All This and More

by Peng Shepherd

Genres: Literary Fiction; Science Fiction Fantasy; Magical Realism; Time Travel

Synopsis

From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The Cartographers and The Book of M comes an inventive new novel about a woman who wins the chance to rewrite every mistake she’s ever made, again and again… and how far she’ll go to get her happily ever after.

What is the price of a perfect life?

Meek, play-it-safe Marsh has just turned forty-five, and her life is in shambles. Her career is stagnant, her marriage has imploded, and her teenage daughter grows more distant by the day. Marsh is convinced she’s missed her chance at everything—romance, professional fulfillment, and adventure—and is desperate for a do-over.

She can’t believe her luck when she’s selected to be the star of the global sensation All This and More, a show that uses quantum technology to allow contestants the chance to revise their past and change their present lives. It’s Marsh’s only shot to seize her dreams, and she’s determined to get it right this time.

But even as she rises to become a famous lawyer, gets back together with her high school sweetheart, and travels the world, she begins to worry that All This and More’s promises might be too good to be true. Because while the technology is amazing, something seems a bit off.…

Can Marsh really make her life everything she wants it to be? And is it worth it?

Perfect for fans of Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, bestselling author Peng Shepherd’s All This and More is an utterly original, startlingly poignant novel with an interactive twist—it allows the reader to decide Marsh’s fate. 

 

Release date: July 9, 2024

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 512

Sample

How to Read This Book

This is a book about choices. Their allure, their power, and their consequences.

And so, of course, you have a choice about how you want to read it.

At certain points in the text, the story will present you with several options about what to do next. You can either allow the book to guide you along like a more conventional novel, or you can forge your own path by choosing to jump to a different chapter. It’s entirely up to you.

To stay on the guided path, or, if you’re ever not sure what to do next:

Pick the first option.

To forge your own path through the story:

Pick any option you like.

Have fun! And remember: you could have All This . . . and More.

The Show

It happened one unremarkable Friday night. Without prelude, without fanfare. Almost as if by accident.

Everyone was still eating dinner or driving home from work, and had no idea the world had just changed forever—because of a television show. Probably the only people who saw the first few minutes of the premiere were the ones who already had the channel on as background noise to be ignored.

But it didn’t take long.

By the first commercial break, the show had taken the entire globe by storm. Family members had called each other, friends had messaged online, and the Internet had exploded. By the time the commercials finished and the first episode returned, there were more viewers glued to their screens than for any other broadcast ever aired, by an order of magnitude. There were hundreds of millions of televisions in the United States all locked on that channel, and hundreds of millions more devices streaming it from abroad. By the ending credits, four billion people were tuned in.

After all, who wouldn’t want the chance to change their life?

Before All This and More, reality TV was still considered a guilty pleasure. Something to be embarrassed about, never to admit watching. Now, no one would argue that the show is the greatest work of media ever made. A redefinition of the meaning of art. Of humankind.

It stuns, to recall how oblivious everyone was to what was coming.

A simple premise: each season, a contestant would have ten episodes to try to better themselves—whatever that meant for them. Repair their marriages, or find true love if they were single, or pursue the dream career that they’d always wanted with every fiber of their being, but had been too afraid to go after. To reach for their joy.

It sounded cheesy, overly saccharine. And it was. But it was also so much more. Each night, legions of rapt viewers watched the season one star, the innocent, earnest Talia Cruz, try something new to get closer to attaining her dreams. She bravely risked it all, flashing through internships, cities, bad dates, good dates, and hairstyles, happier and happier every time.

But it wasn’t incredible because Talia was succeeding at the game. It was incredible because it wasn’t a game.

The changes to her life weren’t special effects. They were really happening.

All thanks to the Bubble.

After the first episode concluded, millions of people became armchair physics experts in an instant, of course. Quantum bubbling was the official term. It had something to do with “separating observable instances and integrating particles,” the scientific literature said. The concept had been discovered a few years before by a private lab, and had only been a theory at that point, something that no one outside of academia had paid much attention to.

Until All This and More proved that it clearly wasn’t just a theory anymore.

“Look. In a nutshell,” an anchor said during the next day’s morning newscast, scrambling to be the first to summarize advanced quantum mechanics to his audience, like he knew what he was talking about, “with enough power and control, you can create iterations of reality branching off from one moment, then collapse them all again once you’re done. It’s like being able to see the future—all possible versions of it, at once.”

