They circled each other. Ellis Grey and Richard Webber. Meredith never realized how much until she saw the chief's resume on Derek's desk. She knew her mother's by heart, of course, though measured in her own timeline. Seattle Grace until she was five, Massachusetts General until she was ten. Then, for reasons she would never understand, they had returned to Seattle. She never told people this, unless they asked. Everyone assumed that because her mother's fellowship was in Boston, and Meredith went to Dartmouth, that they stayed on the East Coast.
In actuality, she lived in the house on Queen Anne's Hill through to the twelfth grade. Her mother told her that her father had moved away. She was in med school, sorting through her ailing mother's papers when she found out that this wasn't true. Richard Webber had done his fellowship at Seattle Grace, and he was still there when they moved in. Meredith didn't meet him then, just as she never met Liz Fallon, her mother's scrub nurse. Her mother kept her private life private, even though she never seemed to leave work at work. Meredith didn't know that the man she had once called "Uncle Richard" was still at the hospital, but he was for two years. Then he went on to Manhattan, where he would mentor the man she eventually married.
They kept the Boston house, and Meredith moved into it after college. It became base camp for her friends' parties. Meanwhile, her mother traveled, doing a long stint at Mayo. The letter asking her to accept a position as chief at Seattle Grace reached the Boston house on the day that Meredith left for Europe. By the time Richard Webber took the position, they were boxing up the house in Seattle. Meredith returned to Dartmouth, her mother to Boston. For all she knew, the east and west planes passed in the air.
It was all very confusing, the circling and path crossing. But it was enough for her to know that Ellis had not disappeared from Richard's life when she was five. They had seen each other again, and her mom might have confided in him. She certainly didn't confide in Meredith, but maybe the man whom she had once loved….
The thought was enough to make her ask. To make her wonder. Had her mother shown signs of Alzheimer's when she was eleven? When she was twenty-one? How early did it onset? How long did she have? There was no one left to give her the answers she so desperately wanted, but he would try. For her, he would always try.