10. Sebastian
— ? —
Sebastian
The room at the Havenport Inn creaks as if it’s dying.
Every step I take pulls a groan out of the floorboards. The bed frame complains when I sit on it. The window rattles in its warped frame though there’s no wind, as if the whole building has taken a position on whether I should be here.
I’ve slept in penthouses that cost more per night than most people earn in a season. I’ve had sheets with thread counts that came with an explanation. Butlers, private chefs, every comfort money can pull out of the air on command.
This room is small and cheap and smells faintly of fish, and the mattress has a valley worn into the middle of it, and it is, without question, exactly what I deserve. A penance cell. A place to sit inside the consequences of everything I failed to be.
My phone hasn’t stopped since I left the ship. Board members wanting explanations. My mother’s voicemails, each angrier than the last. My assistant’s careful updates about the “situation,” asking for direction I don’t have.
I’ve stopped answering all of them.
Let them panic. Let them scramble. Let them discover that Sebastian Austen has a priority that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet.
The window looks out over the harbor. Fishing boats nodding in their moorings, nets spread along the pier, the whole small world Margo grew up inside and gave up for me.
Margo was happy here. I can see it now, plain as the water, in a way I was far too arrogant and far too young to understand when I first asked her to leave it.
She belonged to this place, to its tides and its people and its complete indifference to anything happening beyond the next catch. She fit here the way she never quite managed to fit into my world, no matter how hard she tried to shrink herself into the gaps.
And I never noticed.
I was too busy building an empire to see that I was quietly dismantling the one person I built it for.
The knock at my door is short and hard.
“It’s open.”
Martin Delancy steps inside, and somehow the room gets smaller.
He isn’t a large man, Margo’s father, but he carries the kind of authority that comes from a lifetime of hard labor and harder decisions than I’ve ever been made to face.
Weathered hands. A face cut by salt and sun.
And his eyes, which I realize with a jolt are Margo’s eyes exactly, are moving over me with a verdict already half-written behind them.
“Mr. Delancy.”
“Sebastian.” He says my name the way you’d say a word that tastes of ash.
“I wasn’t expecting…”
“No. I don’t suppose you were.” He doesn’t sit. Doesn’t come off the doorway. Just stands there filling it, radiating a disapproval that makes my mother’s coldest silences feel almost warm. “My girl tells me you’re staying.”
“I’d like to. If she’ll allow it.”
“She’s already let you near Sandy. That’s more grace than most men would get, after what you did.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” He takes one step in, and I have to fight the instinct to give ground.
“Do you have the first idea what these last years cost her? The calls that came thinner and thinner. The Christmases she covered for you with a smile so no one would ask. The way her whole face would light when your name came up on that phone, and then the hours she’d go quiet after you hung up, thinking none of us noticed. ”
“I didn’t…”
“You didn’t notice. That’s the whole of it, isn’t it.
” His voice stays level, but there’s a blade under it.
“You didn’t notice the girl who gave up everything she was to follow you.
You didn’t notice what it took out of her to become an Austen, or what that mother of yours was doing to her, or how lonely a house gets when the man in it is never truly in it. ”
“I know that now.” The words come out of me rough. “All of it. I know it now.”
“Now.” He laughs, and there’s no warmth in it. “Now she’s gone. Now she’s found the spine to leave. Now that you’ve finally been made to look.”
“Yes.”
“Then give me one good reason she should let you back in.”
“She shouldn’t.”
That stops him. He frowns, studying me like I’ve come apart in a way he wasn’t braced for.
“She shouldn’t,” I say again. “I don’t deserve it, and I know I don’t.
But I’m going to ask her anyway, because she is the only thing in my life that ever actually mattered, and I…
” My voice gives out. I let it. I’ve spent my whole life not letting it, and look where that got me.
“I can’t lose her, Mr. Delancy. I can’t lose either of them. ”
Martin looks at me for a long, weighing moment.
Then he steps back, and the doorway opens up behind him.
“She’s up on the cliff path. On her own. Celia has the little one.” He pauses on his way out, and his eyes pin me one last time. “Don’t make me sorry I told you.”
He’s gone before I can find the word for thank you.
***
The cliff path runs along the coastline and I find her near the top of it, out where the land simply stops and gives itself over to sea and sky.
