Meredith had always hated college reunions, but being invited after winning a Harper Avery Award felt different. She never had found many reasons to show up at any of her high school reunions, where you'd wonder why so many of them wasted their lives, but she was surrounded by doctors here and most of them were rather accomplished.

A committee had collected photos of their time at university: Their first week, labs, clinicals, parties. Suddenly Meredith looked back at the picture of Derek. Her late husband was starring right back at her. Weeks before she thought she had seen him for the first time, there was a picture in her college reunion magazine, that showed her and her late husband merely a few feet away from each other. She looked at the picture for minutes until a voice from behind greeted her. Dr. Jason Monroe -one of the few people who knew how much tequila she had been able to handle.
"That was the convention where we ended up going to a bar instead of to the speeches" Jason laughed when Meredith looked at a picture of her late husband. The dinner speeches had been dragging on for more than forty minutes "You told him to get lost and go home to his wife."
"I did?" she wondered and looked up to her old pal "I don't remember anything"
"Well, that's not too surprising" he smirked "We were both pretty drunk that night. I wonder what he's up to now".
"He's dead…" Meredith mumbled. She hadn't seen Jason since graduation and something made her realize that she was horrible at keeping in contact with anyone. They had been very close, but just like Saddie he had been someone that had just faded from her life.
"He wasn't that old" Jason laughed.
"He's Derek Shepherd. A neurosurgeon." Meredith looked at him.
"How do you even think you know what he's up to now?"
Meredith swallowed. "He was my husband. We were married –not back then." Meredith said "and I never realized I met him before I met him in Seattle – I never realized there was an us before I was just a girl in a bar"
"I don't have the faintest clue what you are talking about" Jason sighed.
"It's a Seattle thing… it was my first day in Seattle – and I met a guy in a bar and I had no clue that he was married or he was going to be my boss – we ended up having a lot of sex that night" Meredith smiled "and we dated – until his wife showed up"
"Ouch" Jason laughed.
"Not the end of the story. We got married -and we have three kids. He was great."
"What would you tell him if you could go back to that conference?" Jason wondered "I guess you wouldn't tell him to get lost."
"I don't know." Meredith sighed "Derek probably would have come up with a sassy speech. 'Hi, I'm Derek Shepherd and exactly 45 days from now you and I are going to meet and we're going to fall in love and we're going to get married and we're going to have 3 kids and we are going to love them and each other so much… all of that is 45 days away, but I'm here now I guess because…" She swallowed and closed the magazine. She saw him standing in front of her - in that New York bar.
"Are you okay?" Jason wondered.
"No. I want those extra 45 days with him, I want each one of them." She felt a tear running down her face. "I love you, I'm always gonna love you, til the end of my days and beyond. You'll see. " she heard Derek's voice in her head.
"You would have told him to get lost" Jason giggled. "oh, you actually did that"
Meredith looked at the photo. It was a reflection of her younger self visiting Mt. Sinai hospital in New York. By now she was wondering if he had actually taken her advice and went home, whether it had been the night Derek had caught Addison and Mark. "It's funny how sometimes you just find things" she whispered.