Asystole ✷ Mark Sloan

𝟬𝟱𝟳 addison, alone

𝙇𝙑𝙄𝙄.
ADDISON, ALONE

──────

NEW YORK

Addison could remember the first time she'd ever got the feeling something about Beth was wrong.

It'd been at dinner. They had them regularly in New York.

They would occur at weekly intervals, one evening a week where they would all drop everything and congregate for a family dinner. The day changed based on their schedules, last-minute revisions were accounted for and phone calls were made, seats booked. 

Addison had her favourite venue on speed dial in anticipation for a quick rain check. Despite this, the principals were always the same: Five of them in a fairly expensive restaurant, three courses and countless bottles of red wine.

It would've been an understatement to say that family dinner was Addison's favourite night of the week. It'd overtaken Sunday brunch in its importance and she funnelled all of her energy into making sure that, every week, each of them would be there on time and ready to talk about their week. 

It took far much more energy than Addison would've liked to drag Derek to the dinner table, but once Derek was sat everyone else seemed to fall in line: Beth, Mark, even Amy came without any complaints. 

Archer was always busy, too busy bouncing back and forth between New York and Connecticut to be a regular, but when he did attend, he tipped well. Other than that, every dinner would be the same, every night would work out the same, conversations would be replicas of each other— Addison liked the normality of it.

But this dinner, it'd been different.

It was a year after her sister had gotten back together with Mark, a year of watching them from the other side of the dining table. Addison had watched with bated breath, the seat beside her empty more often than not, watching as Beth and Mark turned up to every dinner together without fail. 

Beth never left her seat empty and Mark vice versa, they seemed to have made some sort of pact not to leave the other man behind. Between their perfectly in-place-smiles (that only seemed to dim whenever Addison touched on a topic that was maybe a little too grating for the time of day) and Amy's completely synthetic enthusiasm, Addison often felt like she was in some sort of alternate dimension. 

A dimension where her sister was in a happy relationship with the man Addison hated almost unconditionally, Amy was clean and Derek didn't spend much time with his wife anymore. It felt like the sort of dimension that should come with a parental guidance warning.

It wasn't as if Addison was naturally sceptical, maybe she'd just become accustomed to the fake.

 After all, they'd grown up in a neighbourhood of plastic houses and plastic people; Addison was pretty sure she'd never seen a real cheekbone in a middle-aged woman until a school trip into New York when she was eight. She'd been born into the sort of society where you looked across that dinner table and wondered exactly why your husband's best friend (the one that seems to sleep with all of your friends) chose to go after your sister and whether this was going to blow up in all of your faces.

Spoiler alert: Of course it was. 

Addison was a few moments from taking bets on how long it was going to take until that bastard broke her sister's heart.

Either way, Mark didn't belong at their family dinner.

That night, Beth was a little dimmer than usual. They'd booked Momofuku Ko for a Thursday night and Beth couldn't even muster a smile as Addison did her weekly 'I'm so surprised we got on the guestlist'.