Her hair is loose and wild in the wind. She’s in clothes I’ve never once seen her wear, a worn sweater gone soft with washing, jeans faded pale at the knees, boots that have clearly walked this exact path a thousand times.
She looks like she grew out of the ground here.
She looks, more than she has in years, like herself.
“Margo.”
She doesn’t turn around. “My father told you where I was.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to have a conversation with him about that.”
“He was trying to help.”
“He was interfering.” She turns, and her face has closed like a door. “What do you want, Sebastian?”
“I want you to come home.”
“I am home.”
It lands harder than any blow she could have thrown, because she means it, and because she’s right. This is her home. This wind, this cliff, this village that made her before I ever walked into her section of a restaurant and ruined both our lives by falling for her. Out here, I’m the trespasser.
“I want the chance to fix it.”
“I’ve already told you…”
“I know what you told me. You filed. It’s over.
You don’t want my pretty words or another promise I’ll break.
” I take a step toward her, and the wind snatches at my jacket, and I have never been more aware of how ridiculous I look, a man in a suit standing on the edge of the world.
“I’m asking anyway. One month. Give me one month to show you I can be the man I should have been from the start. ”
“And why would I do that?”
“For Sandy. For the family we made. For the chance, however small you think it is, that I’m not past saving.”
Her expression doesn’t move. “You want a month.”
“I want forever. I’ll take a month.”
“To do what? Sit at the inn inventing gestures? Turn up with more flowers I hate and wait for me to fall over?”
“No.” I shake my head hard. “No gestures. No flowers. Nothing with a price on it. I want to be here, that’s all.
To be with Sandy. To let you watch me be present, actually present, with no phone and no meetings and none of the machinery that pulled me out of the room every time you needed me in it. ”
“And when the month’s up?”
“When the month’s up, if you still want the divorce, I sign it. All of it. No lawyers, no custody fight, no clever delays. Whatever terms you want, they’re yours. You have my word, for whatever you think it’s still worth.”
Her eyes narrow. “That’s a large promise from a man who breaks them.”
“I mean this one.”
“Sebastian…”
“I know a month of good behavior doesn’t cancel years of the other kind.
” I hold up a hand before she can finish.
“I’m not trying to buy back your forgiveness with it.
I’m not that stupid anymore. I only want the chance to prove I’m capable of being different.
That the man you fell for is still somewhere in here, under everything I let bury him. ”
“And if he isn’t? If he’s gone?”
“Then you’ll know for certain. So will I. And I’ll stop haunting your harbor.”
Margo goes quiet, her gaze moving between me and the sea throwing itself against the rocks far below.
“You can see Sandy,” she says at last. “Every day, while you’re here. That’s for her. Not for you.”
“Thank…”
“I’m not finished.” Her voice turns to iron. “You and I are done. The marriage is over. I’ve already started grieving it, already started imagining a life that doesn’t have you standing in the middle of it, and I am not putting that on hold because your conscience finally woke up.”
“Margo…”
“I spent years waiting for you to choose me. I’m finished waiting.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” I hold her eyes and refuse to drop them. “You’ve said no. You’ve told me it’s over. And I’m going to spend the next month trying to earn you back regardless.”
A flicker crosses her face, surprise or irritation, gone too fast to name.
“That isn’t how this works.”
“Likely not. It’s what I’m going to do. Show up, every day, and be the man I should have been, and prove to you that I see you now, really see you, the way I stopped seeing you somewhere in the middle of all of it.
You don’t have to make it easy. You don’t have to give me any hope at all. You just can’t stop me from trying.”
“And if I tell you to go?”
“Then I go. And I come back the next morning. And the one after that. Until you believe me, or the month runs out.”
She stares at me a long moment, and then she shakes her head, and there’s a look in it I can’t read, reluctant respect or plain disgust, I’ve lost the ability to tell.
“It won’t work.”
“I know.”
“I mean it, Sebastian. A few weeks of playing the devoted husband won’t undo what you did.”
“I know.”
“Then why bother?”
“Because I love you.”
It comes out of me simple and stripped, none of the armor I’ve spent a lifetime building bolted around it.
“Because you’re the only person alive who ever made me feel like more than a name and a number.
Because I would rather spend a month failing to win you back than spend the rest of my life wondering what might have happened if I’d tried. ”
She doesn’t answer.
