Scene: Three years, seven months, one week and two days ago (no, Porthos, I'm not keeping track). A shabby but spacious loft apartment in the city, cluttered with two lives, a pair of black satin heels tossed in a corner, a large desk covered in newspaper clippings and Playbills, a picture frame containing the grinning metal mouth of a sandy-haired teenager, a vase of blue flowers. One wide, rumpled bed, low to the ground. Discarded on the night table, a pair of thick-rimmed glasses and a diamond ring.

He's been typing quietly, trying not to wake her. It's no use; he soon feels her hands hovering over his shoulders, her dark hair sweeping into his peripheral view.

"Writing?" she murmurs in his ear. He leans back into her, closing the laptop.

"Editing," he replies. "Still… still editing."

"Surely it's just about perfect by now," she says sweetly.

"As talented as Thomas was," he says, "he was just a kid. It's close, though," he adds, turning and tilting his face up to hers for a kiss. "I promise I'm close."

She smiles against his lips and her teeth scrape him slightly.

"Good," she says, cupping his face in her hands. "I so want this to happen for you."

"Really?" He flicks his eyes over to the ring on his bedside table, illuminated by the slanting sunlight, and grins crookedly. "You're not at all concerned for yourself? Hoping your new fiancé doesn't turn out to be as broke as your boyfriend?"

"Oh of course I'm worried for myself," she pulls away, smirking, and walks over to the bed. She locks eyes with him and makes a grand show of sliding on the ring. "I always said I'd only ever marry for money, darling."

He watches, one eyebrow raised coolly, as she stalks back towards him and wraps her legs around his lap, rolling her hips into him. He grabs her waist for purchase and grits his teeth. She's bringing back too many memories of last night and they both have to work this morning.

"Luckily," she says, smiling and bending her head to bite kisses into his neck. "My fiancé's a very rich man. Rich in talent, in looks," she punctuates each phrase with another kiss, "in goodness, in love, and –" one hand has slipped down to his inner thigh – "other things."

"You," he half-gasps, half-groans, "are a shameless gold-digger." She laughs, full in her throat.

"Absolutely," and she wiggles her left ring finger in front of his face, bearing the gold he gave her. He takes her fingers and kisses the space where the metal meets the skin of her palm, and she sighs happily.

"I don't want you to get up," he begins with reluctance, releasing her hand.

"Afraid you'll embarrass yourself?" she says, looking arch.

"Oh, very. But that's beside the point. It's just that it's time for work."

"You couldn't have proposed on a weekend like an ordinary person," she says, exasperated, "and then we could have had three whole days. But no, Athos has to work."

"How else am I to keep you in the manner to which you've become accustomed?"

"Shut up," she chucks him on the chin and climbs off of his lap. He aches with the loss of her instantly.

On her way out that morning, she will tell him that she has a meeting, and that it's a surprise for him. He will think nothing of it, and he will forget that he has given her his laptop password along with his heart and his hand and most (but not all) of his secrets.

He will not remember that she has promised him a surprise of any kind until he stumbles home after another eternity biting his tongue against stupid decisions and squandered opportunities. Soon, he'll say to himself. Just a little longer, a little more hard work. And without really thinking about it, he will open his email.

When she returns, half an hour later, his laptop is closed and he's staring at it like he can't quite believe it's still there, and hasn't spontaneously burst into flames, or maybe turned to stone with the weight of what it contains.

She stops in her tracks.

"Oh," she says, sounding just a touch cross. "They were supposed to have let me break it to you first."

"No," he shakes his head, squeezes his eyes shut. It wasn't her, she couldn't have done it and yet no one else could possibly have done it. "No, it wasn't you. You didn't – you wouldn't have – "

She drops her purse and almost runs to him, grabbing the back of his swivel desk chair and spinning it around to face her.

"Please don't get worked up," she says evenly, soothingly.

"Don't get worked up?!" He clutches at his knees with stiff fingers.

She scans his face with something that is too hungry and cold to be real concern in her expression. He wonders why he has never noticed it before. When she speaks again, her voice is as gentle as it's ever been.

"No, darling, this is a good thing. It's what's best for you. I know you said you were close... but let's be honest, darling, you were always going to need a kick to finish this thing and now you've got one! And the royalties – "

"You think I give one flying fuck about the motherfucking royalties?!" His voice is still pitched low and vicious, and he'd forgotten he could sound this violent. She lurches back from the chair, pulling her shoulders up into that iron-backed posture he's seen so many times when they have fought.

