16. Margo #3
She climbs up onto the bed and fits herself against my side, small and warm and certain, and she looks around the cabin with enormous satisfaction.
“I like this ship,” she declares. “It feels like home.”
It does. God help me, it does.
Around sunset, I find the captain on the bridge, bent over her charts. She straightens when I come in.
“Mrs. Delancy.” She’s been told, then. “Is everything to your liking?”
“It’s…” I don’t have the word. “It’s exactly right. Which is the problem.” I make myself ask it. “Can I ask you a thing?”
“Of course.”
“Where’s my husband?”
Her expression stays even and kind. “Mr. Austen instructed us that he wasn’t to board unless you invited him.”
“I know that. He wrote it in the letter. I mean where is he. Right now, tonight.”
“In the city. He’s been there since he left Havenport.” A small pause. “He checks in every day, ma’am, to ask whether you’ve come aboard. When I told him you had, he only asked me one thing.”
“What thing?”
“Whether you seemed happy.”
I close my eyes. “And what did you tell him?”
“That you cried when you found the pomelos.” The captain’s voice softens, barely. “He seemed to think that was a good sign.”
I have to leave the bridge before I do a thing undignified in front of a woman who runs a ship.
We stay aboard through the evening.
Sandy eats pomelo until I have to stop her and explores every corner and narrates each discovery like she’s charting new lands, and I sit in the quiet salon with the letter in my hands, reading it again, finding a new seam in it every time.
He’s waiting. He has been waiting for weeks, in a city apartment, checking in every single day to ask a stranger whether his wife seemed happy.
He gave me the space I demanded and a ship full of everything I ever loved and a promise finally, belatedly kept, and now he’s sitting somewhere with his phone in his hand, waiting to find out if I’ll let him back in.
And the terrible, clarifying truth is that I’ve stopped being able to remember why I shouldn’t.
I think about all of it.
The christening that worsened everything, the photographs I wasn’t in. The night in Therese’s suite that I never let him explain. The boathouse and the storm and the goodbye that tasted like grief.
But I also think about a man learning to mend nets with his ruined hands.
A father on his knees in the sand rebuilding a castle the sea kept taking. A husband in a garden who gave up the fight not because he’d lost, but because he finally understood that pushing me was just one more way of not listening.
A man who sent a ship full of pomelos because he finally understood what I gave up, and what it cost, and that I was worth the noticing after all.
Sandy is drowsy on the couch beside me, a half-eaten pomelo going soft in her hand, her eyes at half-mast.
“Mommy,” she mumbles. “Is Daddy going to come?”
“I don’t know, baby.”
“Do you want him to?”
And there it is, the only question that matters, out of the mouth of the only person brave enough to ask it plainly.
Do I want him to?
I’ve spent weeks insisting I don’t. That anger is safer than hope, that the filed papers mean what they say, that whatever we had drowned somewhere off the coast of Santorini and isn’t coming back. I’ve held that line so long it calcified into a personality.
But I’m sitting on a ship that has no name and no cameras and no world attached to it, holding a letter that kept a promise a lifetime old, and for the first time since I walked off that flagship with my ring on his nightstand, I let myself feel the thing underneath all the anger.
I miss him.
I miss the boy from the dunes and the man he’s clawing his way back toward being. I miss the weight of him in bed and the sound of him laughing and the person I got to be when he was actually looking at me.
I miss my husband.
“Mommy.” Sandy yawns, enormous. “You’re doing the thinking face.”
“I’m doing a lot of thinking, baby.”
“I think you should let him come.” Her eyes drift shut. “He tried really hard. And he sent us a whole boat. That’s pretty good.”
“A whole ship,” I correct, on reflex, and she’s already too far gone to argue the point.
I tuck the blanket around her and kiss her forehead, and then I sit in the hush of a ship that belongs to no one but me, with the lights of Havenport scattered across the black water and the letter worn soft in my hand.
I think about fear. About trust, about the specific, particular danger of letting a person back in after they’ve already taught you exactly how much it hurts when they leave.
Then I think about the pomelos, and the books, and a vow behind the vow about always coming to find me.
I pull out my phone.
I open a new message. His name sits at the top of it, the way it has sat unanswered through weeks of missed calls, and my thumb hovers over the empty box.
Three words. That’s the whole distance between the life I’ve been bracing for and the one I keep not quite letting myself want.
Three words, and everything changes.
I type them before the careful, frightened, five-years-armored part of me can talk me out of it.
Come aboard.