**English version of the WATTYS 2019 WINNER story**
1672, Caribbean Sea.
He lost everything for her. She risked everything for him.
But maybe love is not enough to bridge over so many deep differences between them, and the only way for them is goodb...
Marina spent most of the cool winter morning at the shipyard. After making sure the Phantom was receiving the proper attention after a couple of months at sea, she wanted to check the remodeling works on the Carthage, that were to be done in strict secrecy. The day in which Morris and Dolores would make their vows was still weeks away, but the girl wanted to surprise her friend with the gift of the ship already set up for battle.
Since Dolores was still married, Cecilia and Fray Bernard came up with an alternative for her and Morris to have as much of a Christian union as possible. So they'd hold a ceremony to make vows of mutual love and respect. Cecilia and Dolores threw themselves to the task of planning the event, find a house for the couple, choose garments and furniture. Overwhelmed by their untiring activity, Marina and Morris only needed to trade a look to understand each other. The next morning they set sail, running away from all that buzzing. Despite being still in hurricanes season, they spent some weeks sailing without any trouble. As Laventry liked to say, storms were afraid of the Phantom and changed course to avoid it.
Back to Tortuga, Marina had taken her ship to Lombard, to have the obvious little details fixed, like sides scratched at boardings, or worn-out gunports after exhausting use. Occupational hazards. Two weeks later they were back to the sea.
Contrary to what she herself had expected, Castillano's absence didn't burden her. After all, he'd never been a part of her regular life. And like her mother had told her once: the sorrows the sea brought, only the sea could wash away. She didn't miss him while she was sailing. But she did give in to melancholy when she was on land. In those quiet nights alone in her room, her eyes couldn't stay away from the tamarind tree growing outside her window. Memories came back like the gentle stroke of the leaves against the glass, as they swayed in the soft breeze. And her chest got full of sighs.
At those moments, she would wonder whether she'd been fair to him, demanding from him more than what he could give. She'd expected him to trust her blindly just because she'd dared to infiltrate into enemy territory to get to him. And she'd never paused to consider the cost of that trust she'd called for: that he acknowledged that his brothers in arms, his life-time friends and mentors, were capable of lying to him and betraying him. And that she, a pirate, a sea dog, one of his sworn enemies, was more honest and straight than any of them.
However, she refused the guilt those thoughts caused her, and discarded them as soon as they tried to emerge.
Maybe that was why she spent as much time as she could on the Phantom, at sea. Out there her memories didn't burden her, and her heart was so light and contented that she had no time to be sad.
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The decommissioning of the Windward Fleet, after only two of its vessels survived, had brought interesting times around.
Its absence let pirates free to deploy all their cunning to ambush and attack merchantmen trying to keep the trade routes between the colonies open. It'd also encouraged many to raise as captains of boats that didn't even qualify as sloops, which would sail from Tortuga and Port Royal like a swarm of flies to despoil what the larger pirate ships wouldn't even touch. For most of them a brigantine meant a deadly challenge, so they used to form temporary alliances to band up and pillage.