It strikes him that she thinks this is just another fight.

"You sold Thomas' play," he says, marveling at the words. "You sold it and you know – you know – what it means to me and you – "

"I made the career decision you were never going to make," she finishes icily, and that's nowhere near whatever he was going to say. "You want to become a director? You want to move on in your career? This is how! You're a talent, Athos, you'll just never put yourself out there! Besides, they've agreed to let you direct this one, and they only had a few editing changes they wanted to consider – this is the best offer you're going to get, apparently the indie-troubled-adolescent thing is on it's way out – "

"It's not a thing," he hisses. The skin around her bright red lips is white with tension. "It's my brother's life, his life's work and you – you can't – " his hands are quivering, and he anchors them with fistfuls of his hair, standing jerkily. "They can't – take that from me, not when Thomas – not now he's gone – "

"He's been gone a long time, Athos," she says, soft but brusque. "We're at a new stage of our lives now. We have different responsibilities to consider."

His throat fills with sour liquid.

"No, 'we' aren't anything," he spits. "We have nothing." At this she stumbles backwards a little. And he feels gratified because her composure breaks and she is laid bare and it feels like he's never seen her before even though he knows every inch of her better than he knows his own soul.

"What?" she says. "What?"

He tears his eyes off her and collapses in the desk chair.

"Get out. You can take the ring, take whatever you want – you've already taken the only thing I cared about. Just get out."

"No," she says shrilly, rushing towards him with eyes wild. She seizes his face between her hands and forces him to look at her. "No, you don't mean that. We- we're engaged – you love me, you said you love me – "

"I said we're nothing," he repeats. "Nothing."

Her face twists cruelly and she slaps him, hard enough to make his jaw pop.

"Bastard," she cries, voice cracking with tears. "I was doing something for us, for once. You bastard."

He closes his eyes.

The last he will hear of her for a very long time is three sounds: her ring hitting the floor with finality; "I don't want your damn diamond"; and a slamming door.

He will suppose (rightly) that she picks up the rest of her stuff sometime during the drunken fog that is the next few days. He's always been a casual drinker, but this is his first spree. The next one will be bigger, badder, and arrive six months later.

Between then and now, he will call up the only two of his university friends who have ended up in the same zipcode, Aramis and Porthos. They will agree that they'd never liked her, that she was probably a psychopath, that Athos is better off. They will say Fuck Love! at the tops of their voices, and agree to help him get his directing project off the ground, finally.

It will not be his brother's play. Thomas' play will never see the light of day. The copy that her company purchased is incomplete, and he has refused any contract with them, for directing or writing or anything at all. He will continue to think he has stonewalled them, and start work on a new project, a recovery project, a simple bittersweet love story for which the best they can hope is that Aramis' acting might fetch them one or two favorable reviews.

And then, when six months have passed, he will open his newspaper to a double page spread about the "Most Hauntingly Lovely New Play on the Great White Way," all about a teenager with cancer telling his own story, a "humorous and aching rendition of Catcher in the Rye meets Our Town." The main character's name is Tommy; she is listed as the author.

He will miss rehearsal that day.

And for two more days after that.

Porthos and Aramis will find him amid the shredded remains of the Style section and at least three empty bottles of vodka that they can find. They will smash, violently in a back alley dumpster, the bottle of expensive brandy they also find waiting on his stoop, wrapped in green ribbon and bearing an envelope containing two of the hottest tickets currently on Broadway and a note reading 'eat your fucking heart out' in elegant cursive.

He will leave exactly twenty-four messages on her phone, half of them unintelligible and the other half unprintable. She will reply to none of them.

The Cardinal Company's new play will make them a fortune.

His own funding will fall through when his producer gets word of how inconsistent his work has become. The producer will not be shy about expressing disgust with the director and thoroughly demolishing his reputation.

Eventually the one and only reply he will get to any of his applications will come from an old drama school professor who's moved to the area and started a community theatre troupe.

He will cry into his hands, hidden and ashamed, when he hears that his friends have accepted jobs with Treville as well.

Two years, four months, and six days will pass, and very slowly, things will begin to change. He will begin to change.

Until one day it will all come hurtling horribly back to him, in a way he could never have expected; but then, she never had been one to be predictable.