Ten minutes later, Frank bounds out of the car and up the stairs to the house and Alice trails behind him, Van, and Marie, feeling like she’s going to the gallows. Marie opens the front door and they all file in, Frank exuberantly and Alice with dread tight and low in her gut.
It’s a familiar sight, one that hurts Alice’s heart. They’re all there. They’ve clearly just finished breakfast—all three of the men on the couches, and Babs and Aunt Sheila gathering up the dishes from the dining room table. They stop cleaning the minute they realize Alice is there, coming to hover in the living room, and Alice finds herself standing in front of all of them with no idea what to say. “Hi,” she says, which is not a great start, but she’s hoping she’ll improve as this goes on.
“Explain,” Nolan says, curt and clearly mad, and Alice gets it. She lied to all of them about a lot of stuff, but she lied to Nolan about himself. Made him doubt his choices, his taste,his own fucking life. She owes all of them an apology, but she messed with him the most.
Alice opens and closes her mouth a few times, not sure where to begin. She really should have spent more time drafting the speech these past few days.
“Maybe let me start,” Marie says, stepping forward out of the group of women. Alice blinks at her. Why would Marie…whatever. Sure. How much worse could this get, really?
“Okay,” Alice says.
“So Nolan’s memories kept slowly coming back, but he still didn’t remember you. He wasn’t sure when you were supposed to pop up, right, so he asked me the other day when you guys started dating,” Marie says, crossing her arms over her chest and forcibly reminding Alice of a lady on a lawyer show, pacing around the courtroom and getting ready to absolutely eviscerate someone on the witness stand. “It’s a pretty simple question,” she continues, for all the world like she has brand-new DNA evidence from the lab. “When did you and Nolan start dating? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, I didn’t know. And that’s weird. Don’t you think?”
Marie should get booked onLaw & Orderimmediately, that’s what Alice thinks.
“You see,” Marie says, her mask slipping a little, showing Alice the vulnerable kid underneath the act. “We certainly thought that was weird, Nolan and I. So I started digging.”
Alice swallows. She knows what Marie concluded, obviously, but she’s not sure if she should jump ahead to the confession or let Marie go through with her monologue. She takes a second, really looking at Marie. She looks tired, sad, and kind of betrayed, but not angry. It feels like she wants an excuse to forgive Alice, to be able to put this very upsetting idea to rest.Alice hates that she won’t be able to give it to her.
“Nolan never used social media much, but girls were always posting pictures of him. And last week he went out with this girl who totally sucked, and I remembered that every girl who ever posted him kind of sucked. They were always, like, hot and tall and superficial. None of them were at all like you.”
“Ouch,” Alice says, but without any heat. She knows what Marie means. She knows Marie’s only telling it like it is.
Marie blushes, but she keeps going. “So I went deep. Stalked all the girls I remembered, and I found some posts that were…curious. Timeline-wise. This one girl, Kerry, she had a picture of herself on his lap like a week before the accident.”
Fucking Cherry/Kerry! No wonder she’d looked so panicked up on the fourteenth floor; she hadn’t just slept with Nolan, she’d slept with Nolanthat week,and then he almost died, and his mom showed up with his frumpy girlfriend. Alice would feel horribly bad for putting her through that if Cherry hadn’t been so weird to Van.
“She’s the receptionist at his firm,” Alice says softly, because Marie wasn’t there for that delightful exchange, and she doesn’t miss the way Van’s eyes narrow, clearly remembering how Cherry had looked at her, how Van had risen to Alice’s defense without hesitation when it had become clear that Cherry had slept with Nolan.
“So I started thinking. He wasn’t remembering you. You’re not his type, and you didn’t…you didn’t seem to know much about him. You got lost trying to find his bedroom.”
Alice grimaces. Yeah, okay, she hadn’t played that one off successfully. “Not my finest hour,” she mutters, and Marie almost smiles.
“And then I remembered it was the EMT at the hospitalwho first told us you were his girlfriend, not you.”
Alice nods. She’ll curse Corey J. the EMT for the rest of her life, but yeah. This girl is good. She should consider a career in true crime podcasting or something. She’s a masterful sleuth.
Alice takes her in, takes all of them in. She wonders what her life would be like if she’d done it all differently. She looks at Van, and she loves her so much that it hurts.
Marie stands tall, presents her closing argument. “Did you ever actually date my brother?”
Alice loves them, not just Van but Marie and Babs and Aunt Sheila and even the interchangeable Steve and Uncle Joe. She doesn’t want to lie to them anymore.
“No,” she says, very softly. “I never dated your brother.”
There’s a loud silence, broken only by Alice’s harsh, fast breathing and the sound of Frank nibbling at his own leg.
“Why?” Babs finally asks, holding on to Aunt Sheila as Marie deflates against them, all of her hope that somehow Alice was going to explain this visibly leaving her body. “Why did you lie to us?”
Before she can stop herself, Alice says, “I mean,technically…” but she shuts her mouth on the next words. They don’t matter, and the Altmans deserve much better than a technicality. They deserve so much better than Alice has ever given them. Alice girds herself, and tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her Olivia Benson.
“It was a misunderstanding,” she says, and at everyone’s incredulous looks, she hastily adds, “at first.” She tries to talk mostly to Nolan, but she can’t help but be more focused on what Van and Marie think, how they’re reacting, because at the end of the day she doesn’t love Nolan.
She never did.
“I’d seen you,” she says to him, “coming through the lobbysome nights, and you were, you know…” She gestures at him. She knows he knows this about himself, but she’s blushing anyway. “You were cute, and I was lonely so I had this, like, massive crush on you, but we’d never, like, talked.” She huffs out a breath, dropping her head for a second. God, this is embarrassing as shit. Pathetic, that’s what she was. Pining after someone she’d never really talked to, someone who noticed her so little that they’d swear they’d never seen her before.
She looks back up to see that Marie looks curious, Nolan slightly disgusted, and Van’s face is so closed up that Alice can’t make heads or tails of what she’s thinking.