The broadcast desk was quiet for a moment.

“You should write the Wikipedia page,” the meteorologist finally ribbed.

“It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie,” the sportscaster added, and chugged his mug of coffee.

But even though no one really could explain it, they could see it happening. After every choice Talia made, everything in the Bubble would instantly rearrange itself, entire rooms or buildings or neighborhoods morphing into somewhere new in real time, right before their eyes.

It wasn’t like magic,

 It was magic.

The entire world cared as much about Talia Cruz as her own family did. More, even. Countless souls wanted her to finally become the passionate, courageous reporter she’d always dreamed of being, even more than they wanted to love their own jobs—not to dread the instant their alarm clocks went off each morning, not to think of the eight hours that always followed as mind-numbing, as soul-crushing. They wanted her to break up with the lazy, free-riding boyfriend who’d been holding her back since college, to reconcile with her long-lost little brother, and to finally travel back with him to visit the place where their mother had been born. They wanted so desperately for her, it eclipsed all else.

Because, deep down, they understood the show’s implicit promise. That if Talia could be chosen to radically, miraculously change her life, it meant that, however remotely possible the chance . . .

So, maybe, could they.

And when the first season ended and Talia really did finally end up free and ready to find her real Prince Charming, with her family reunited, and in her dream job—as the cheery, darling host of a women’s issues talk show—along with everything else she wanted, the cry of celebration that went up around the globe could have registered from space.

Talia Cruz had really done it. She had really turned her life around, and it had stuck.

It was real.

A TV show that could literally alter the fabric of reality to change one’s life.

No wonder everyone, everywhere was obsessed with the show. No wonder it was all anyone could talk about. No wonder people quit their jobs, gave up their homes, and moved across oceans to attend overpriced workshops to “learn the secrets of getting chosen” with millions of other desperate people, or camped out in the RealTV network parking lot waiting for open auditions. No wonder they would gladly stand in line until they fainted or even died, just for the chance to be a contestant.

Naturally, critics interrogated why such a technology would be wasted on reality TV when it could save the world. But trying to stop war or solve climate change would have been impossible—the Bubble could fit a life, maybe two, but not the entire Earth. Then, the scaremongers declared that the technology was dangerous, or unethical, or even untrue. Was whatever happened inside a quantum bubble real, if it had been manufactured? they asked.

No one listened. No one cared. Who could begrudge the legitimacy of Talia Cruz’s new life, or question things like participant consent or the value of authenticity, when they all knew that if they had the chance to be on All This and More, they’d take it in a heartbeat?

What was a pesky thing like truth compared to happiness?

When season one ended, humanity looked forward to season two more than any

other event in modern history.

Except for some reason, season two never came.

Halfway through filming, the whole thing shut down, and the footage couldn’t be aired. Technical difficulties, or legal difficulties, the press releases said, the network promising it hadn’t given up, that All This and More would return soon.

The world waited, restless. Every evening, millions rushed through dinners and scrambled to living rooms to flip fruitlessly through TV channels and scour websites and social media on their phones, searching for news. Days, weeks, months, and still, they waited. As if the show could be willed back into being if they refused to give up hope.

But that deliverance never came.

Until one night, after even the most loyal of fans have stopped believing, it finally did.

It’s another unremarkable Friday night. Some are still doing the dishes after mediocre leftovers. More are already on the couch, scrolling mindlessly. Others have just gone to work, to grind through a night shift.

They all hear the music.

“YOU COULD HAVE ALL THIS . . . AND MORE!”

An exuberant voice cries at hysterical volume.

“LIFE is many things—good, bad, steady, unexpected—but we can all agree that each one is UNIQUE. All your experiences, all your choices, have made you the person you are today. But have you ever wondered what you could be doing instead if you’d made a DIFFERENT CHOICE?

“Pursued a different COLLEGE MAJOR?

“Married your HIGH SCHOOL SWEETHEART?

“Or what about gone for the sexy, thrilling ONE-NIGHT STAND a few years ago in that dark, seedy bar, instead of playing it safe and heading home alone?

“We’re about to find out!”

Billions are at the TV at once.

Everything else has ceased to exist but those words, that music, this moment.

All This and More is finally, finally back again—and it’s the start of the first episode of season three.

