There is another woman in Meyrin's marriage.
She has known about this other woman from the moment she and Athrun began seeing each other. She found out even before then, by the gossip that weaved its way from his social circle to hers. It would be a lie to say that she didn't care; she cared a great deal. If she could have a wish granted, it would be to remove this third party from between them. But wishes were useless—Cagalli Yula Athha was to be a permanent fixture in her relationship to Athrun Zala.
Meyrin felt this on their very first date, when they drank coffee on a sunny park bench. She and Athrun sitting on that bench, and in the space between them, Cagalli's invisible but overpowering presence. If there was a way for him to be with her right now, she wondered, swishing the lukewarm coffee around in the paper cup, would he even be here?
But there wasn't a way for him to be with Cagalli. In this, at least, Meyrin could win. There was no Cagalli, only she, who spent years lingering in his shadow, warm and available, until he finally deigned to notice her.
Her first visit to his apartment had been unplanned, an unforeseen pit-stop to dry off after they were caught outside in a sudden shower. For a year, he had guarded his space from her, something classified, something she wasn't yet credentialed to access. But there was nothing secret when she stepped through the door and the lights came up on various photos of a blonde woman, smiling, laughing, posing; on an office and closet painstakingly preserved like a mausoleum. There it was, laid bare and ugly, the truth of the situation.
Athrun doesn't keep those mementos in their house anymore. She'd never say it, but they made her feel out-of-place, a stranger in her own home. He knew. He knew without her telling him, and he took them someplace else. But the reminders don't cease. For ten years, this woman was the central part of his life. She was irreversibly tied to his very best friend. She stars prominently in almost all the portraits in Kira and Lacus' house: of couple vacations, of their respective weddings, of Kira and Cagalli's family gatherings.
Meyrin, she's the material body, the anchor that keeps Athrun grounded from where he really wants to be. She's the one who has to discourage him from his long hours at work, who impresses expectations and obligations on him, who has to scrape for a scrap of his attention. She's a real person who has flaws. She can't compete with a ghost. With an angel.
He told her, before they even were engaged, that he did not want children. After years of watching him dote on his niece, Meyrin has picked up the missing words at the end of his statement, that he did not want children with her.
If she could have a wish granted, it would be to remove Cagalli Yula Athha from their relationship. To erase his wife from his memory, maybe. There's a part of him she'll never have. It belongs to someone else. She's tried so hard to gauge the size of the hole, yet it only seems to grow in size.
Meyrin thinks that there's no Cagalli left in this world, not anymore. She thinks this, until she looks into her husband's eyes, and finds that woman staring back at her.