Patricia's Silence
Chapter 07 - Patricia's Silence
The days following the docking moved with the specific, disorienting speed of a story racing ahead of the people living inside it, reporters camped outside the hospital, Margot's carefully worded statements multiplying across news outlets faster than Owen's measured legal filings could keep pace.
Patricia Colgrove returned to her own home in Palm Beach, a house she had shared with two husbands and, for the past decade, mostly her own considerable collection of orchids, and found herself unable to settle into any of her usual routines.
She had known Margot Sterling since college, had watched her build Sterling Maritime from a single aging ferry into a global cruise empire through sheer, relentless will, had admired that will even when it frightened her, which it had, on occasion, over the past four decades.
She had also, she now understood, spent those same four decades quietly excusing behavior in her closest friend that she would never have tolerated from anyone else, telling herself that ruthlessness in business didn't necessarily translate to cruelty in family, telling herself that a woman who had built so much from nothing had earned the right to a certain hardness.
She thought of that hardness now, standing at her own railing overlooking a considerably calmer stretch of ocean than the one that had nearly swallowed Charlotte and Henry three nights earlier, and found she could no longer locate the line between admirable will and something considerably darker.
Her phone rang. Margot's name on the screen.
Patricia let it ring twice before answering.
"Patricia," Margot said, her voice carrying the same warm, practiced ease it always had, as though the past week had been an unfortunate inconvenience rather than the collapse of everything Patricia had believed about their friendship. "I wanted to check in. I know the whole ordeal must have been difficult for you too."
"It was difficult," Patricia said carefully. "Watching your daughter and grandson nearly drown."
A brief silence on the line. "It was a terrible accident, Patricia. I know how frightening it looked."
"I heard you tell her to let go," Patricia said, the words arriving before she'd fully decided to say them, four decades of careful diplomacy finally cracking under a weight she could no longer sustain alone.
The silence stretched considerably longer this time.
"You misheard," Margot said finally, her voice cooling by several careful degrees. "The wind was extraordinary that night. I was pleading with her to come back inside the railing. I imagine, in the chaos, my exact words became difficult to distinguish."
"I don't think I misheard," Patricia said quietly. "I've spent three days trying to convince myself I did, and I don't think I did."
"Patricia," Margot said, and something in her tone shifted now, no longer warm, something considerably more direct. "I would think very carefully about what you say publicly, and to whom. Our friendship has meant a great deal to me over the years. I would hate to see it damaged by a misunderstanding neither of us can fully verify."
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Patricia felt the specific chill of a threat delivered so smoothly it barely registered as one until several seconds after the call ended.
She sat with her phone in her lap for a long time afterward, the orchids on her patio swaying gently in a breeze that carried none of the violence of the wind three nights earlier, and understood, with a clarity that frightened her, exactly what kind of choice she was actually facing.