A new contestant. A new set of choices. A new chance at perfect.

The frame of every television seems no longer like a portal, but mere decoration.

Almost like there’s no edge to where one’s life ends and the show begins.

 

A New Star

“Have you ever had the feeling you’ve gone down the wrong path?” Talia Cruz asks. “Like somewhere along the way you made a bad choice . . . and wish you could go back?”

The screen fizzles a little, static snow falling lightly for just a moment before the scene crystallizes. Is it the Bubble shaking off the last bits of quantum dust, after such a long break? Or merely an aftereffect added to make the footage more intimate? Whatever the case, it doesn’t matter. The important thing about the preshow clips isn’t the cinematography or special effects.

It’s the star.

The woman in the chair across from Talia puts her hand to her chest. She’s dizzy, or maybe sick, with nervousness. Who wouldn’t be, when faced with this chance? This impossible dream that, somehow, a person could rewind and do it all over again. Make different choices, fix her mistakes.

That she could somehow really, as the show promises, change her life.

“Let’s back up. First, we’re thrilled you’re here, Marsh,” Talia gushes, clasping her hands together on top of the pristine glass table. “Can I just tell you how thrilled?”

“Uh,” Marsh manages to squeak out. She’s always been a bit pale, but the roiling in her stomach has made her cheeks even more blanched than usual, and the harsh studio lights turn her limp brown hair mousy.

Plain, she would say. Too generous to spend time or money on herself, her best friend Jo would stubbornly counter.

“Thank you,” Marsh splutters at last. “For this opportunity.”

Ever the professional, Talia’s charming veneer does not crack in the slightest. If anything, her smile patiently widens.

“I love that. So genuine. You remind me of me, on my first day.”

Marsh attempts a smile back, but it comes across like mild, embarrassed constipation. She’s still not sure how she’s actually in the same room as Talia Cruz—likely the most famous person on Earth at this point. It’s hard not to stare. Talia is just as tall and graceful as she was in her own season, with the same bronze skin and luxurious golden locks. Her pitch is exquisite, and the conference room doesn’t echo, despite being all sharp angles and hard surfaces polished to an eye-watering shine.

“By the way,” Talia continues, busy with the papers in her slim folder. “How are you with motion sickness?”

Talia’s asking her about the Bubble. About the reality-bending quantum physics that make the jumps through realities actually possible.

Marsh tries to nod.

The giant flatscreen on the wall screeches to life right then.

“Welcome back, folks! After an unexpected season two hiatus, the world’s most popular series ever, All This and More, finally returns! RealTV is bringing you a season three as explosive and thrilling as our unforgettable season one premiere. There’s excitement, there’s romance, there’s drama, and a whole lot more! Starting right now—”

Suddenly, the awful upbeat music cuts off, and the blaring colors disappear.

“Sorry about that,” Talia says, setting down a remote on top of her folder. “That song will get stuck in your head for sure.”

It’s too late. This show is all Marsh has thought about since the day it premiered, anyway.

But she never expected to actually be here.

Over Talia’s sharp shoulder, Marsh’s reflection gapes back at her from the darkened screen. She has the same expression that she saw on Talia’s own face three years ago—back when she was just a nobody, about to step into her first episode. A look of disbelief, of incomprehension. Of being unable to trust something that’s too good to be true.

“So.” Talia draws her back. “Let’s talk about you.”

With the attention back on her, Marsh’s throat tightens. She blinks rapidly, self-consciously, until her eyes aren’t shiny, surprised at her own reaction. Unsure of whether it’s terror at being chosen for this, 

or guilt.

Because she’s lucky. She has her daughter, who’s healthy and happy. She has a home, and a job that, even if she dreads heading into the office each day, puts food on the table. That’s a lot more than some people can say. She should be happy with what she’s got. Everything is fine.

Talia is ready for this. “But why are you here, then, Marsh? If everything is fine?” She’s using her talk show voice, a musical blend of compassion and firmness. “Why did you enter your information into RealTV’s system, for a one-in-a-billion chance to be a contestant on All This and More? Why did you answer the call? Why did you come to the studio? Why are you sitting here with me right now?”

She leans in and fixes Marsh with her gorgeous, inescapable gaze.

“Why do you think I chose you?”

Marsh swallows hard.

