Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first time Helly wakes up after the revolution, she’s sitting backward in a chair, head strapped to some device, and in a place she doesn’t recognize. She flinches violently, the motion sending a spike of pain through her head and into her eye sockets. A sharp voice behind her tells her to stay still. She’s about to tell the voice to go fuck herself, but then, she sees Mark.

He’s crouched in front of her, clutching her hand. His eyes are wide and sad, and his lips are parted in surprise. Recognition floods his features, and he looks at her like she’s the most precious thing he’s ever seen.

“Helly.” He breathes her name like a prayer. He brings her hand to his lips, presses a gentle kiss to each knuckle.

He’s not her Mark. She knows it immediately, and maybe that should scare her, but it doesn’t. She’s seeing him for the first time; he’s a stranger. But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like she already loves him.

(Much later, she asks him when he knew he loved Helena, and he tells her it was the moment he saw her at Zufu, a Chinese restaurant back in Kier. They’d never even met. It wasn’t a conscious realization, even then. He says it was as if he already loved her.)

“You’re reintegrating,” he says. “It’s going to be okay.” He flickers, or rather, she must. For a moment, it’s like watching the world in stop-motion.

She doesn’t understand, doesn’t have time to wrap her throbbing head around it. But he’s told her that it’s going to be okay, and she believes him.

The next time she wakes up, she’s in bed. A real one. Sunlight streams through the windows. She hasn’t seen sunlight since the ORTBO, but even then, she’d had no time to savor it. The way it looked, the way it felt, the vast expanse of the sky.

Her head still aches. She still doesn’t know where she is or what’s happening or why Helena has decided to reintegrate.

But she’s overcome by the need to see the sky.

She throws back the covers and swings her legs off the bed. When she stands, she feels the pounding of her pulse in the back of her head. It makes her wobble on her feet. But once she’s upright, she finds her footing, makes it to the door, and throws it open. She tears down the stairs and out the front door. She doesn’t know the way, but somehow, she does.  

It’s cold. She’s wearing a shirt with no sleeves, a pair of shorts with no socks. The breeze cuts through her skin, chaffs her cheeks. Her feet go numb against the sidewalk. In her mind’s eye, she’d thought there would be green grass, like in Mammalians Nuturables. But there are only uneven, scraggly patches of dull brown and yellow tufts on cracked and uneven earth. Somehow, even that is beautiful.

She spreads her arms out wide and tilts her face to the sky. Slate, dappled with flashes of blue. A puffy cloud looks like it’s sliding gently over the surface of the sun. Do clouds move? She doesn’t know. Slowly, slowly, the sun is revealed. Her skin is so numb that she doesn’t even feel it.

Behind her, she hears a muffled yell, someone shouting her name. No, not her name. Helena’s.

She turns her face. Mark stands in the doorway, shoving his feet into boots. He’s holding a puffy coat in his arms. He looks at her like he’s seen a ghost. Worried eyes. Sad eyes. Not her Mark.

“Helly,” he says, his voice soft.

Maybe like he’s thinking, not his Helena. Because they’re together, right? Isn’t that what’s happening? That’s why she woke up in a bed that smelled like him, how she knew the way to the front door? That’s why Helena decided to reintegrate in the first place? She wants to know, she does. But right now…

She tilts her head back again, squints against the brightness. Then he’s behind her, wrapping the coat around her shoulders.

“Mark,” she says, tilting her chin back so far that she’s looking at him upside down. “Have you looked at the sky lately?”

She thinks maybe he’ll look up, but he only looks at her in wonder.

She wakes up periodically over the next few days. Sometimes her Mark is there, sometimes the other one. She learns that they’re both reintegrating now. Mark Scout had figured out a way to stop his after completing Cold Harbor, after saving his wife and going back to her when the revolution ended.

Before Helly woke up in his basement, that had been her last memory. Being dragged away from him, kicking and thrashing, and shoved out the door and into the stairwell.

It had been a year since then, the other Mark told her. It had happened, what his sister had said: they brought down Lumon, at least the severance part of things. And Helena had helped them do it, even though she lost everything in the process: her company, her family, her home.

That was the part that Helly couldn’t believe.

(Her Mark told her what had happened between Mark and Gemma Scout. “He couldn’t stop thinking about you,” he’d said, lying beside her in bed, their faces so close that his lips brushed hers when he spoke.

“Me?”

He’d smiled. “You’re hard to forget.”)

The long and short of it: though Mark Scout had stopped the reintegration from progressing, he couldn’t stop what had already happened. He continued to experience flashes of Lumon, memories and dreams. And so many of those featured Helly. Eventually, it ended his marriage. But they decided it together, her Mark had told her. He said they’d both changed.

So, a few months after Gemma left, he tracked down Helena and…the feeling was mutual, maybe. Helena’s never told her about it. Helena never tells her anything. All Helly knows is that the feeling must be mutual now.

She gets most of her information from her Mark, but he gets most of his from the other Mark. In a leather-bound journal with a broken spine, the two Marks pass notes back and forth to each other. They share everything. Sometimes, Helena scribbles notes to Helly on a legal pad that sits on their nightstand, things like “Tell Mark to tell you about my mother” or “Tell Mark to let you watch Singin’ in the Rain.” Helly doesn’t write back.

She never knows which Mark she’ll wake up to, though they both recognize immediately when she’s there. Her Mark told her once that it’s because she always wakes up gasping for breath. It’s not like that for Mark. He changes so fluidly that sometimes she doesn’t realize until she sees his eyes.

She thinks maybe it’s because she has to claw her way out. I am a person, Helena had said, you are not. It was one of the first things she’d ever said to her. And still, besides choosing to reintegrate, Helena had never said or done anything to make Helly think she felt any differently.

When she wakes up with her Mark, he always kisses her, says “Hey” with a goofy grin that makes her feel like a giddy teenager. Then, he immediately begins telling her everything he thinks she needs to know. What they’ve been doing, what the other Mark’s told him. Sometimes he reads from the journal. Things about his life, things about her—or Helena’s—life.

When she wakes up with the other Mark, he seems startled, like he doesn’t quite know what to do with her. He doesn’t say hello, just starts telling her where she is, what she’s doing. He’s distant, but he’s also…sweet. He often asks her how she’s feeling, asks her if she’s hot or cold or hungry or thirsty.

He always looks at her out of the corner of his eye. But he’s always looking, always watching, like if he looks away, she’ll be gone. 

She wakes in the kitchen, the inside of her nose burning and tears streaming down her face. She coughs, gags, and takes a staggering step back. 

