5. Margo
— ? —
Margo
Morning comes whether I want it to or not.
I don’t go to breakfast. I told Sebastian I wouldn’t, and it’s the one promise between us I have any intention of keeping, so instead I sit Sandy on the edge of the bed near noon and work the tangles out of her hair while she narrates a very detailed argument two of her stuffed animals are apparently having about whose turn it is to be the doctor.
Sebastian hovers.
That’s the only word for it.
He’s dressed, more or less, standing at the mirror across the room doing and undoing the knot of a tie he keeps getting wrong, and every few seconds I feel his eyes land on the back of my neck.
He’s being careful with me, the way you’re careful around a thing you’ve already broken once and are afraid to touch again.
He hasn’t left for a single meeting. He hasn’t taken a call.
He just keeps starting sentences and abandoning them, and I keep not helping him finish.
“Coffee.” He sets a cup down on the nightstand beside me, close but not too close, testing the water. “Just how you like it.”
I don’t thank him. I pick it up, take one sip to confirm it’s exactly how I like it, which of course it is, and set it back down without looking at him. The small cruelty of it costs me nothing and I’m too tired to feel bad about it.
Sandy, however, misses nothing.
“Mommy.” She twists around, nearly taking the brush with her. “You didn’t say thank you to Daddy.”
“Hold still, baby.”
“But he gave you coffee and you didn’t say thank you. That’s the rule. You always make me say thank you.”
“You’re right. I did forget my manners.” I keep my eyes on her hair. “Thank you, Sebastian.”
It comes out flat enough that Sandy frowns, sensing the words don’t match the temperature, but she’s four and the mystery of adult moods can only hold her for so long before something more interesting takes over.
“Daddy, can we go see the dolphins today?” She bounces on the mattress. “The man said sometimes they follow the boat… Ship. And I want to see them do the jumping thing. Can we? Can we go to the front where you can see the water?”
Sebastian crouches down in front of her, and his whole face changes, the careful, hunted look smoothing out into an easier expression.
At least this part he’s good at. This part he’s always been good at.
“The observation deck.” He tucks a curl behind her ear. “That’s the best place for dolphin-watching on the whole ship. How about this… Let me go find out when they’ve been spotting them, so we take you at exactly the right time. Deal?”
“Deal!” Sandy sticks out her hand and they shake on it with tremendous seriousness.
He stands, and for a second he looks at me as if he wants to say a word, some version of let me fix this that he’s said a hundred times in the last twelve hours.
Whatever it is, he decides against it. He just grabs his jacket off the chair.
“I’ll be back soon,” he says, to both of us and mostly to me. “I won’t be long. I promise.”
And then he’s gone, and I tell myself I’m relieved, and I only half believe it.
I don’t want to sit in the suite waiting for him, so I get Sandy into her sandals and take her out myself.
If she wants the observation deck, I can at least walk her toward it, and God knows I’d rather be moving than sitting in that room breathing the same air as last night.
At first, I don’t realize it.
We step out of the corridor into the atrium, and it takes me a few seconds to register that the room is doing something. A hush moves out from us, conversations dropping mid-sentence, heads turning with that practiced, plausible-deniable subtlety the rich are so good at.
Eyes find us, take their measure, slide away. A woman by the champagne fountain leans to her husband and says a word behind her hand, and his gaze cuts to me and then very deliberately doesn’t.
It lands slowly, the way cold water does when you’ve already stepped in before you feel it.
They know.
I don’t know how, exactly. Whether the photographer sold what he swore he deleted, or a steward talked, or someone simply saw Sebastian in that corridor at dawn and did the math.
It doesn’t matter.
On a ship this size, packed with people who have nothing to do but watch each other, a thing like this doesn’t stay quiet past breakfast. And I wasn’t at breakfast, which I understand now was its own kind of confession. Nothing feeds a rumor like a wife too humiliated to show her face over eggs.
Sandy, oblivious, swings off my hand and asks why the fountain is spitting.
“Mommy, why is everyone looking at us?”
“They’re not, baby. They’re just busy.”
“That lady was pointing.”
“She was probably pointing at the dessert cart. Come on, this way.”
I steer her toward the doors that lead out to the deck, but the atrium is a bottleneck at this hour and we’re not moving fast. Near a cluster of potted palms, two women in resort wear and enough jewelry to fund a small country don’t even bother pretending they aren’t staring.
