Page 3

That Night

Marsh knows where she has to go now.

She doesn’t want to, but she has to. She can’t just show the good, she knows a shrewd, talented journalist-celebrity-goddess like Talia would tell her. She has to show the bad, too. That’s what puts the “real” in “reality TV.”

The image on the screen has shifted. Harper is a young teenager, and Marsh is firmly middle-aged, the way she is now as she sits beside Talia. She and Dylan have been married twenty years.

“Time is strange like that,” Marsh says to Talia as she watches. She tries to ignore that helpless feeling creeping up on her, of knowing what’s coming but being unable to change it because it’s already happened. “It all seemed so unique at the time, but in the end, what did I do, really? I went to work, did the laundry, went on vacations, had sex, had a kid, had slightly less sex. Went to work more, did more laundry, went on more vacations, and had even less sex. Everything and nothing happened, for two decades.”

She sighs.

“You know, Dylan had this saying,” she finally continues.

“He called you Mallow?” Talia prompts.

“He did.” Marsh hesitates. “But he had another one, too. ‘You gotta light it on fire sometimes’—the ‘it’ being a marshmallow skewered on the campfire stick of life, of course. We were having an argument about money, or a trip, or spicing it up in the bedroom, or something. It was funny in the moment, the first time. But over the years, it sort of became our marriage’s unfortunate refrain.”

Talia clucks her tongue. “Surely, Dylan wasn’t perfect, either.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Marsh agrees. “He was a little bit of a workaholic. Impatient. A nitpicker. He was always pushing for something, and I was always trying to keep it the same. I thought I was balancing him out. But now I think... maybe he was right.”

She looks up at Talia.

“I mean, that’s why I’m here now, aren’t I? Because I missed every chance I ever had to ‘light it on fire’?”

The background behind Marsh morphs. The recap version of her is sitting in a car, parked in the dark of night at the curb of the community college where Dylan works.

“I remember stopping at every stop sign on the drive there, and looking both ways before rolling through,” Marsh says. She chuckles, hoping for insouciance, but the sound is hollow. “As if being especially good right then might have made a difference. Might somehow have made things go my way, at the last second. But of course, it didn’t.”

Recap-Marsh sits in the run-down parking lot with the engine off for what seems like forever, working up the courage to climb out.

Finally, the frame pans. There are only two other cars there with her at that late hour, parked right next to each other in the darkness at the other end of the lot.

One is Dylan’s old Volkswagen.

The other—well.

“Our anniversary was that week,” Marsh finally tells Talia. Her stomach is slick, roiling. “Twenty was such a big, respectable number. I was proud of that number. It felt like some kind of proof.” She swallows. “That we were happy. That the marriage was good. That I’d made the right choice all those years ago.”

The truth is, things had not been happy or good for a long time.

Marsh had never returned to school after all. She never graduated, never took the bar, never got a chance to practice law. And as for her travel dreams, she and Dylan did visit Mexico for their sixth anniversary—but Harper was just a newborn then, and Marsh was in full new-mother caution mode, panicking over every little cough or sneeze—she didn’t even try the resort-guided scuba dive, within the safety of their man-made lagoon, let alone leave the beaten path to explore the vibrant cities, try all the exciting food, or take in the nightlife.

Marsh swore they’d go back one day and she’d really dig in. But of course, once Harper started school, the budget got even tighter, and time seemed to move even faster.

She never managed to visit Iceland or Hong Kong, either.

Everything she’d wanted for her life—none of it happened.

The marshmallow had never even gotten near the fire.

And with that, the montage swirls to reveal the scene.

The empty lobby of the community college is too bright, too revealing. Marsh watches herself hesitate at the elevator, unable to decide if she wants to ride up or sprint out of the building.

“What am I doing?” the Marsh in the recap whispers to herself desperately. She presses the UP button again, and then jams the button a third time, frantic.

Finally, she notices the little gold-plated sign on the door.

TAKE STAIRS AFTER HOURS.

The elevators power down at night to conserve electricity.

Below the footage of herself cursing at her luck, Marsh shakes her head and manages a rueful smile.