Mark is there in a heartbeat—the other one, she knows, because he’s speaking to her in a low voice, saying, “Kitchen, chopping onions. Be careful.” His hand is on hers, gently pulling the knife handle from her grip. His face is close to her ear as he murmurs, “Go wash your hands. Don’t touch your eyes.”

“I—I can do it,” she blubbers, tightening her grip on the handle, angling her body away from him. She turns her head to try to rub away her tears on the shoulder of her shirt. Her forehead brushes his cheek, and he flinches away like he’s been burned.

Still, he holds his hand over hers. He speaks in an even, measured tone. “Please don’t fight me over a knife.”

She relents, loosens her grip, and steps away from him. She crosses the kitchen to the sink to wash her hands; he watches her the whole time. Only when she’s dried her hands does he turn his attention back to the onions. The only sound in the kitchen is the whisper of each slice, the dull thud of the knife on the cutting board.

Like Helena, he rarely wants to talk to her. She tries not to feel disappointed.

His arm is heavy around her shoulders, but it lifts almost as soon as she comes to. They’re on the couch watching a movie. She wonders which of them has chosen it; she doesn’t even know enough yet to know what their preferences are. She doesn’t ever get much time. According to Reghabi, it’s because her reintegration is still so new; she’ll get to stay longer as time goes on. Helly thinks that maybe it’s because Helena finds a way to fight her way back.

She knows she’s not with her Mark because he scoots away from her, slumps slightly over the arm of the couch. Looks at her out of the corner of his eye.

“Living room,” he says. “Watching Raiders of the Lost Ark.” He tugs at the blanket on the top of the couch. “Are you cold?”

Her body still holds the residual heat of his touch, but a chill creeps into the space between them. She shakes her head anyway.

He leans forward and retrieves the remote from the coffee table. He pauses the movie and starts scrubbing back to the beginning.

“It’s okay,” Helly says quickly. “You’re already halfway through. You can just tell me what’s happened.” It’s what her Mark does when she wakes with him, recounts the plot and the character details with great enthusiasm. She loves it. She loves him.

Mark shakes his head. “You should get to see it yourself,” he says.

The room falls quiet. The movie restarts. Helly hopes she gets to stay long enough to see the end of this one. 

She wakes up in the dark. She’s in bed with her head on his chest and her leg draped over his, and for a moment, he actually holds her tighter. And for that moment, she thinks it’s her Mark, though she isn’t yet sure how she feels about the idea that Helena might be cuddling with him, that perhaps both of them were becoming Helena’s.

(Yesterday, she’d woken up at the kitchen table with a heart drawn on her inner wrist. Beside her, her Mark sat twiddling a pen between his fingers. When she touched the ink on her skin, it smeared—recent, still drying. Maybe she could convince herself he’d left it for her to find later.)

But she feels him shift his weight, feels him moving away, and she knows it’s the other one. She pulls away, flopping back onto her pillow with a sigh. She turns toward him and watches him over the space between them, but he stays on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

“Bedroom. About to go to sleep.” He barely glances at her.

She feels irritation surge in her stomach. Anger that he’d convinced Helena to reintegrate and then acts like Helly is an inconvenience. Why had he even wanted her around? Just as some plaything for his alter ego? And when they were fully reintegrated, what then? Half of him hates her? Half of herself?  

She grits her teeth, tries to contain her simmering anger. But she’s never been particularly good at it. “You hate me, don’t you?” she snaps.

He flinches, turns his head halfway. “What?”

“You blame me for ruining your life.”

He turns fully now, studying her face intently. Sad eyes. “You didn’t ruin my life.”

“Mark told me. You and Gemma—it didn’t work out because of me.”

“It wasn’t because of you.” His voice is soft, careful. “It was because of me. And my life isn’t ruined.”

She feels indignant. That he’d say all these things when clearly, he doesn’t want her around. “You’re always disappointed when it’s me.”

“What? No, I’m not.” He looks genuinely surprised, shaking his head, his hair mussed over his forehead. “Helly, I could never be disappointed that it’s you. I—I thought you were…were disappointed when it’s me. You always pull away. I don’t want to make you feel…I know I’m not the person that you, you know, love.”

“No, you always pull away.” But when she thinks about it, she’s not sure. Is it she who turns away from him? She who thinks of him as the other one? Her neck flushes with shame, but still she pushes on, “I thought…because…I’m not your Helly. Or Helena. Whatever.”

“You said he told you, right?” He clears his throat, swallows, like he’s struggling to speak. Like he always acts, like it’s hard just to talk to her. “That for months I couldn’t stop thinking about you?”

Her heart clenches in her chest. “Yes.”

“Then you should know, then. That you are my Helly.”

The next time she wakes up, she’s with her Mark again. They’re on the couch. Her feet are in his lap, and he’s massaging them tenderly. He turns toward her, grinning, and tells her about the movie they’re watching.

There’s a popping sound, like hot oil in the pan, but she can’t figure out where it’s coming from. She’s alone in bed; the room is dim. She can see the soft imprint of Mark’s head on his pillow, so he hasn’t been gone long. She raises up, looks at the nightstand. There’s nothing written on the legal pad.

She closes her eyes and tries to let herself drift back to sleep, but the incessant noise is driving her crazy. She throws back the covers, stomps down the hallway, and down the stairs.

Mark’s in the kitchen, pen in hand, working on the Sunday crossword. He looks up at her. Sad eyes. She hasn’t seen him since he’d told her that she was his Helly. She feels nervous, her mouth dry. Then she hears the pattering again, and annoyance sparks in her gut.

Before he has time to tell her where they are or what they’re doing, she huffs, “Ugh, what is that noise?!”

He stills, eyes drifting like he’s reading something unseen. Then, a ghost of a smile on his lips. “It’s…rain. It’s raining.”

She stands, her hands hanging limply at her sides. Listens to the rhythmic, soft splashes on the windowpanes. Rain. She’s never seen it before. Only on television, in movies. The one that Helena had told her to watch, Singin’ in the Rain. Helena had been right; she’d loved it.

And it’s like the sun all over again. Suddenly, she has to see it. Before she’s gone again, she has to see the rain. Feel it. To see what the sky looks like when it happens.

She spins toward the front door. Distantly, she hears the kitchen chair scoot back and Mark thud down the hall behind her, calling her name. But she’s already out the door, leaving it open behind her. Hoping, maybe, that he’ll follow. Knowing he will.

Raindrops pelt her face, soak through her clothes. She’s wearing his boxers, she realizes. His shirt. Red, turning maroon as it takes on water. Her bare feet slap against the walkway, but she veers off it, slipping through the mud. It feels nice, somehow, her toes gripping the earth like this. Something she thought she’d never be able to do. Something, maybe, that Helena has given her.

