Archive of Our Own ^beta

It felt like breaking up with her husband. Gretchen couldn’t keep herself together, leaving Lumon. she was shaking like Jim when he was running that 103.9 Fahrenheit fever. She and Dylan had panicked and took him straight to the ER.

Her husband: the person she has a real relationship with. The person who stayed behind with the other kids while she took Ruth to the hospital, texted her that she was a great mom and Ruth would be fine. And Ruth was fine!

This didn’t feel fine. This felt like she willingly stabbed herself in the heart.

Gretchen got in her car but couldn’t bring herself to start the car. Now that she was alone, the tears came, flowing down her face freely as she rested her forehead on the steering wheel.

The innie version of her husband was her husband, even if Dylan couldn’t see that. The last few years have been hard, like they never found their equilibrium after Merrick was born. Like Dylan never recovered from the change from a family of four to a family of five.

And yeah, it was fucking chaos most of the time. There were always chores to do, always someone’s butt that needed to be wiped. Merrick’s not quite sleeping through the night and Jim wakes up every morning at five. They’re both exhausted, which makes the relationship magic hard.

Except with Dylan at Lumon, the magic had been easy. The missing chemistry was somehow there in those short visitations.

Of course that pissed Dylan — her real husband — off. God, it was so confusing, but she could understand it, at least a little. If her husband somehow was seeing her, but a version of herself that didn’t have all the baggage of the relationship and the kids and the daily tasks and the memory of her throwing up on him when he accidentally thrust up into her mouth while she was drunk, well, she’d be fucking livid. They’re supposed to be in it for good and bad, and to wipe out all the memories and start over? That’s cheating.

Breaking it off with the innie was the right thing to do. Keeping secrets in a relationship was wrong, it only drove her and Dylan further apart.

It was the right thing to do. She could tell her husband that she did the right thing.

She cried the whole drive home.