“Now that I think about it, it’s kind of funny. Dylan is actually the reason I even know about All This and More ,” she says. “He’s the one who told me about it in the first place. Not just the show, but the science behind it, too. Quantum bubbling.”

Most people first heard the words quantum bubbling the night of Talia’s season premiere, but the concept had been discovered years before scientists figured out how to make it actually work as part of All This and More .

“I couldn’t have cared less,” Marsh continues. “What did some physics theory have to do with getting a kid to school on time every morning, or with eight hours of pushing paper around at Mendoza-Montalvo and Hall every day?”

“But to Dylan...” Talia leads her.

“His whole world was physics,” Marsh nods. “To him, this was the discovery of a lifetime.”

“This could change quantum theories. It could change everything ,” Dylan babbles in a quick jump cut to their kitchen, as recap-Marsh fusses with the oven and he paces the room. He’s supposed to be helping with dinner, but he’s so excited, he just keeps picking up utensils and setting them down instead of stirring whatever he’s supposed to stir, and knocking things over as he tries to explain the news. The real Marsh almost looks away—it’s jarring to suddenly see him so chatty, so intimate, again. “It’s huge! A whole new reality! It’s like, imagine if the butterfly effect were real. Any theory, any idea, you could test it out, infinite times!”

“Will it help me with the dishes?” recap-Marsh replies to him, snatching the spatula before the vegetables burn. The real Marsh doesn’t have to look to remember how far his face fell.

“This is bigger than dishes,” Dylan says as the quick shot fades out, but his voice is already quieter than before.

“You’re too hard on yourself,” Talia says once the screen is dark.

“Still. I could have feigned more interest,” Marsh replies. “His students didn’t really care, either. Quantum bubbling just seemed too abstract at the time. After a few weeks of impromptu lectures on the subject, he gave up trying to convince a bunch of budding photographers and creative writing freshmen, and me, how cool this new discovery really was.”

She shrugs at her own na?veté.

“But then, about five years later... your first season premiered, Talia.”

The screen pulses to life again, and now Harper, thirteen years old, is helping Marsh feed Pickle his evening meal when Dylan comes barreling through the front door, his eyes wild with excitement.

“It had been years since I’d last seen that look on his face,” Marsh says, below the image. “I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him at home in the evening, period. He’d already been stretching his hours at work for years by then, to avoid the inevitable, awful silence of the dinner table.”

“Girls! Turn on the TV!” Dylan cries excitedly as Pickle comes crashing straight into his shins at the commotion, a big, black barking cannonball.

It turns out, earlier that day he’d run into an old colleague from his PhD studies, a physicist named Lev Hoffman, who had told him about All This and More .

Dylan didn’t like reality TV, but this show was going to be different, Lev had assured him. It was going to be big . As Dylan describes their conversation, the studio around Marsh begins to glow with a particular hue of purple that she, and everyone else in the world, knows very well.

Sharp Purple .

Dylan tells Marsh that Lev works for the privately funded Sharp Labs, part of Claire Sharp Incorporated, the colossal corporate empire wealthier than most nations that had originally discovered the concept that made the whole show possible: quantum bubbling. And he’s the lead scientist for the first season.

“I remember Lev!” Talia says fondly. “He was a darling. I wish he were still with the crew for you this year.”

“Just watch the first episode,” recap-Dylan is saying to Marsh and Harper as he pulls them toward the couch. “Then you’ll see.”

They all watched the whole season together, that last year Marsh and Dylan were still married. The screen shows her, Dylan, Harper, and Pickle all huddled together on the couch, the adults with glasses of wine and Harper sharing her popcorn with Pickle, but Marsh doesn’t need to look to remember it.

It was, oddly, one of the best times they had with each other, right there at the end. She and Dylan would barely talk, barely even touch each other—by that point in the relationship, an accidental graze of a hand or a foot in bed came with an actual apology—but that one night a week, he’d be home on time, and they’d settle in like a perfect, happy family to watch All This and More . Even though they were paying attention to the TV and not to each other, it had felt like, briefly, the show made them more present. Or perhaps not even though , but because . The show gave them an excuse, it let them pretend. It was about a different life, different choices, not their own.

