Magic tricks are precise acts of illusion. Misdirect, then pull a bunny out of a hat. Lock yourself up in a straight jacket or a box, and then appear from stage left. The audience? They're left hushed and in awe. Because they didn't even see it coming.
"MVC! Six minutes out!" Kepner shouts as Meredith skids into the pit. Riggs is just steps behind her, running a hand through his hair. Maybe trying to look natural. He turns to glance at her, and she nods at him. They'd been making out in the North stairwell when they had received the page, a 911 to the pit.
What are they doing? Sneaking around the hospital, sneaking around behind Maggie's back. It had been less than 48 hours since Meredith had told Nathan she was in, that he he should ask her out. It all feels very familiar to the whirlwind that was her romance with Derek, and yet somehow entirely different.
But this, emergencies and the urgency to solve problems, this feels natural to Meredith. There's a high in the chaos. She lets it drive her, gives herself permission to put her personal feelings away and be in the moment. She and Nathan will figure out whatever they're doing after this, after today.
Pulling on trauma gowns, they both follow Kepner out to the ambulance bay. Meredith is finishing pulling on her latex gloves as they're joined by Warren.
"How many have we got?" Warren asks as he finishes tying his gown.
"Three. Dispatch said two cars, four patients," Kepner replies.
The first ambo rolls up and cuts its lights. The paramedic driving hops out, jogging around to open the back of the rig. The doctors look to one another before Meredith steps forward.
"What've we got?" she asks, as she rushes to the head of the stretcher that is just being lowered to the ground by a female paramedic. She gets one glimpse of the patient and a wave of recognition hits her. Together they push the stretcher towards the doors. Meredith glances at Nathan quickly to see how he's taking it. Both he and April are staring at the stretcher with wide eyes.
"Mom," he calls out, pained, as she is wheeled past him.
"Evelyn Hunt. 85. She was restrained in the vehicle, and the other car hit the driver's side, so she didn't get the brunt of it. But multiple facial lacs and a broken nose because her airbag didn't go off, and likely fractures in her left leg. She was having trouble breathing at the scene. Likely blunt abdominal trauma. We keep trying to give her oxygen, but," the paramedic explains before Mrs. Hunt reaches up with her right hand to take the oxygen mask off her face. Her left reaches for Meredith's arm.
"I keep telling them to help the girl. My sons work here. They'll see to me. She needs help first."
"I've got you, Mrs. Hunt. We'll take good care of the others, but you need to take care of yourself for Owen and Nathan, okay?" Meredith told her, and she reaches forward and replaces the mask on Mrs. Hunt's face.
April looks to Riggs with both alarm and concern on her face. Nathan is staring after Mrs. Hunt.
"Nathan, I've got this next one," she directs. "You'll be okay?"
He shakes his head, refocusing, and turns his gaze to April. "Yeah, Keps, I'll be fine."
The next ambulance has parked and its doors are already open, the paramedics wheeling a seated teenage girl towards the pair. Her mother, clutching her right forearm, follows.
"Hana Mori, 16. She was driving and lost control of the vehicle. Her mother, Soojin Mori was in the passenger seat and said Hana stopped responding and her eyes glazed over. No previous history of seizures," the paramedic reported.
"Hana, Mrs. Mori, I'm Doctor Kepner. Let's get you both inside and figure out what's going on." The paramedic pushes the gurney inside, then both he and April help Hana into a sitting position on one of the ER beds.
"Thanks," April smiles at the paramedic, before turning her attention to the girl and her mother. "Mrs. Mori, why don't you have a seat on the next bed there and Dr. DeLuca can take a look at your arm?"
The mother rolls her eyes, but sits on the bed. As DeLuca starts examining her arm she begins, "If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, Han. You need to pay attention while you're behind the wheel!"
April takes her pen light out of her pocket and clicks it on. "Okay, Hana, just follow the light for me." She slowly moves the light from side to side in front of the girl's face.
"I know, mom. You've told me every. single. time I've gotten behind the wheel. Like I told you in the ambulance, I don't know what happened."
"Ouch," the mother shrinks away from DeLuca when he presses the spot where her fracture clearly is. "I know you say that. But you really need to pay attention. You HURT someone today with your negligence. Two someones, in fact, not including me, your own mother. Did you see them putting those two women into ambulances? What if they're not alright? Did you even think of that?!"
"God Mom. Do you think I don't know that?" Hana says, starting to get agitated.
