Marcus's Doubt
Chapter 05 - Marcus's Doubt
Grief has a way of arriving late to disasters, showing up only once the body has finished doing the more urgent work of simply surviving, and Marcus felt it catch up to him on the third night, sitting alone in the hospital cafeteria at two in the morning while his wife and son slept upstairs.
He had believed Charlotte instantly, in the medical bay, in the first raw hours after the rescue. He still believed her now. But belief, he was discovering, was not the same as certainty, and certainty was what the coming weeks were going to demand of him, in rooms full of lawyers and reporters and Margot's carefully assembled allies.
He thought of his mother-in-law the way he'd known her for six years, the woman who had walked Charlotte down the aisle in her late husband's place, who had held Henry within an hour of his birth and wept, actual tears, the kind Marcus had never once suspected her capable of faking. He tried to hold that woman in his mind beside the one Miguel Torres had described, the one who had crouched at a railing and told her own daughter to let go, and found he could not make the two images occupy the same space without something in his chest tearing slightly.
Patricia Colgrove found him there, unable to sleep herself, still in the same burgundy gown she'd worn on the deck that night, having refused, for reasons she hadn't yet explained to anyone, to leave the ship until she understood exactly what she'd witnessed.
"May I sit," she asked, and Marcus, too tired to do anything but nod, gestured at the empty chair across from him.
"You were there," he said. "On the deck. Before it happened."
Patricia's hands, folded on the table, trembled slightly. "I was thirty feet away. I saw the beginning of it. I didn't see, I couldn't say for certain, exactly how the fall itself happened."
"But you heard something," Marcus said. "You must have heard something."
Patricia was quiet a long moment, the specific silence of a woman weighing four decades of friendship against something she could no longer pretend she hadn't witnessed.
"I've known Margot since we were both twenty-two years old," she said finally. "I was at her wedding. She was at mine. I have loved that woman through two husbands and a hundred crises, and I want you to understand that context before I tell you what I'm about to tell you."
Marcus waited, his exhaustion momentarily forgotten.
"I heard her say something," Patricia continued. "Right before the wave hit. I couldn't make out every word. The wind was strong, and I was frightened, and some part of me, I'll admit honestly, some part of me didn't want to understand what I was hearing."
"What did you hear," Marcus said.
"Enough," Patricia said, tears finally falling, "to know that whatever Margot has told the reporters isn't the truth. I heard enough to know that. I haven't decided yet what I'm going to do with what I heard, and I need you to understand that I'm telling you this because I can no longer carry it alone, not because I've decided how this ends."
May you like
Marcus reached across the table, an instinct more than a decision, and took the older woman's trembling hand.
"You don't have to decide tonight," he said. "But someday soon, you're going to have to decide. My wife and my son fell twenty-six meters into the ocean three nights ago because of whatever happened on that deck. Someday soon, the world is going to need to know the truth, whatever it costs you to tell it."
