A/N: Once upon a time, I wrote an Addison-after-Derek-dies piece, and here it is. It felt appropriate to post now in this renaissance of Addison/Derek. Canon-compliant, takes place in the period following Derek's death. It's a bit bleak and a bit of a free-write, and I apologize for lack of polish. If you read it, I'd love to know what you think.

Four Times She Remembers Him
(and one time she can't)

I

She's at the clinic on West Pico for her Wednesday shift, and there's a new guy this time. Young, straight out of school. She'll have to supervise him.

His eyes are wide when he pushes open the heavy front door, sees the wire-meshed glass. There's a back door for the doctors, and she'll use it if it's late and she's alone but on principle she doesn't like to. If her patients can walk through the front, so can she.

"You all right … doctor?" She asks it with some emphasis on doctor - the kind of you all right that means you'd better be all right, you signed up for this. This kid has a baby face and she doesn't really want to look at it. His surname is right there on his jacket: Henderson. But she doesn't use it.

Once, when she was a resident, volunteering at the clinic in Washington Heights, Derek hailed a cab for her – there were no cell phones then, it wasn't like now when you can text the entire time, never wonder where your wife is. He hesitated for just a minute, hand on the bright-yellow door, and said I wish I could go with you. She said you can, teasingly, almost flirtatious.

(They'd only been married a year or so; it was appropriate.)

I mean … to look out for you, he said, clarifying, and she actually beamed. It felt acceptably dramatic, then. They were young and in love and he was saying I'd stand in the way of a bullet for you. He was saying that, or she chose to hear it, one of those things. He kept his hair short in those days, fluffed up in the back; it was high summer and he tasted salty when she kissed him goodbye, but when she closes her eyes now to try to picture it she just sees the old checkered cabs, the ones that are gone now. That was what he hailed for her, a checkered cab, and she folded down the stool like a child and sat on it the whole way there.

It surprises her, this memory. Usually it's Mark she thinks of at the clinic, not Derek. Or Naomi, that look of judgment in her dark eyes. With Mark it's how sad he looked, afterwards, and how she had to fake tears so he wouldn't think she was an unfeeling bitch. What she was is numb. No anesthesia needed. Everything was thick and clumsy for days afterwards, like her life fell asleep from sitting still too long.

Are you sure? She asked every patient, just like you were supposed to, from the first one three days after her own. You know your life will still suck, afterwards. She never said that part. She wanted to; she wanted them to stop looking at her like she had all the answers. Most of the time she didn't even know what the questions were.

She's different now, of course. She's a wife again. A mother for the first time. The younger women, patients and staff, see her as maternal, she knows this, and she doesn't discourage it. She lets her shoulders slump in matronly fashion under her lab coat, wears her most shapeless sweaters to the clinic even if that doesn't stop the voices outside from yelling. Whore, they say. Sometimes killer. Other than the political context, it's not like she disagrees with their assessment.

"Dr. Montgomery?"

"Yes, Dr. Henderson?"

"Is it, um, always like that out there?" he asks. He's too green to have shaken the nervous tics from his speech. He's looks embarrassed; he flushes and says hastily, "I mean, I want to be here. I'm sorry."

"You'll be fine," she tells him, cool and clipped. It not that she can't feel pity, but it doesn't do to coddle them. They'll leave from the front door tonight.

II

Henry's holding court at the kitchen table, last bite of pancake still speared on his fork, fisting a jar of strawberry jam. Well. It used to be a jar of strawberry jam. Now it's almost empty, just little sticky bits of bright red clinging to the inside of the jar. There's no word for it now, no word she can come up with to say that place where something used to be.

Henry is joking, for his little sister's benefit, telling her he's going to lick the remaining bits up. "Careful," Addison says, at the moment he drops it onto the kitchen table.

It doesn't break.

"It's a lucky drop, that's why," Henry says, "Dad told me. When it hits in the right spot and it doesn't break. Like his phone when Evvy dropped it."

"Didn't," Evelyn retorts, probably more out of force of habit than anything else.