She tilts her head back to the grey sky. No sun, but still bright. She’d expected that maybe it would look different. Maybe it would look like it was opening up, like the sky was being pulled apart to let the water in.

The droplets fall over her face, and, for a moment, it feels like she’s drowning again. Which means, at least, that she’s still alive. She sucks in gulps of air, of rain, of cold. She shivers, but she can’t contain her smile.

And then Mark is there, in front of her. He’s smiling too, a crooked thing that doesn’t quite fit his face. Doesn’t quite go with his sad eyes. But she likes it, likes it in its asymmetricity. Laughing, she throws her arms around his neck.

He grunts softly, eyes widening in surprise. But his hands fall to her waist, cupping her hips. His fingertips press lightly into the dimples of her lower back.

She moves her hands to his shoulders, lets herself fall back, face to the sky, arching in his arms.

He laughs, says, “I’ve got you.”

She knows.

He moves his hands up her back, pulling her toward him. She goes willingly, falling against his chest with a damp thud, their clothes sticking to them like a second skin. She’s still giggling. He wraps his arms around her back and rocks her gently. Their feet make soft squelching noises in the mud. Even through their wet clothes, he feels warm.  

His lips are close to her ear when he says, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” She tips her head back, searching his eyes.

“That it took so long for you to be able to see the rain.”

She laughs and shakes her head, letting her rain-soaked hair slap her skin. “Not your fault. If not for you, I’d have never felt it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You convinced her to reintegrate.”

His smile falters. “She didn’t tell you?”

“What?”

“It wasn’t me, Helly. Not that I—I didn’t want to. Not that I didn’t want you because, god, I did. I just felt so fucking guilty for it. She, Helena, she wanted to. But she wouldn’t, not until I agreed to restart my reintegration.”

“B—but why?”

“Because she didn’t want to be alone. Because she didn’t want you to be alone. We—we’re all in this together.”

Helly feels dizzy. Her lips tremble; from the cold or from the revelation, she doesn’t know.

“But…why did she want to reintegrate, though? Want you to?”

“Because you deserve to live,” he says softly. “Because we love each other because you two love each other. And because…because we thought that maybe you two could make us…make us better.”

She blinks up at him. Maybe she should feel used, but she doesn’t. When she looks in his eyes, she wants to make him better. “And did it work?”

A ghost of that lopsided smile again. He nods. Keeps nodding. “Yeah, Helly. Yeah. It worked. It’s working.” He moves his hand to her face, pinching away a wet lock of hair from her cheek. “I really want to kiss you right now.”

She pulls back, letting herself practically hang from his neck again. “That right?”

Thin rivulets of water trail down his throat as he swallows. “Yeah.”

She grins. “So, are you going to?”

“Do you want me to?” His gaze flicks to her lips.

“Do you act this way with her?”

He inhales. “No,” he says, like a confession.

She tilts her head, studying him. “Then why with me?”

“You make me nervous.”

“Me?” She can’t believe it, that she’d make him more nervous than the woman who’d previously been a Lumon heiress, who’d been raised in her family’s business-turned-religion-turned-cult, and who, according to the other Mark, cut her food into ridiculously tiny bite-sized pieces.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re brave and unpredictable and a little bit reckless. You’re always flitting away to do something like…like run outside in the freezing rain.” He smirks and shivers for effect.

She laughs and blinks raindrops out of her eyes.

His gaze softens. “And because, for so long, I felt what he felt, even though the reintegration was…was stalled. And I didn’t know how you’d feel…because you loved him first. But I—I loved you first. Before I even met you, Helly.”

Her heart races, and she takes a shuddering breath. It’s her turn now to stare at his lips, glistening in the rain.

“So, kiss me then,” she says, feeling brave and unpredictable and a little bit reckless.

He doesn’t need to be told twice. One hand tightens on her hip, drawing her closer, and the other rests on the side of her face, his thumb applying gentle pressure to her jaw to tilt her face to his. He kisses her gently, slowly, like she’s the most precious thing in the world. His mouth is warm and soft and slick with rain.

She pushes herself closer to him, brushes her tongue against his lips, and coaxes him to take the kiss deeper. Her fingers skim over the spiky hairs at the nape of his neck. He breathes sharply into her mouth, then follows her lead, slides his tongue against hers, and moves his hand back into her hair, twisting in the wet locks.

Kissing him is different in the same way that being with him is different; the same in the same way that being with him is the same. Where the other Mark is eager, this Mark is gentle. Where the other Mark is effusive, this Mark is reserved. But they’re both him. And they’re both hers.

When Mark pulls away from her, she’s shivering, one-part rain, one-part anxious excitement.

“Let’s get you inside,” he says softly. “And into some dry clothes.”

“Okay,” she says, still breathless.

He takes her hand and pulls her back toward the door.

She takes a few steps forward, then looks to the sky one last time. She can see the raindrops falling, but her skin is so numb she barely feels them. Barely feels anything but the fullness in her heart, that every version of Mark loves her…and that Helena wants her to live, too.

She tugs lightly on his hand. “Mark?”

“What?”

“Why doesn’t Helena write to me?”

“What do you mean?"

“You and Mark…you tell each other everything. Helena only leaves me sentences, and not very often.”

Mark smiles again, like maybe he knows something she doesn’t. “What do you write to her, Helly?”

She stops short just steps from the threshold. “I—I don’t write her anything.”

He nods. “Maybe you can start.”

This whole time, she’s thought that it’s Helena’s responsibility. Helena’s the one who knows things, who has stories to tell. But maybe she’d misjudged. Those scribbled lines and sentences, Tell Mark to…, Helly had never replied. She'd never told Helena how she felt when she heard about her mother for the first time. Never told Helena that her favorite song from Singin’ in the Rain was “Make ‘Em Laugh.”  

“I don’t know what—what to say. What to share with her.”

He opens the door, pulls her in behind him, and brings his hand back to her face. He holds her gaze, stroking his thumb along her cheekbone. “What if you just start by telling her about the rain?”

Chapter Text

Helena Eagan has never been more surprised than when, just before midnight on a Friday night, Mark Scout shows up drunk at her front door.

She doesn’t know how he found her. It’s been seven months since the fall of Lumon, and she’d been tangled in legal and financial battles for the better part of them. Her father had said he’d rather die than watch his company crumble, and so he had. Some part of her wishes it had been by her hand rather than his own. When she’d finally gotten herself out of the legal trouble, thanks in large part to money and whistleblower protections, she’d gotten the hell out of Kier.

