16. Margo
— ? —
Margo
Three weeks of silence is louder than I thought it would be.
I told myself I wanted this. The space. The quiet. The absence of Sebastian’s longing looks and his desperate little attempts to prove himself. I was so sure that the moment he finally left, I’d feel the knot in my chest come loose.
Instead I feel hollow.
The days blur. I work at the café. I walk the cliffs. I build sandcastles with Sandy and try not to think about the last person who built them with her. I sign paperwork my lawyer sends, and I pretend that putting my name on divorce documents doesn’t feel like signing away a limb.
Sandy asks about him every single day.
“When’s Daddy coming back?”
“I don’t know, baby.”
“Is he on the big boat again?”
“I think so.”
“Does he miss us?”
“I’m sure he does.”
“Then why doesn’t he come?”
I never have an answer for that one.
The truth is that I sent him away. That I told him, in a hundred wordless ways, that I didn’t want him here. That I stood in my mother’s garden and let him say a goodbye that wasn’t quite a goodbye, and I didn’t ask him to stay.
I just didn’t expect the quiet to feel this permanent.
I check my phone more than I’ll ever admit. Looking for messages that don’t come. He’s doing exactly what I asked, giving me space, letting me breathe, staying away, and I should be grateful for it. I’m not. I’m angry and bereft and confused, and I hate every contradictory inch of it.
***
It’s a Tuesday when the ship appears.
Sandy shakes me awake at dawn, her voice pitched high with wonder.
“Mommy! Mommy, wake up, there’s a SHIP!”
“What?” I squint at the gray light. “What ship?”
“Outside! In the water! A big one!”
I stumble to the window expecting a fishing boat, a coast guard patrol, anything ordinary. What I see instead stops the breath in my throat.
A ship sits anchored in the bay. Not a mega-yacht, nothing like the flagship, nothing like the floating monuments to Austen ambition I spent five years learning to hate.
This one is smaller. Elegant. Classic lines and polished wood, the kind of vessel built to be lovely rather than loud.
No name I can read from here. No insignia I know.
Just a ship, waiting offshore, patient as if it has all the time in the world.
“Can we see it?” Sandy is already bouncing. “Can we, please, maybe there’s PIRATES…”
“I don’t think there are pirates in Havenport, baby.”
“But there could be.”
There’s no arguing with that logic, so we dress and go down to the shore, where half the village is already gathered, pointing, muttering theories about who could own a thing like that.
We get there just as a tender launches from the ship and cuts toward the old fishermen’s pier, a single crew member at the helm in crisp white, wildly out of place against the weathered boards.
She ties off and steps up. “Mrs. Austen?”
The name lands wrong, the way it always does now. “Margo Delancy.”
“Of course.” She doesn’t blink. “I have a delivery for you.” She holds out an envelope, cream paper, no insignia, my name across the front in handwriting I would know in the dark, in my sleep, at the end of the world.
Sebastian’s writing.
“There’s a whole ship, ma’am, and the young lady looks like she’d enjoy a turn around the bay while you read.” She glances at Sandy, who is gazing at the tender like it’s made of sugar. “I’m happy to take her, with your permission. Life jacket and all.”
Sandy is already pulling my hand off my arm. “Please, Mommy, please, please…”
She works for Sebastian, which means she’s been vetted within an inch of her life, and I need one single minute alone with this envelope. “Stay where she can see you,” I tell Sandy. “Life jacket. Listen to everything she says.”
Sandy squeals and is helped aboard, and the tender putters off with her narrating the whole bay at the top of her lungs, and I open the letter.
Margo,
I spent our marriage asking you to share me. With my family, my company, my ships, and everyone who ever wanted a piece of me. You gave and gave, and I took, and I never once looked at what it cost you.
This one belongs to no one but you.
No passengers. No cameras. No mother. No Therese. No board, no investors, no one who ever made you feel like you didn’t belong. Just you, and the sea, and the quiet you should have had from the start.
I promised you once I’d take you somewhere the world couldn’t reach us. A tiny rented apartment, before Sandy, before any of it went wrong. You said you’d never been anywhere the world couldn’t find you, and I said one day I’d fix that. I never did. I’m sorry it took losing you to keep the promise.
I won’t step aboard unless you ask me to. The captain will wait as long as you need.
Always yours, Sebastian
I read it twice. Then I fold it against my chest as if I can press the words straight through my ribs, and I stand on the beach a long time while my daughter laughs somewhere out on the water.
