4. Margo #2
It stops him cold. For a second, hope crosses his face but I take it away.
“That’s not the part that’s breaking my heart, Sebastian,” I say. “I asked you, a few hours ago, to choose us. To choose Sandy. And a few hours later you spent the whole night in her room. Checking on a sick woman, I understand. That’s decent. That’s the kind of man I married.”
My voice doesn’t rise. It doesn’t need to.
“But you stayed. Tonight, of all the nights. And you didn’t send one text. You couldn’t find twenty seconds in seven hours to tell your wife you weren’t coming back.”
“Margo…”
“I lay in that bed all night not knowing anything other than whatever it is you decide to give me. While you were asleep on her couch. Comfortable enough to take your shoes off.”
His mouth opens. Nothing comes out, because there’s nothing to say to that, and for once he seems to know it.
A door opens somewhere down the corridor.
Footsteps. Then the man rounds the corner, camera already up, and I recognize him from yesterday, the media team, the one who shoots the daily newsletter, the “candid” photos that get passed to investors and press to prove what a beautiful, functional family runs this beautiful, functional ship.
The flash goes off before either of us moves.
Once, twice, three times. Sebastian with his shirt untucked and his shoes and a plate of cake in his hands. Me in a robe with my arms around myself and my face coming apart. The two of us frozen outside the Royal Suite at five in the morning, looking exactly like the thing we are.
“Mr. Austen.” The photographer lowers the camera, going pale as he registers what he’s walked into. “I’m sorry, I was doing my sunrise rounds, I didn’t…”
“Delete them.” Sebastian’s voice turns to ice. “Now.”
“Sir…”
“Those are private. Delete them or you’re off this ship before breakfast.”
The photographer’s eyes dart between us, and I watch him weigh it, what he’s holding against what it’ll cost him, and I already know how that particular calculation tends to go on this ship. He scrolls, presses something, nods.
Whether anything actually leaves that camera, I couldn’t say.
“Of course, Mr. Austen. Deleting them now.”
“Margo.” Sebastian’s hand closes around my arm, gentle, desperate. “Please. Not here. Come back to the suite.”
And because I don’t have a single thing left in me to fight with, and because the photographer is still standing there pretending not to watch, I let him steer me back down the corridor. The plate of cake is still in his other hand. He never does put it down.
Inside the suite, Sebastian shuts the door and leans back against it, breathing hard.
I don’t wait for him. I’m already moving toward the bedroom, and somewhere along the way his hand finds my arm again, and I lift it off me without a word, without heat, the way you’d move a branch out of a path.
Behind me I hear the small sound of a plate being set down on a table. The cake, finally abandoned. It only took the end of everything for him to put it down.
I am so tired.
It’s the kind that lives in your bones and your teeth and the backs of your eyes, the kind five years builds one disappointment at a time.
I think about the version of this trip I let myself imagine, the family voyage, the quality time, the promise of just us, and I want to laugh at how stupid hope makes a person.
This is what the cruise gave me.
A woman in a hallway at dawn, watching her husband hold a plate of cake and a fistful of excuses.
“Margo.” He’s followed me in. “Please. Talk to me.”
“I’m going to sleep.” I pull back the blanket. “I’m not going to make it for breakfast. Tell whoever needs telling that I’m unwell.”
“Margo.” He comes around the bed, and his hands come up to my face before I can step back, framing it, tilting it so I have to look at him.
His eyes are red at the edges and I have spent years being undone by those eyes.
“I need you to believe me. Please. Nothing happened. I would never do that to you. You have to know that.”
I look back at him. I wait for the pull, the old ache, the thing that always made me forgive him.
“I don’t know what to believe about you anymore,” I say. “I used to know exactly who you were. Now I look at you and I have no idea.”
His hands go slack against my cheeks. I watch it land on him, the quiet of it, worse than anything I could have shouted.
Then I take his wrists and lower his hands gently as I look away, and I get into bed.
The silence that follows is its own weather. I feel it settle over him, standing there in his ruined shirt with nowhere to go, and I make myself close my eyes and keep them closed.
After a long time, the mattress dips. His weight settles behind me, careful, as if he’s not sure he’s allowed. His arm comes around my waist. His mouth finds the back of my head.
“I’m sorry,” he breathes into my hair. “Give me time. Whatever it takes, I’ll fix it, I promise you…”
Another promise.
There was a time I’d have held onto it with both hands, the way I held onto the one he made me on a beach with sand in his knees and salt on his mouth.
But I don’t reach for this one. I let it hang in the space behind me and I don’t turn around even as I feel him waiting for something I don’t have left to give.
I lie there in the circle of my husband’s arms and I have never felt further from him in my life.
And I let myself think the thing I’ve buried for five years, the thing I’ve smiled over and made excuses for and refused to look at head-on.
I don’t know if he ever really chose me.
At least not over the company. Not over his mother, not over the woman his family picked for him before I ever walked into his life. Maybe I was always just the detour. The seaside experiment that was supposed to run its course.
Maybe Dorothy was right all along.
Maybe there was never any room for me in his world, and I just kept mistaking the doorway for a place to stand.