4. Margo
— ? —
Margo
I tell myself not to be that wife.
The paranoid one, the suspicious one. The woman who checks her husband’s phone and reads meaning into every late night and convinces herself the worst is happening even when it isn’t.
I’ve never been that wife.
Five years of marriage, and I’ve trusted Sebastian with a faith that bordered on stupid.
When he said the business trips were necessary, I believed him.
When he said the late nights at the office were temporary, I waited.
When he missed Sandy’s first steps and her first words and her first day of preschool, I made excuses on his behalf and told myself it would get better.
I’ve been so understanding it’s a miracle I haven’t choked on it.
And now, here I lie, trying hard to sleep and calm down. I turn onto my side, then onto my back, and onto my side again, chasing a comfortable position that doesn’t exist. I close my eyes and ask the ceiling the question I keep circling.
When did it come to this?
Because it wasn’t like this before.
It didn’t start with cold sheets and a husband three rooms away with a woman in a suite next door. It started somewhere so far from here I can barely see it from where I’m lying.
It started on a beach.
I can still put myself back there if I try.
Late summer, the sun going down over the water in that slow gold way it only does at the end of a good day, and the two of us walking the tide line with our shoes in our hands, my fingers laced through his because back then, we couldn’t go five minutes without finding a reason to touch.
I keep stopping to pick up shells. I have never once in my life passed a good shell and left it behind, and Sebastian has learned this about me and mostly finds it charming, which is its own kind of miracle in a man raised to think everything worth having comes with a receipt.
“You’re going to fill my entire car with those,” he says, watching me pocket another one.
“They’re free treasure. You’re a businessman. I’d think you’d approve of free.”
“I approve of you.” He catches the hand that isn’t full of shells and tugs me back into him, walking me backward a step until my spine meets his chest and his arms come around me from behind. His mouth finds the top of my head. “The shells are negotiable.”
“The shells are non-negotiable, actually.” I hold one up to the light, a little spiral thing worn smooth, and I feel him laugh more than hear it, the rumble of it against my back. “This one’s coming home with me. You can put it in the car next to all the others you pretend to hate.”
“I don’t pretend anything with you.” He says it lightly, into my hair, but there’s a weight under it that I don’t catch in time. “That’s the entire problem.”
A flash of pink catches my eye further down the tide line, half-buried where the water’s pulling back, and I’m gone before I even finish my sentence, jogging ahead with my dress hiked in one hand to beat the next wave to it.
“Oh, look at this one!” I crouch and work it free. A conch the size of my palm, unbroken, which is rare. “This is the one. I think I’ve finally found my true calling. I’m making it a job…”
I straighten, already turning to show him, to gloat, and that’s when I realize he isn’t behind me.
When I turn the rest of the way around, I find out why.
The line I had loaded dies somewhere behind my teeth, because Sebastian is down on one knee in the wet sand, ruining a pair of trousers that cost more than my rent, holding open a small box with a ring inside that catches the last of the light off the water.
“Sebastian…”
“I had a whole speech.”
His voice isn’t steady, and that’s the thing that undoes me, because Sebastian’s voice is always steady. It’s the steadiest thing about him but right now, he actually looks nervous.
“I wrote it down. I practiced it in the mirror like an idiot. And then you spent the last hour arguing with me about seashells and I forgot every word.”
“Then don’t do the speech.” My eyes are already burning. “Just talk to me.”
He lets out a breath, and his shoulders come loose, the way they only ever do with me.
“You’re the first woman I ever fell in love with.
” He says it plainly, no polish on it at all.
“The first one who saw me. Not the name, not the money, not the empire attached to me like a shadow I never asked for. You looked straight past all of it and saw me, and then you stayed. Through every version of me I’m not proud of, you stayed.
And now I can’t picture a single day of the rest of my life that doesn’t have you in it. ”
His thumb moves against the edge of the box.
“I’m not going to pretend it’ll be easy. It won’t. You know that better than I do. We’ve already fought for this, and we’ll have to keep fighting, and I know you have your doubts.” He looks up raw and vulnerable. “But I’m asking you to build that life with me anyway. Both of us. Together.”
The wind pulls a strand of hair across my face and I can’t make my hands move to fix it.
