did not get asked for things often. He was the one who asked. He was the one who decided.
"Here," he agreed.
He found the zipper at the back of her dress without breaking the kiss, and the long slow zzz of the teeth coming apart was the loudest thing in the apartment.
His knuckles brushed her spine the whole way down.
The silk loosened on her shoulders and he eased it forward, forward, let it slip from her arms and pool around her hips before he caught it and lowered it the rest of the way to the floor like something he respected.
She stepped out of it. She was wearing nothing underneath but the small nude lace of her underwear and her mother's pearl earrings. The cool of the floor traveled up through the soles of her feet.
Alexander looked at her.
"Christ, Melody."