2. Margo
— ? —
Margo
The answer I’m braced for never comes. What comes instead is worse, because it’s gentle.
His shoulders drop, and the man who manages me for a living just looks tired.
Sebastian crosses the room, slower this time, and when he reaches for me, I don’t step back. He pulls me in, one hand at the back of my head, and presses a kiss to my forehead that undoes what I’ve been holding together all afternoon.
“I should have told you,” he says into my hair. “About her… about all of it. I’m sorry.”
It’s not an answer. It’s the shape of one, and I know the difference by now. I still lean into him anyway.
“Then tell me now.”
He leans back just enough to look at me, both hands coming up to cup my face.
“We’re not close. Not the way we were as kids. Now, it’s just business. A dinner when the families needed to talk, a benefit here and there…” His thumbs rest against my cheekbones. “I’ve barely seen her since I married you, Margo. I need you to hear that part.”
“Really?” I search his eyes for the lie, the hedge, the thing he’s not saying and I don’t find it.
He nods. Then, after a pause, “If there’s one thing you should know.” His thumb goes still against my cheek. “When we were younger, everyone assumed we’d end up together. Her family and mine. Everyone treated it like a foregone conclusion.”
I pull back far enough to see his whole face. “You were engaged to her?”
“No.” At least he has the decency to look uncomfortable. “It was never formal. Just an expectation. One I didn’t meet, because I chose you. I married you, Margo.”
He says it as if it settles everything. As if the fact of his choice erases the years I’ve spent smiling at people who look through me, learning which fork to use so no one has an excuse to sneer, lying awake in a bed the size of a small country while my husband works three rooms away, is all nothing.
Sebastian doesn’t see it. That’s the part that sits in my throat like a lump I can’t swallow.
Sure, he chose me, and he says he loves me but he still has no idea what it costs to be the girl who wandered in from a fishing village and never stopped feeling as if she was tracking sand across his mother’s marble.
Because he grew up in this. The glamour, the yachts, the rooms where everyone already knows his name. He’s never once had to shrink himself to fit through a door that wasn’t built for him.
He doesn’t understand how lonely it is out here, on the edge of his world, and I don’t know how to explain it without sounding as if I’m asking him to apologize for who he is or that I’m being too much.
So the words stay stuck where they are.
And he kisses me before I can find them, a soft press to my lips that stops the spiral cold. Then he rests his forehead against mine, and his voice drops to the register he used to save just for me.
“Tomorrow, after the ceremony, it’s just us. You, me, and Sandy. No mother, no investors, no ship. I’ll clear the whole day.” His thumb brushes my cheek. “I know I’ve been absent. Let me fix it.”
I close my eyes and let his words settle over me, and I try, I really try, to be reasonable about this.
At this point, nothing has actually happened yet.
Therese is just a name. A face and a childhood I wasn’t part of, and I’ve known about her for all of an afternoon. I haven’t even properly met the woman.
Maybe I am overreacting. Maybe I’m so used to bracing for the worst that I’ve started manufacturing it, and if I let every insecurity turn into an accusation, I’ll finish the job of pulling us apart myself.
Across the room, Sandy shifts in her sleep, one small fist curled under her chin.
For her. For us.
For the family I still want, even on the days it feels as if it’s slipping through my fingers, I can choose to be the bigger person. I can choose to trust the man I fell in love with instead of the story my fear keeps writing about him.
“Okay,” I say, and I mean it as much as I’m able to. “Okay.”
He kisses my forehead again and gives me a small smile. “Get ready for dinner. Seven o’clock, black tie. I have one call to make and then I’m yours.”
The call takes him into the next room before I can answer.
Then the afternoon bleeds into evening the way it always does, in meetings I’m not part of and hours I spend waiting, despite his words.
I get Sandy bathed and into her party dress first, wrestling her hair into the bow she has extremely strong feelings about, and then I finish getting ready alone. Black silk, the good earrings, and whatever’s left of my dignity zipped in at the back.
When I step out at six forty-five, Sebastian has Sandy hoisted onto his hip, the two of them peering out the window at the lights strung along the deck below. The phone is face-down on the table. For the first time all day, he isn’t looking at it.
“Mommy! You look so pretty!”
He turns, and whatever he sees on my face softens his. “Daddy thinks so too. You look beautiful, Margo.”