"Okay, let's take a deep breath everyone. Can you think of any symptoms you've had lately that…" April begins, hoping to calm the duo's rising tensions. Her sentence is stopped by Hana, whose eyes suddenly glaze over before she loses consciousness and falls backwards. Five seconds later she starts convulsing.
"DeLuca," April begins. Hana, still convulsing, begins to vomit.
"On it!" He darts across the room to the drug chest, returning with a vial and handing it to April before turning Hana on her side.
"Pushing 40 of lorazepam," April announces as she lines up the syringe to Hana's IV. She pushes the head of the plunger into the syringe, thankful that the paramedics thought to start a line. Hana's movements slow until she is lying prone on the mattress. A few moments later her eyes blink rapidly, until her unfocused gaze lands on April.
"I…" Hana begins.
"I know. You're back with us. You gave your mom and me quite a scare there." April turns to DeLuca. "She's going to be pretty drowsy while she's postictal. Take her up to CT, and hopefully she'll be nice and still." DeLuca nods and pulls the railings up on the bed, as April skirts around it to comfort the mom. She rests a hand on mom's good arm, "We're going to take Hana upstairs for a CT scan, so we can figure out what we're dealing with here. In the meantime, I'm going to have an ER doctor take you for an x-ray. I'll be back down the minute we know anything."
Riggs taps his right foot as he waits for the last ambulance to pull into the bay. He looks down at his watch. 3:47pm. He'll be happy to see this trauma through so he can go check on Evelyn. He scoffs to himself. Just as he was beginning to feel like his life was back in order, or as close as it could be anywhere in Meredith Grey's orbit, this was thrown at him.
He knew Evelyn wasn't doing as well as she reported in her weekly emails to all her friends - how he had landed himself on her chain letter mailing list was beyond him - but he knew Hunt had recently hired a caregiver for his mother. That must have been who was driving the car, if Evelyn hadn't been driving.
She had to be okay. She became his de facto mom after his own had passed away. She had welcomed him into her family, as if any co-worker friend of Owen's should be part of their family too. And after everything that happened, that she still thinks of him as a son...Riggs spares one more brief look towards the emergency room doors. He shakes his head again. No, she had to be okay.
The last ambulance slows to a stop in front of Riggs and Warren. One paramedic pushes the stretcher out of the vehicle while the other guides its wheels to the ground. The former doesn't wait to be asked by either doctor before launching into the patient history.
"Jane Doe, late 30s. She was driving when the car was hit on the driver's side. Unconscious when we arrived at the scene. Firefighters had to unpin her from the vehicle. Broken clavicle from her restraints. Unclear the extent of her head injuries, but no other symptoms at the scene. We tried to find a purse or some sort of identification, but there wasn't any in the car. The older woman in the passenger seat was too distraught to identify before they loaded her in the other ambo."
Warren is pushing the stretcher towards the building as the wheels in Nathan's head are still spinning. He stands there, frozen, staring at where the previous ambulance had been. Warren glances back at him worriedly. The doors glide shut.
Meredith looks to the intake desk for direction. "Trauma one," the intake nurse calls out. Both Meredith and the paramedic stop and change direction, heading to the opposite trauma room. They push open the doors, parking the stretcher in the middle of the room.
"Somebody call Hunt," Meredith hollers at the medical staff starting to populate the room. "And get plastics down here!"
"Let's get an xray on those leg fractures. They look pretty clean from the outside, but I want to know if we need to get ortho involved."
Everyone works together to transport her to one of Grey Sloan's beds so the paramedic can take her stretcher back, then to remove her backboard. Meredith unstraps the brace from Mrs. Hunt's neck once she has determined it's uninjured.
One of the nurses leans towards the table, the phone pressed to her shoulder. "They're saying Dr. Hunt's in surgery. He'll be done in a few minutes. Dr. Avery is on his way now."
Meredith sighs. "She seems relatively stable for now. I guess that'll do."
"Mrs. Hunt? I don't know that you remember me, but I'm Dr. Grey? Meredith. I'm Amelia's sister. We met at the wedding?" The older woman's face doesn't give away any recognition. "I'm just going to press along your abdomen. You let me know if anything feels tender?" Meredith begins a manual exam, pressing her fingers into Mrs. Hunt's stomach. She doesn't get more than a few inches before even the gentle pressure she had been using has the older woman howling in pain.
"Alright, get me an ultrasound. Clearly internal injuries. Let's figure out what's going on."