Maybe she can lie to everyone else—colleagues, friends, family—but she can’t lie to Talia Cruz, who knows that subtle, gnawing ache inside her better than anyone else in the world. That creeping dread that this life isn’t bad at all, by any measure—but it isn’t the one she’s supposed to have. She just ended up here. And now it’s too late.

Or is it?

“Believe me, I understand what you’re feeling,” Talia assures her. “How big this moment feels.”

She clicks her pen.

“Don’t be nervous. Just start from the beginning.”

“I . . . I’m not sure what to say,” Marsh stammers.

“Marriage. Divorce. Motherhood. The past. The future. Hopes. Fears,” Talia offers. “Everything that happened before this that led you to this moment. Everything your loyal viewers need to know.”

She points to the words that are somehow materializing in the air between them:

The Recap

The seconds stretch, uncomfortable. Marsh fidgets like prey caught in a wire trap. The option of gnawing off one’s foot in exchange for escape seems at least semi-legitimate.

How can a person not even know where to start in her own life?

Maybe it is right that Talia chose her, after all.

“Well . . . my name is Marsh,” Marsh finally tries.

Already, the show responds. The smallest flicker as the room seems to contract around her. Whatever Marsh is about to admit, she doesn’t want to, and the Bubble knows it. She’s curling in on herself, becoming smaller, and it’s copying her.

“Actually, Marsh isn’t my real name. It’s short for Marshmallow—”

She sighs before she scrunches the first two fingers on each hand, to mimic quotation marks for what everyone says.

“Because I’m so sweet and soft.”

The music does a

 wah-wah.

“Someone started the nickname in high school, and it just kind of stuck,” Marsh continues. “Now, my best friend Jo always calls me Marsh, and so do the rest of my friends, and my coworkers. Everyone calls me Marsh, really. No one even remembers my real name anymore. As soon as anyone hears Marsh, that’s all they remember. Because I’m so nice.”

And boring, she really means.

There are other ostensibly nice things people might say about Marsh, too, she knows. A good friend, for example. Kind and dependable. Always around if you need her.

She’s like the best supporting character in a movie ever.

Especially her own.

Marsh winces. “I’m not very good at this.”

“Who’s Dylan?” Talia prompts, reading from her folder.

“Oh,” Marsh says.

Talia grins.

The Recap

The Spark

The studio’s stationary camera slowly zooms in on Marsh as the lights dim. Talia is still sitting across the table, but Marsh feels that she might as well be on an island, alone in the middle of an ocean. The music softens; the corners grow fuzzy.

Marsh looks down.

“Dylan, Dylan, Dylan,” she says to herself, and shakes her head. “Even after everything that’s happened, I still get butterflies when I think back to the first moment I saw him.”

The Bubble reacts, and a soft glow begins to gently throb around them. This is why they do the recap, Marsh knows. To customize the Bubble to the star. But to feel it happening around her in real time is like magic.

The glow sharpens, until a forest scene comes into view on the flatscreen in front of her. Lush, crisp pine, the sound of rushing wind, and a helpful caption.

It was twenty-five years ago, on a camping trip Marsh’s sophomore year of college at Arizona State. A bunch of her classmates had driven four hours north to the woods of Flagstaff during break.

Marsh stares at her memories as they manifest, spellbound.

“Are you ready for this?” Mateo cries on the screen, clearly more excited than almost anyone else about this. They’re all on the cold, clear shore of a lake, ready to attempt kayaking in several of the little boats some of the guys had brought strapped to the roofs of their cars. The sun is high and white, and Marsh has put too much sunscreen on.

“You bet,” a younger, even shyer version of her replies beside him, trying to sound convincing.

She and her best friend Jo knew Mateo from a class their first semester of college, before he changed to another dormitory. He’d invited the two of them on this camping trip because, in his words, prelaw students were more fun than physics majors. Marsh knew that he really meant that Jo was more fun than physics majors, but that the two of them came as a package deal, they’d been inseparable since they’d first met in Intro to Constitutional Law, and so if he invited Jo, he had to invite Marsh, too.

A lot of things in Marsh’s life had been like that. By that point in university, she’d started turning down some of the offers and letting Jo go alone, because it was just too embarrassing. But this is one time she’ll always be grateful that she let Jo talk her into coming on the trip.

Because it was this day that she met Dylan.

