After spending the morning steeling himself for what he expected to be a very volatile conversation with Melody, Ben had finally flooed back home. He had his reasons all laid out in his mind, and he expected to tick them off to her just as Aldous had done when explaining his options. They might not get through the whole list before she interrupted, but it didn't matter. This was what was best for both of them, he thought. What they were doing now was toxic, and neither of them were happy. Living apart would give them some much needed space, and it was everything Melody had wanted from marriage: independence, freedom to do as she pleased, no overbearing fathers or husbands dictating her every move. It was everything she wanted except love, that was, but Ben couldn't give her that. He'd spent too long pretending that maybe he could, someday; it wasn't happening and it was time to move on.

Only when he went to knock on her bedroom door to tell her, she wasn't there. Neither was the dog, nor any of her things. The room looked like it had been burgled. Her clothes were missing from the wardrobe, her stationary from the desk, her toiletries from the bathroom. Melody was gone.

For a moment he merely stood dumbly in her room, trying to think what to do next. She didn't have anywhere to go; that was the whole reason he wouldn't entertain the idea of divorce. So she'd probably done something ridiculous and stupid, in true Melody fashion. She still had this romantic but entirely foolish idea that she could survive living on the streets if she needed to, and that was probably what she'd gone off to do. Hopefully no one had seen her yet. Stupid fucking Melody and her melodramatics, Ben thought. He'd finally landed on a solution, a way that they could see themselves through the other side of this, and she was off trying to ruin it before he'd even had a chance to communicate it to her.

He sat down on her bed with a heavy sigh and tried to put himself in her shoes, to figure out where she would have gone first. It could have been anywhere, conceivably, though she wasn't so stupid that she was likely to run off and throw herself into poverty without at least asking her friends or family for support first. Unfortunately, Ben only knew of one or two of her friends, and not so well that he knew which of them were most likely to harbor her in the event of something like this, and he was loathe to let on that anything was amiss if they hadn't seen his wife.

The Finches, on the other hand, were unlikely to say anything while it might still reflect poorly on their younger daughter, and it wasn't as though they could possibly think any less of him.

He flooed to Aldous' home, then walked to Wellingtonshire. Both of his brothers were working already, so no one questioned him about how it had gone. He was hardly looking forward to approaching the Finch house, but he had to find Melody. If she was there, he didn't even really care if she came home or not; so long as she wasn't planning on throwing herself to the wolves on the streets of London, she could live wherever she pleased. He could send her an allowance at the first of the month, if that was what she wanted, and that would check the box on his obligations as a husband.

As he approached the house his eyes slid up to the window of her bedroom, wondering if she was inside. He'd been to that window a few times before, always with disastrous consequences. He'd never been to the front door, but was hoping this meeting would end a little less catastrophically. Even so, he was so nervous his insides felt like a bundle of squirming insects. He'd never actually met Melody's parents — it hadn't come up during the summer he'd been flirting with her, and after his trip to Canada he'd gone out of his way to avoid them, which was easy to do when their social circles were inherently so different.

He was shown in to a parlor and told Mrs. Finch would be with him shortly. He didn't sit, but instead stood by the fireplace alternatively balling his hands into nervous fists and then flexing his fingers out. The door opened behind him and Ben jumped slightly, then turned quickly towards the woman who'd entered.

"Ah, good morning, Mrs. Finch," he said quickly, wondering if it was appropriate to shake her hand or bow or what. "I'm Ben Crouch."