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Lost Footage

Marsh stumbles through a set of heavy wooden doors and trips over a rug, throwing a tumbling echo of footsteps across the stone floor.

“Shit!” she curses as she catches herself on her hands and knees, and winces at the way the walls bend her voice back at her in the broken silence.

After a few moments, she picks herself up from the rug.

Now what?

She’s exhausted, out of ideas, and almost out of time. But she can’t give up. She has to find Dylan. She has to fix this. She has to .

But what can she do?

Then she hears it.

One small word that only she and one other person know, and said in a voice she’d recognize anywhere, anytime.

“... Mallow?”

Marsh turns around.

Dylan.

He’s here—he’s here —standing in front of her, in the flesh.

“Dylan!” Marsh shrieks, launching herself into his arms.

“Mallow? Mallow! Oh, thank God!” he’s shouting back, and then he’s holding her, familiar and crushing as he clings to her in a desperate embrace.

“I’ve been trying to find you everywhere, and everywhen!” Marsh wails into his shoulder. “Everything about you—our photos, our friends’ memories, all gone! Then I tried to call you, but your phone number disappeared from my contacts, and then—”

“What? Disappeared?” He gasps, pulling back to stare at her.

“Yes! Like you never existed! You just vanished after the midseason special!” she yells at him through tears. “Why did you leave like that?”

“I didn’t leave!” Dylan says. “I mean, I did—but I didn’t mean to leave for good ! I was mad about the show, and just wanted to go home and clear my head. Then, when I tried to go over to your house the next day to talk about it, things were... They were different . I couldn’t find you or Harper. I couldn’t find anything, the harder I tried.”

“What?” Marsh asks, confused.

“It was like the more I tried to reach you, the harder it was to move,” Dylan says. “Things were closing in. Streets turning around on me, buildings disappearing... someone following me, it felt like! So I ran. I finally thought I might be safe here, but then when I tried to leave, I couldn’t get out.” He waves his arms around. “I’ve been stuck here ever since.”

Finally, Marsh has calmed down enough to look around for the first time.

Where is “here”? she wonders as she examines the scene. Where are the two of them? And why would it be where Dylan got stuck?

They’re in a big, multistory building, with shelves full of books all around them. The walls are stone, the light is soft and gray through the tall windows, and the air is even stiller than usual for a grand, serious place like this.

“Are we...” Marsh furrows her brow. “Are we in our old university library?”

Dylan nods. “Yeah. The day before our freshman year.” He points at the wall clock behind them. “Welcome orientation is supposed to start in an hour. But the time never changes.”

Marsh shivers. “Weird.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “But thank goodness you chose this moment. We never would have found each other otherwise.”

“It was a fluke,” Marsh admits. “I didn’t know where I was going. I was just looking for somewhere safe.”

“Somewhere safe?” Dylan frowns. “Marsh, what’s been happening out there, the second half of this season?”

Marsh takes an exhausted breath.

How can she even begin to explain?

“Try me,” Dylan says, reading her expression. “I do know a thing or two about quantum bubbling.”

“This is about so much more than just the Bubble now,” she replies.

She sighs.

“If you say, I told you so, I swear, I will leave you here.”

Dylan holds up a solemn hand. “Just tell me what’s going on.”

She has to close her eyes to say it.

“It turns out that Chrysalis... is Ren.”

For once, instead of firing back with a witty rejoinder, Dylan bites his tongue and waits.

Quickly, she explains everything that happened after he disappeared—that Ren has been sneaking around behind the scenes this entire season, pulling strings and trying to influence Marsh’s choices, the same way he did in his own season.

“Harper,” Dylan says, as soon as she finishes.

“She’s safe,” Marsh replies. Ren would never hurt her. “And she doesn’t know. I tried to tell Talia, but she wouldn’t listen. That’s why I ran. To find you.”

Dylan’s shoulders sag, heavy with relief. “I’m glad you did.”

“But I almost couldn’t! I’ve been everywhere in our life together, and you were nowhere,” she says, shuddering at how close she came to missing Dylan before her time ran out. “I even... I even went to your office, that night. And nothing. I’d run out of places to try, and was just running. I didn’t know you were even here on this day!”

“I think that’s just it, though,” Dylan says softly.

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“You said Ren had found a way into every significant life moment you could think of with me, including that day camping, when we met for the first time. At some point in your relationship, Ren must have asked you, or you must have told him about that first time you saw me. That’s how he knew how to get there and replace me.”

Dylan points up to indicate the library all around them.

