Page 2

The Heart of It

There’s a shudder, as if Marsh can’t bear to think about that moment anymore, and the recap suddenly shifts backward.

Now on-screen is an even slightly younger Marsh, perhaps in her first year of university. She’s wandering around her college library. The vast hall is quiet, and she’s moving slowly through the towering stacks, her fingertips brushing the spines of every book she passes. She looks bewitched, enchanted, by what they all might contain within.

“I remember this. My very first day as a freshman,” Marsh says as she watches her former self, her eyes full of wonder as she relives that moment. “I went to meet my academic counselor, and then I walked to the study abroad office. By lunchtime, I had a stack of eight textbooks for prelaw, and three flyers for exchange programs—Mexico, Iceland, and Hong Kong. They were my most prized possessions.”

“That’s a lot of places!” Talia laughs, and so does Marsh.

“I’d been itching to get out of my hometown since I was old enough to read, and all those places sounded like the complete opposite of where I’d come from,” she shrugs. “Latin America seemed so vibrant and musical, the Nordics so mysterious and remote, and Asia so huge and chaotic, like it could swallow me whole. I thought that if I could make it there, I could make it anywhere.”

“Sounds more like you wanted to be a travel agent than anything else,” Talia jokes.

Marsh laughs, but quiets again as she reflects. “I’d been in love with law since middle school, actually. That sounds corny, but it’s true. I liked the idea of trying to find the truth at the heart of something.”

She ponders that for a moment.

“Maybe that’s also why Dylan likes physics so much,” she finally murmurs.

“Let’s stay in the scene,” Talia prompts. She softens her expression until her forehead has the faintest empathetic crinkle, and her eyes peer deep into Marsh’s soul as the recap screen waits for a prompt. “Dylan proposed after university, the two of you got married, you started law school... and then what happened?”

At that question, Marsh can’t stop the smile that spreads across her lips.

“Harper,” she says, as a faint beeping begins in the background of the recap. It almost sounds like a little alarm.

Or a hospital monitor.

Suddenly, the lights go down, and the suggestion of a flock of nurses—the rustle of blue scrubs, the snap of latex gloves, the squeak of sneakers on linoleum floor—swirls around Marsh and Talia.

“After I stabilized and woke up, Dylan told me about the bleeding,” Marsh finally says. “They caught it in time, and everything was fine in the end, but it was really touch-and-go for a bit. I remember talking with him one minute, and the next, he said that my eyes were rolling back in my head and they were dragging him away from my bed and pushing it out the door to the surgery wing, everyone shouting and all the monitors screaming at once.”

Talia is clutching her hands to her chest, both terrified and enthralled as she listens.

“It was worth it,” Marsh says when she sees Talia’s expression. This is something she feels absolutely, unshakably certain of, if of nothing else in her life. “I’d do it a thousand times again.”

“Hello, little Harper,” young Marsh says as she pulls the bundle in her arms closer to her, and a little nose peeks forth from the soft fabric to nuzzle her own. “Welcome to the world.”

Beside her, Dylan is perched on the bed. His eyes are shining, huge and fierce and wet. “Happy birthday, baby girl,” he whispers, his voice thick.

HARPER LEE: Marsh and Dylan’s daughter, and the light of Marsh’s life. She’s whip-smart, kind, and responsible, even for a teenager—the perfect kid! Harper’s greatest passion is music, especially classical violin. Her dream would be to attend the prestigious Pallissard Institute of Music, the best high school music conservatory in the country, but she knows that her parents can’t afford it.

“But,” Talia gently nudges Marsh, who’s caught up in the recap footage playing over her head, staring so intently that she’s forgetting to continue her story, “a law student with dreams of joining one of the top firms in the country couldn’t take an extended recovery and maternity leave with the bar exam looming.”

“She couldn’t pump during training, either, or skip court if her daughter came down with the flu in preschool,” Marsh agrees. “Things had to change.”

Then she looks down and sighs.

“Or maybe they didn’t change at all. Maybe I’m just using it as an excuse, and I never would have done any of it anyway.”

“Are you sure?” Talia asks softly.

Marsh shrugs. “I don’t know. But I went and got all those flyers years before I married Dylan, and even more years before Harper was born.”

She looks up at Talia.

“But did I go to any of those places I dreamed that I would go? Did I refuse to give up my career? Or did I just let it all go, because that was easier, was less scary, than trying?”