"Don't touch," Addison says anyway, taking hold of his hand – not so little anymore – before he can pick up the jar. "You can still cut yourself. You don't know if there's a crack; they don't always show right away."

She's remembering the tumbler of scotch – empty, like the jam jar – a tumbler that used to hold something, something that she tasted warm and sticky on her lips. She was angry. Or he was angry, she can't remember.

The emotions seem glossed over now, melting and soft so she can't quite remember what they were, individually. Only that it was the two of them in the kitchen of the brownstone, and she can't remember what the fight was about but she can remember the individual cream-and-ecru flecks in the marble of the kitchen island.

Derek teased her about the colors she close, she said you stick to your rooms and I'll stick to mine and he bought fishing rods that he didn't use and she stocked a kitchen with appliances she didn't touch. Was that was what they were arguing about – the things they bought and chose and filled the house with that just accrued a thin layer of dust? Another time in that same kitchen, he said have you thought any more about … and she said I'm not ready. She didn't interrupt him that time; he just stopped talking after the word about. Like she'd already disappointed him.

Memories are troublesome because they don't make sense, because one moment it's a tumbler of scotch and then she's saying I'm not ready and she's tripping over a tangled reel of a fishing rod after he's left her – it was in the upstairs hall closet where it wasn't supposed to be and she kicked it out of frustration; later, at Mark's, he saw the scratch on her ankle and asked her about it and she said it's nothing.

(That's what her memories were like in those months: the three of them. Tangled up like a fishing reel.)

That night in the kitchen with Derek, she slammed the tumbler down onto the island. Banged it, for emphasis. She was angry, and the sound was the smack of a fist, an exclamation: damn it! It didn't break and she felt victorious, for a moment, and then just he walked out of the room and even though it was an open plan, the very one she designed, she could hear a door slamming in her head.

She left the tumbler on the island that night – the housekeeper could clear it away the next morning – and went to sleep alone. In the morning, when she traipsed downstairs to turn on the espresso machine, the tumbler was completely different: the smooth glass from night before was now a network of fine cracks like a spider's web. She touched the surprising surface, her fingers a question – is it you, are you really the same, and a drop of red welled up on her finger.

(Perhaps she shouldn't have been surprised: theirs was a marriage that drew blood.)

She left before it could shatter completely.

"There's no crack, Mom, see, it's perfect. Look." Henry points, but he stop short of touching the glass, though. He still listens to her.

"Leave it, to be safe," she tells her children. She ushers them out and they move on with their day, but Henry, persistent like his father, tugs her into the kitchen by the hand the next morning. "See, it didn't crack at all. I was right."

III

Flipping casually through a journal that's been sitting on her nightstand for weeks, she comes across an article authored by Meredith. The byline says Grey. Just Grey. She thinks good girl and then she's hit with a wave of secondhand embarrassment.

It should be firsthand – that woman in Seattle she's remembering is the same woman now, in Los Angeles, isn't she? But the embarrassment feels secondhand anyway because that period of her life is like looking through a fogged glass window at a barely lit memory. Like the window she pressed her palms to the night her life imploded.

(Glass flat against her hands has always sounded like please, ever since that night.)

The secondhand embarrassment, though. When she praised Meredith for not taking Derek back (good girl), when she thought she could still make sense of her life with enough bravado and high enough heels. It didn't last – nothing lasts – and she was hating every inch of her passive aggressive reflection within barely a week.

Then she remembers sitting around the Shepherds' big, rough-hewn dining room table, the clattering chatter of Derek's siblings and in-laws as everyone weighed in – uninvited – on her choice to take Derek's name. Won't your parents mind? Carolyn asked that – Mom, call me Mom, she said, early on, but she said it in a way that felt like a reverse challenge. Like when you tease a child; you can't really resist this candy, can you? Addison couldn't, of course she couldn't. She swallowed every bite of sweetness his family offered. It's not like she had one of her own.

