Morning light filtered through the blinds of the apartment. Alyx had been awake for hours, sitting at her desk with a cup of cold coffee between her hands. Lily kept spinning in her head. Her image in the bar window the night before replayed on a loop: her darker, straighter hair; her vulnerable, hesitant expression; her eyes scanning the group until they locked with Alyx's, that brief battle where she felt her composure waver; and her flight from the bar's entrance.
She was keeping that sight, that secret, for Marshall—for his fragile peace that was just starting to recover from the rubble. But the weight of that omission sat on her chest like an added burden. When Marshall entered the living room, already dressed for work in a suit that hung a little loose after months of neglect, Alyx felt a stab of guilt.
"Everything okay, Alyx?" Ted's voice pulled her from her whirlwind of thoughts. He and Robin were coming out of the bedroom, ready to start their day.
"Yeah. Just… planning the day," she lied, forcing a smile.
Marshall walked past them, adjusting his tie. "First day back as Eriksen, Attorney at Law." The attempt at enthusiasm in his voice was palpable, though weak.
Alyx looked at him and wondered if she should tell him. But seeing the brief, genuine smile Marshall directed at her, she hesitated. "Thanks for the coffee, A.L."
That nickname, used after so long—the affectionate diminutive only Lily and Marshall used for her—paralyzed her. That gesture of regained normalcy and affection. How could she be the one to break it?
"Good luck, Marshmallow," she responded with the childhood nickname they had given him. That brief exchange was an echo of their past dynamic.
When the door closed behind Marshall, Ted, and Robin as they left for work, the silence of the apartment became deafening. Alyx stood motionless, listening to the hum of the refrigerator. The obsessive cleaning was no longer a refuge; the apartment was perfect. The order no longer masked the internal chaos.
Slowly, she got up and headed to the bedroom they had shared. She went to her section of the closet—not Lily's or Marshall's, but her own, a small space she had claimed when the three-way relationship solidified. And there, at the bottom of her dresser drawer, beneath her clothes, was Lily's sketchbook, the one she had found days ago and moved from that drawer to her desk, and finally to her dresser.
She had found it a week after Lily left, while desperately reorganizing the living room furniture drawers that night. It was a hardcover notebook, worn at the corners, with stains of paint and coffee on the cover. Lily had started it in college and abandoned it half-finished. Alyx had initially kept it as another relic, another fragment of Lily to preserve.
But one night, after one of her many sleepless nights, her hands trembling from the excessive caffeine she had been consuming lately, she had opened it. Seeing those pages—some with brief sketches of fruit, vases, or landscapes, and many more completely blank—had shocked her enough to take an HB pencil and start drawing, something she hadn't done in what felt like a lifetime. In another life, she used to draw everything she saw, spending her youth sketching every moment, only to ultimately fail in her greatest dream of becoming a well-known artist. Instead, she became an office worker due to a lack of opportunities and her own resignation to keep fighting for her dreams beyond adversity.
The first stroke was clumsy—a nervous, meaningless scribble—but then came the second and the third. Little by little, she began to capture fragments of her memories from this life: the door to Marshall and Ted's college dorm room, Lily's silhouette the first time she saw her in the flesh, Marshall dressed in the first suit he ever bought, and others of objects and landscapes from her other life.
Since then, every night when the apartment fell silent and her vigilance over Marshall could relax, she would open the notebook. At first, they were more drawings of memories, of places and silhouettes of many of the people she had known in her other life. Others emerged when the sadness and anger with herself were too much, when thoughts like: for not focusing on the fact that she knew the future, for naively believing it was just a possibility, that all her love and care for Lily, plus her love for Marshall, would provide Lily with an anchor to reality—when, apparently, it was just a blindfold she placed on herself to avoid seeing the truth. That she couldn't stop that future by being so inactive in changing it, and that her presence wasn't a compelling enough reason for Lily to stay. With those thoughts, she would draw fragments of her new life with them, with Marshall and Lily—some of the two of them together, other portraits of them alone or in memorable moments. Many were so dark in hue and tone that you couldn't recognize the scene if you didn't know the memory; others were so full of color there was no room for a single dark shade. And lately, she had been drawing Lily and Marshall. Not as they were now, but as almost mythological figures, intertwined in charcoal lines, bathed in a light that only existed in her artistic memory.
But last night, the fact of seeing Lily again had left Alyx unable to sleep once more. This time, it led her to a fragment of memory, sharp and painful: herself, in another life, as a teenager sprawled on an old sofa in front of a TV. On the screen, a sitcom. A couple—him tall and clumsy, her petite with red hair—arguing in an apartment. Then other episodes that made her laugh, where she identified with their awkwardness, dreamed of a love that was equally challenging and fun. How I Met Your Mother—she watched it religiously every afternoon. It was her escape, her comfort for so many dreams she couldn't achieve, for relationships that weren't what they seemed. And then, when Lily Aldrin appeared in her life—in this life—it was as if that beloved character had jumped off the screen, so real, tangible, and with a capacity for love even greater than television could show. Not long after, she met Marshall, and although she still doesn't know how, she had fallen in love with them, with their dynamic, with their story, long before allowing herself to be a part of it.
So this time, she didn't stall with the drawing. She decided to make healthier choices than just wallowing in her pain in silence. So, she spent the entire night at her desk on her laptop, searching for courses in anything to distract herself, things that would tire her out enough for her body to sleep a full night.
And now, on this new day, with decisions made between last night and the early hours of this morning, Alyx took her coffee cup, the closed notebook, and calmly returned to her desk. She placed the notebook next to her laptop, worked for a couple of hours, and searched for rental agencies for apartments. She needed her own space too, to find herself again—no longer to be Lily's or Marshall's other partner, Marshall's caretaker, or the disposable third wheel in their relationship, which is how she sometimes felt, even though they had been together for years. It felt like she was a spectator and, at times, a participant when she was with them or the friend group. And this might be because she had never fully shown them who she is, or was, beyond her calm, controlled, and peaceful facade.