Page 5

The Pivotal Moment

Talia is staring at Marsh now with one hand clapped over her mouth, waiting for her to say something—anything—as she continues to sit there with her head hung low.

The music is shifting and the haze filter is lightening on the flashback montage, gradually inching closer to the environment of the studio, where Marsh and Talia are sitting live—the recap is nearly over.

It’s only a day and a half behind the present time now. Marsh watches herself climb into Le Fascination in a bathroom stall at work, put a tight black dress that Jo loaned her over it, and then leave the office to meet Ren for their big dinner.

“Light it on fire,” she whispers to herself on the elevator ride down.

“We can’t just...” Marsh starts to ask, but Talia shakes her head gently.

She sighs.

“Yeah. Okay.”

The sun is just setting over Phoenix, and the skyline is golden orange. Ren beats Marsh to the restaurant, always early for their dates so he can confirm the reservation, and is waiting for her by the front door. As Marsh approaches, he glances at every passerby to see if it’s her, and when his gaze finally lands on recap-Marsh, the way that his eyes light up with surprise and pleasure makes present Marsh’s already fluttery heart race—even knowing what’s to come.

“You look incredible,” Ren whispers in her ear as the waitress leads them to their table, one of his hands resting delicately against the small of her back.

Marsh spends the meal feeling like everyone can see right through her clothes to what’s underneath, but Jo was right: Ren doesn’t seem to be able to tell how nervous she is. All he knows is that he’s getting lucky later, and can’t take his eyes off her. Jo was always right about these things. Ren eats his entrée so fast, it makes Talia giggle.

Marsh skips dessert, and Ren drives the two of them back to his place, his foot like a lead brick on the pedal. He lives downtown in a swanky in dustrial loft, with a funky metal cage elevator and floor-to-ceiling windows. The furniture is artfully distressed, the decor effortlessly casual. The whole city twinkles through the glass panes, the sky a deep shade of Sharp Purple in the night. Marsh’s jaw actually drops when he opens the door.

“I know, kind of a bachelor pad,” he says as he leads Marsh inside, apologizing.

She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “That’s not it at all.”

It is a bachelor pad. And that’s why she likes it.

Because it’s nothing like her own boring suburban family home.

They try to make small talk as Ren goes around the room turning on mood lighting and trying to find some music—but then conversation pauses for a second too long, and all pretense drops.

They’re on each other in seconds.

“Are you okay with this?” he asks as he nuzzles her ear.

“Yes,” on-screen Marsh answers passionately.

She can still feel it now. Ren’s lips were so soft, his skin so hot. She’d been afraid her heart was thundering so loudly that his neighbors could hear it. The recap shows his hand on her leg, slipping slowly up her inner thigh, under her skirt, and then he’s drawing gasp after gasp out of her as the camera jerks swiftly back to show just their faces.

“Yes,” Marsh says again. “Oh, yes.”

And then she blows it.

Big-time.

“ Dylan, ” she moans. “It feels so good.”

Dylan.

She said “Dylan.”

Below, present Marsh has covered her ears so she doesn’t have to hear it again.

For a single moment, nothing changes on the recap screen. The Marsh in the scene doesn’t even realize what she’s just done. But then she finally does—at exactly the same time as the realization dawns on Ren as well.

She stares in humiliated agony as he freezes, and his expression goes from excited and mildly perplexed to crushed all at once.

Poor Ren is heartbroken .

And everything is ruined.

“I don’t even know why I said it!” Marsh cries to Talia beneath the recap, her eyes shimmering in the harsh overhead lighting all over again with shame. “I hadn’t even been thinking about Dylan! I was in the moment!”

“Old habits are hard to break,” Talia soothes.

It’s night again, but not the same one—it’s a whole day later. Marsh is at home, standing in her bathroom wearing her same robe.

But this time, it doesn’t look as fun as it did before.

She wouldn’t admit this to Talia, but of course, she had been thinking about Dylan, a little. It would have been impossible not to. But there’s a difference between being sad that her twenty-year marriage imploded and actually wanting it back, isn’t there? Marsh could be sad and happy at the same time. She could wish that she was still with Dylan without actually wishing she was still with Dylan, and also wanting to be with Ren.

Couldn’t she?

After getting home from the disastrous date, Marsh spent the rest of the night texting Ren apologies and then waiting for his response. She fell asleep late, woke up late, and missed work, so she just carried on texting him, hoping that finally, he’d reply.

“Ren was a perfect gentleman about the mix-up, but it was clear that I’d ruined everything,” she finally says to Talia. “Right after, he politely insisted that he was fine, it was no big deal, but he was just so tired, and had to get up early in the morning, so maybe it was best to end the evening there.”

“Oh, Marsh,” Talia coos, looking distraught.

“He called me a taxi, and even kissed my hand when he put me inside,” Marsh continues. “He told me to send him a text when I got home, so he knew I was safe.”

Reluctantly, she gestures at the footage illuminated above her head.

“But he didn’t reply back to it. So I just kept writing them.”

How many times could a person apologize before it went from contrite to pathetic? Jo would say once. Talia might say two. Marsh, perhaps, would say three times, at the very most.

Recap-Marsh checks her phone again.

She’s already sent eighteen texts since the night before.

“What was one more, I told myself,” Marsh says as, in the recap, she uncorks a cabernet and grimly, nervously sips it straight from the dark green bottle. “I’d already crossed the line into embarrassingly pitiful long ago. I thought, maybe if I just kept texting him, it would prove to him just how sorry I was, and how little that slipup meant. That maybe it would show him how much I cared about him and wanted a future together.”

Just as she puts her thumb on the screen to pull up the keyboard for the nineteenth time, her phone buzzes in her hand right then, as if on cue. Despite the fact that she’s already holding it, Marsh bolts upright from her lean against the sink to grip the device with two hands, her heart racing.

But it’s not Ren. It’s an email from her boss, Victor Mendoza-Montalvo.

She’s fired.

Talia howls with dismay, but Marsh just grimaces.

“It gets worse,” she says.

Recap-Marsh’s phone buzzes again.

This time, it’s Ren.

She’s already standing stiffly, still absorbing the shock of this latest disaster, but she somehow manages to straighten up even more as her fingers move to open his message.

He finally replied!

Everything’s not lost!

Hey, Marsh, the text begins.

After a moment, Marsh drops the phone in her robe pocket, and reaches for the wine again. Her eyes are dead and glassy.

I had a wonderful time reconnecting, but I think it would be best if we...

She doesn’t have to read the rest.

In another life, maybe , he’d written at the very end.

Another life.

Another. Life.

“That was it. I was done. I went straight to my laptop, opened up the application, and before I could chicken out of it, I did it. I submitted my name.”

This is the moment, she told herself at the time, feverish. The moment she finally stops letting things happen to her, and makes them happen instead. The moment she finally takes control of her life. The moment she finally makes a choice.

In their chairs, Marsh and Talia look at each other, an intimate, knowing stare.

And then, like a divine sign from the heavens, her phone rings on-screen in her pocket, startling her.

“Marsh,” a familiar voice greets her over the line, perky despite the late hour. “Do you have a minute to talk?”

She’d recognize that caller anywhere.

There’s no one in the world who wouldn’t.

“I’m calling from All This and More ,” Talia Cruz’s voice says.