My family won't mind, she said, and Derek squeezed her hand and looked at her with twinkling eyes. They're very traditional, she said by way of explanation, and didn't add except my father likes to fuck anything that moves and I'm in charge of keeping my mother from finding out so it doesn't affect her busy society calendar. Maybe they should have registered for therapy.

(She made that joke to Mark once, but not to Derek. She can't remember if he laughed.)

Just Montgomery. The divorce was finalized today.

That's what she said, and it was a lie. By then lies were more natural than the truth; they didn't even faze her, just slipped out of her mouth like air. In truth, it took months and multiple angry calls to sever Shepherd from the end of her name. She stood on the filthy, gum-stained floor of a municipal building in twelve hundred dollar shoes and hated her life. She burst into tears on the phone with the DMV. The woman was actually nice about it, which made her feel worse. You'll get over him, honey. No one's that great.

When Jake asked her to do it, she hyphenated. She wanted her whole family to have one name in common, that's what she said when the DMV clerk didn't ask.

Or maybe she's a glutton for punishment.

IV

Nancy goes to the NCOG conference each year, and so does she, but they've made a tradition of keeping professional distance – quick kisses on the cheek and how are you how's your practice how are your children like she does with anyone else. Like they were never sisters, like she's not one more of Addison's missing limbs: with practice, it's easy.

This year, though, she bumps into Nancy in the ladies' room. Ladies' lounge, as this hotel likes to call it. The pink striped walls start closing in on her as soon as she sees Nancy, while too many different perfumes tangle in the air.

It's strange to run into her in a place with so much intimacy. It reminds her of the relationship she used to share with Derek's sisters; she was, in many ways, always closer to them than he was. In women's bathrooms over a decade and a half, in houses and hotels and restaurants, they shared lipsticks and tampons, fluffed each other's hair, kept an eye out for stray bra straps or smudged eyeliners. That's what ladies' rooms are for. Ladies lounges. For women to be honest, outside of the shells of their clothing and makeup.

Maybe that's why she steered Mark to the men's room, that time. Why does it matter, the door locks, he said, but she pushed his hand. Do you want to argue with me or do you want to fuck me? That's what she said in return because that's who she was, those two months without Derek. That's how she talked. Mark took the hint.

(Now when she walks by single-stall men's rooms, if it's dark and she's in a bar that smells like house brew and loneliness, she can sometimes still feel the sting of him inside her.)

Ladies' rooms are different.

Nancy is holding a lipstick halfway to her thin lips. It's the same black-and-gold case she remembers - after all this time, Nancy is still using the same brand of lipstick.

Addison speaks first: "I'm sorry," and when their eyes meet in the mirror she sees that her eyeliner is very slightly smudged; she hadn't noticed before.

"Thanks," Nancy says. "I'm … sorry too."

She considers saying something more. She could say she wanted to go to the funeral, and she also didn't want to. But don't those cancel each other out? Null set.

So she says nothing.

Who knows, Nancy may not have been there either. She doesn't ask. Derek put distance between himself and his family. Even before Seattle. Even in Manhattan when most of his sisters were within spitting distance – a vulgar phrase, one that would have made him smile, maybe – he still kept his distance. There were so many of them. He said that, once. I'm always outnumbered, and he was laughing, as she helped Amy with her hair and the others gathered around them. Lizzie, Nancy, Kath. They laughed at him. With him. She wasn't sure, she was busy thrilling in the camaraderie. She never had a sister. Or a sister-in-law, even. She had a brother who loved her but his love sometimes felt like breathing the wrong way in the chlorinated pool at the club. Like salt behind her eyes. Like not drowning when maybe you wanted to.

The Shepherd sisters were a buffer, a noisy, chattering, hair fixing buffer between the mother-in-law who never warmed to her and the husband who was slowly cooling to her. I'll always have you, she remembers thinking that. Not about Derek, but about the girls. Do you like my sisters better than me? He asked her this once, and it sent a little firework off inside of her, because it was Derek, he was too arrogant to be jealous of anyone, but maybe... I don't like anyone better than you, she said and kissed him; he tasted like coffee.

