It had a private balcony, a marble bathroom, a bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket, and a welcome card with only one name on it — mine, and no one else’s.
For once in my life, something I had paid for belonged, completely and without apology, to me.
I stood on that balcony the first night with the whole dark ocean in front of me and I said a sentence out loud to no one, just to hear it: This is mine. Two words I had somehow reached thirty-three years of age without ever once being able to say.
Chapter 9 — The Buffet
I didn’t run into any of them the first day.
The ship is enormous, and I had an entire tier of it they couldn’t reach.
But the second evening, I saw them at the buffet, and they did not see me at first, which gave me a moment to simply look.
They looked miserable.
My father’s face was set in the particular fury of a man whose comfort has been interrupted.
My mother looked drained and gray.