“But, this is the first time I saw you . You didn’t know about this moment, either—and so neither did Ren. Only I did.” He swallows. “I could never forget it.”

Marsh looks at him. Slowly, she turns around to face the quiet library, to take it in.

She remembers the day now, sort of. There were hints of this moment in the recap, but only from her perspective, of course, not his. Marsh had slipped away from the orientation tour to come into this room to look at all the law books. They were so mysterious and imposing, such huge leather-bound tomes stacked from floor to ceiling, with gold-leaf lettering on all the well-worn spines. She just wanted to run her fingers along one of the shelves, to feel the supple material of the covers and dream of the day when she’d soon start reading them all, as a prelaw student.

She hadn’t known anyone was watching her.

But apparently Dylan had been.

“Mallow,” he says, when she turns to him.

But before Marsh can respond, there’s a boom—the big double doors that lead out of the library being thrown open.

“Damn,” Ren pants, and leans over to put his hands on his knees, apparently winded from running. He checks his watch. “The finale’s half over. We’re almost out of time.”

Dylan is in front of Marsh now. He’s trying to push her away from the main doors, back toward the study areas, where there’s a secondary exit.

“Marsh,” he says under his breath. “On three, when I say go—”

“Calm down. I’m not going to hurt you,” Ren says, waving a hand.

“You expect us to believe that?” Dylan shouts. “You trapped me in this frozen scene for who knows how long! You erased me from the show! You—”

“It wasn’t like that, I swear,” Ren says, looking at Marsh. “I was just trying to simplify things. To make the paths easier.”

“By manipulating me?” Marsh counters. “How could you?”

“Please. Don’t you see?” He shakes his head, frustrated, overwhelmed. “I thought you’d understand.”

But Marsh is too angry to listen.

“Understand? You tricked me!”

She stabs an accusatory finger at him.

“My life was part of your fucking season .”

Everything—not just what happened to Marsh here, in her episodes, but also what happened in Ren’s —was all planned. The hundreds of bad LoveMatch dates, the loneliness, the inescapable rut she couldn’t climb out of alone, was all him. Carefully, purposefully engineered to lead her to him.

Even... even the affair.

“Chris,” Claire Sharp had called Dylan when Marsh stumbled upon her in his office.

Like Chrysalis.

It was ultimately Dylan’s fault that he chose to cheat, but was the fact that it was Claire he met more orchestrated than she’d known at the time? Because it seems impossible that in the real world, Dylan would ever have been able to cross paths with a woman like Claire, as powerful and rich and busy as she is, let alone get to know her and convince her to have an affair with him. The founder of Sharp Incorporated would have given him one second of attention, if even that.

But if you could redo that one second a million times, putting things together over and over again, until everyone finally does exactly what you want, and you get it exactly the way you like...

Until it’s perfect...

“They weren’t your choices to make,” Marsh finally says.

“Were they yours, either?” he asks.

Marsh glares.

“What’s the difference, anyway?” Ren asks, throwing up his hands. “Everything I did, both seasons, was all for you.”

He sighs and wavers slightly. He looks exhausted, worn to the bone, like he might collapse at any moment.

“I’ve never stopped loving you, all these years,” Ren finally continues. “But I waited too long to tell you, and then it was too late. You’d met Dylan, and then you were married, and then you had Harper, and then it was decades too late. The show was it . My last chance to fix our lives. To make you as happy as you were always supposed to be.”

He closes his eyes and shakes his head.

“But it’s one thing when you’re just trying to improve your own life. The more people you add, the more complicated it gets. So many threads to unknot, so many strands to follow.”

“What did you do?” Dylan demands. “What did you do ?”

“I just—I was desperate,” Ren answers, but he’s looking at Marsh. “There was so much I had to accomplish, and too many rules in the way.”

“Ren,” Marsh repeats. “What did you do?”

“It took an entire episode, but it was worth it,” he says. “I made myself a journalist—went back and sent myself around the world after school where I knew there had been big stories, backfilled my résumé with clips, turned it into my whole career. Then I wrote a big piece on quantum bubbling and Sharp Entertainment.”

Of course, Marsh remembers.

The big article he told her about in her recap, that made his career take off.

“You could pretend to need expert interviews,” she says at last, understanding now.

Ren nods. “Before your season, the crew was always in the Bubble, too. The low-level coders at Sharp Labs gave me a tour, and showed me how ev erything worked,” Ren continues. “How the Bubble closes and opens, how they change scenes, how the security filters are triggered.”

He can’t help but smile.

“I snuck back in at night and made myself the system administrator, so I could edit every aspect of every episode. Then I changed the password, so no one could undo it.”

