6. Margo
— ? —
Margo
Santorini rises from the sea like a dream.
The ship glides into the caldera at dawn, and I’m already awake with my heart pounding and my mind running through lists. What to pack, what to leave, and how to disappear from a two-billion-dollar ship without anyone noticing until it’s too late.
Sandy stirs beside me, blinking awake in the gray pre-dawn light.
We slept in the secondary bedroom, the two of us, because I can’t lie next to Sebastian right now and he’s stopped pretending not to notice.
Last night, he didn’t even ask. He just wished us goodnight through the doorway and let me have the distance I’ve been building between us.
“Mommy…” Her voice is groggy with sleep. “Is it morning?”
“Almost, baby. Look.”
I carry her to the window, and her whole face transforms.
“Pretty white houses!”
The clifftop villages of Santorini cascade down the volcanic slopes in waves of white and blue, their domed churches and sugar-cube buildings catching the first light of sunrise.
It’s the kind of view that belongs on postcards, in travel magazines, in the dreams of people who will never be able to afford to see it in person.
I used to be one of those people.
“They look like frosting,” Sandy announces. “Like someone put frosting on the mountain.”
“They do, don’t they?”
“Can we go there? Can we climb to the top?”
“We’re going to take a boat ride to the shore. How does that sound?”
Her eyes go wide. “A little boat?”
“Yes, a little boat. Just you and me.”
“What about Daddy?”
The question lands somewhere soft.
“Daddy has meetings today, remember? Important boat meetings.”
“Ship,” she corrects automatically. “Daddy says ship.”
“Right. Ship meetings. But you and I are going to have an adventure.”
Sandy considers this with the seriousness it deserves. “Will there be ice cream?”
“Probably.”
“Okay. Adventures with ice cream are the best! Hihi.”
I hold her against my chest and watch the sun rise over Santorini, painting the white buildings gold and pink and orange, and I let myself feel the weight of what I’m about to do.
By tonight, I’ll be gone.
By tonight, Sebastian will come back to an empty suite and the dawning realization that his wife finally reached the end of her rope.
I should feel grief, maybe. Fear. Regret.
Instead I feel calm.
The kind of calm that comes after a long illness finally breaks. The fever is gone and the worst has already happened. Now there’s just the recovery, and it starts with leaving.
Sebastian is in the shower when I begin.
The water runs in the master bathroom, a twenty-minute affair involving steam settings and rainfall heads and probably some kind of aromatherapy, because even the showers on this ship are designed for people who have never had to worry about a water bill.
Twenty minutes is plenty of time.
I move through the suite with a calm that scares me a little, pulling suitcases from the closet with hands that don’t shake.
Two bags. That’s all I’m taking. Everything Sandy needs and the bare minimum for myself. I can buy clothes later, replace whatever I leave behind, rebuild a wardrobe that doesn’t smell of five years of marriage to a man who forgot who I was.
Sandy’s things go in first. Her favorite stuffed elephant, the one she can’t sleep without. Her coloring books and crayons. Enough clothes for a week, because I don’t know how long we’ll be in transit because I don’t know anything except that we can’t stay here.
My hands hover over her princess dress, the one she wore to the christening and I decide to leave it.
The safe yields both passports without complaint and I tuck them into my bag, feeling the weight of escape pressing against my hip.
My own packing is faster.
Jeans. T-shirts. One nice dress in case I need it. The small jewelry box I brought from home, not the diamonds Sebastian gave me, not the pearls from Dorothy, but my grandmother’s simple gold chain and my mother’s birthstone ring, the only things I owned before I became an Austen.
I leave everything else.
Let them have it. Let Dorothy see my abandoned designer clothes, expensive gifts, and make whatever judgment she wants about the woman who left them behind. I didn’t come into this marriage with them, and I don’t need to leave with them.
The water shuts off in the bathroom.
I move fast. Everything goes into the closet of the secondary bedroom, the room Sebastian hasn’t set foot in for days, and I shut the door on it, crossing back to the dresser to sit before I pull a brush through my hair.
By the time the bathroom door opens, I’m the picture of calm. My hands don’t shake. I’ve discovered, these past two days, that I’m a much better liar than either of us ever suspected.
Sebastian comes out in a cloud of steam and cologne, already half into a charcoal suit, the armor he wears when he has to be Sebastian Austen instead of just my Sebastian.
