19. Sebastian
— ? —
Sebastian
Slow days at sea teach you things about yourself you didn’t know you needed to learn.
I’ve spent my entire adult life in motion, planes and meetings and the relentless forward march of quarterly reports and expansion timelines.
Even my vacations were scheduled down to the minute, every activity planned and optimized for maximum relaxation efficiency, which is an oxymoron I never noticed until now.
Here, there’s nothing to optimize.
The ship drifts along the coast, anchoring in quiet coves, moving when we feel like moving and staying when we don’t.
Sandy has declared herself Captain of Dolphin Watching and maintains a running tally of every sighting, which she reports with the seriousness of a naval officer delivering intelligence.
“Three this morning, Daddy. Plus one that might have been a shark, but I think it was just a big dolphin.”
“Excellent work, Captain Sandy.”
“I know. I’m very good at this.”
She is. She’s good at everything, this small person Margo made while I was busy being absent, this miracle of a child who somehow turned out kind and confident despite having a father who was never there.
Watching her fills me with equal parts joy and grief.
All the moments I missed. All the firsts I traded for things that seemed urgent at the time and now seem meaningless. Her first steps. Her first words. The first time she said “Daddy” and I wasn’t there to hear it.
“You’re doing the sad face again.”
Margo appears beside me on the deck, two cups of coffee in hand. She’s barefoot, wearing a sundress that’s slightly too big for her, one from the ship’s collection that I had stocked without knowing her actual preferences, and her hair is wild from the sea wind.
She’s never looked more beautiful.
“I’m not sad,” I lie.
“Liar.” She hands me a cup and settles into the chair beside mine. “You’ve been staring at Sandy with that expression for the past ten minutes. What are you thinking about?”
“Everything I missed.”
“Ah.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “The greatest hits of Sebastian Austen’s failures.”
“More or less.”
“Want to talk about it?”
The question catches me off guard.
In our marriage, I never talked about the things that weighed on me.
I managed them alone, the board pressure, the constant comparisons to my father, the fear that I was nothing more than a caretaker of someone else’s legacy.
I told myself I was protecting her, sparing her the burden of problems she couldn’t solve.
Really, I was just hiding.
“I don’t know how,” I admit.
“How to talk?”
“How to let you in. I’ve been keeping things from you for so long it’s become automatic.”
Margo is quiet for a moment.
“Then start somewhere,” she says. “Anywhere. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”
I look at her, this woman who has every reason to keep me at arm’s length, who is instead offering me a gift I’ve never accepted from anyone.
A chance to be seen.
“The board is pressuring me,” I say. “They’ve been pressuring me since before the flagship launch. There are factions that think I’m too young for this, too untested. They look at me and see my father’s shadow instead of a leader in my own right.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Because I never told you.” I stare out at the water. “I never told anyone. I thought I had to handle it alone. Prove myself without showing weakness.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is.” I laugh, and it comes out hollow. “It’s been exhausting for years. And the more exhausted I got, the more I buried myself in work, because that was the only thing I knew how to do. The only thing my father ever taught me.”
“What about your mother?”
“My mother taught me that appearances matter more than reality. That the Austen name comes with obligations that override everything else, including happiness.” I pause. “Especially happiness.”
Margo sets down her coffee and turns to face me fully.
“Is that why you stopped being yourself? After we got married?”
The question hits somewhere vulnerable.
“I don’t know when I stopped. I don’t think there was a single moment. It just… happened. Gradually. One compromise after another, one obligation after another, until I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the man looking back.”
“I recognized him.”
“What?”
“The man you stopped being.” Her voice is soft. “I recognized him. He was the one I fell in love with.”
She tells me about the early days.
The ones I’ve mostly forgotten, buried under years of meetings and mergers and the relentless machinery of corporate life.
“You were different when we met,” she says. “Do you remember the apartment?”
“The tiny one. With the water stain on the ceiling.”
“That wasn’t a water stain. That was a leak we couldn’t afford to fix.” She smiles at the memory. “You used to put a bucket under it every time it rained. And then one night the bucket overflowed and flooded the kitchen, and we spent three hours mopping it up with beach towels.”
“I remember. You were laughing so hard you couldn’t stand up.”
“Because you kept slipping on the floor and swearing under your breath. I’d never once heard you swear before that night.”
