Page 10

Early Bird

Marsh had been hoping that this version of her, the cutthroat lawyer at the esteemed Mendoza-Montalvo and Hall, would know how to ask for exactly what she wants in bed and always get it, but it turns out, she doesn’t.

Apparently, the Bubble can only do so much.

She fumbles through the whole thing and fakes two orgasms, both of which Adrian seems to believe are real, then breathes a sigh of relief when he finally passes out before he can suggest round three. Hopefully, the darkness and tasteful angles Talia promised made it look hotter than it actually was.

Marsh wasn’t sure she’d able to sleep after such a disappointing advancement, but eventually she must have drifted off, because in the morning, her conquest’s light snoring wakes her before her alarm does.

In this path, she lives in a modern downtown apartment with high ceilings and cool exposed brick. It’s almost like Ren’s trendy loft that she saw that one disastrous night, come to think of it, but decorated more to her taste. Her gauzy curtains are slightly parted, and in the morning light, the room is almost too bright.

Marsh sighs, ragged. She’d kill for a shower and cup of coffee, but definitely not with Adrian. She stifles a yawn, trying not to move too much in case it wakes him, and wonders what polite excuse she can come up with to kick him out as soon as he stirs.

She’s still drowsy, but her eyes finally focus on the sleeping face on the Sharp Purple silk pillow next to hers, and at first, she doesn’t understand.

She recognizes it, but something’s wrong.

It doesn’t look like Adrian’s face.

Because it’s Ren’s face.

“What the fuck!” Marsh yells, bolting upright in shock.

“What! What’s happening?” Ren says blearily, startling out of sleep so violently that he falls off the bed.

JesterG: Holy mackerel!

Notamackerel: Lol, WHAT

Moms4Marsh: I’m so confused! Where’s Adrian??

Monsterrific: What a twist for the show to pull off!

“What the hell are you doing here?” Marsh shouts.

“What are you talking about? You invited me!” Ren shouts back, clambering to his feet. “Last night. We had a drink and were flirting, and you brought me back here! Remember?”

“No, I most certainly did not bring you back here last night!” Marsh stabs a finger at him. “I brought back Adrian Jackson!”

Ren massages his face roughly, and then bends down to snatch his clothes from the floor. “Jesus, lady, if you wanted a one-night stand, you can just say that. You don’t need to invent a whole thing so I won’t offer to cook you breakfast or ask for your number.”

Marsh is scrambling through her dresser for something that’s not a designer pantsuit. Does Ren not know her in this reality? “I’m not inventing anything!” she cries.

Am I still dreaming? she wonders deliriously. The comments are going haywire, obliterating her vision with laughing emojis and jokes, but she ignores them, blinking them off three times in a row before they finally shut up.

Did the show do this? Did they bring Ren here to do some kind of late-night switch? Or did Adrian somehow... morph into Ren?

Did the Bubble... glitch?

“You have to go,” Marsh says.

“Yeah, no shit,” Ren replies.

“No, I—” She shakes her head. “I’m sorry.”

Ren is heading for her bedroom door, his fingers hooked on the heels of his shoes. “Whatever. Thanks for last night. I think.”

Marsh watches him leave, speechless. She jumps as the door slams.

What the hell is going on?

As she leans against the wall, waiting for her heart rate to return to normal, there’s a little rustle. A dark shape darts out from beneath the dresser and shoots across the room. Marsh screams, until she realizes it’s just a cat.

“How on earth did you get in here?” She asks it nervously.

She’s never had a cat, and has always assumed they’re all skittish. This one doesn’t seem to be, though. It’s black and silky, with round yellow eyes, which are currently staring at her like two big moons.

Marsh sidles up to the cat as slowly as possible, trying not to spook it, but it just watches her from its new perch on the corner of the unmade bed, its tail swishing placidly. It doesn’t seem to be planning to go anywhere now that she’s not shrieking. At last, Marsh reaches out and touches the little silver tag on its collar.

Pickle, it reads.

She drops the tag and lurches backward.

This is getting really weird.

Pickle the cat hops off the bed and pads across the floor to where Marsh has stumbled. He threads himself in between her ankles in figure eights, purring. Then he trots away and jumps onto a little decorative side table, where there are two small bowls, one filled with water, and one empty. He sits expectantly beside the empty one.