I cross to them and fix his tie, which is crooked, knotted in the kind of hurry that tells me the call ran long and he rushed the last two minutes to be ready. He lets me straighten it, watching me the whole time.
“There,” I say. “Now you look like you didn’t get dressed in a war.”
Sebastian sets Sandy down, and she immediately starts spinning to watch her skirt fan out.
He catches my wrist before I can pull away, tugs me in by the waist, and brushes his lips to the side of my neck. “This dress is going to be a problem for me all night. You know that.”
“Behave.” I swat his chest, which does absolutely nothing except make him grin against my skin.
“I am behaving. You should see the alternative.”
Sandy tugs at his trouser leg, brow furrowed, working through something serious.
“What’s wrong with Mommy’s dress?” she asks. “Is it a cupcake too? Like mine?”
“It’s not a problem, baby,” I start, but she’s already moved on, rounding on me with the full weight of her grievance.
“Mommy, Daddy said my dress looks like a cupcake.” She points an accusing finger at Sebastian, lower lip trembling with the injustice of it all. “A cupcake isn’t a dress. I told him.”
Sebastian looks down at her with the gravity of a man handed a genuine crisis. “I meant it as a compliment, princess. Cupcakes are the best thing there is.”
Sandy considers this, deeply unconvinced, then decides to accept the apology and goes back to spinning her skirt.
I’m fighting the smile and losing. A laugh gets out of me before I can stop it, traitorous thing, and I let myself lean into the man who still knows how to do this when he remembers to.
I decide, again, to leave the afternoon where it is.
“Come on,” I say. “Your mother’s waiting, which means we’re already late in her opinion.”
We walk to dinner as a family, Sebastian’s palm warm at the small of my back, Sandy skipping ahead to count the ceiling lights.
For a moment it almost feels like the thing he promised.
Then we reach the entrance to the Grand Dining Room, and a man in a dinner jacket peels out of the crowd with his hand already extended.
“Austen. Good, you’re here. A word before we sit, it’s about the Walton timeline.” He’s already steering Sebastian away, one of those men who assume the whole world runs on their schedule.
Sebastian looks back at me, jaw tight, and I can tell he doesn’t want to go.
“Go,” I tell him. “I’ve got her.”
He squeezes my hand once and lets the man pull him into the crowd.
So I stand at the edge of the room with my daughter and a champagne flute I don’t remember taking, and I do what I’m best at these days, I disappear in plain sight.
That’s when I hear them.
Two women near the flower arrangement, close enough that I catch every word without trying.
“…the Walton girl, obviously. Heiress to half the shipping on the coast.”“She’s lovely.
And so accomplished. Sits on every board worth sitting on, speaks I don’t know how many languages.
You know she turned down a diplomatic post?
”“Of course she did. That face belongs on a magazine, not in an embassy.”
A laugh, low and knowing.
“Everyone always assumed she’d end up with the Austen boy. Pity how that went.”“Mm. Well. These things have a way of sorting themselves out.”
I keep my eyes on Sandy, on the ceiling lights she’s still counting, on anything but the two women confirming out loud what I’ve spent all afternoon telling myself not to imagine.
Every measurable thing I’m not, spoken as if it’s a weather report.
This is the woman Sebastian was supposed to end up with, and apparently the entire room knows it but me.
I turn to hide my expression, and that’s when I see the display.
It’s set up near the entrance, a tall screen looping through images while soft piano plays underneath, some tasteful little tribute to the partnership everyone’s here to celebrate.
Two great families, decades of history, the future of Austen shipping.
I watch a handful of photos cycle past before the one that stops me.
Sebastian, younger, tanned, laughing at whatever’s off-camera. And beside him, a woman in white.
So this is Therese.
The gossip didn’t do her justice. She’s the kind of beautiful that photographs on purpose, all honey-blonde and effortless, chin tipped up with confidence.
Her hand is curled around Sebastian’s arm as if it lived there and the two of them look like an advertisement for a life I was never going to be cast in.
The caption fades in beneath them.
Austen heir with longtime companion Therese Walton.
Longtime companion, huh?
I read it twice, and both times it lands somewhere I can’t reach to pull it back out.
My grip tightens on the stem of the champagne flute until my knuckles ache, and I set it down on the nearest surface before I do that thing where I hold something too hard and it shatters and everyone turns to look at the fishing village girl who can’t handle her drink.
My other hand finds Sandy’s shoulder, warm and small and real, and I anchor myself to it.