She hadn’t gone far. Helena had never been asked where she wanted to live, but if she had been, she wasn’t sure she could have even named another place. She’d lived under her father’s thumb since she was six years old: always told where to go, what to do, and how to do it. She was less a person and more a prop.

She moved just 20 miles north to Soil Hill, rented a shitty one-bedroom apartment, and lived in self-imposed isolation. She could have moved somewhere people didn’t know her face, lived off what was left of her trust fund, changed her name, escaped. The very thing she’d wanted to do for years, before she’d even let herself admit it. But she stayed.

And maybe it was all for this moment.

She tries to close the door in his face, but she doesn’t move very quickly or forcefully, and he wedges his foot in the doorframe.

“How did you find me?” she whispers through the cracked door.

“You’re not that hard to find.” His face is close to hers. The sharp, acrid smell of his breath makes the inside of her nose burn.

“Why are you here?”

Cold stare, teeth gritted: “You know why.”

It’s the first time she’s ever let herself think that it might be the same for him: that he might think of her as much as she thinks of him. That he might long for her, might feel that same pit in his stomach, might see someone out of the corner of his eye and imagine it could be her.

She could ask him to leave, but she doesn’t. Maybe she can convince herself it’s because he’d driven there and it’s a miracle he’d made it in one piece. Or maybe it’s because when she opens the door wider and tells him she’ll call someone to come get him, he looks at her and says, “There’s no one to call.”

He stays all weekend. They don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything besides sit on her couch and binge-watch some island-based reality TV show and fuck like they hate each other.

She doesn’t think he’ll ever come back. Maybe hopes he doesn’t come back, because she isn’t sure she can take it—having him but not really having him. Looking into his eyes and expecting him to look at her like he loves her. Like he looked before. When it wasn’t him at all.

So, she tries to make sure of it. Before he leaves, she tells him that she’d fucked his innie at the Lumon retreat. She tells him that he’s just like him, just like the innie.

He tells her that she’s not like Helly, but he doesn’t know. She asks him if he ever dreams of fucking her in the orange light. Eyes wide: so he does. Maybe it’s me you’ve wanted this whole time, she hisses at him. Eyes sad: no, no it’s not.

She’s right, then; they are the same: neither of them really wants her.

(Some time later, she tells him about what happened after, about being found out and nearly drowned. About waking up on the elevator still shivering and gasping for breath, Drummond on the other side: “The medical team will see to you. Do you need assistance?” Following him stiffly, hyperextending her joints to keep her knees from buckling.)

He comes back the next weekend. And the next.

They’re both chasing after something they can’t have. He doesn’t want her; he wants Helly. And she doesn’t want him; she wants Mark S., the one who looked at her like he loved her. But only, she knows, because he loved Helly. Still, she remembers how it felt, being her, being someone who hadn’t been born into her family’s legacy, who could laugh at their stupid origin stories and make uncouth jokes and be loved by people who didn’t fear her.

She knows that both Marks belong to Helly, and she starts to think that maybe she does, too.

The last time he shows up drunk, he hits the rock entrance sign at her apartment complex and staggers to her door with blood gushing from a cut in his forehead. The sight of it awakens something very real and very scared deep inside of her: that he’s the only person she has left, and she’s going to lose him, too.  

After she cleans him up, bandages his head, and forces him to eat something, she cries. He holds her and kisses her like she’s someone important. Pulls away and says, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Her heart plummets into her stomach. “Be with me?”

But he replies, “Be without you.”

He whispers apologies all night. Says he’s never meant any of it. Says he’ll stop drinking, he’ll change, he’ll get better. Says he wants her, wants to be with her, for real.

And she believes him.

Gemma Scout left him three months before he showed up at her door. Gemma Casey now, having gone back to her maiden name. She’d moved back to Florida to be closer to her family.

On the day he gets his one-month sobriety medallion, he tells her the reason. Not the drinking, at least, not at first. But what he was trying to forget by doing it. Her. Or not her. Helly.

Helly’s the kind of person who’s hard to forget.

That night, she asks him if he’d ever continue the reintegration. It comes out like small talk, Hey sweetie, how was your day? Have you given any thought to reintegration lately? He blanches at the idea. Mark S. hates him, he says. It’d be no life for his innie, to be tied to him. He says it like pausing the reintegration was a favor, a favor that he’d never see the outside world. 

What neither of them say: Mark S. probably hates her, too.

Helena had loved Mark S., and she falls in love with Mark Scout as well. It’s not a conscious decision; it’s like it’s always been this way. She knows that he loved Helly first, the Helly who still lives in his dreams and in the in-betweens. She can’t blame him it, for loving the part of her that hadn’t been taught that love was a weakness, that the only love that was worthwhile was fealty.

But the strange thing is, Mark Scout loves her, too. In a way that is both all-consuming and inherently broken. It’s the kind of love, she thinks, that comes after a great loss. He’s always looking for her, roaming around the rooms of the home they make together, calling her name when she’s out of sight. She’s not used to it, not used to someone looking for her. Not used to being loved like this. Being loved at all.

The next time she asks, it’s more deliberate. Not just a passing conversation topic, an actual ask.

“I think I want to reintegrate,” she says over dinner.

He pauses mid-motion, a piece of broccoli speared on his fork and hovering in front of his lips. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She pushes the food around on her plate, avoids his eyes. “If you would…would do it with me?”

He puts down his fork with a gentle clink. “Look at me.”

She does.

“I love you.” It’s the first time he’s said it. They’ve only been together three months; it’s too soon. So, it surprises her—not just that he’s said it, but that, again, she believes him.

“I—I’d do anything for you.”

She believes this, too.

“But not that,” he says.

Her mouth goes dry. She grips the handle of her fork so hard that her knuckles turn white.

“Because you’re afraid you’ll love her more?”

His brows knit. He’s hurt; she’s hurt him. “Fuck, Helena, you are her.” He’s changed his story now. But then again, he’s changed a lot since he stopped drinking.

“But I’m not, not yet. She should get to live. She should get to experience life out here. With him. You love me because they loved each other. Don’t we owe them something?”

“I love you because I love you. Bringing them into this, it could mess everything up.” He shakes his head. Eyes sad—no, eyes scared. Scared to lose her.

Her chest tightens. “I love you, too.”

She doesn’t ask again for another three months because she knows that when she does, he’ll say yes. He always does.

Mark tells her that in the first few moments after the procedure, Helly woke up. As she sits by his side, tracing his fingers with her own, she wonders if it’ll be the same for him. Hopes, maybe, that Mark S. will wake up and see her. Hopes that he’ll look at her like she’s Helly again.