“That’s what a flooded kitchen at midnight does to a man.” I smile despite myself. “I haven’t thought about that night in years.”
“I think about it all the time.” Margo’s expression turns wistful. “That was the man I married. The one who could laugh at a flooded kitchen. The one who didn’t have assistants or staff or a mother breathing down his neck. Just a man figuring himself out.”
“That man was broke.”
“That man was happy.” She reaches over and takes my hand. “Don’t you see, Sebastian? I didn’t fall in love with the empire or the name or the money. I fell in love with someone who made me laugh and listened when I talked and didn’t care that I came from a fishing village.”
“I still don’t care about that.”
“I know. But somewhere along the way, you started caring about things that didn’t matter and forgot about the things that did.”
She’s right.
God, she’s right.
I think about all the things I sent instead of showing up.
The jewelry couriered to an empty house, diamonds and pearls chosen by assistants who knew her measurements but not her preferences.
The cars she never asked for, sitting in a garage she rarely used.
The flowers I ordered after fights, roses she hated, apologies with price tags that only proved how little I understood.
I thought I was providing.
I was paying her off.
Buying forgiveness for absences I couldn’t explain and failures I couldn’t admit. Every gift was a transaction, my guilt exchanged for her patience, and I called it love because I didn’t know what else to call it.
“Margo…”
“Look.” She points toward the bow of the ship, where Sandy is excitedly waving.
“DADDY! MOMMY! A WHOLE POD! THERE’S A WHOLE POD OF DOLPHINS!”
We both stand, moving to join her at the railing. The dolphins are everywhere, dozens of them, arcing through the water around the ship, their sleek bodies catching the morning light. Sandy is bouncing so hard I’m afraid she’ll vibrate right through the deck.
“This is the BEST DAY EVER!”
I look at Margo.
She’s laughing, really laughing, her face lit up with the kind of joy I haven’t seen in years. She’s barefoot and windswept and completely, utterly present in this moment.
And I understand, finally, what I’ve been doing wrong.
She never wanted the things I sent.
She wanted this.
Me, here, watching dolphins with our daughter. Present. Paying attention. Choosing this moment over every board meeting and conference call and urgent email that used to fill my days.
I spent five years trying to buy her happiness.
All she ever wanted was my time.
We have lunch on the deck, fresh fish the crew caught this morning, pomelo segments arranged on a plate, simple food that costs nothing and means everything.
Sandy eats her weight in fruit and then crashes for a nap, leaving Margo and me alone in the gentle afternoon sun.
“Can I ask you a question?” she says.
“Anything.”
“If you could go back to the beginning, the tiny apartment, the flooded kitchen, before any of this, would you do it differently?”
I think about it. Really think.
“I’d still marry you.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know.” I turn to face her. “But it’s the answer. I’d still marry you. I’d still choose you over every easier path my mother tried to push me toward. The only thing I’d do differently is stay.”
“Stay?”
“Present. Here. I’d tell the board to handle things themselves and come home for dinner. I’d take Sandy to the park instead of delegating it to nannies. I’d remember that the empire doesn’t matter if I lose everything that makes it worth building.”
Margo is quiet for a long moment.
“What’s stopping you from doing that now?”
“Fear, mostly.” I laugh at myself. “Fear that if I step back, the whole thing will collapse. Fear that I’m not actually necessary, and the only thing I contribute is my presence in meetings. Fear that my father’s ghost will be disappointed if I choose my family over his legacy.”
“Your father is dead.”
“I know.”
“So why does his opinion still matter more than mine?”
The question lands square, and it hurts.
Because she’s right. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing, prioritizing the expectations of a dead man over the needs of the living woman in front of me.
“It doesn’t,” I say. “Or it shouldn’t. I’ve just… never known how to stop.”
“What if I helped you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean…” She hesitates. “I mean I never understood your world because you never let me into it. You handled everything alone and kept me at a distance, and I spent years feeling like an outsider in my own marriage. But what if we did it differently this time? What if you let me in?”
“You want to be involved in the company?”
“I want to be involved in you.” She reaches for my hand. “I want to understand the things that keep you up at night. I want to be someone you talk to when things are hard, not someone you hide things from.”
“I’d like that.”
“Then tell me. Right now. What’s the thing you’re most afraid of?”