3. Margo
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Margo
Christening day dawns bright and ruthless, the kind of Mediterranean sun that turns everything into a postcard and makes it impossible to hide.
I’ve been awake since four.
Not by choice. Sandy had a nightmare about sea monsters eating the boat, which required forty-five minutes of reassurance and a thorough inspection of every corner of the suite to confirm that no, there were no tentacles hiding in the closet.
By the time she fell back asleep, my brain had decided that rest was for people who weren’t slowly unraveling, and I spent the remaining hours until sunrise staring at the ceiling and replaying Dorothy’s words on a loop.
That I am nothing but her son’s little seaside experiment.
I’ve turned the phrase over so many times it’s starting to lose meaning, the way words do when you say them enough. She said it as if I’m a science project and a novelty he tried on a whim that he will eventually discard when the excitement wears off.
The worst part is that I can’t even argue with her logic.
Sebastian did meet me in Havenport, the summer he passed through as a bored young heir looking for authenticity.
He did fall for the waitress who made him laugh because that girl didn’t know his last name meant anything.
And he did marry me against his family’s wishes, in a ceremony his mother attended with the expression of someone enduring a root canal.
But I thought that counted.
I thought choosing me, fighting for me, meant he saw a future in us worth protecting.
Now I’m starting to wonder if I was just a rebellion that went too far.
“Mommy?” Sandy appears in the bedroom doorway, her hair a bird’s nest of tangled curls. “Is today the boat party?”
“Ship party,” I correct automatically, then catch myself. “Yes, baby. Today’s the big day.”
“Will there be cake?”
“Probably.”
“Will there be balloons?”
“I imagine so.”
“Will Daddy be there?”
The question lands somewhere soft and bruised. “Yes. Daddy will definitely be there.”
Sandy considers this with the gravity of a four-year-old weighing very important information. “Okay. Can I wear my princess dress?”
“You can wear whatever you want.”
Her face lights up, and for a moment, just a moment, the weight on my chest lifts.
Whatever else is true, whatever is happening between me and Sebastian, this small person loves me without conditions or calculations.
She doesn’t care if I’m an experiment or a placeholder or a fishing village nobody.
She just wants to know if there will be cake.
I hold onto that as I get us both ready for the most expensive public relations event in maritime history.
The christening deck is chaos dressed up as celebration.
Thousands of people crowd the dock below, press, investors, dignitaries, and what looks like half the population of the Mediterranean coast. Camera flashes strobe even in the bright sunlight.
A brass band plays a triumphant, vaguely nautical tune.
Banners bearing the Austen crest snap in the wind like victory flags.
And there, gleaming in her berth like a floating palace, sits the ship that has swallowed years of my husband’s life. We’re docked for the christening, the whole spectacle staged against the harbor, and by tonight we’ll be back at sea.
She’s beautiful. I can admit that, even through my resentment.
Two billion dollars of engineering and ambition, all sleek lines and impossible glass and the kind of audacious scale that makes you understand why men have always loved building monuments to themselves.
She’ll carry thousands of passengers to places most people only dream about, and she’ll do it wrapped in luxury that borders on obscene.
But I hate the ship a little.
Because she’s the thing Sebastian chose instead of me, the mistress I couldn’t compete with, the love affair I was never consulted about.
So when a hand settles at my back, I almost don’t turn around.
“Margo.” Sebastian appears at my elbow, and I hate that my body still registers him before my brain gives it permission.
He looks like the version of himself that the magazines print.
Charcoal suit cut close enough to remind you there’s a man under all that money, dark hair swept back, a day’s worth of stubble he didn’t have time to shave catching the light along his jaw.
His eyes move over me, slow, and land somewhere warmer than I’m ready for.
“You’re wearing your hair up.” He says it quietly, almost to himself. “Beautiful as always.”
His hand comes up to the back of my neck, warm against the skin the updo leaves bare, and before I can decide whether to let him he leans in and presses a kiss just behind my ear. It travels straight down my spine, despite the turmoil in my chest, the one my body has never learned to fake or fight.
I do know exactly what my hair does to him. That’s precisely why I wore it up, back when I still dressed for him. Muscle memory, apparently, is slower to give up on us than I am.
Now the gown does the rest of the work, silvery gray bleeding down into seafoam and then into the deep blue of open water, the beaded bodice catching every camera flash on the deck.
