Days passed in a new, carefully constructed normalcy. Alyx had managed to reduce her compulsive cleaning to a more acceptable routine, and though the apartment remained spotless—more from the inertia of her previous discipline than anything else. Coffee had become her fuel, but she now measured it in cups (three a day, not six).
Even so, her hands were beginning to show signs. After three months, what was a slight, occasional tremor a few days a week had become a fine, almost imperceptible daily tremor that appeared in the afternoons, when caffeine met nervous exhaustion. And then there were the cigarettes—not just a couple every few days, but two every night, a secret, self-destructive ritual she performed on the rooftop, watching the city lights as smoke left her lips.
Muay Thai was a pursuit she'd taken up, with classes four times a week. It had been an unexpected and liberating discovery. In the gym, her height—those 1.9 meters (about 6'2") that had always made her feel lanky—became an advantage. In her classes, she learned to channel her dull rage, her powerlessness, her guilt over not having stopped Lily, into every roundhouse kick to the heavy bag. Each impact, and the end of each class, left her a little more relaxed from her overwhelming emotions.
The other three days of the week, she dedicated to exploring oil painting in classes—a territory she hadn't ventured into before. Here, she didn't paint Lily or Marshall. She feared capturing all her memories of them and not being able to vividly recall the happy moments, only the present pain and loneliness.
Instead, she painted bowls of fruit under artificial light, urban landscapes from memory, and portraits of anonymous models. The surprise was discovering she had an innate hand for color and composition—something she attributed to the practice from her entire past life, albeit in a different area of drawing and painting, finding many similarities here. Her teacher, a woman in her sixties with hawk-like eyes, once told her: "You have the gaze of an analyst, but the soul of an expressionist—though unexplored beyond the perceptions you want others to see. It creates a tension that is interesting." Alyx didn't know how to respond, her mind full of borrowed memories and emotions on pause.
Her mornings were still dedicated to trading, sitting at her desk in front of three monitors, watching Japanese candlestick charts rise and fall from support levels. She now leveraged fragments of memories from her other life—notions of emerging technology, names of companies she remembered would take off—to make calculated investments. Of course, she wasn't just throwing a stone into a sea whose depth and accuracy she didn't know based on her memories; she backed it up with fierce analysis. Money now grew silently in separate accounts, one of which she mentally named the *Getaway Fund*.
Because Alyx had made a decision. She couldn't stay indefinitely in the apartment that smelled of Lily and the shadow of what the three of them had been. She began secretly looking for a place of her own, with criteria so specific she would never admit them to anyone, not even herself. She looked for an apartment with a separate kitchen and good countertops—the kind Lily liked. Spacious for one person, with cabinets for kitchen utensils, and its own terrace or balcony. She was looking for herself now, but every time she saw a well-lit kitchen, she briefly wondered—*if Lily would approve*. It was a mental habit she couldn't eradicate.
Her social life was reduced to evenings at MacLaren's with the group, listening to Barney's stories with a tense smile, enduring the saccharine sweetness of Ted and Robin—which, though she tried to ignore it, *produced a pang of bitter envy*—and observing Marshall. He was better now. He laughed more, but sometimes his laugh was louder and less genuine. And on some nights, when he drifted into his thoughts, Alyx inevitably ended up looking toward the large window by the bar door, where the ghost of Lily from the night she spied on them always materialized in her mind, sharp and painful.
One afternoon, she returned from grocery shopping for the apartment to find Barney and Marshall mid-discussion on the sofa.
"Come on, buddy, let's get you another woman tonight!" Barney was saying with enthusiasm.
"I hate you! You've stolen my 'sweets' these nights! I don't want to go out with you again!" Marshall protested, but his tone was more one of theatrical annoyance than genuine refusal.
Alyx stopped in the kitchen doorway. *Sweets*, she thought. That's how Barney sees women, and he's teaching Marshall to see them that way too, objectifying them.
Barney slapped the sofa. "I won't steal them tonight! I swear. We're going to a new bar near the university—*The Scorpion and the Frog*. Young crowd. You'll seem mature and worldly. And I've got the strategy: Operation *So Long, Redhead!*"
Marshall didn't correct him. He said nothing. He just nodded weakly with a slight grimace on his lips. Alyx felt the floor tilt. Was he only forgetting Lily, or was he also erasing the last nearly six years in which she had been part of that equation? Was he reducing her to an uncomfortable memory, a *third wheel* that no longer fit into his new single life?
Marshall looked toward the kitchen, seeking her out. Alyx held her breath. *Tell him no, tell him to stay, we need to talk. Tell him Lily is here, that she still loves you, that I still love you.* The words wanted to leave her mouth, bitter, mixed with the aftertaste of the afternoon coffee.
But what stopped her was seeing that Marshall's eyes held no pain, no confusion, but a faint glimmer of curiosity and a small, strange, morbid attraction to the abyss that Barney represented. That first glimpse in months that wasn't pure agony. How could she, with her trembling hands and her sketchbook full of memories, extinguish that spark, no matter how dangerous it was?