They chose to sail. The account manager removed the private dining room, imported flowers, and extra cabin. Paige kept the photographer for one afternoon and canceled the staged events she could still recover. I signed a written recusal from every decision involving their account. Then I changed into coveralls and descended to the engine room with the regulators. The Meridian Wake was five years old, built around a hybrid system Owen had helped design. Near the coolant pumps, his initials remained stamped into a bracket where no passenger would ever look.

For three days, I saw little of Colin and Paige. My inspection team reviewed maintenance logs, emergency drills, and crew accommodations. One young electrician named Safiya showed me a vibration trend others had dismissed as sensor noise. We traced it to a misaligned bearing before it became dangerous. She was applying for one of our apprenticeships. The money Paige had requested would fund her placement and five others like it. That did not make Paige a villain. It made the cost visible in lives other than our own.

On the fourth evening, Colin asked me to meet them on an open deck away from their friends. Paige apologized for using my name, but she still wanted me to understand why the celebration mattered. Her parents' marriage had ended quietly after years of pretending, and she believed a public renewal would prove she and Colin were different. Colin said proof could not be purchased while they hid debt from each other. I listened without refereeing. When Paige asked what Owen and I had done for our tenth anniversary, I told her the embarrassing truth: we worked separate shifts, argued over a leaking roof, and ate vending-machine crackers at midnight. The ship kept moving while our family finally stopped pretending nothing had shifted.