I don’t board it right away.
I want that on the record. I hold out for two whole days while the ship sits there being patient and the entire town loses its mind.
“It’s romantic,” Julie announces, across my mother’s kitchen table. “Infuriating and problematic and romantic.”
“It’s a manipulation.”
“He’s not even on it, Margo.”
“He’s making a point.”
“Yeah. That he can give you something without a hook in it.” She breaks a scone in half. “You keep saying it’s a trap, but you’ve read that letter forty times and you haven’t once told him to take the ship back. You’re not processing. You’re stalling.”
“Those are the same thing.”
“They are extremely not the same thing.”
I don’t have an answer, which Julie takes, correctly, as a win. And on the second day Sandy plants herself in front of me with her arms crossed, a tiny mirror of every stubborn thing I’ve ever been.
“You said we’d have adventures. This is an adventure. And I miss Daddy, and maybe if we go on the ship, he’ll come too.”
“Daddy’s not on the ship, baby.”
“I know. But maybe he could be. If we asked.”
If we asked. Such a small thing. Such an impossible one.
“Okay,” I hear myself say. “We’ll go look.”
***
I board braced for roses.
For staged candlelight and rose petals and some expensive, impressive, wildly-missing-the-point grand gesture, the kind of thing the old Sebastian defaulted to every time he needed to be forgiven.
There’s none of it. He kept his word.
The deck is clean and unadorned. The salon is quiet, comfortable, beautiful in a way that doesn’t announce itself.
And it’s full of me. It takes a moment to understand what I’m looking at.
Photographs, framed on every surface, not the formal portraits from the estates, not the posed magazine shots.
Real ones. Candid ones. Me laughing at a joke off-camera.
Sandy asleep on my chest as a newborn. A blurry, badly-lit picture from the first tiny apartment we ever shared, before the money went from real to obscene.
Sandy is already gone, shrieking, “BOOKS, Mommy, there’s so many BOOKS,” and I let her run, because I’ve picked up one of the frames and I’ve stopped being able to move.
It’s us on the Havenport pier, from that first summer.
Our feet hang over the water. His arm is around me and I’m looking up at him with my whole face open, laughing at something the camera didn’t catch, and I know exactly who took it, my mother, from the kitchen window, because she kept a copy of this on her mantel for years.
And just like that, I’m not on the ship anymore.
“Okay, but define rich,” I’m saying.
We’re in the back of a car that costs more than my parents’ cottage, and I’ve just watched Sebastian tip a doorman an amount that made the man’s eyes go round, and I am beginning to suspect I have badly misjudged the scale of the person I’m dating.
“I don’t know how to define rich, Margo.”
“See, that’s a rich person answer.” I turn in the seat to face him.
“Because here’s the thing. I know you’re rich.
Obviously. You wear shoes that cost more than my tuition and you say things like ‘have your people call my people’ unironically.
But there’s rich, and then there’s rich RICH, and I need to know which one I’m sitting next to, because they are extremely different situations for a girl from a fishing village. ”
He tries not to laugh. He fails. “What’s the difference?”
“Rich is a nice car. Rich RICH is you own the road.” I narrow my eyes. “Which are you?”
Instead of answering, he leans across the seat and kisses me, slow, unhurried, until I forget the entire question, and by the time he pulls back I’m annoyed and breathless in equal measure.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting until the weekend.”
That weekend, he takes me to a harbor I’ve never seen and shows me a fleet of ships with his family’s name on every hull, ship after ship after ship stretching down the dock, and I stand there in my one good dress with my mouth open and I think, oh. Oh, no. It’s the road one. He owns the road.
I don’t run. That’s the thing I’ll turn over for years. Any sensible girl would have run.
I stayed because when I looked at him, he wasn’t looking at the ships. He was looking at me, nervous, actually nervous, like he was waiting to see if all of it would send me sprinting for the hills.
“It doesn’t change anything,” I told him. “Except now you’re definitely paying for dinner.”
The relief on his face could have powered the fleet.
There’s another night, later, deeper in.
We’re tangled together in the dark of his ridiculous bed, my head on his chest, his heart going steady under my ear, his fingers moving slow and idle through my hair the way they do when he thinks I’ve already fallen asleep.
I haven’t. I’m listening to him not-quite-say a thing, the way his breathing changes when there’s a worry he’s deciding whether to trust me with.
“What,” I murmur against his skin.
“Nothing.”
“Liar. Your heart sped up.” I press my palm flat over it. “Tell me.”