Alison:

Alison is listening to the most depressing music, her faucet is dripping and she can't get it to stop when there is a knock at her door. It's Ben, and he's sporting wine and flowers.

She asks him to sit because they need to talk, but he wants to talk to her about something first. He tells her he's married. Of course, she already knows since she ran into his wife in his office. She told him everything about herself, and he lied to her.

He's been rehearsing this for two days, and he wants to say everything. Alison opens the wine and sits on the couch. Ben left his wife today, but Alison doesn't believe him. He offers to let her see the texts.

Ben should have left a long time ago but didn't want to fail at yet another thing in his life. He knows it's not the ideal situation, but he wants to start again with no more secrets because Alison is the woman of his dreams.

Things get even worse when Ben reveals he has two boys, Body and Gabriel. That throws Alison for a loop. Ben tells her he loves her, but he and his wife have already decided they'd be better with other people as parents.

Alison is angry they'll never be able to have a chance to see where it goes, but she is done being the woman you lie to your wife about. She's lived the life before, and it doesn't end well. She couldn't do it again even if she wanted to and wants him to understand.

Ben notices the leaky faucet and Alison says a plumber keeps standing her up so he offers to fix it before he leaves. She laughs a little but allows him to do the job. Then she offers to make him some dinner before he goes.

When Alison offers to make him eggs, Ben looks into the cabinets and takes over dinner preparation. It's not going quite the way she expected. She does as she's told and pours herself some wine. She looks out to the ocean getting a sad look on her face. 

When she returns to the kitchen area, she speaks about Ben's wife. She's very beautiful. He didn't tell Heidi about Alison. That just seemed cruel. They told each other they didn't love one another anymore. Why? He went to war and it changed him. He doesn't know how to explain it any more than that. Heidi wanted a man with a capital M to take care of her and be strong and tell her she was pretty. But he wasn't that man any longer.

His second combat tour in Afghanistan sucked the life out of him. He killed a kid with an RPG, an RPG that wasn't real. 

After sharing that story with Alison, he went to the table to eat pancakes. He tells her about his life with Heidi, tying her to the bed so he doesn't have to hurt her face. All he wants is to somehow be forgiven. He knows that's not possible.

Alison shares what happened with Gabriel with Ben. She was angry at Cole for flirting and was a nurse who thought she knew better for what Gabriel was going through. They have so much in common. 

Alison is having a recurring dream about Gabriel as a teenager. He has a little mustache and stinky feet. He's listening to music, telling his mother to go away, but she won't. He's so angry that she won't go, and he's still so gray.

Alison thinks Gabriel might have been proud of her for persevering. But then she thinks she's living a shell of a life that's meaningless. While she's crying, Ben puts on music and they dance. Alison talks about Athena's believes in reincarnation. Maybe this is as far as she was ever supposed to come.

Ben wants to live. They have sex. After they're done, she puts the music back onto her song.

It was all a fantasy. 

Alison:

Ben shows up in the rain bearing nothing. he's talking about combat from the time he enters, and he's angry she stood him up for their date last week.

He's really hungry and is now angry they aren't going out to dinner.

He still wants to talk first, but this time he says he can't do "stuff like that" to her. It has taken a lot to trust her, he says, and he's been very vulnerable with her.

She starts asking questions of him about where he grew up and his parents. He's answering her but in a smartass way. 

Ben refuses to answer a single question Alison asks truthfully, and she can barely make tea. He comes up behind her to play idiotic games.

Alison realized she had convinced herself Cole would one day cheat on her to the point she cheated on him first. She did the same thing with Noah. She felt like the victim in both marriages when it was the exact opposite.

Alison wants to know who Ben is, and when she asks him, holding his hand, he slaps her away. 

His story about deployment is much different. He was angry and halfway through his tour, a story he's telling while drinking heavily. He figured it was a suicide mission. He didn't care if he made it home or not. He knew the kid was unarmed and knew the RPG was a burned-out relic, but he shot him anyway.

He just wanted to go home.

Alison asks Ben to leave, but he won't. He refuses to address the marriage and only addresses his "time in the sandbox." He tries the "you don't want this" by kissing her, but when she opens the door, he sits on the couch, puts his head in his hands and cries. It's ridiculously obvious he's going to kill her.

He tries having sex with her. She pushes him off of her and threatens to call his wife. That's when he starts to toss her around the room. He knocks her out and dumps her into the ocean. She sinks right in, just like the song says.