“You’re not dressed.” He says it lightly, but there’s a question under it. “I thought you were coming ashore with me this morning. Before the luncheon. We talked about it.”
“I changed my mind.” I keep my eyes on the mirror, on the brush, on anything but him. “I’m not feeling up to a crowd. I’ll take Sandy out somewhere quieter, just the two of us.”
A pause. In the mirror I watch him decide whether to push it.
“Are you all right?” He crosses toward me, and I can hear the concern, real enough, but distracted, already half-aimed at the door and the Archbishop, the day waiting to swallow him. “You’ve barely slept. If it’s about yesterday, I can move some things, I can try to…”
“I’m fine, Sebastian. I’m just tired.”
“Alright, if that’s what you want.” He accepts it and straightens his cuffs in the mirror behind my reflection, and I let myself look at him, really look, one last time.
He looks his best. Fresh from the shower, dark hair still damp and pushed back, the charcoal suit sitting on his shoulders perfectly. Any woman in that atrium three decks down would trip over her own feet to stand where I’m standing.
But this is the polished one, the Sebastian Austen the world gets, and somewhere behind it is the man I actually married, the one with sand on his knees and a fishing rod and a laugh that belonged to me.
I can barely find him anymore.
This version, the tailored one, the one already glancing at the door while he talks to me, is the exact face that has put me last for five years. It’s the one I fell asleep across the suite from, the one that drove us here.
Just gone. Always, somehow, gone.
“The blessing’s at eleven, then the investor lunch. I’ll be done by four.”
“Okay.”
“And I’ve, uh…” He stops fussing with his cuffs, and his voice changes, loses the polish. “I’ve booked us somewhere for tonight. A place up in Oia. Private. Just the two of us.”
He turns from the mirror to look at me directly now, and there’s real regret in it, the apology he can’t quite line up into words.
I believe he means every word. He genuinely thinks tonight is where it turns around.
“That sounds nice,” I say, because it’s easier than the truth, and because by seven o’clock the table will sit empty and he’ll finally understand everything I can’t make myself say to his face.
“Seven?”
“Seven o’clock.”
He believes me.
Of course he believes me. I’ve spent five years being believable.
Sebastian crosses to me and bends, pressing a kiss to the top of my head, and he lingers there, longer than he needs to.
For a moment, I feel how easy it would be to lean back into him, to let this be the version of us that’s real.
But I don’t. I sit perfectly still and give him nothing.
No lean, no hand over his, no warmth at all, and if he feels the cold of it, he must file it under a wife who’s still upset and will have softened by dinner.
“Tonight,” he says quietly into my hair. “We’ll talk about everything.”
I don’t answer, I can’t. There’s a limit to how many lies I can tell before breakfast, and I’ve decided that particular one isn’t a debt I want to carry out the door with me.
He straightens, checks his watch, and the tenderness folds back into the businessman as smoothly as it always does.
“I have to go. The Archbishop apparently runs on divine punctuality.” He pauses at the door, and I feel him look back at me as I keep my eyes on the mirror. “See you tonight.”
The door clicks shut behind him.
I sit there a moment longer, the warmth of his mouth still on the top of my head, and I let myself feel it for one more brief moment.
Then I get up and finish packing.
Sandy wakes for real a little after, and I dress her in her favorite yellow sundress, the one with the pockets she loves and I brush her curls back, clipping them with the butterfly barrettes she picked out herself at some airport gift shop before.
“Are we going on the adventure now?” She’s practically vibrating.
“We’re going on the adventure now.”
“Do I get to pick a treasure?”
“You get to pick as many treasures as your pockets can hold.”
She gasps as if I’ve promised her the moon, and I have to turn away to pretend to look for her other sandal, because if I keep watching her face, I’m going to lose the calm I’ve worked so hard to build this morning.
Here is the thing I know, kneeling on the suite floor, buckling my daughter’s shoes while I dismantle her family around her without her knowing.
There’s a selfishness in this. I won’t pretend there isn’t. She loves her father and while Sebastian lacked a lot in being present, I know how much he loves his daughter.
Now, I’m about to carry her off a ship and put an ocean between them, doing it partly for her and partly, if I’m honest, for me.
Because I can’t breathe here anymore.
Because I’ve run out.
But I keep coming back to the same thing.
Sandy is four. She still thinks this is a game about a little boat, surprise suitcases, and treasure in her pockets. She doesn’t yet know what a scandal is, or a whisper, or the particular way a room goes quiet when her mother walks in.