“Hey, there you are!” Mateo is shouting, waving at someone across the crowded, rocky beach.

There he is.

On-screen, their eyes meet. For a moment, her younger self forgets to breathe or blink. Marsh watches the moment with equal intensity.

“We’ve been waiting on you for half an hour! How long does it take to put on a bathing suit?” Mateo continues to tease, oblivious. Somehow, he doesn’t notice that Marsh and Dylan are just staring at each other, and not listening to him at all.

“Hi,” Dylan finally says.

He’s a little taller than Marsh, with dark skin and a jock-ish, cool buzzed head. He’s so handsome, he looks like he could have been a high school quarterback, or a prom king.

“Holy mackerel,” Talia whispers as a character insight bubble appears on the flatscreen, in exactly the same adorable tone she used whenever something fantastic happened her own season—two little words that became her beloved signature catchphrase by the finale. “That guy’s a scientist?”

DYLAN LEE: Mischievous, full of life, and a physics geek through and through, even if he’s quite a looker! Everyone always said that Dylan was a little out of Marsh’s league when they started dating, but the two lovebirds proved the world wrong and got married! For years, things were absolutely perfect. But somewhere

 along the way, something happened . . .

“I’m Dylan. Mateo’s roommate,” recap-Dylan finally says.

Young Marsh is trying not to melt, and mostly failing. “I’m—” she starts to reply.

“This is Marsh!” Jo cries before she can finish, appearing in a burst of laughter and thundering of giant yellow life jackets. She’s a ball of energy, short yet still gangly, almost like a little spider, with skin even darker than Dylan’s and a spiky black pixie cut. She drapes an arm over Marsh’s shoulder and offers one of the vests looped in her fingers to Dylan.

“Marsh?” Dylan asks, taking the life jacket from Jo, but his eyes never leave Marsh’s.

“It’s short for Marshmallow,” Jo explains to him as Marsh—both of them, young and old—wince inwardly. “Because you’ll never meet anyone sweeter. She’s the best person we know.”

“Marsh,” Dylan repeats, as if considering the word, as Jo slides a vest over Marsh’s head, winks, and then spins off again toward another circle of classmates.

“It’s an old joke,” Marsh says as soon as she’s gone.

“I like it,” he replies.

“It’s dumb,” Marsh says.

“It’s not,” he insists. “It’s a good thing to be known for.” He smiles. “Hardly anyone is kind anymore. Especially lawyers.”

Hearing him say it like that again—so quietly and intensely, while staring deep into young Marsh’s eyes—makes older Marsh soften. It was the first time she’d ever felt like, for once, being herself was actually kind of cool. Like she didn’t have to try to be edgier, or tougher, or more fashionable, or any of that. She could just be herself. And someone might like that self.

Marsh ends up in Mateo’s kayak, so she spends the afternoon paddling around with him right next to Dylan and another friend of theirs from the physics department, who’s much better than Dylan at kayaking and the only reason the two of them stay upright and dry. But even though Dylan is a terrible oarsman, he’s having the time of his life. He spends the whole outing playing jokes, or pretending to fall or drop his paddle, and Marsh and his friends laugh so hard that she cries.

Marsh wants to stay right by Dylan, to spend every moment of the rest of the weekend together, but she loses track of him while climbing out of the kayaks and dragging them up onto the gravelly beach. And then, she gets roped into helping set up the plastic folding chairs in front of the campfire, and then into putting out all the supplies for the group dinner around the flames, and then . . .

By the time she’s done, people are ready to start cooking and eating, and then Marsh is cooking and eating, too, and trying to look like she’s paying attention and laughing at Jo’s jokes instead of letting her gaze desperately wander the crowd, searching for Dylan like a pathetic, lost child.

She’d been so sure that there had been a spark, the moment the two of them met. It was there in how his eyes locked on her, in how close he stood when they had been talking. It was electric. A finger in a socket, a lightning storm.

But then where was he?

Marsh and Talia watch the party feast on hot dogs, corn on the cob, and beer when

 dusk falls. Afterward, young Marsh moves from group to group with Jo, letting the chatter distract her until it’s dark and people start to settle into smaller, quieter conversations for the night. Eventually, she finds herself standing alone by the fire for a moment, watching the orange light dance as she soaks in the warm glow.

“Well, hello there,” Dylan says as he sidles up beside Marsh. “Enjoying the fire?”