She starts to turn away, and a crack opens straight down the middle of me.
“Margo. Please.”
I move before I can think it through, closing the space between us, and I go down.
Not to hold her. Not to trap her against me the way some part of me wants to. I just can’t hold myself upright in front of her anymore, so I let my knees go, and I land in the cold wet grass at the edge of the cliff, and I stay there, kneeling behind her while the wind tears past both of us.
She turns. Looks down at me. Her face does a complicated thing.
“Get up, Sebastian.”
“I can’t. Not yet.” I shake my head. “Let me say it from down here, where it belongs. I got lost, Margo. That’s the truth of it, and I’m not offering it as an excuse, because it isn’t one.
I got so lost in the company and the name and my own endless list of problems that I stopped seeing the person carrying the weight of all of it beside me.
I took you for granted. I leaned on your patience like it was infinite because it was easier than actually being there, and I told myself that providing was the same as loving, and it isn’t. It never was.”
“Sebastian…”
“I realized it too late. I know that. I saw your ring on that nightstand and I understood, all at once, exactly what I’d been doing for years, and there is no undoing it, and I have to live inside that.
” My voice breaks and I let it break. “I was a fool. Not a villain, maybe, but a fool, and a fool with you is somehow worse, because you deserved a man who was paying attention, and I gave you one who was always looking somewhere else.”
She’s quiet. The wind fills the space where her answer isn’t.
“You can’t go back,” she says finally, and her voice is almost gentle, which is the worst thing she could have done. “That’s the whole point. You can’t undo it.”
“I know.”
“Then what is this for? Kneeling in the mud, making promises you might not keep?”
“It’s to show you that I’m not the man who watched you walk out and didn’t fight.
That man died the second I picked that ring up off the nightstand.
” I press on. “I’d rather spend the rest of my life on my knees in front of you than the rest of it standing tall without you.
That’s not a line. I’ve never meant anything more. ”
For a long moment neither of us moves. The wind howls, and the spray comes up off the rocks, and the damp soaks through to my skin, and I don’t care about a single degree of it.
“It won’t work,” she says again.
But her voice is different this time. Less sure of itself.
“I know.”
She steps forward, out of my reach. My hands fall into the cold grass. I stay kneeling, because I haven’t earned the right to stand yet, and I watch her put distance between us, one step, then another.
She stops. Looks back at me over her shoulder.
“One month,” she says. “You can see Sandy. You can try to convince me you’ve become someone else. But I won’t make it easy, and I won’t pretend I believe you.” Her chin lifts, and her eyes are dry and steady and absolutely certain. “One month, Sebastian. It changes nothing.”
“I know.”
“Get up. You’ll ruin your suit.”
“I don’t care about the suit.”
“You used to.”
“I used to care about a great many things that turned out not to matter.”
She holds my gaze one last moment. Then she turns and walks away up the path, sure-footed on ground she’s known her whole life, and she doesn’t look back again, and she doesn’t waver, and she crests the hill and is gone.
I stay where I am, kneeling in the wet grass with the sea roaring below me and the wreckage of everything I built spread out behind me.
I should get up. The cold has gone into my bones. My knees ache against the stony ground.
I don’t move.
One month. She gave me one month.
It isn’t forgiveness. It isn’t hope. It’s barely permission at all.
But it’s a door, left open the width of a hair, and I have spent my whole life getting through smaller gaps than that.
I think of Sandy launching herself across that café like I was the answer to a wish she’d been making all week. I think of Margo out on this cliff, wind in her hair, more herself than I’ve seen her in years, still able to bring me to my knees with a single flat sentence.
It changes nothing, she said.
She said it like a woman who’d already made her peace with the ending. But I felt her go still when I knelt. I saw the smallest hesitation before she turned away, one hairline crack in a wall she’s spent a week building.
I’m going to find that crack. Not with money, not with gestures, not with the grand romantic nonsense that plays well and means nothing. With time. With presence. With the plain, stubborn act of turning up, day after day, until she cannot pretend anymore that the man she married is gone for good.
The wind kicks up, and the first cold drops of rain come with it.
I stay kneeling a moment longer, looking at the empty path where my wife used to be.
Then I get up, and I start back toward the town, and the month, and whatever thin chance I have left.
It starts now.