Mrs. Hunt is gasping to catch her breath, but pulls the oxygen mask down again. "I need to know that she's okay. Please tell Owen, tell Nath...she's got...To...Be...Okay," she managed before a coughing fit overtook her.
"Nathan knows you're here. And we paged Owen. He'll be here in just a few minutes," Meredith reassures her. The coughing increases and, as she turns to the side to cough, a trickle of blood comes out of Mrs. Hunt's mouth. She must taste the metal in her mouth because her eyes widen in panic.
"Make...sure," she breaths out, reaching for Meredith's arm once more.
"We've got to intubate her," Meredith calls. One of the nurses hands her an intubation kit and Meredith pulls off the packaging.
Jackson walks in just as Meredith finishes inserting the tube. "What have we got here?" he says quietly as he approaches the table and begins to evaluate the patient's facial lacerations and broken nose.
"This is Mrs. Hunt…" she begins.
"Okay, as in…?"
"Yeah, this is Owen's mother."
"You've called him?"
"He was finishing surgery upstairs. He'll be down soon. I thought it would be better to tell him once his hands weren't inside of another person."
"I'm just saying...he'll beat himself up forever if something…"
"Nothing's going to happen. I'm going to figure out where she's bleeding internally. We're going to scrub in, and you're going to reconstruct her nose so she can breath and make her beautiful." Meredith puts gel on her chest and abdomen before using the ultrasound wand to smooth it out. She moves the wand back and forth, trying to get a clear picture. There is not a clear field, but something has to be causing her abdominal pain and bleeding. Based on the pain, that something is near to her spleen.
"Okay, I can't tell from here. We've got to get her up to surgery now. I'll find the bleeder once we're inside." Meredith declares.
"Someone call Hunt back," Jackson directs.
"Let's do xray on the way upstairs. I can look at the scans before we scrub in. Then we'll call ortho if we have to." Murphy nods before leaning her body weight into the stretcher and beginning to push.
"And Murphy?" Meredith calls after her when she's nearly out of the room. Murphy looks up at her. "Don't let anything happen to her."
"I won't."
April taps her pen against the desk impatiently, as DeLuca gets Hana situated for the CT scanner. After strapping her in and reminding her to stay still, DeLuca drops himself in the desk chair beside her.
With a few keystrokes the machine comes to life, the table that holds Hana slowly sliding into the machine. There's a whirring noise and then images light up the monitor in front of April. She exhales deeply.
"Well that's good, right?" DeLuca ventures, his voice trailing off at the end.
"If good is she doesn't have a brain tumour or a brain bleed, then yes, this is good. Except we still don't know what caused her seizure."
"Okay, I'll take her up to Peds now?"
"Yeah, just make sure to…" April begins to instruct, her directions trailing off at the end as she sees Hunt striding toward her down the hallway.
DeLuca nods at Hunt as they pass in the doorway.
"Kepner, talk to me." Hunt orders as he enters the room. "I went down to the pit and the said the patient they needed me to see had come upstairs."
April looks up at him, her expression softening.
"It's not me they meant," she pauses, trying not to alarm. April hadn't seen Mrs. Hunt since she exited the ambo, and she had been talking and pretty spunky, if a little confused. Since she couldn't account for the older woman's condition, she didn't want to freak Owen out if it was nothing or make light of the situation if something dire had occurred in the meantime. "Meredith needs you. I'm not sure where she went."
"Okay, I'll go find her then," he says, slipping back out the door. April rubs her hands over her eyes and then presses them to her temples. Her eyes dip out of focus as she prays that Mrs. Hunt will be okay, and, if she's not, that Owen will too.
Warren is calling out orders when Dr. Webber enters the room.
"What's going on here, Warren? Where's Dr. Riggs?" He questions.
"Left him in the ambulance bay," Warren says dismissively with a wave of his arm towards the exit. Webber knows he should correct the resident, call him out on his borderline insubordinate tone, but the man has become known for doing what needs to be done when the time calls for it. Richard admires that in him, even if it's dismissive of his superior, Riggs. He focuses back on the patient at hand.
"And the patient?"
"Jane Doe. Restrained driver, hit hard on the side by the other driver. Unconscious since the accident. Possible brain bleed."
"Alright, page Dr. Shepard."
Amelia is silent upon seeing the scans. She looks to Warren to determine their next course of action. She may side with Richard Webber in the ongoing battle, but also knows that Warren is fully capable of running lead on this case. Adding to that, according to Webber, it had been Warren's case from the start.