One leans to the other and murmurs again. The other laughs, a small, cut-glass sound that carries farther than she means it to. Or exactly as far as she means it to. Hard to say with women like these.
I should keep walking. I should give them nothing. I should protect what’s left of my dignity and get my daughter to the dolphins.
Instead I stop and turn and look right at them.
“Is there a problem?”
The one who laughed at least has the decency to blush. Her friend does not.
“We were just saying how brave you are,” the friend says, in the tone wealthy women reserve for meaning the exact opposite. “Showing your face. After everything.”
“After what?”
She falters, thrown by the directness. People like her aren’t used to being answered. “I only meant… with everything being said…”
“What’s being said?”
“Mommy?” Sandy tugs my hand, her voice going small. “Why are you using your angry voice?”
I breathe in and breathe out. Then crouch to her level so she can see my face isn’t angry, even if my voice slipped.
“I’m not angry, baby. I’m just talking to these ladies.”
Sandy studies them with open four-year-old appraisal. “They don’t look nice. That one has mean eyebrows.”
I have never loved my child more than I do in this exact moment.
The mean-eyebrowed woman opens her mouth, finds nothing in it, and closes it again. I take Sandy’s hand and rise.
“You’re right. Let’s find nicer air.”
I walk us out before either of them can recover, my heart slamming against my ribs as if it’s looking for the exit too.
Sandy skips along beside me, already three topics past it, wondering out loud whether dolphins sleep and whether the ship has a pool that’s only for kids with absolutely no grown-ups allowed.
I let her voice carry me down the corridor and try not to hear the whispers closing in behind us.
The observation deck, at least, is nearly empty.
Most of the passengers are still at lunch or sleeping off last night’s champagne, and the midday sun has beaten the Mediterranean into a sheet of hammered gold. I scan the deck out of habit, half-expecting to find Sebastian already here, since this is where he said he’d meet us. He isn’t.
A crew member in crisp whites peels away from the railing and comes over before I can decide whether that stings, crouching to Sandy’s level with the easy warmth of someone who’s good with kids.
“You must be the young lady who wants to see dolphins.”
Sandy’s whole face opens. “Are they here? Did they come?”
“Not yet, but they’ve been spotting a pod off the port bow most afternoons, so you’re in the right place.
” He straightens and turns to me. “Mr. Austen asked us to look after you both until he’s back.
He had to step away for a few minutes. He was very specific that Sandy get the best seat on the deck. ”
Of course he did. I honestly don’t have it in me anymore to think or ask what it is.
“Thank you,” I just say. “We’ll be fine here.”
The crew member sets Sandy up at the railing to watch for fins, and I settle onto a lounge chair where I can see her, pretending to read a magazine I have no intention of reading.
Ten minutes of peace. That’s all I want.
I get three.
“Margo, dear. There you are. I’ve been looking everywhere.”
Dorothy arrives unprompted. She’s in cream and gold today, silver hair set as if it was poured that way, and she arranges her face into an expression meant to read as concern but landing closer to pitying a wounded bird.
“Dorothy.” I don’t stand or offer a cheek. I keep my eyes on Sandy at the railing. “What a surprise.”
“Is it?”
She doesn’t wait to be asked, lowering herself into the lounge chair beside mine and smoothing her skirt over her knees with two precise strokes. She’s close enough now that I can smell her perfume, the same one she’s worn to every dinner where she’s looked through me.
“You poor thing. You look exhausted. Both of you. That child has shadows under her eyes.”
“We didn’t sleep well.”
“No.” A pause, weighted, kind on the surface and sharp underneath. “I don’t suppose you did.”
She lets it sit. Dorothy is a master of the silence that does her work for her, and I refuse to fill this one, so we watch Sandy point at the water for a while, two women pretending this is a pleasant afternoon.
“I’ll be direct, because I think we’re past the other thing.” She turns the ring on her finger, unhurried. “This is a difficult moment for the family. For Sebastian, especially. Do you have any idea what today was supposed to be for him?”
“His launch.”
“His father’s launch.” The correction is gentle and it cuts anyway. “Leonard bled for this ship, Margo. My son has spent years of his life making sure the last thing his father built didn’t die with him. This week is the culmination of all of it. The most important week of Sebastian’s life.”
She finally looks at me, and there’s real steel behind the warmth now. “And instead of standing at his side while the world watches, he’s managing a scandal. Do you see the problem?”
“You mean the scandal your son created by spending the night in another woman’s suite?”