But he doesn’t wake up.

It’s still Mark Scout, the man who, on the very same day she agreed to move in with him, moved all of her stuff into the townhouse he bought with his Lumon settlement money. The man who printed out the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest Movies of All Time list and shows her something new each week in an attempt to fill in her pop culture blind spots. The man who uses purple ink to grade his students’ papers because he thinks red is too aggressive. The man who, just last week, had cried because he’d finally been allowed to see his niece again after he’d shown up to a dinner party completely shitfaced (perhaps she should thank Devon sometime; he’d only sought her out when he had nowhere else to go).

She’d been right from the beginning: he is just like his innie.

The Mark Scout she’d seen before, when she was at Lumon, wasn’t himself. He was angry and broken. Fueled by grief and whiskey, disillusioned with the world, lacking the one thing that he thought would make him happy. And the Mark Scout that showed up at her door was the same. He hadn’t been gentle with her. He blamed her for losing Gemma a second time. Never said it, of course, but it was there.

He’s not angry anymore. But he’s still broken. He’s a broken man who loves a broken woman.

He glances at her, smiles a crooked little half-smile that she loves dearly, and says, “Did it work?”

Helena wakes up outside with the dark sphere of the sun burned into her vision, arms wide and staring into the sky with Mark’s puffy coat wrapped around her shoulders.

“It’s okay,” Mark says quickly and wraps his arms around her. “We’re outside. We’re…I guess, looking at the sky.”

She squeezes her eyes closed and presses her face into him. “Why?”

“Because she wanted to see it.”

Her chest aches, burns with each breath. It would’ve been the first thing she’d want to see, too. The vast beauty of sky, compared to the monotony of Lumon. A reminder that, in the grand scheme of things, Lumon was small. Not the whole world. Not her whole world. A reminder that she’s free.

“Did she like it?”

Mark’s breath is warm against her freezing cheek. “Yeah, baby, she did.”

Helena laces up her running shoes in the front hallway while Mark watches her, leaning against the threshold of the living room with his arms crossed.

“What happens if she wakes up again?”

“Reghabi said it would only be for a little while at first.”

“Helena.” He takes a step toward her. “She doesn’t know where she is. She could get hurt. You could get hurt.”

“Come with me, then.”

“What if we both switch?”

“The switches won’t last long.” She glances at him. “Plus, they’ll be okay as long as they’re together.”

He raises an eyebrow. “It’s freezing out there.”

“I’m tired of being cooped up. Just for a little while? A walk instead of a run?” She elbows him in the side gently. “Old man.”

He catches her arm and pulls her into him. “I’ll show you old man,” he breathes in her ear.

She shivers and looks up at him. “Come with me,” she says.

He’s already opening the coat closet.

They only make it to the end of the driveway before he switches. There’s a stutter in his step, and his grip on her hand tightens almost painfully. His eyelids flutter. It’d be subtle except it’s not.

Because he’s screaming Helly’s name.

He stops mid-inhale, tilts back his head, and looks at the sky. Blinks and flings his forearm over his eyes. The muscles in his throat ripple as he swallows. “What…the fuck?”

“You’re okay,” she says softly.

His head snaps in her direction. He stares at her, and then his eyes flick down to their intertwined hands. “Helly?”

She’s been waiting for this moment since the reintegration procedure; she’s gone over it again and again in her mind. What she’d tell him. How she’d apologize. But when he looks at her in that lingering second that he thinks she’s Helly again, she can’t speak. Her heart soars.

He spins to face her, his hands covering her ears. He kisses all over her face: cheeks, forehead, lips. “I thought you were gone,” he whispers. “I thought I lost you.”

And suddenly she’s stealing something from Helly again, taking the reunion she’d have had after whatever had happened on the severed floor. Before Helena woke up on the floor in the stairwell with Seth Milchick’s arms wrapped around her midsection, his voice in her ear, “Don’t look back.” Would she have seen Mark there if she had?

Before the reintegration, she’d vowed to be better. No more taking things she didn’t earn.

She wedges her hands between them, palms flat to Mark’s chest, and pushes him back.

He stumbles away from her, and that’s when he knows. Arms snap to his sides. “It’s not you.” Cold stare, teeth gritted. Angry. Same voice as the night he’d shown up at her door. It’s not until that exact moment that she realizes how far she and Mark have come.

She’s not the one who’s meant to tell him. Mark had pulled a blank leather journal out of his office, filled the first five pages in purple-inked scrawl, trying to explain. No video this time. He says he thinks better when he writes. But those pages are inside, and at this moment, Helena isn’t sure he’ll follow her in there.

“Let me just—”

He’s talking over her. “Where the fuck are we? What is this, another retreat? Why are you here? Where’s Helly?” Breathing heavy, looking around wildly, as if she could be anywhere else.

“You’re out. Of Lumon. You’re reintegrating—”

“Liar,” he spits.

“I am, too.”

He stares at her. He looks younger, like the lines of age could be smoothed out in the transfer of consciousness. Lighter, despite the fact he’s looking at her like he hates her.

“Liar,” he says again. “You could never be her.”

He isn’t telling the truth, she knows. Because she knows him well enough by now to see it, beneath the shadow of rage, a flicker of hope in his eyes when she says she’s reintegrating. Maybe he doesn’t believe it yet, but he hopes it’s true.

She pushes on, “You’re going to flash in and out for a while. You’ll get to stay longer with time. Until…until it’s permanent. He—he’s supposed to tell you. He wrote it all down. It’s in the house.” She gestures to the two-story townhouse behind them. “If you come with me, I’ll show you.”

“You live there? You…and him? Together?”

She bites her lip. “Yes.”

His shoulders fall and his hands ball into fists at his side. “Now I know it’s not true.”

Then, Mark Scout wakes again, and Helena knows it immediately. It’s not just because of the flutter of eyelids but because of the immediate concern on his face when he looks at her.

“What happened?”

“He was here.”

“And?”

“And this was a mistake,” she whispers.

He steps into her, brackets her face in his hands just like the innie had done, drops kisses in the same spots that his lips had touched just moments before. She’d pull away if she didn’t need it so badly.

Mark takes to carrying the little leather-bound journal with him everywhere now, so it’ll be within arm’s reach when Mark S. wakes up again. He’s trying to protect her, not that either of them thinks Mark S. would physically hurt her, but from the disappointment of rejection, the sting of not being the person someone wants you to be.

So, when she wanders into the living room to find Mark S. on the couch, she’s relieved to see that he’s already reading the pages intently. She freezes in the doorway, knows instinctively that it’s him, even though she hadn’t seen the transition.