The bleed looks bad. It's right in her cerebrum, which is causing her unconsciousness. Plus her skull is fractured and her brain is swelling.
Warren is hesitant to answer.
"C'mon Warren. She doesn't have all day," Amelia urges.
"We'll need to clip the bleeder at the back of her cerebrum, and leave a piece of her skull off to allow for the swelling. And then check for fracture fragments that may have gotten loose." Amelia nods in assent.
"Alright then. Let's get Jane here up to surgery."
Nathan slides along walls, hoping like hell he will be undeterred as he makes his way to the corner of the hospital furthest away from the pit. He doesn't know if he could force himself to interact with other staff, with his friends properly. Not after seeing her.
He slipped into the next doorway, a supply closet. He didn't bother turning on the lights, just simply slid to the floor.
The x ray had shown nothing but a simple leg fracture, something Meredith could easily reset herself without the help of Ortho. She is concerned though about Mrs. Hunt's continued state of unconsciousness. The longer her mystery bleed continued unchecked, the closer she was to bleeding out.
Murphy scrubs in alongside Meredith, the two women silent as they stare ahead into the operating theater. Jackson will join them once Mrs. Hunt's bleeder had been controlled.
"Are you ready?" Meredith turns to Murphy and asks as she pushes the faucet off with her forearm. Murphy nods.
The automatic doors rush aside and each woman approaches a surgical nurse who helps them into their gowns and gloves. Meredith approaches the table. Mrs. Hunt is already prepped and sedated. She reminds herself that this wasn't personal. This isn't her friend's mother, her...maybe something's surrogate one. This is just a patient, one who needed saving. And she is the surgeon who was going to do it. It is time to save a life.
She looks up at Murphy, reaching out her right hand.
"Ten blade."
The nurses' station reported to him that Grey had just gone into surgery, so Owen searches the board for her name. He finds it next to OR 3, the surgery's description showing that she'll be performing a trauma ex-lap. His eyes follow the line over to gather the rest of the details, preparing himself to assist in the OR. Jackson is scrubbed in too, as is Murphy. The patient's name is...the patient's name reads Hunt, Evelyn. Owen's eyes widen in panic as his mind whirs. What happened to his mother?
He grabs a tablet from the charging station on the counter behind him, his fingers flying through logging in and searching patient records until he finds his mom. He skims the details: car accident, the new homecare nurse had been driving. Conscious at intake, coughing up blood, inconclusive ultrasound. Xray, simple fracture in her left leg. Facial trauma, which would explain Jackson scrubbing in.
Setting the tablet back on its charger, Owen takes off running for the gallery of OR 3. In less than two minutes he finds himself outside the door and takes a deep breath before slipping inside. He leaves the lights off so as not to alert the surgeons of his presence and folds himself into one of the chairs in the front row. He crosses his right leg over his left and leans forward for a better view. His right elbow leans on his leg as he braces his chin. Owen exhales deeply. All he can do now is wait.
Amelia and Warren are scrubbed in, both peering through magnifiers onto their Jane Doe's head. Warren holds the scalpel, but hasn't yet cut.
"You got this, Warren?" If he was too panicked to cut, they were wasting time. At the very least they needed to relieve the pressure that her swelling brain was under.
"I do," he declares. He makes the first incision, slowly removing a square piece of her skull. When her brain is revealed Amelia can immediately see a swelling bubble of blood under the first membrane of her brain.
"Dammit. She has a subdural hematoma too. Okay, you're going to want to go beneath the dura, but take care not to puncture the arachnoid mater." His hesitance in diagnosis had worried her, but Warren follows her directions to a T, proving once again his skill under pressure.
The rest of the surgery goes smoothly. Amelia takes over and clips the bleed in Jane's cerebrum after Warren did so for the hematoma.
In accordance with Minick's new protocol, Amelia does the post-op, carefully wrapping Jane's head to stabilize her fracture and protect the open flap of skull she now has. It's a shame, Amelia offhandedly notes, that this woman had to have brain surgery. Half of her gorgeous auburn hair is now shaved off or buzzed down. Other than her ongoing state of unconsciousness, Jane is recovering well. Still, they won't know anything until she wakes.
Amelia silently hopes that she'll wake up, that they can find her family. She can't help flashing back to Derek, to the poor care he received. At the very least, this woman's family will know she did everything she could.
"Is my mom okay?" a timid voice asks from the hospital bed DeLuca is pushing out of the elevator.
