The morning light filtered through the blinds of the apartment. Alyx had been awake for hours, sitting at her desk with a cold cup of coffee between her hands. Lily was spinning in her head, her image in the bar window from the previous night replaying—her darker, straighter hair, her vulnerable and doubtful expression, her eyes scanning the group until they fixed on her own gaze, that brief battle where she felt her composure waver, and her flight from the bar's entrance.
She was keeping that glimpse, the secret from Marshall for the sake of his fragile peace that was just beginning to recover from the rubble. But the weight of that omission settled in her chest like another burden. When Marshall entered the living room, already dressed for work in a suit that hung a bit 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 leaving the room, ready to start their day.
"Yes. Just… planning the day," she lied, forcing a smile.
Marshall passed by them, adjusting his tie. "First day back as Attorney Erikson." 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 that only Lily and Marshall used for her—paralyzed her. That gesture of regained normality and affection. How could she be the one to break it?
"Good luck, Marshmallow," she responded with the childish nickname they had given him. That brief exchange was an echo of their past dynamic.
When the door closed behind Marshall, and Ted and Robin left for work, the silence of the apartment became deafening. Alyx remained motionless, listening to the hum of the refrigerator. The obsessive cleaning was no longer a refuge; the floor was perfect. Order no longer masked the internal chaos.
Slowly, she got up and went to the bedroom they had shared. She checked her space in the closet—not Lily's or Marshall's, but her own, a small space she had claimed when the three-person relationship solidified. And there, at the bottom of her dresser drawer, beneath clothes, was Lily's sketchbook, the one she had found days earlier and had stored from that drawer to her desk, and finally in her dresser.
She had found it a week after Lily's departure, while desperately reorganizing the living room furniture drawers that night. It was a hardcover notebook, worn at the corners, with paint and coffee stains on the cover. Lily had started it in college and abandoned it half-used. Alyx had initially kept it as another relic, another fragment of Lily to preserve.
But one of those many sleepless nights, with her hands trembling from the excess caffeine she had been consuming recently, she had opened it that night, seeing those pages—some with brief sketches of fruits, vases, or landscapes, and many more completely blank—it had shocked her enough to take an HB pencil and start drawing as she hadn't in a lifetime. In another life, she used to draw everything she saw, spending her youth capturing every moment of her life, only to ultimately not achieve her greatest dream of being a known artist, but becoming an office worker due to lack of opportunities and her own resignation to continue choosing and fighting for her dreams beyond adversities.
The first stroke was clumsy—a nervous, senseless scribble—but then came the second and third, successively, until gradually she began capturing fragments of her memories in this life: the door of Marshall and Ted's university room, Lily's silhouette the first time she saw her in person, Marshall dressed in his first purchased suit, and more, some of objects and landscapes from her other life.
Since then, every night when the apartment was silent and her vigilance over Marshall could relax, she opened 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. Some others, when the sadness and annoyance with herself were too much—when those thoughts of how, for not focusing on the fact that she knew the future, she had naively believed it was just a possibility that all her love and care for Lily, plus that for Marshall, would provide that anchor for Lily, when apparently it was only a bandage Alyx placed on herself not to see the truth: that she couldn't stop that future by being so inactive in changing it, and that her presence didn't mean she was a reason valuable enough for Lily to stay. With these thoughts, she drew fragments of her new life with them—with Marshall and Lily, some of them together, other portraits of them alone or in memorable moments, many with such dark hues and tones that the setting was unrecognizable if you didn't know what memory it was, others with so many colors there was no room for a dark shade. And lately, she drew Lily and Marshall. Not as they were now, but as almost mythological figures, intertwined in charcoal lines, bathed by a light that only existed in her artistic memory.
But the previous night, the fact of seeing Lily again had made Alyx unable to sleep once more. This time, it led her to have a fragment of memory, sharp and painful: Her, in another life as a teenager, lying on an old sofa in front of a television. On screen, a sitcom—a couple, he tall and clumsy, she petite and red-haired, arguing in a room. Then other episodes that made her laugh, she identified with their clumsiness, dreamed of a love as challenging and fun. "How I Met Your Mother"—she watched it religiously every afternoon. It was her escape, her consolation for so many unfulfilled dreams, 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 an even greater capacity for love than television could show. Soon after, she met Marshall, and though she still didn't know how she had fallen in love with them, with their dynamic, with their story, long before allowing herself to be part of it.
So this time, she didn't stagnate with drawing; she decided to make healthier decisions than just wallowing in her pain silently. So, all night from her desk with her laptop, she looked for courses—anything—to distract herself enough so her body would sleep for a full night.
And now, with this new day and the decisions made between yesterday evening and this early morning, Alyx took her coffee cup, the closed notebook, and calmly returned to her desk, where she left the notebook next to her laptop. There, she worked a couple of hours and searched for rental agencies, since she needed her own space to find herself again, to no longer be Lily's or Marshall's other partner, Marshall's caretaker, or the disposable third wheel in their relationship that it seemed to be—though years have passed together, she feels like a spectator and sometimes a participant when with them or the group of friends, and this might be because she has never fully shown them who she is or was beyond her calm, controlled, and peaceful facade.