This animal doesn’t seem like a plant from the show. A cat would never cooperate like this for any human boss. He clearly knows Marsh and this apartment very well. As if he belongs to her, as her pet.

Her Pickle.

Marsh keeps staring at him until he meows, irritated.

“Sorry! I’m just trying to get my head around this,” she says, rushing to locate a bag of cat food. “Why am I talking to a cat? It’s not like you can understand me any better than you could as a dog. Why am I still doing it?!” Frazzled, she pours some kibble into the bowl, and watches Pickle happily crunch his way through it.

Think, she admonishes herself. There has to be an explanation for both Ren and Pickle.

She had a few drinks last night, but she definitely wasn’t drunk enough to have completely misidentified Adrian as an entirely different person in the previous episode. And even if she was a little tipsy, she’s certainly not drunk now, staring at this animal, which is clearly not a dog.

Actually, the longer she observes this Pickle, Marsh realizes that he does remind her of the original, canine version of Pickle. He cocks his head the same way, and scratches at things with his little front left paw just like he does as a Lab.

Maybe in this version of her life, a dog would have been too much for a single career woman to properly take care of, she considers. Maybe a cat was all she could handle.

But that still doesn’t explain why Adrian turned into Ren.

Briefly, hesitantly, Marsh blinks the comments back on to skim them to see if anyone else is wondering the same thing. But it seems they’ve taken it in stride, as part of the show, and are now cooing over Pickle the adorable cat.

She stifles a groan and minimizes the scrolling texts again.

She needs to talk to Talia.

A few minutes later, Marsh has thrown together a presentable enough outfit and whizzed down the elevator from the penthouse to the parking garage. Even as rattled as she is, she doesn’t miss the conspicuously placed flyer for a winter holiday taped just above the panel of buttons.

Your future awaits in Iceland, a white and blue ribbon of text beckons in front of an imposing mountain peak, as she stares.

The elevator dings, and Marsh tears her eyes away from the poster to rush through the sliding doors, but then stops cold once she enters the garage.

She doesn’t know what her car looks like in this life.

But as she’s digging through her purse to see if her key ring will give her a hint, a soft squeal of tires on concrete interrupts her, and a sleek dark sedan with impenetrable tinted windows pulls up in front of her.

Marsh stares at it for a few seconds, wondering what’s going on, until the driver opens his door and pokes his head over the top of the roof. He’s young, barely a teenager, in a white dress shirt with a red vest.

“Good morning, ma’am! Will you be taking your car now?” he asks Marsh politely.

Marsh blinks. In this reality, her luxury building apparently has a full-time valet for its residents.

“Yes, thank you,” Marsh recovers, and darts over to the driver’s side.

“Have a wonderful day,” the valet says as she clambers behind the wheel, and shuts her door for her.

Marsh waves to him, and then hits the gas. The car lurches into motion with feline grace.

“Talia!” she cries as Talia picks up just after the first ring.

“You sound tired,” Talia says. “Must have been a good time last night!”

“The opposite,” Marsh replies. She puts her phone on speaker and tosses it onto the passenger seat so she can drive with both hands. “However bad you’re imagining, triple it.”

Talia laughs. “Better luck next time.”

Marsh can’t even think about a next time right now. “We need to talk,” she says. “Something really weird is going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I went home with Adrian last night, and then in the morning...” She fumbles, at a loss as to how to explain the strangeness. “He was Ren!”

Talia coughs on her end of the line, like she might have just choked on her breakfast for a moment. “What? What do you mean, he was Ren?”

“Exactly that! Like the show replaced Adrian with Ren, for some wild reason!” Marsh takes a right turn too fast, and her tires squeak. “And it turned Pickle into a cat, and—”

“Okay,” Talia says, trying to calm her. “Remember, we’re making big changes to your life. Some surprises are to be expected.”

“Surprises!” Marsh wails, incredulous. She’s not sure if she’s relieved that she didn’t imagine everything that just happened, or unnerved that the show really would play musical chairs with her romantic partners with such whimsy.

