Day 56 in the afternoon
The living room was silent after Robin and Ted left for the bedroom. Barney didn't take long to go back to the bar, as he didn't know how to handle the tension of the moment. Only Alyx and Marshall remained, with him still holding the credit card bill in his hand and staring at the data on his laptop, still absorbed in her expenses.
Alyx took a seat in the chair next to him in silence. She reached out one of her hands and softly closed the laptop.
"You shouldn't be looking at that," she finally said, her voice low but firm in the quiet.
Marshall didn't look up. "It's the only real thing I have left... The places and things she buys are clues to what she's doing with her life now."
"Clues for what, Marshall? To find out she's living her life, without us?" Alyx asks, and for the first time in almost two months, frustration is noticeable in her tone directed at Marshall—not just the constant care and support. "She left, Marshall, to that art program. And that bill is data from over a month ago; it's already history."
"But the hotel is from today!" Marshall looked up, his eyes red and glassy, trying to maintain composure but still conveying his sadness and desperation over the breakup. "The hotel on Fifth Avenue. Why would she be staying in a hotel? Why isn't she staying with us? Why didn't she call?"
These questions were like arrows aimed at Alyx's heart. And why didn't she call me? she thought—the question Alyx repeats every night during her sleepless nights, staring at the ceiling while on the sofa. But she didn't feel entitled to that pain and doubt that gnawed at her, because she doesn't know what will happen if they are answered—if Lily didn't feel the same trust or love for her as before.
"Maybe," she started, forcing herself to stay calm, "it's for another reason. A flight layover, visiting a relative, or something else."
"Or she could be with someone," Marshall whispered, his gaze fixed again on the bill. "The guy who answered the call had a raspy voice."
Alyx crossed her arms defensively over her chest. "Marshall, what do you gain from this? Torturing yourself?"
"I gain the truth!" He slammed the table with the palm of his hand, making Alyx's cold coffee cup jump. "I gain knowing if the nine years we spent together, the three of us, mean so little to her that she can come back to the city and not look for us or even call to... to find even those damn plants." He finished by emphatically pointing toward the window where there were a few small planters.
Alyx looked toward the corner where Lily's pothos was starting to have yellow leaves from lack of attention. She watered it, but it wasn't the same.
"Maybe," said Alyx, choosing her words with the care of someone walking on broken glass, "she needs this silence as much as you do. To figure out… whatever she has to figure out. Maybe calling you, or calling me, would confuse everything again."
Marshall looked at her then, really looked at her, as if for the first time he realized that Alyx was also part of that relationship that ended.
"And you?" he asked, his voice softer. "Don't you miss her? Aren't you angry about all this?"
Alyx felt her perfectly practiced mask of control and strength crack slightly. An uncontrollable tremor ran through her hands, and the only way to keep them still was to grip her coffee cup tightly between them.
"All the time..." she admitted, her voice breaking. "I miss her when I see her favorite cup. I miss her when I watch a TV show she didn't like... I'm angry when I think she could have talked to us, to find a different way to fulfill her dream without leaving us... And she didn't." She paused, swallowing. "But I also understand her search, or I try to. Even though her decision hurts me."
A long silence stretched between them, filled with the shared pain but expressed in opposite ways—him expressive and chaotic, her measured and controlled.
"I'm going," Marshall announced, rising from the chair.
"Where? If it's to the hotel, you shouldn't, Marshall. Ted is right," said Alyx, trying to convince him.
"Not to the hotel, for now," murmured Marshall. "I'm going to get some air, in your car. I just need to think without being in these four walls," he finished with a sigh.
Alyx hesitated to lend him her car, but seeing his resolve already made and not as frantic as before, she said, "Alright, the keys are in the box on my desk. But I want you to promise me something before you leave."
"What?" he asked doubtfully.
"That if at any moment you feel the impulse to go to the hotel, you'll come here first. Or call Ted. Or... or call me," she finished, looking intently into Marshall's eyes.
Marshall held her gaze and nodded slowly. "I promise."
As the door closed behind him, Alyx reached out and took Marshall's laptop, reopening it to the open window. Her eyes scanned the charges, each one a small window into a parallel life where Lily was happy, experimenting, and living without them.
With a brusque movement, she closed the computer again and took the bill Marshall had left on the table, folded it, and put it in her pants pocket. Then she stood up and went to the pothos. Taking pruning shears, she expertly cut off the dead leaves.
"It's okay, Lilypad," she murmured to the plant, using her affectionate nickname. "I'll take care of what you left behind. But you have to come back soon, for us."