He doesn’t look up, but he knows she’s there, too. She can see it in the tension of his shoulders, the set of his jaw. He keeps reading, twiddling the purple pen between the fingers of his left hand. When he flips the page to find the next one is blank, he flicks his gaze to her.

“It’s Helena,” she says quickly.

“I know.”

“Uh, Helly—she, because Mark restarted and it’s still new for me…she will be here, I promise. But she, um, she flickers faster. But she’ll stay longer, soon.”

“I believe you.” He rotates the journal in his hands and speaks almost to himself. “A year and Lumon’s gone and…” He looks up at her again. “He sounds different.”

“When you spoke to him before, he was…” She isn’t sure how much Mark’s told him, and she isn’t sure how to explain alcoholism to someone who’s never even had alcohol. She isn’t sure if he would already know what it is. She’d been stunned by how much they did know when she interacted with them down there. “He was sick.”

“And now he’s better?”

She considers this for a moment. Thinks about how his eyes sparkle when he holds Eleanor, how he’d smiled as he filled the pages of the journal with things he thought Mark S. should know, how they’d spent last evening laughing together about ridiculous sentences written by students in his online class (“If you ask anyone in our country about the Civil War nowadays, they’ll tell you it was a historically significant event in our country’s history”).

So she says, “Yes.”

He nods.

She leans against the doorframe, still unsure whether she should enter the room. “Did you learn anything about yourself that you’d been wondering?”

He huffs something like a laugh. “Did you read it? What he wrote?”

“No.”

“It’s not about him,” he says. “It’s about you.”

She swallows back the lump in her throat. “I—I didn’t know.”

“You turned against Lumon.”

“Yes.”

“And this was your idea? The reintegration?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She shrugs, eyes watering. “Because you deserve to live. And so does she. Together. And because…because I could never apologize enough for everything I’ve done. Everything my family’s done. ‘None may atone for my actions but me.’”

“‘And only in me shall their stain live on.’” There’s a crease between his eyebrows that she knows well. “Atonement doesn’t erase what you did to me. What you did to her.”

Her breath catches on the sob in her throat. “I know.”

He turns his attention back to the notebook. “Do I write back to him?”

“If you want.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

She considers this for a moment. “You could tell him about Helly.”

He leafs through the pages, and although she hadn’t asked him to tell her, he begins to speak aloud: “She’s…brave and selfless and funny and adventurous. She makes me better. I, uh, I don’t think I knew who I was until I met her.”

Helena’s chest is so tight she can hardly take a full breath. “Tell him that, then.”

He flips back to the blank pages and smooths one hand over them. He smirks, uncaps the pen, and begins writing.

It’s Mark Scout who enters the kitchen later, still carrying the journal. She knows because he immediately wraps his arms around her midsection and pulls her into him, her back against his chest.

“He was here,” he says.

“Yeah. The journal helped, I think.”

“Yeah?”

She hums an affirmative and then says, “He said it was…it was all about me.”

Mark chuckles in her ear. “They say write what you know.”

“And what’d you say about me?”

“Just that you’re brave and selfless and funny and adventurous.”

Helena stills in his arms. It occurs to her that Mark S. hadn’t been telling her about Helly. He’d been telling her about herself. He’d been reading.

“And what’d he say back?”

Mark kisses the side of her head. “He said, and I quote, ‘she sounds a lot like Helly.’”

One night while Mark is locked away in his office responding to discussion boards, Helena digs out a legal pad and sits down at the kitchen table with one of his purple pens, determined to write something to Helly. She has no idea what she’ll say, but she tries to think of what she’d want to know about…if she were in this situation.

She fills up the front of one page, all of it about her mother. But when she finishes writing, she just feels sad. Just one page. That’s all she can remember of the only person who loved her before Mark.

She could write a book about her father.

She hears Mark’s office door open.

“Hels?”

“In the kitchen,” she says. She rips off the page and crumples it into her fist. She jots Ask Mark about my mother on the top line.

“Can we watch something a little more…uplifting tonight?” Helena whines.

They’ve been making great progress through the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time list, given that they don’t leave the house much while the reintegration is in full swing. This also meant, however, that she sometimes missed parts of a movie, or woke up to find that Mark had started it over for Helly.

Mark S. had started crossing movies off the list, too. The two of them talked about them, in their journal. Mark would sometimes read aloud from Mark S.’s reviews, would annotate them with information about the director or the cinematography. Helena would laugh and tell him that soon enough, Mark S. would know all these things anyway, but Mark would just grin and say, “And miss a chance to show off my film knowledge?”

As time went on, she’d sometimes wake up curled into Mark S.’s body or with her head pillowed in his lap. She’d move immediately, always with a mumbled, “Sorry, it’s Helena.” 

But the last time it had been she and Mark Scout who’d started the movie, they’d crossed off Schindler’s List. Somehow neither Helly nor Mark S. had woken up during that one. It was probably for the best.

“I’ve got a good one for tonight,” Mark says, opening up one of seemingly dozens of streaming apps that Helena had hardly known existed. He flips to a movie called Singin’ in the Rain.

Helena loves it, perhaps her favorite of all they’ve watched so far. When the credits roll, she feels disappointed that Helly hadn’t woken up for it.

That night, on the legal pad, she writes Tell Mark to let you watch Singin’ in the Rain.

Helly never writes anything back.

Mark S. flashes in early in the morning as he stands alongside Helena at the vanity, brushing his teeth while she pulls her hair into a ponytail.

“It’s Helena,” she says.

“Yeah.” He spits into the sink.

“You okay?”

“Fine.” A flush creeps up his chest and neck, and only then does she realize that he’s caught off-guard by the fact that he’s standing beside her in only his boxers.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” she says, holding her hand over her eyes. “Lemme give you some privacy.”

He barks a short laugh as she ducks out of the room. “You’ve seen it all before, yeah?”

“I—yeah, but…” She swallows and drifts around their bedroom, gathering pieces of clothing to lay out on the bed for him. “I left you something to wear. Come downstairs after you get ready.”

“Oh, okay. Thanks.”

He gallops down the stairs just moments later, looking eager and boyish in a way she’d never seen him before. “Are we going somewhere?” he asks.

They hadn’t been planning on it, but when Helena looks at his face, she knows they absolutely are. It occurs to her that he’d never really gotten ready before, that as he’d been getting dressed upstairs, he’s been thinking that he’s getting ready for something.

“Yes,” she says. “Let’s walk somewhere you haven’t been yet.” Mark would kill her if she tried to drive somewhere.

He smiles so wide she can almost convince herself it’s for her.

