6. Margo #2
If I stay, she learns all of it. She watches this marriage curdle in public, on camera, in front of the entire gilded world, until it’s too ugly to hide from her.
I would rather she remember her parents on good terms.
For now, this isn’t the ideal solution but it’s the best I have.
“Wait here baby, give Mommy two minutes, alright?”
Sandy nods as I settle her with her crayons and cross into the master bedroom one last time, because there’s one thing left to do and I’ve been putting it off all morning.
I slide my wedding ring off my finger.
It comes away easier than I expect, which somehow makes it worse.
Five years, and it lifts off as if it was never really settled there at all. I hold it in my palm and I feel the doubt rise up hot and fast, asking if I’m sure, if this is really the only way, if there is really no hope.
Then I think about the roses. About the powder room, and the helicopter, and his mother’s smile that’s all teeth by the railing downstairs.
And a man who kissed the top of my head this morning but still couldn’t feel me leaving.
Even until the end, Sebastian is too clueless.
So I set the ring on his nightstand. It looks so small sitting there against the dark wood.
A circle of metal and a stone that used to mean forever, and I leave it exactly there so there can be no confusion, no misunderstanding, no mistaking this for an accident.
I don’t let myself look at it twice.
“Okay, baby.” I hoist the day bag onto my shoulder, both our passports zipped into the inside pocket, and hold out my hand to my daughter. “Let’s go find that little boat.”
We slip out of the suite as if we’re getting away with something, which we are.
I keep my chin level and my steps unhurried, a wife taking her daughter ashore for a day of shopping and nothing more as we make our way down to the tender deck where the day’s excursions are boarding.
It’s chaos dressed as luxury.
Passengers queue for the small boats that ferry them to shore, staff in crisp whites check names against lists and hand out wristbands. The whole thing runs on the patient smiles of people paid very well to pretend they aren’t tired.
Sandy bounces at my side. “Little boat! Little boat!”
“That’s right, baby. The little boat.”
I’ve already sent our suitcases ahead on an earlier tender, checked with the luggage service and declared as souvenirs I mean to buy and ship home, because money makes everything smoother, even leaving.
All I’m carrying now is the day bag.
Nothing to see. Just a mother and her daughter, off for the afternoon.
We’re almost to the boarding line when the one thing I didn’t plan for finds me.
“Margo. Leaving us so soon?”
Therese.
She’s near the railing in pale silk, sunglasses pushed up into that honey-blonde hair, looking for all the world like a woman who had a perfectly restful night and not one who collapsed at a reception two days ago.
She takes in the pair of us, Sandy’s little hand in mine, and her mouth curves into a smile that’s all teeth and no warmth.
“Shopping,” I say. “Enjoy the blessing.”
“Oh, I intend to.” She drifts a step closer and drops her voice, keeping it pleasant for the benefit of the staff nearby. “You know, I did wonder if you had it in you. To be sensible about all this. Most women in your position dig in and make everything so much uglier than it needs to be.”
Her eyes flick over me, appraising, satisfied. “But you’re smarter than they gave you credit for. You can feel it, can’t you? When a thing has run its course.”
I should keep walking. I almost do.
“He looked after me beautifully the other night, by the way.” She says it lightly, examining her own manicure, and there’s a gleam in it she can’t quite hide, the look of a woman admiring her own handiwork.
“Didn’t leave my side for a second. I knew he wouldn’t.
Some things you can always count on, if you set them up right. ”
If you set them up right.
The words snag as they go past, a small wrong note I don’t have the time or the room to chase down, not with a plane to catch and my daughter’s hand in mine and my whole life balanced on getting off this ship before four o’clock.
“Mommy,” Sandy stage-whispers, tugging me. “That’s the tall lady. I don’t like her smile.”
Out of the mouths of babes.
“We’re going, baby.”
I look at Therese one last time, and I find that whatever she wanted from this, that flash of triumph, the confirmation that she’d finally broken me, I simply don’t have it in me to give her.
I’m already gone. She’s gloating over an empty chair.
“Goodbye, Therese.”
I don’t wait for her answer.
The crew member at the boarding line finds my reservation and beams. “Mrs. Austen! Shopping ashore, is it? Will Mr. Austen be joining you?”
“Not today. He’s with the Archbishop.”
“Ah, the blessing! Very exciting.” She waves us toward the little boat. “Mind your step, and enjoy Santorini.”
I take Sandy’s hand and walk her onto the tender without looking back.
Behind me, I can feel Therese still standing there, holding a victory over a woman who already stopped playing.
The tender pulls away from the ship’s hull, small and quick across the caldera, and Sandy presses her nose to the window and narrates every wave.
“Mommy, the water is so blue! More blue than the pool and Sandy’s crayon… Is it the super blue water in the whole wide world?”
“Maybe. They’re famous for it here.”
“Aegean…” She’d caught the word from a crew member and won’t let it go. “Aegean! Aegean! Aegean!”
I don’t quiet her.
This uncomplicated joy is the thing I love most about her, the way she takes in everything fully without once wondering what anyone thinks.
She hasn’t learned yet that the world wants girls smaller and quieter than this. I’m going to fight like hell to make sure she never does.
Behind us, the ship shrinks against the sky, that floating monument to Austen ambition.
He thinks I’ll be there tonight. He thinks we’ll sit across a quiet table in Oia and find our way back through good intentions and a love that once seemed enough.
This time, he’s wrong.
Once I step off, I’m not coming back.
The tender bumps the dock, and then it’s the small blur of things I’ll barely remember later: a driver holding a sign that reads DELANCY and not Austen, my own name, the one I was born with and get to be again.
Our suitcases are loaded and Sandy is buckled in as the engine turns over.
In the end, money makes even running away run smoothly that by the time the taxi climbs the first switchback, the port is already falling away below us.
Sandy twists around in her seat and waves both hands at the water.
“Bye-bye, big boat!”
“Ship,” I murmur, out of habit, and my throat closes around the word.
“Bye-bye, big ship!”
She waves until the cliffs swallow the caldera and the ship slides out of view, and my chest cracks clean down the middle, quiet enough that she doesn’t hear it.
That’s my marriage down there. That’s the man I loved for as long as I’ve known how to love anyone, standing in a room full of investors, blessing a ship, certain I’ll be waiting for him at seven.
He doesn’t know yet. For a few more hours he gets to not know, and I find I can’t decide if that’s a mercy I’m giving him or a coward’s way of not having to watch his face.
The ache wants to fold me in half. I don’t let it.
Because Sandy has already turned back around, cheeks flushed, curls wild, her father’s gray-blue eyes bright with the pure thrill of a day that is, to her, nothing but an adventure.
She reaches over and pats my knee, the way she does when she’s decided I need managing.
“Don’t be sad, Mommy… We’re having fun!”
“You’re right, baby.” I catch her small hand and hold it, and I make myself smile. This time it isn’t entirely for her benefit. “We are.”
I don’t look back at the ship, or the man on it, or the version of my life I’m leaving in the caldera behind us. I look at my daughter, and at the white town climbing the blue hillside as the road unspools toward whatever comes next.
Then I leave it all behind.