At the sound of his voice, everything else falls away from the recap for a second. The forest, the flickering flames, the laughter coming from all around the campsite.

“It’s nice,” young Marsh finally manages, once she looks sure that she’s in control of her heart rate again. “I heard there will be s’mores, later.”

“I heard that, too,” he agrees.

In the background of the scene, Jo begins to head back toward Marsh from the cluster of girls she’d been talking to, slows as she recognizes Dylan, and then smoothly re-angles her direction toward another group of friends with a subtle, cheeky nod to Marsh.

“Did you have a fun afternoon, after the lake?” Marsh adds to him, trying to sound nonchalant.

“Nope,” Dylan replies. He hesitates, then drops his voice. “I just wanted to be hanging out with you.”

Marsh blinks, surprised and thrilled at the same time.

“But—but I didn’t see you after the kayaks,” she stammers.

“Yeah, I know.” He rubs the back of his head sheepishly. “I was trying to play it cool.”

Marsh turns and locks eyes with him at last.

“Pretty dumb, huh?” he asks, laughing. “I just didn’t want to blow my chances with you by seeming overeager.”

Marsh is now blushing so hard that she’s lost the upper hand, but she can’t help it. “I don’t think you have to worry about blowing your chances,” she finally says.

At that, Dylan’s nervous grin gets a little less nervous, and a little more playful. He reaches behind himself, to where he must have already set some supplies down on a folding chair before he made his move.

“This is for you,” he continues, and offers Marsh a thin, straight stick for roasting s’mores.

“Thank you,” she replies shyly, taking it from him.

“And so’s this.”

Both Marshes look down. In his other hand is a little, puffy white shape.

“A marshmallow.” He winks. “For Marsh.”

He’s leaning in, so close that the soft exhale of his breath stirs a loose curl of her hair.

“It’s a dumb name,” Marsh says again, too nervous to think of anything else.

“I like it,” he insists again, as well. “I really do.”

“That makes one of us,” she tries to joke.

Dylan scoots even closer. “What if I secretly call you Mallow, then?” he asks, barely a whisper.

“Mallow?” Marsh 

 repeats.

“You know. Marsh. Mallow. Same name, but different. It could be our thing.”

Our thing. Her heart thrills.

Marsh manages to nod just before he kisses her.

Marsh watches, mesmerized, as she and Dylan talk about everything that night, huddled together at the edge of the campfire. Childhoods, hobbies, travel, future dreams. Long after everyone has gone to bed—even Jo, who was always the last one up—the two of them are still there, knees pressed together, whispering and giggling. At one point, a corner of the marshmallow Marsh has skewered over the fire catches the flame and begins to burn, which makes her shriek. She tries to save it, but Dylan just laughs, grabs her hands on her stick, and thrusts them a little farther forward, so the marshmallow is pushed straight back into the blaze.

The poor little white puff goes up in a glorious, bubbling explosion of sugar and flames as he kisses her again—just like her heart.

“I was so young then. My whole life ahead of me,” Marsh says to Talia, and her young self. “It was like anything could happen.”

A few years later, on a walk through Central Park in New York one balmy April morning, it even still felt that way when she turned around from studying the flowers at Azalea Pond and saw Dylan not standing behind her, but rather down on one knee, holding a little velvet box.

In fact, it felt even more like that. Like her life had only expanded, not narrowed. Like it would go on expanding forever, as long as she and Dylan stayed together.

“Congratulations, Marshy!” Jo screams with glee as she bursts from the foliage on-screen—Dylan had planted her in the bushes ahead of time with her camera and a bottle of champagne, to capture the moment for them. She practically throws the bottle at him so he can pour for them all. “I already have ideas for the bachelorette party!”

“Do you still have that picture that Jo took?” Talia asks her. “That perfect day?”

“I do,” Marsh says.

What she does not say is that it’s no longer in its gold frame on the mantel above the fireplace, next to the other pictures of her and Dylan, or the candids of the whole family together—everyone midlaugh because their black Lab, Pickle, messed up the shot by bounding into the frame just before the shutter clicked.

She took it down and put it in the box that she then shoved at the back of her closet, after Dylan had finished packing his things and left for the last time.

 

The Heart of It

There’s a shudder, as if Marsh can’t bear to think about that moment anymore, and the recap suddenly shifts backward.