Talia lets the pause linger, full of regret.

“What about Dylan? Did he consider scaling back his own career once Harper came along?” she asks at last.

“I didn’t want him to,” Marsh says. “He was right in the middle of his PhD at that point. He’d been working so hard for so long, researching full-time and working night shifts at a private lab all to cover the bills, just to give it up then.”

She turns and looks again at baby Harper and a young Dylan holding her, and smiles.

“It wasn’t totally fair, but maybe it didn’t have to be, I thought at the time,” she says.

“And Dylan agreed?”

Marsh laughs a little. “Dylan was so shaken by the close call that he couldn’t think straight. He just agreed with whatever I said.” Her expression grows a little more serious. “I’ve never seen him so afraid as that day at the hospital,” she says. “And never have again.”

“Not even once?” Talia asks.

Marsh looks at her for a long time.

There can be no secrets, no matter how painful, she knows. The Bubble has to learn everything about her life if there’s any hope of her fixing it.

Talia’s voice is soft, but firm. “Not even years later, on the night that you caught him in the act, and he knew that your marriage was truly, irrevocably over?”

Marsh is silent. She looks down, and then turns back to the recap. She watches the three of them in an artfully faint sepia tone as they do the little things together—Harper’s first sponge bath, Harper’s first word, Harper’s first steps.

“That doesn’t happen for a long time,” she finally says.

And before that, there would be a lot of good times. The trips they’d take together as a family, the memories they’d make. Dylan would go from being hopeless in the kitchen to a surprisingly competent cook. Marsh would come in with Harper from her music lessons and find him putting the finishing touches on a meal he’d made after sneaking out early from work, just to see her smile. The notes he’d leave telling her what he loved most about her, the flowers he’d pick if he walked home through the park instead of driving. The way his voice would get soft and his eyes misty when he talked about how it would be when the two of them were wrinkled and old, together.

Marsh admits that sometimes, at night, she’d go into the living room to find him fast asleep on the couch, Harper dozing in his long arms with the exact same expression on her face, and she’d be so overwhelmed with happiness, such pure and engulfing joy, that she’d briefly worry she might be dying. Like the love was too much for her body to physically bear.

“I thought I could never want more than that moment,” Marsh whispers as she watches.

“Some doors slam loudly as they close on you, and others click shut so quietly that you don’t realize they’re gone for years,” Talia prompts her.

“This one was one of the quiet ones,” Marsh says. “I didn’t regret it for a long time. A very long time.”

Talia nods knowingly. “Until...?”

Marsh sighs. “Until Jo made partner at Mendoza-Montalvo and Hall.”

As Marsh talks, a montage of scenes from a work celebration smatters the space above and behind her head. There are party hats and glasses of bubbly and trays of hors d’oeuvres going around a luxurious conference room, and everyone is crowded around Jo, who appears to be giving an impromptu thank-you speech at the front of the room as her own character insight bubble finally appears.

JOANNA HALL: Marsh’s best friend, and a force of nature. Jo’s a risk-taker, a heartbreaker. She and Marsh met on the first day of college, and have been inseparable ever since, despite the very different paths their lives have taken. Jo may be Marsh’s polar opposite, now a high-flying partner at the firm they both work for while Marsh is stuck as a paralegal, but she’s also as loyal as they come, and will do anything to help her friend find happiness.

A distinguished man with tan skin, silver hair, and a suit that looks like it cost more than a car joins Jo at the front of the conference room just as Marsh, carrying a tray with a giant cake on it, bumps open the door with her hip in the corner of the shot. There’s just enough time to catch sight of her expression as she looks around the party before another caption pops up beneath the same man now raising a glass to Jo.

VICTOR MENDOZA-MONTALVO: Marsh’s boss at Mendoza- Montalvo and Hall. Tough, ambitious, and with a jaw that could cut glass. Marsh has been working as his head paralegal for decades now, appreciated but invisible—can she prove her abilities to him and finally get the promotion she’s always dreamed of on All This and More ?

“I set that cake down, saw Jo’s name on it, and I finally realized that I had made a huge mistake by giving it all up.” Marsh looks away from the montage, down at her hands. “And that it was too late to fix it. I’d lost too much time. And then...”

Talia leans in. “And then?”

The music changes, growing quieter, more sinister.

Marsh grimaces.

“And then...”