They walk to the Soil Hill library, which is actually just a converted farmhouse filled with bookshelves. But looking at Mark S.’s face as he marvels at the shelves, Helena could be convinced it was the Peabody Library. In a hushed tone, he explains that he knows the concept of a library, knows it’s a place that loans out books, but that he had no mental picture of it. He’s never seen so many books, so many words, “even in O&D,” he says.

He touches almost everything. If he had time, she’s sure that he’d caress every spine and thumb through every page.

“It’s just—I guess I just never knew,” he says, almost breathless, cross-legged on the floor amidst a pile of books.

“Knew what?”

“That there was…so much to know.”

“I’m not sure you should be using a knife right now. What she flashes in?”

“You think she doesn’t know how to use a knife?”

“No, I think she does. And that’s what I’m afraid of.” He keeps his tone light, like he’s joking. But he’s not, not really.

“She’s going to have to learn how to chop onions eventually.”

“Let me do it.”

“So, you have more faith in him?”

“That he won’t cause you bodily harm? Yeah, I do.”

She pauses, fingers wrapped around the hilt of the knife in the knife block. “Isn’t she happy?”

“I—I don’t know. We don’t talk much.”

Helena doesn’t understand. If it’s one thing that she and Mark do, it’s talk. All the time. He can’t even stay quiet during a movie, especially if there are some historical facts he can spout or if he can comment on all the ways that the film revolutionized cinema.

But it hasn’t always been that way, she remembers. Strange that she thinks so rarely of the times before they’d become so domestic, before he’d become her best friend. Maybe she’d been too quick to dismiss it all as the influence of alcohol. Because, she recalls, it was something else, too. It was guilt.

And maybe that’s the same reason he can’t talk to Helly.

“It’s okay, you know,” she says, pulling the knife from the block.

“What?”

“If you love her.”

He turns to her and his eyes flick across her face like he’s reading words on a page. Then, that crooked little smile. “I don’t like that you’re holding a knife while you say that.”

She tries to press her lips together to hide her own smile, but she fails. Laughs and turns back to the cutting board and begins slicing into the onions.

Behind her, he says, “Of course I love her, Hels. She’s you.”

Her eyes burn and tear up, but she tells herself it’s because of the onions.

Going places around the neighborhood has become the thing that she and Mark S. do now. There’s not much to see or do in Soil Hill, but at least there’s more to do than at Lumon. Mark S. writes about it in the journal; he calls their trips “adventures.” Soon, Mark Scout starts to ask, “What adventures are you two getting into today?”

The library, the park, the corner store.

They visit the library the most, though; it’s the place he keeps wanting to return to. Today he brings the journal and makes lists of books under the heading “HAVE WE READ.” He asks Helena if she’ll tell Mark to put checkmarks next to the ones he’s already read. He could ask him himself, but he doesn’t always: sometimes he likes to use Helena as an intermediary of sorts. She likes it, and she thinks he knows.

On the walk back, it starts to snow. Nothing will come of it, already late enough in the winter season that they’re getting more rain than snow. But the big, fuzzy flakes still excite Helena as she tilts back her head and sticks out her tongue.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“I’m not sure,” she admits. “I saw it on a movie though. You should try it!”

He obeys automatically, tilting his head back and opening his mouth.

She stands still, eyes closed and mouth open. The flakes brush against her eyelids and across her cheeks. She thinks that maybe some of them land in her mouth, but she doesn’t feel anything. When she opens her eyes, he’s still beside her, mimicking her actions. 

“Did you get anything?” she asks.

He tilts his head back and shrugs. “Maybe? But I’m not sure why people in movies do this. I was kind of hoping it would be like the middle of the ice cream sandwich?”

He’d discovered ice cream sandwiches on their last adventure to the corner store, and they’d eaten them, shivering, on the sidewalk outside. In fact, he’d eaten two, both his and the one he’d picked up for Helly. Helena had gone back inside to purchase another, which she hid in the back of the freezer and only told Mark Scout about.

It was the first time she’d had an ice cream sandwich, too. She liked the idea that she and Helly might both get to try one on the same day.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I kinda did too?”

He looks at her for so long that she begins to feel a blush creep into her cheeks. Then he rolls his shoulders. “You ready to head home?”

Halfway through their walk back, he takes her hand and laces his fingers through hers. Neither of them says anything.

Helena loses minutes, then she loses hours. Sometimes she comes to curled into Mark’s side; sometimes she’s pulled away from him. It helps her know which one she’s with, if nothing else.

When she wakes up straddling his lap, his lip between her teeth, she pushes herself off him so quickly that she ends up on her ass on the floor. “It’s Helena,” she gasps, crab walking backward. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, it just happened.” She can taste him on her tongue. He tastes the same.

He’s still sitting on the couch, stunned. His lips are swollen, his hair messy. “It’s okay,” he says. “Was bound to happen sooner or later.” He hurries to his feet, holds his hand down to her, and hoists her up to her feet. “Are you okay?”

She nods and brushes the front of her pants with her open palms, as if she’s spilled something on them.

“Helena,” he says softly.

“Yeah?”

“Today—the journal, it said, ‘I marked the books I read like Hels told me to.’”

She eases down on the couch, a good arm’s distance between them. “Yeah, he, uh, he calls me that. ‘Hels.’ I’m not sure where it came from. Less of a mouthful than Helena.”

He smirks. “Plural.”

She laughs. “I guess so. I guess it’s fitting.”

“Because you’re both,” he says. He’s never said anything like it before, never comes close to acknowledging that she and Helly are the same person. At least, not to her.

She nods, just barely. She doesn’t deny it, but she doesn’t accept it enthusiastically either. The truth is, she wants to be both. Desperately.

“She’d probably hate it,” she says. “Being called ‘Hels.’”

“Well, Helly’s already a nickname,” he says. “From your mother, right?”

“Yes. He told you?”

“She did.”

Her throat constricts. “And did she, uh, did she say anything about it?”

“Just told me about her. Your mother. She, uh, seemed nice.”

“Yeah. She was. Or rather, she tried.” Helena didn’t blame her mother for the life she’d been given. Her mother had been one of many that Jame Eagan wooed and mystified, back when he was still capable of getting women that way. Before he had to take advantage of severed workers who knew no better. It was just one of many things that Helena learned about during the Lumon trials.

Helena had been taken to live at the Lumon compound when she was six years old. The next time she’d seen her mother, she’d been ten, and it was at her funeral. 

“Helena,” he says again, shaking her from her thoughts.

She looks at him. Wipes the back of her hands against her cheeks, even though she’s not sure there’s anything there.