Now on-screen is an even slightly younger Marsh, perhaps in her first year of university. She’s wandering around her college library. The vast hall is quiet, and she’s moving slowly through the towering stacks, her fingertips brushing the spines of every book she passes. She looks bewitched, enchanted, by what they all might contain within.

“I remember this. My very first day as a freshman,” Marsh says as she watches her former self, her eyes full of wonder as she relives that moment. “I went to meet my academic counselor, and then I walked to the study abroad office. By lunchtime, I had a stack of eight textbooks for prelaw, and three flyers for exchange programs—Mexico, Iceland, and Hong Kong. They were my most prized possessions.”

“That’s a lot of places!” Talia laughs, and so does Marsh.

“I’d been itching to get out of my hometown since I was old enough to read, and all those places sounded like the complete opposite of where I’d come from,” she shrugs. “Latin America seemed so vibrant and musical, the Nordics so mysterious and remote, and Asia so huge and chaotic, like it could swallow me whole. I thought that if I could make it there, I could make it anywhere.”

“Sounds more like you wanted to be a travel agent than anything else,” Talia jokes.

Marsh laughs, but quiets again as she reflects. “I’d been in love with law since middle school, actually. That sounds corny, but it’s true. I liked the idea of trying to find the truth at the heart of something.”

She ponders that for a moment.

“Maybe that’s also why Dylan likes physics so much,” she finally murmurs.

“Let’s stay in the scene,” Talia prompts. She softens her expression until her forehead has the faintest empathetic crinkle, and her eyes peer deep into Marsh’s soul as the recap screen waits for a prompt. “Dylan proposed after university, the two of you got married, you started law school . . . and then what happened?”

At that question, Marsh can’t stop the smile that spreads across her lips.

“Harper,” she says, as a faint beeping begins in the background of the recap. It almost sounds like a little alarm.

Or a hospital monitor.

Suddenly, the lights go down, and the suggestion of a flock of nurses—the rustle of blue scrubs, the snap of latex gloves, the squeak of sneakers on linoleum floor—swirls around Marsh and Talia.

“After I stabilized and woke up, Dylan told me about the bleeding,” Marsh finally says. “They caught it in time, and everything was fine in the end, but it was really touch-and-go for a bit. I remember talking with him one minute, and the next, he said that my eyes were rolling back in my head and they were dragging him away from my bed and pushing it out the door to the surgery wing, everyone shouting and all the monitors screaming at once.”

Talia is clutching her hands to her chest, both terrified and enthralled as she listens.

“It was worth it,” Marsh says when she sees Talia’s expression. This is something she feels absolutely, unshakably certain of, if of nothing else in her life. “I’d do it a thousand times again.”

“Hello, little

Harper,” young Marsh says as she pulls the bundle in her arms closer to her, and a little nose peeks forth from the soft fabric to nuzzle her own. “Welcome to the world.”

Beside her, Dylan is perched on the bed. His eyes are shining, huge and fierce and wet. “Happy birthday, baby girl,” he whispers, his voice thick.

HARPER LEE: Marsh and Dylan’s daughter, and the light of Marsh’s life. She’s whip-smart, kind, and responsible, even for a teenager—the perfect kid! Harper’s greatest passion is music, especially classical violin. Her dream would be to attend the prestigious Pallissard Institute of Music, the best high school music conservatory in the country, but she knows that her parents can’t afford it.

“But,” Talia gently nudges Marsh, who’s caught up in the recap footage playing over her head, staring so intently that she’s forgetting to continue her story, “a law student with dreams of joining one of the top firms in the country couldn’t take an extended recovery and maternity leave with the bar exam looming.”

“She couldn’t pump during training, either, or skip court if her daughter came down with the flu in preschool,” Marsh agrees. “Things had to change.”

Then she looks down and sighs.

“Or maybe they didn’t change at all. Maybe I’m just using it as an excuse, and I never would have done any of it anyway.”

“Are you sure?” Talia asks softly.

Marsh shrugs. “I don’t know. But I went and got all those flyers years before I married Dylan, and even more years before Harper was born.”

She looks up at Talia.

“But did I go to any of those places I dreamed that I would go? Did I refuse to give up my career? Or did I just let it all go, because that was easier, was less scary, than trying?”

Talia lets the pause linger, full of regret.