“The Bubble is an incredibly complex system. There are a million side effects to every single choice that it has to track, and some of them have to be streamlined to make your new reality work,” Talia explains. “Sometimes, the change will be obvious, like becoming a lawyer. Other times, it will be less so, like Pickle becoming a cat.”

Or Ren taking Adrian’s place, Marsh muses.

But even if this was just a side effect, why did the Bubble insert Ren, and not Dylan?

Even in this reality, in which Marsh has been divorced far longer than she was ever married, Dylan still did propose to her. Dylan still was with her through pregnancy, and childbirth, and took care of her while she recovered, before it all went south. And he’s still Harper’s father, even if he’s not her husband. Surely, the Bubble must know how significant of a person to Marsh that makes Dylan. He seems like the obvious choice.

Or maybe that’s the reason? she ponders.

Is the show trying to push Ren and her together?

Or... trying to keep her and Dylan separated?

“Marsh, I need you to trust the process. We’re going to make everything perfect by the finale, just like I promised you,” Talia is assuring her. “Where are you now?”

“I’m in my car,” Marsh replies. The light ahead of her turns red, and as she brakes for it, it finally occurs to her that she actually doesn’t know where she’s going.

Yes, she does, she realizes as her gaze settles on the neighborhood outside her tinted windows.

She was driving to her house.

Well, it’s not her house anymore, in this episode. But in real life, it is.

Marsh wonders who lives there now, within those familiar, unfamiliar walls. Originally, she and Dylan bought it when Harper was about two—before that, they’d been in a two-bedroom apartment closer to downtown. That’s probably where Dylan still lives now, with their daughter. In this version of reality, Marsh has probably never set foot in this house. It never belonged to either her or Dylan at all.

She pulls past the driveway a bit, so as not to creep out the residents, and puts the car in park along the curb. It seems smaller, somehow, but in a cozy way. The windows have the same wooden shutters, and the front is painted the same cheery light blue. There’s a little plastic sign poking out of the grass on the corner of the property that says, CHRYSALIS REALTY: MAKE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE!

Chrysalis.

That word again.

She stares at the sign for a long moment, trying to ignore the twinge of dread in her gut.

This is getting really, really weird.

“We have to make some changes,” she finally says to Talia. “I’m so glad I’m finally a lawyer, but there have been... a lot of unintended consequences.”

“That’s okay,” Talia replies. “We’ve got plenty of time to get it all straightened out! But overall, your life is getting better and better. Don’t you agree?”

Marsh frowns. It’s definitely true that she’s drastically improved things already—at least professionally. She’s found her passion again, and become the lawyer she always wanted to be. She’s winning cases and rising fast at Mendoza-Montalvo and Hall, and everyone there finally sees her as the smart, ambitious woman she’s always known she could be.

But was it really worth what happened to Dylan’s career, and her marriage, which now barely ever was? Or what happened to her relationship with Harper? She still loves her mother, but it’s obvious that the two of them are even less close than they are in the real world. They’re nearly strangers—and no wonder. Harper lives with her father, and Marsh works herself to the bone and then goes drinking every other night with Jo or brings home a warm, faceless body to fill her bed.

Talia’s car keys jingle on her end of the line, drawing her back. “I’ll meet you wherever you are, and we can go over everything,” she says to Marsh.

“No need,” Marsh replies. “I know what I want to do. My career is on track, but I need to focus on my personal life now.”

There are two ways to go about accomplishing that, though. She could try to make things better with Dylan and Harper, to give him one last chance to have their family back together again. She’s not sure how many last chances a person deserves, but maybe it doesn’t matter. In the Bubble, she has infinite tries to get it right. Or at least until the season finale.

On the other hand, is the show trying to tell her something important? Is that why Ren keeps popping up in her life, no matter what path she chooses? Because she is supposed to be with him after all?

“I love this new, take-charge attitude, Marsh! You’re doing a great job pursuing everything this show has to offer,” Talia gushes. “Remember, Marsh, as we like to say—you could have All This ...”

“ And More, ” Marsh replies.

To go back to before Dylan cheated on Marsh: Turn the page

To pursue Marsh’s burgeoning relationship with Ren: Go to Episode 4