"I haven't heard in awhile, but I can check for you, once I get you set up in a room." Hana smiles shyly at the handsome doctor.
"Do I have to be on the little kids' floor?"
"I'm afraid so. Since you're under eighteen, intake requires you to be in the pediatric wing. But, on the plus side, you get all you can eat pudding. The adults have to eat Jello instead." The smile he gave her quickly falls from her face as she starts seizing once more. DeLuca calls out for assistance, and a older nurse hands him a medicine vial and needle, and rolls Hana to her side just as she throws up all over the woman's shoes. She grimaces, but nods to DeLuca as he instructs her to page Karev or Robbins as Hana's seizure subsides.
"Hana? Can you hear me?" He questions, clicking on his penlight and checking her pupils. His peripheral vision catches the nurse slipping her vomit-covered shoes off as she dials in the page. The hand holding her eyelid open suddenly feels warm. Too warm. He doesn't remember what Kepner took as Hana's temperature, but the girl is burning up now. Hana barely nods.
"You feel a bit warm here, Han. Did you feel like that before?" The teen nods again.
He quickly inserts the thermometer in her ear and waits for the beep. 103.1°. DeLuca lets out a big sigh, but quickly reverts back to a squinty smirk. "I thought you might have. I'm going to do a test, but you'll have to be brave and hold really still. Do you think you can do that for me?" Another nod.
DeLuca parks the gurney next to one of the Peds beds and gently helps Hana into it, encouraging her to lay on her right side. He moves to the other side of the room to retrieve the necessary needle and syringe. Demonstrating again to Hana how to hug her knees, DeLuca punctures her lower vertebrae to remove spinal fluid.
He's about done when Karev bursts in the door with a vengeance.
"Thank god I already had the needle out of her." DeLuca is used to rash behavior from Alex Karev, but it's typically not at the expense of his patients.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?!" Karev shouts at him.
"I didn't think about what I was doing…" He begins. DeLuca finishes corking the vial of spinal fluid, setting it on the tray as he tosses his latex gloves in the bin.
"Of course you didn't think! You're supposed to be learning, not going crazy without supervision!" Naturally Karev would pull the seniority card, though it had been the senior surgeon in the pit who had missed the likely diagnosis.
"No, you misunderstand me. I didn't think, I just did. I did what we needed to do, what I needed to do to save Hana. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get this to the lab." DeLuca picks up the specimen and storms out the door towards the lab, ignoring the flabbergasted face of Alex Karev.
Owen can see Murphy nod to Grey and begin to close up. The resident had set his mother's leg easily before rejoining the general surgeon as she explored and eliminated the bleeding within his mother. Jackson had come in soon after, working simultaneously to repair her facial fractures. Owen had been going crazy in the gallery because the intercom hadn't been working.
Once Meredith disappeared from view, Owen darted downstairs to get an update from her. Despite watching most of the surgery, he still felt in the dark. He made a mental note to remind Bailey to fix OR3's intercom. He found Meredith just as she was exiting the scrub room. Seeing Owen she immediately folded her arms and looked at him earnestly.
"She's not out of the woods yet, but she'll be fine, Owen," Meredith reassured him, placing a hand on his arm. She gives more details as they continue down the hall. He has been so focused on her words that he hasn't noticed where she was taking him. They are at the stairs that lead to the intensive care unit. "She'll be in the ICU for recovery, but you should go sit with her," she encourages, gesturing up the stairs.
He nodded before heading towards his mother. Owen briefly thought about finding Riggs. The other surgeon would surely want to know Evelyn was okay. Hell, he didn't even know if Riggs knew she had been in an accident. No. Someone would have told him. Owen renewed his course towards the ICU, taking the stairs two at a time.
…
"Hey," Meredith calls out to April as the red-haired surgeon passes the nurses desk. After leading Owen towards the ICU, she had dug into one of her least favorite tasks, paperwork. "Have you seen Riggs?" The question was innocuous enough that Meredith knew Kepner wouldn't think anything of it. When she finally finished Mrs. Hunt's surgery - a long 3 hours that involved clipping one bleeder after another - Meredith simply wanted to update the man on his surrogate mother.
Kepner didn't need to know that Meredith also wanted to comfort Nathan as much as she wanted to inform him. Meredith didn't know where they stood, but she was empathetic to what he was going through. Her life had followed one dark and twisty path after another. She knew too well the pain of losing a mother.
She checks yet another storage closet, thinking maybe he's isolated himself somewhere. The lights are out, but as she turns to leave she hears a choked sob.