“What about Dylan? Did he consider scaling back his own career once Harper came along?” she asks at last.

“I didn’t want him to,” Marsh says. “He was right in the middle of his PhD at that point. He’d been working so hard for so long, researching full-time and working night shifts at a private lab all to cover the bills, just to give it up then.”

She turns and looks again at baby Harper and a young Dylan holding her, and smiles.

“It wasn’t totally fair, but maybe it didn’t have to be, I thought at the time,” she says.

“And Dylan agreed?”

Marsh laughs a little. “Dylan was so shaken by the close call that he couldn’t think straight. He just agreed with whatever I said.” Her expression grows a little more serious. “I’ve never seen him so afraid as that day at the hospital,” she says. “And never have again.”

“Not even once?” Talia asks.

Marsh looks at her for a long time.

There can be no secrets, no matter how painful, she knows. The Bubble has to learn everything about her life if there’s any hope of her fixing it.

Talia’s voice is soft, but firm. “Not even years later, on the night that you caught him in the act, and he knew that your marriage was truly, irrevocably over?”

Marsh is silent. She looks down, and then turns back to the recap. She watches the

three of them in an artfully faint sepia tone as they do the little things together—Harper’s first sponge bath, Harper’s first word, Harper’s first steps.

“That doesn’t happen for a long time,” she finally says.

And before that, there would be a lot of good times. The trips they’d take together as a family, the memories they’d make. Dylan would go from being hopeless in the kitchen to a surprisingly competent cook. Marsh would come in with Harper from her music lessons and find him putting the finishing touches on a meal he’d made after sneaking out early from work, just to see her smile. The notes he’d leave telling her what he loved most about her, the flowers he’d pick if he walked home through the park instead of driving. The way his voice would get soft and his eyes misty when he talked about how it would be when the two of them were wrinkled and old, together.

Marsh admits that sometimes, at night, she’d go into the living room to find him fast asleep on the couch, Harper dozing in his long arms with the exact same expression on her face, and she’d be so overwhelmed with happiness, such pure and engulfing joy, that she’d briefly worry she might be dying. Like the love was too much for her body to physically bear.

“I thought I could never want more than that moment,” Marsh whispers as she watches.

“Some doors slam loudly as they close on you, and others click shut so quietly that you don’t realize they’re gone for years,” Talia prompts her.

“This one was one of the quiet ones,” Marsh says. “I didn’t regret it for a long time. A very long time.”

Talia nods knowingly. “Until . . . ?”

Marsh sighs. “Until Jo made partner at Mendoza-Montalvo and Hall.”

As Marsh talks, a montage of scenes from a work celebration smatters the space above and behind her head. There are party hats and glasses of bubbly and trays of hors d’oeuvres going around a luxurious conference room, and everyone is crowded around Jo, who appears to be giving an impromptu thank-you speech at the front of the room as her own character insight bubble finally appears.

JOANNA HALL: Marsh’s best friend, and a force of nature. Jo’s a risk-taker, a heartbreaker. She and Marsh met on the first day of college, and have been inseparable ever since, despite the very different paths their lives have taken. Jo may be Marsh’s polar opposite, now a high-flying partner at the firm they both work for while Marsh is stuck as a paralegal, but she’s also as loyal as they come, and will do anything to help her friend find happiness.

A distinguished man with tan skin, silver hair, and a suit that looks like it cost more than a car joins Jo at the front of the conference room just as Marsh, carrying a tray with a giant cake on it, bumps open the door with her hip in the corner of the shot. There’s just enough time to catch sight of her expression as she looks around the party before another caption pops up beneath the same man now raising a glass to Jo.

VICTOR MENDOZA-MONTALVO: Marsh’s boss at Mendoza-Montalvo and Hall. Tough, ambitious, and with a jaw that could cut glass. 

Marsh has been working as his head paralegal for decades now, appreciated but invisible—can she prove her abilities to him and finally get the promotion she’s always dreamed of on All This and More?

“I set that cake down, saw Jo’s name on it, and I finally realized that I had made a huge mistake by giving it all up.” Marsh looks away from the montage, down at her hands. “And that it was too late to fix it. I’d lost too much time. And then . . .”

Talia leans in. “And then?”

The music changes, growing quieter, more sinister.

Marsh grimaces.

“And then . . .”