“All I can promise you is this one thing and mean it with everything I have.” His thumb moves over the ring. “You will never regret choosing me. Whatever it costs, whatever they say, however long it takes, I will spend the rest of my life making sure of it.”
I don’t remember saying yes.
The last I remember is my heart going so full it hurt, this swell behind my ribs that had nowhere to go, and I remember thinking that no one had ever wanted me the way this man was kneeling in the sand wanting me, ruined trousers and cracked voice and all.
I remember my whole body deciding before my mouth could catch up.
The shells slip out of my hand.
I throw myself at him instead, and we go over sideways into the sand with a sound he makes that’s half laugh and half relief, his arms locking around me before we even land.
I kiss him with salt on both our mouths and his hands fisted in the back of my dress, holding on as the tide comes in around us, soaking us to the skin, and neither of us moves to get away from it.
Neither of us cares even a little.
That’s where it started.
When I open my eyes, I’m back in the dark, in a bed that costs more than that whole summer did and holds half the warmth.
The ship rocks under me, slow and endless, and it makes me think of drowning.
The kind where you don’t even notice you’ve been going under because it happens so gradually, an inch of water a year, until one night you surface enough to realize the promise a man made you on a beach has been holding your head below the waterline for longer than you want to count.
I have been treading water for so long I forgot there was ever any other way to be in the ocean.
I reach across the mattress at some point without meaning to.
His side is cold. Still empty. Still smooth because no one has been in it.
I turn my head toward the nightstand and the clock tells me it’s past three in the morning, and my husband has not come home.
For a long moment I just lie there, staring at the pillow where his head should be.
Then I get up.
I don’t have a plan. I’m not going to hammer on a door or make a scene. I just can’t lie in this bed one more minute listening to my own thoughts, so I pull on a robe and slip into the corridor, leaving the suite door cracked in case Sandy wakes.
The ship is quiet at this hour, passengers and crew alike sleeping off the celebration. My bare feet make no sound on the carpet.
I don’t even decide where I’m going.
My body just moves, and I let it, drifting down the corridor with my arms wrapped around myself, and I round the corner without any idea what I’m looking for.
Then I find him.
Sebastian is coming toward me from the far end of the hall, from the direction of the Royal Suite, and every part of him is wrong.
His shirt is untucked, hanging loose over his trousers in a way I have never once seen him wear anything. His hair is a disaster, pushed up on one side. His jacket is slung over one arm, his shoes hooked by the heels in that same hand.
He sees me and stops dead in the middle of the corridor. Whatever color is in his face drains out of it.
“Margo.”
I don’t say anything. My voice is somewhere back in the alcove I passed, and I can’t reach it.
“It’s not what it looks like.” The words come fast, tumbling over each other.
He takes a step toward me, then stops, because I’ve taken one back.
“I swear to God. Therese wasn’t well. The weather turned rough around midnight and she panicked, she thought she was going to have another episode, she begged me not to leave her… ”
I’m not listening to his words. I’m watching his hands and the way he can’t quite hold my eyes.
He sees me not softening, and an expression close to panic gets into him. He lifts his other hand toward me, and that’s when I notice he’s holding a plate.
“Here.” He says it fast, desperate, as if he’s just remembered it and it might help. “I brought you this. There was cake left from the reception, and Sandy never got enough yesterday, so I…”
He holds it out between us.
And I finally look at it. A slice of christening cake, the good kind, half-collapsed and sliding sideways on the plate from being carried too fast by a man with his hands full.
He’s offering it to me across a dawn-lit corridor with his shoes in his other hand and another woman’s suite ten feet behind him.
I wait to feel something about it.
Anger, maybe. Or the old reflex of being moved because he tried.
Nothing comes. I’m just tired, and very far away, and looking at a plate of cake.
“You just walked out of her room like that.” My voice comes out flat, from somewhere else entirely. “With your shoes off. Your shirt untucked.”
His arm lowers. He glances down at himself, at the state of him, at the evidence he’s been too rattled to see.
“The shirt was digging into me on the couch. The shoes, my feet were swollen.” He gives up on the excuses halfway through, hears how they sound. “Nothing happened, Margo. I swear.”
“Let’s say it’s true.”