I look like I belong here. Hopefully dressed to be impossible to crop out even just for tonight.
“Thank you,” is all I give him.
He hears the coldness in it. His jaw shifts, but he lets it go, and his hands slide to the small of my back instead, drawing me a half-step closer while his eyes make another unhurried pass over me.
“What about me, Daddy?”
Sandy plants herself between us with both hands on her hips, refusing to be a footnote in anyone’s moment.
Sebastian turns, and the whole expression on his face changes, the CEO packing himself away and the father stepping out.
“You,” he says, crouching, “look like a princess.”
“I know! Hihi.” Sandy twirls to make her skirt flare, entirely without doubt on the subject, then looks up and beams at him. “Mommy said I could wear whatever I want!”
“Did she?” His eyes find mine over our daughter’s head, and there’s a whole conversation in the look, one I’m too tired to have. “She was right. You’re the most beautiful princess on this ship.”
“Prettier than the lady in the blue-green dress?”
We both go still.
“What lady, baby?” I keep my voice easy.
“The tall one!” Sandy points across the deck to where Therese stands beside Dorothy, glowing in a seafoam gown coordinated to the ship so precisely it could only have been planned.
Then her small face falls, just slightly, and she drops her voice.
“Grandma said I hafta look more presentable. And prettier. Like the tall lady.”
The deck doesn’t move, but I feel the floor go out from under me anyway.
Four years old. Standing close enough to my mother-in-law to soak up her poison, and now she’s holding it out to me, proud and oblivious, the cruelest thing on this deck offered up in a princess dress.
My little girl thinks she isn’t pretty enough. Because Dorothy told her so. Because Dorothy could not resist reaching all the way down to a child to land the blow.
My hands curl into fists at my sides, nails biting my palms.
Sebastian’s whole face darkens.
“Grandmother is wrong, sweetheart.” He tips Sandy’s chin up so she has to look at him. “You are the prettiest girl on this entire ship. And do you know how lucky I am? I get to walk in there with the two prettiest ladies on board. Everyone’s going to be jealous of me.”
Sandy dissolves into giggles, the wound closing as fast as it opened, the mercy of being four.
I make myself smile for her. I hold it in place while everything under it burns, because it is one thing for Dorothy to spend five years carving me down to nothing, and it is another, entirely different thing for her to pick up the knife and turn it on my daughter.
“Mr. Austen?” A staffer hovers at the edge of us, apologetic. “We’re ready to begin. If the family could take their places.”
The family. As if I’m part of it.
Sebastian straightens, offers me his arm.
I take it, because there are cameras everywhere and I’ve learned the only thing worse than pretending is letting people watch you stop so I let him lead me toward the platform, hoping the whole spectacle ends fast, because I am so tired of forcing myself into rooms that were never built to hold me.
The platform is easily a stage.
The second we reach it, Dorothy is there, hooking her arm through Sebastian’s and peeling him toward the center before he’s finished a full step. She doesn’t bother to greet me or even look my way, same as always.
He goes, but not before I catch him lean in close to say a low word to her, brow drawn down, and even without the sound I can read the shape of it. His jaw is set and for one foolish second, my chest lifts.
Dorothy doesn’t so much as blink. Whatever she murmurs back is brief, and then she lifts one manicured hand toward the bank of cameras at the rail, the gesture that always means the same thing.
Not now. People are watching.
His eyes cut to me across all those shoulders, just for a breath, and I feel the whole of me lean toward it, hoping this is finally the moment he plants his feet.
But he simply frowns and then he turns to the cameras, the thing set aside for later the way everything with me gets shelved, because there’s always an audience, always a launch, always a reason now isn’t the time.
So it’s the first moment in two days that I feel nothing but relief to be let go of.
I take Sandy’s hand and step back, out of the cluster, out of the tight little knot of Austens and suffocating board members.
Nobody stops me, because nobody expected me up there in the first place.
This is the business side of him and I have no place in any of it. I didn’t broker a deal or sign a contract or inherit a shipping empire.
I’m just the wife. There’s no line on the program for the wife. That’s the part that’s slowly pulling us to opposite ends of everything: his whole world runs on a stage I was never allowed a role on, and after five years I’ve stopped auditioning for one.