“You idiot. You fucking idiot!” Dylan shouts. “It could have been so much worse. It could have been the actual end of reality!”

“Or not!” he yells back. “Or it could have been everything I wanted!”

Marsh puts her head in her hands.

“You changed the password to ‘Chrysalis,’ didn’t you?” she finally asks.

“That’s how I thought of the Bubble,” he tells her, his voice full of wonder. “Like our little cocoon, from which this perfect butterfly could emerge, at the end.”

“Or like the butterfly effect,” she can’t help but say.

“Small, seemingly innocent changes that can lead to unpredictable consequences,” Dylan murmurs. It was one of his favorite remarks to make about All This and More, every time they watched Talia make a choice.

Back when they were just viewers of the show—not contestants.

“That isn’t fair,” Ren rasps, his words like acid. “Of course everything was going to be messy at first! What rough draft starts out error-free? Especially one as important as this? This was about happiness, about life . It was going to require risks.”

His eyes darken.

“But I didn’t get the chance. When Alexis realized what was going on, she told Claire, who filed the lawsuit. Alexis and Claire said that what I’d done was too dangerous, and decided to pull me out at the midseason special, and cut the show prematurely. I begged her and Claire to reconsider. I was at the start of my season—everything had been pulled apart, but I still needed to put it back together! But they wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t let me finish. They were just going to leave all of our lives in pieces.”

His hands curl themselves into fists.

“I couldn’t allow that to happen. Not when we could have had so much more,” Ren says. “My last choice was to make you the season three contestant.”

He looks longingly at Marsh.

“So that we could try again.”

For a long moment, none of them say anything. The silence is so intense, it has its own atmosphere, like a heavy, dark fog.

Despite how angry Marsh is, it hurts her to see Ren so despairing. After not one, but two seasons, of trying everything he could think of to win her over, no matter the cost, he’s nothing left to give. He’s a tree hollowed out, a heart bled dry.

And she knows that even so, if ten more episodes magically appeared right now, he’d do it all over again for her.

That’s how much he loves her.

“You’re a monster,” Dylan says.

“Oh, am I?” Ren snorts. “You’re not perfect, either. Far from it. You’re telling me you wouldn’t undo all the bad—all the pain—you’ve caused the people you love, if you had the chance?”

Dylan scowls, but Marsh can see by the guilt on his face that what Ren said cut deep.

“Even if you had succeeded in season two and gotten everything you wanted, none of it would be real,” he says at last.

“‘None of it would be real,’” Ren repeats, rolling his eyes. “Grow up, Dylan.”

“It’s selfish,” Dylan says.

But Ren simply turns to Marsh. “I was just trying to make you happy. In my season, and now in yours. I did everything I could. To make your life—our life—better. Is that selfish?”

“Marsh, let’s go.” Dylan takes her hand.

“No, don’t look at him,” Ren demands. “Look at me. Stay with me. We can still fix this, Marsh. Ignore how angry you are at me for a second. Just think about the show, and everything we accomplished. Where you started, and where you are now. Everything I did for you. Everything I changed.”

His stare is so desperate, so determined, that despite everything that’s happened, it’s hard not to listen to him.

“We don’t need Chrysalis anymore, now that you know everything,” he says. “We can choose each other, and everything we’ve built here, at the finale. Everything you’ve wanted, your whole life. You can be the incredible lawyer you deserve to be, Harper can stay at Pallissard, and we can be together. We can have perfect.”

His eyes shimmer, huge and dark, as he smiles.

“Or pretty damn close, right?”

Marsh looks down. She doesn’t want to recall that line, but it was true when she said it half a season ago, just before the midseason special.

She doesn’t want to admit that Ren is right.

Because she really is happy.

Things are pretty perfect.

Ren is pretty perfect.

Suddenly, her arm almost yanks out of its socket.

“Now!” Dylan yells, hauling them toward the back exit of the library before Ren can react.

“Marsh!” Ren cries.

“Run!”

Marsh lets Dylan drag her away, faster in his terror than Ren is in his dogged determination. But even as the two of them lurch through the old, musty corridors, passing genre after genre, shelf after shelf, Marsh can’t deny that even though Ren did a terrible thing, deep down, she can understand why.

She knows things about the show that Dylan never can, even with his fancy physics degree. Because the show isn’t about fairness, or realness, when it all comes down to it. The show is about life. Her life . The only one she’s got.

Ren was acting out of desperation and love. Can she really blame him for what he did?

If she’d had his chance, could she have resisted the same temptation, either?