“It was almost like being in love again, those nights,” Marsh admits to Talia. “And when your season ended, I couldn’t wait for season two to start. I thought that if it could come soon enough, maybe Dylan and I could keep hold of this new feeling a little longer. That maybe things could...”

But then season two never came.

“I don’t know what happened, either,” Talia says.

“It doesn’t matter, I guess,” Marsh replies. “By the time Sharp had announced that they couldn’t air the season, but promised they’d return soon with another, it was too late.”

She turns to the flashback footage, which has returned to the community college lobby. She watches herself pushing open the door to the stairwell, and staring up at the dark journey ahead.

“I was already here.”

It’s a long, awful climb. Seven flights later, Marsh arrives to the right floor sweaty, panting, and embarrassed. This was no way to confront a cheating husband! She wanted to be steely, cool. She wanted it to be his dignity that was shattered, not hers. She can’t do that with her bangs clinging to her forehead and her shirt all twisted around from the climb.

Before emerging from the stairwell, she takes her compact mirror out of her purse and fixes herself.

Somehow, this makes it even more painful.

The hallway is just as long as she remembered. That feeling returns again. That she could just turn around, climb back down. Pretend that she didn’t know for sure, pretend that her marriage was okay, or would eventually be. As long as she didn’t look at a thing head-on, maybe it didn’t have to be real. But her feet won’t obey, and they just keep marching her down the hall, carrying her toward his office.

She thought the door would be locked.

It was not.

“I don’t need to watch it again,” Marsh says, looking at her hands instead of the footage.

The recap gives only snatches of movement, a flash of arm or a glimpse across a back, but it was Dylan’s eyes that stunned her the most, that night.

They were big and dark, like two black holes, as he moved on top of the outline of this other woman. Like it wasn’t even him behind them anymore, like he’d gone somewhere else entirely and it was just a body there, a thrusting, throbbing tapestry of muscles and nerves and sex. No agency, no guilt, even. Those two swallowing, drowning pools. So deep that he couldn’t clamor back to the surface of them before Marsh fled from the doorway, tears streaming down her face as she ran.

“And just like that, everything was over,” Marsh finally says as the recap goes dark. “Everything we’d worked to build, everything we still had wanted to do. Two decades of history, thrown out like trash.”

But also, she couldn’t have done anything else. Once she knew, she couldn’t have just kept pretending it was all fine, or would be again. Even without the affair, it had not been fine for years.

“I know what happened wasn’t my fault,” Marsh continues. “But I still felt like I deserved it, in a way. Because even if Dylan hadn’t blown everything apart... I still was never going to have that life I wanted anyway. I still wasn’t going to do all the things I’d dreamed about. Every year, I promised myself I would make a change, I would do something, and I never did. I just kept letting it slip by.”

She looks down.

“It was my choice, every time—and I never chose myself.”

“Sorry,” Dylan says, suddenly back on-screen, and awkwardly clears his throat.

He and Marsh are on opposite sides of the kitchen island six weeks later, a cold pot of coffee between them. The divorce papers are open in front of her, the pen still in her hand. The ink of his signature is already drying on the left line.

In the studio, Marsh’s eyes alight on the bandage on his hand. A small burn from grilling burgers, nothing to worry about, he’d grumbled when she asked. She’d spent weeks furious about that bandage, making herself sick imagining all the possibilities. He actually singed the skin at the stove trying to impress some new fling with his manly cooking skills. He tried to light a bunch of candles for a romantic tryst and got clumsy. Even, maybe, trying to make campfire s’mores to flirt with someone else.

It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been six weeks or six years later, he was always going to move on faster than her. It’s easy to be first when the other person never moves at all.

“I can leave the papers here if you want more time. It’s just that band rehearsal starts in an hour, and I’m helping with snacks,” Dylan finally murmurs, as if ashamed.

The two of them had agreed that the most important thing was Harper. Marsh didn’t want him to let her down his first time cheering her on solo. Each of them had to be both parents now for everything, on each of their turns.

“Right,” recap-Marsh replies. “You can’t be late for that.”

She signs.