"You're a little smudged," Nancy says, her voice just slightly hoarse, like she hasn't used it in a while.. "Right there," and she gestures with her chin in the general direction of Addison's face, hands unmoving.

Addison widens her eyes in the mirror to stretch the skin, the fine network of lines before the arch of her cheekbone. "I know," she says. "But … thanks."

V

She's crying on the couch when Jake finds her, the big microfiber L-shape that would have horrified her parents, but it resists stains and her new life is loud, messy. The kids are closed in the den now, watching something about happy families, and he wraps his arms around her before he asks her what's wrong. She tells herself that's a good thing.

He is always so reasonable, her husband. I'm driving, he said, years ago, and she handed over the reins to her life with gratitude she never bothered to question.

Maybe her therapist fixed her.

(Maybe he fucked her up more.)

"What's wrong, baby?" Jake asks finally.

I can't remember what his hands felt like. That's what's wrong.

She can't say it so she just thinks it. Her thoughts are still her own. Aren't they? Is there anything left for her to steer?

Out loud she says: "I lost a patient today." She lies tentatively, like the first bite of something hot, waiting to see if it will tantalize or numb her tongue.

"I'm so sorry. It's always hard." Just like you're supposed to say. His voice is tender, understanding, and he kisses the top of her head.

Jake's hands are big and deeply tanned, with long fingers. They look dark against the whiteness of her flesh. They touch her gently, reassuringly, like they won't leave marks. Will she forget him too?

She loves him, of course she does. She loves their life together. Loves their imperfect home, their children and the clutter they bring. She loves listening to the ocean from their bedroom window and pretending she deserves any of it.

She does love him. But. There's just one problem: the men she loves die, brutally.

They die alone in a ditch, betrayed by their own heart.

They die slowly from a crashed plane, their internal organs destroyed.

They die in a violent car wreck, a victim of irony as much as the collision: no one but he could have saved him. It's soap operatic.

(And the connection among them – all of them – is Addison.)

It's all about Addison, that's what Callie would say, when they were friends, teasingly. She knows Mark and Derek were childhood friends – brothers even – before she entered the picture. But then enter it she did. She destroyed their lifelong friendship, her marriage to Derek, whatever it was that she and Mark had, and by the time they'd finished untangling their lives, she'd destroyed most of herself and then Mark was dead. And then Derek was dead.

She wrapped arms and legs around these men, let them into her mouth and her home and her heart, and they are all dead. The last time she saw Sam – he lives in New York in a new life with his old wife – she thought, enjoy it now, you're as tainted as they are. One day someone will find him, mouth slightly open, the indignity of death, and it will be her fault.

Sorry, Sam.

Sorry, Mark. Sorry, Pete.

But Derek … I can't remember what your hands felt like. She says it directly to him this time, still in her head. Maybe he'll answer and she'll recognize his voice. But it's Jake who responds.

"You want to go for a run? You might feel better. I'll watch the kids." Her husband smiles at her like he's offering her a treat. He's so hearty, so healthy. She can't look into his dark eyes and say I'd rather down a bottle of scotch and fuck a stranger. She doesn't deserve jogs on the beach, two perfect children, or a healthy, whole husband. Stop being nice to me, she wants to say. Can't you see what I am?

"Yeah, I think that would help. Thanks, honey." She kisses him. It's getting easier, this lying. It always does; that's how it starts.

There's a light rain falling as she jogs along the beach. Unusual here in the land of relentless sunshine: it feels almost like Seattle. A lighter version of the rainstorm that ripped her marriage in two. She misses rain.

She misses a lot of things.

Picking up speed as she passes the ring of houses she recognizes, she runs until her pumping legs feel like exploding and she can't tell whether the moisture on her face is rain, sweat, or tears.

You can't outrun everything. In her case, maybe she can't outrun anything. So she pivots and turns, running back toward the house.

She didn't get as far away as she thought.

(But there's always next time.)

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