“I’m, uh, I’m sorry.”

“For?”

“Everything that’s happened to you.”

She huffs a wry laugh. “Well, there’s nothing you could’ve done about it.”

He looks sad.

“And, well, things are better now. We’re experiencing all these new things together, aren’t we?”

He nods. “Yeah. We are.”

“And that’s not so bad.”

“No, not so bad at all.”

When she wakes up this time, it’s not like usual. It feels like she’s actually waking, like she’s been asleep. Mark told her once that Helly always wakes up gasping for breath. She doesn’t, though. She comes back quietly, like she’s afraid someone will notice.

 She blinks open her eyes to the credits of a movie rolling by on the screen.

“She fell asleep,” Mark says. “During Raiders of the Lost Ark.” He sounds incredulous. “She must not have liked it as much as Singin’ in the Rain.”

“She liked that one?”

“She didn’t tell you?”

She takes a deep breath. “She doesn’t tell me anything.”

Mark doesn’t push it. Says simply, “You’re going to have to watch this one over,” and pulls her legs into his lap. He’s always like that, always touching her. She doesn’t mind. He grounds her.

“How’d you know it was me?” 

He rolls his eyes. “Because I know you.”

Mark S. wakes up mid-sip of coffee and sputters it directly into her face. She scoots back violently in her chair and stands, wiping at her eyes. He’s beside her in an instant, dabbing at her face with a kitchen towel.

“Fuck. Shit. Aw, Hels, I’m sorry,” he says. He’s never called her that. And he knows it’s her, even without her saying.

She starts giggling. Absolutely giggling, an outrageous, giddy sound that she’d thought had been beaten out of her. He’s laughing, too, his breath in short bursts against her skin. Without thinking, she throws her arms around his shoulders, as if he’s hers. But she realizes quickly what she’s done, mutters an apology into his face, and pulls away.

He gently grabs her wrist to keep her from straying too far. “It’s okay. You don’t have to apologize.”

“I get it, I just—” She doesn’t know how to explain it, how determined she is to never make him feel the way she must’ve made him feel before. How much she needs him to set the pace. But maybe that’s what he’s doing. “I don’t want to push you.”

“You’re not.”

“Okay.”

He refolds the kitchen towel and puts it on the countertop. “So, um, what were we doing?” He gestures to the chairs at the kitchen table, pulled closely together.

“Working on the crossword.”

“Oh.”

They sit down. Helena reads a clue out loud while Mark S. twiddles the pen in his fingers. Neither of them has any idea what the answer is. Mark’s already gone through and asked for her help on the ones he knew she’d know. That’s what he always does.

She feels Mark S. gently pull her hand toward him, and he starts to doodle something on the inside of her wrist. “We’re supposed to be solving this,” she chides playfully.

She reads another clue, but again, nothing.

“No offense,” he says, “but I don’t think we’re the right people to try finishing this.”

She laughs and pulls her arm away from him to examine his artwork. There, in purple ink, is a tiny heart.

Mark S. flashes back about halfway through E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Helena swings her legs from his lap with a quick “it’s Helena.”

He smiles. “I know.”

She pauses the movie and catches him up quickly. She’d offered to restart their movies in the past, but he always says no, that he likes to hear her tell him about them. And, after all, he’s already seen them anyway.

She presses play again and settles back on the opposite side of the couch, folding her knees into her chest.

By the time they make it to the final scene, she’s biting her lips to keep from crying. She rarely cries during movies, and even when she does, she hides it well. But she’s completely fucking losing it with this one. When E.T. says “I’ll be right here,” she isn’t able to tense hard enough to fight the sob that escapes her.

Mark turns his face toward her, and only then does she see that he’s crying too, his cheeks entirely wet with tears.

She buries her face in her hands and tries to focus on the TV through her fingers as E.T. ascends the ramp of his spacecraft and the family dog tries to follow.

“Not the dog,” Mark sobs.

They both watch as the score swells, and spacecraft soars through the sky. The camera focuses on Elliot, tears in his eyes, and the credits roll. Helena hiccups another sob, and suddenly Mark’s arm falls around her. He pulls her to his chest.

“It’s okay,” he whispers.

“I know—I know he had to leave—to go home but—he was Elliot’s best friend. Elliot didn’t want him to leave. I didn’t want him to leave,” she blubbers.

“I know, baby.” He strokes her hair.

She’s curled in so tightly that she can hear his heartbeat.

“Was it just the movie, Hels?”

He knows. They both know, though she’s tried to hide it. That she’s afraid, so afraid she’ll lose them. So afraid she’ll be alone again. They know because they know her. Because she’s let herself be known. And she worries she’ll pay for it.

She wipes her face against the soft fabric of his sweatshirt. Shakes her head. No, not just the movie.

“Helena,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere, okay?”

The sobs come more freely now.  “You—you don’t even—it’s not me—I’m not—I’m not her.”

“You are.” He presses his lips to the side of her head. “God, Helena, you are so her.”

“But I—”

He eases his fingers under her chin, tilts her face to his. She thinks, for a moment, that he might kiss her. But he knows what she really needs. He always does, no matter which Mark he is.

“I forgive you,” he whispers.

She ducks her head into his neck. Cries harder. Because, like always, she believes him.

It’s afternoon when she wakes, sitting on the side of the bed, with the legal pad clutched in her hands. There’s handwriting there, more purple ink, but she’s surprised to see that it’s her own. That she’s still holding the pen.

Today I saw the rain for the first time. It was like that movie, only without the singing and dancing. So, maybe it wasn’t like the movie at all. The rain was cold. I wasn’t wearing shoes.  

Helena looks down at her bare feet. She’s clean and dry now, but there’s still dirt under her toenails.

Mark said he’d mop the floor, so you don’t need to worry about that. I used to think “my Mark” and “the other one,” but they’re the same, right? How do you refer to them in your head? Let me kn—

Helena feels tears well in her eyes. It feels like her chest cracks open. She doesn’t know what’s changed, but Helly’s here: on the page, yes, but also here, with her. She’s suddenly very aware that she’s not alone, that she never has been.

Mark’s voice interrupts her thoughts. “Hels?”

She smiles. She loves it, the way he’s always looking for her.

“In here.”

But it’s Mark S. who stands in the doorway. Mark S. who was calling, calling for her. “Hey,” he says softly.

“Hey.”  She looks back down at the legal pad and listens to the soft peck of raindrops against the windowpanes. Then, she lifts her head. “Do you want to go on an adventure?”

“In the rain?”

She grins at him. “Exactly.”

He laughs. “Yeah, absolutely.”