3. Margo #3
“You have no idea what today was.” His voice drops, and it’s the first tonight that there’s an edge under the exhaustion.
“This ship was my father’s. His last project, the one he didn’t live to finish, finally setting sail.
Do you understand what that is for me? So yes, I was focused.
Yes, I was somewhere else. But it’s because I could not afford to fall apart in the middle of it. ”
It’s the most honest thing he’s said in two days, and part of me softens toward it, toward the boy who lost his father and built him a monument.
The rest of me is too tired to be generous.
“That’s beautiful,” I say. “Really. It must be nice, having a reason that big. I wouldn’t know. I’m just a fisherman’s daughter. We don’t get legacies.” I keep my eyes on him. “Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe you needed someone who understands what today meant. Someone like Therese.”
“Don’t.” His expression changes, goes flat and serious. “Don’t twist this into that. I’m not doing this with you, Margo. I don’t want to keep fighting about this.”
“No, you don’t want to do anything.” It comes out louder than I mean it to, and I glance at Sandy and pull it back down.
“You don’t want to fight, you don’t want to talk, you don’t want to upset your mother or the investors or the press…
You’ve got energy for all of it. The whole world gets the best of you.
We get whatever’s left, which lately is nothing at all. ”
“Please.” He drags a hand through his hair and lets out a long exhale, reaching for the calm he uses on boardrooms. “Don’t turn this into a bigger thing than it needs to be.”
“It already is a bigger thing. You just keep hoping if you stay quiet enough it’ll shrink.”
“Just get through the voyage.” He steps toward me, and his voice gentles all at once, and that’s almost worse than the fighting.
“Please, baby. Three more days. That’s all.
Once we’re back on land, we’ll really talk.
I promise. I just can’t risk it coming apart right now. You have to understand, Margo…”
Sebastian reaches for my hand.
I step back before he can take it.
Because that’s the thing he still doesn’t understand, standing there worn and asking me to wait three more days. I’m not asking him to talk. I’m not even asking him to fight with me.
All I’m asking is for him to hear what I actually mean, and he can’t, or he won’t and I have run all the way out of the patience it takes to keep translating myself for a man who only listens when it’s convenient.
I’m so damn tired of being the one who understands.
“Don’t call me baby.” My voice is low and even, and I hold his eyes so he can see I mean it. “I’ve had enough for tonight.”
“Margo…”
“You keep asking me to wait.” I try my best to keep my voice steady. “But waiting no longer fixes this, Sebastian. You just don’t get it.”
His hand drops back to his side. Whatever solution he thinks he has, he can see now that it will not work, and for once he has the sense not to reach for me again.
Then a knock lands on the cabin door.
Sebastian crosses to answer it, and I already know from the shape of the silhouette in the corridor light who it is before the door even swings wide.
Great. Just in time, because this night hasn’t quite taken enough from me yet.
“Sebastian.” Dorothy steps in without waiting to be asked, the way she moves through every room she’s ever entered. “There’s something you need to…”
“Not now, Mother.”
It comes out flat and final, and for once there’s real heat under it. He doesn’t step aside to let her in. He doesn’t soften it.
Dorothy’s eyes narrow to slivers. “Watch your tone with me.”
“Sandy’s asleep.” I keep my voice down, nodding toward the sofa. “Whatever this is, it can be quiet.”
She doesn’t so much as glance at me. She looks at her son, and she lets the silence stretch until she’s certain she has the room, and then she says it.
“It’s Therese.”
I watch the words land on him. Watch his shoulders drop half an inch.
“She took ill after the reception. They’ve had the ship’s doctor with her for the last hour, and she’s asking for you.” Dorothy’s voice takes on the smooth gravity she saves for when she’s certain she’s already won. “Specifically. No one else will do.”
“Can’t someone…” Sebastian starts, and there’s a note in it I haven’t heard from him in days, close to resistance. “The doctor’s with her. I’m sure it isn’t as serious as…”
“She has no family on board, Sebastian. She is a guest, a partner, and the godmother of this vessel, and she has taken ill on our maiden voyage.” Dorothy’s tone hardens into steel.
“If word of this reaches the press, if it looks as though the Austens left her frightened and alone in a medical crisis, the story writes itself. We are at sea. There is nowhere for any of this to go but outward. Do you understand what that does to the launch?”
And there it goes. The human reason and the corporate one, braided together so tightly that saying no to either means saying no to both.
I open my mouth. Then I close it again, because I already know how it goes.
If I say a single word, if I so much as ask why it has to be him, I become exactly the woman they need me to be.
Jealous. Irrational. The fishing village girl who begrudged a sick woman her husband’s five minutes of decency.
There isn’t a person on this ship who would take my side over Therese Walton’s, not with her fainted in a suite and me standing here with my arms crossed. I’d be the villain of a story I never agreed to be in.
So for the nth time, I say nothing. I press my whole hurt down under my ribs and hold it there, and I make my face give away exactly none of it, because the one thing I have left tonight is not letting them watch it cost me.
Sebastian looks at me.
For a long moment he just looks, torn clean down the middle, and I can see him wanting me to make the choice for him. To tell him to stay or tell him to go. To hand him a way out of the guilt either way.
I give him nothing.
He crosses the room instead, wrapping his arms around me from behind as his mouth finds the curve of my ear, low enough that Dorothy can’t hear it.
“Just one last thing, baby. That’s all. I just have to take care of this, I swear.”
I tilt my head away from his voice. I fold my own arms over his and hold myself inside them, not him, and I don’t say a word. He registers it, the way I’ve gone quiet and cold in his hands.
He lingers long enough that I almost believe he might choose the door and not walk through it.
“Sebastian.” Dorothy, from the hall. “Now.”
But his arms slide away.
I hear him gather his jacket from the chair, hear the door open, followed by his footsteps receding down the corridor, and I don’t turn around for any of it. I stay exactly where I am, back to the door, until the latch clicks shut and the cabin goes silent again except for the sea against the hull.
Then I let myself move.
I wipe the one tear that made it out and catch my own reflection in the black glass of the window. A woman in a loose robe with her hair down and her arms wrapped around herself because there’s no one else left to do it.
Five years, and it still comes down to this.
A choice, and my husband making it with the answer, every single time, being anyone but me.