She flips half of the lights on to reveal Nathan, sitting in the far corner, sobbing. It's clear he's trying to keep it together but failing. She holds him as he weeps…
Amelia finishes scrubbing out of surgery. She successfully clipped the brain bleed of the Jane Doe, but the surgery had come at the end of a long day. Exhausted, she moves through cleaning up, getting redressed in street clothes pretty much on autopilot. With her brain turned off, she's surprised to find that her feet don't take her to her car, but instead to a quiet hallway in the ICU.
She and Owen are still barely talking. She had been quite dismissive of his friends when the wife had undergone surgery, but she hadn't meant to be quite so cold. It just would have been tough to be the warm and funny Amelia that his friends thought she was. She didn't have to put up that front now.
Standing outside Evelyn's hospital room, Amelia can hear the steady beeping of the machines as her mother-in-law sleeps, the sedatives from surgery not yet worn off. Owen sleeps fitfully.
He had tossed and turned in the chair at his mom's bedside, but Owen is thankful to have gotten any sleep at all. He's not sure what woke him, but the sun is just beginning to peek through the mini blinds, casting the room in a light glow.
Evelyn wasn't out of the woods yet. She still hadn't woken up from the anesthesia, but at least she was breathing on her own now, the trach having been taken out sometime around 3am.
He hears mumbles, from the nurses station in the hall, he assumes, until he realizes that the sliding glass doors to his mother's room are closed.
"Mom?" He asks. "Can you hear me, Mom?"
Evelyn continues to mumble, her eyes closed, but the word she's saying slowly begins to be audible.
"Gan." she breathes out.
"Mom, I'm here. It's Owen." Her eyelids begin to flutter.
"Meg...an," she more clearly states. Owen runs a hand over his face. Her dementia had been getting worse and the homecare nurse hadn't said anything to him? Evelyn's requests continue, his mother getting more and more distressed.
He presses the call button placed next to Evelyn's bed. "Can you get her a sedative? She's starting to get agitated." He asks. The nurse smiles and nods. She heads behind the nurses' station before returning with a rather heavy dose of sedative.
"There you go..."
"Thanks," Owen interrupts, running a hand over his face in frustration.
"If it's not too forward of me…" the nurse begins. "She'll be out all night. Why don't you get some real rest in one of the on call rooms. I can page you if something comes up." Owen looks between her and his mother, clearly torn.
He sighs and uses his arms to push himself out of the bedside chair.
"Okay. But if anything…"
"Any change and I will page you immediately. Get some rest, Dr. Hunt." The nurse continues to finish her work, checking Evelyn's vitals, as Owen starts down the hall. He pauses to look over his right shoulder once before turning the corner and heading for an on-call room. A decent night's sleep did sound good right now.
"Meningitis?" Mrs. Mori clarifies. DeLuca had just found the mother in the waiting room, finally able to update the woman on her daughter's condition.
"Yes, meningitis. If you'd like I can take you to see Hana now?" The woman nods and rises to follow DeLuca. Her arm now sports a yellow cast. The pair journey to Hana's room in the pediatric floor.
"It's great that we caught it when we did. We'll still need to do some checks to make sure she's okay neurologically, but we've placed her on a high dose of antibiotics that hopefully will have her feeling better in no time."
They walk into the hospital room. Hana is curled up, asleep on her side.
"Oh, Han. She looks so young."
"The duck hospital gown doesn't help," he attempts to lighten the mood. Dr. Shepard's pokes her head in.
"Hi, I'm Doctor Shepard. I just wanted to do a quick neurological exam to see how Hana here is doing, but I'll come back a little later."
Though their talking is quiet, Hana begins to stir.
"Hana, can you tell me what you remember from today?" The police are hovering in the hallway, waiting to take a statement from the teen. Amelia wants to shelter her from questioning if she's still feeling woozy. But after a check of her vitals she seems alert and her fever is going down.
She waves the policeman into the room, introducing him to Hana.
"He's just going to ask you a few questions about what happened yesterday," she tells her. He asks questions about what Hana remembers before the crash, clarifying questions that Amelia knew he already has the answers for. She already vouched for the teen's current mental state. She rolled her eyes. Why was he second guessing her expertise?
Thanks to annoyance, she was barely listening to the questions, but she hears Hana's answer to one quite clear. Amelia eyes lift in confusion at the answer.
"No, I remember after. The old woman called out the younger woman's name."
Nathan peeked around the corner. Meredith had held him as he cried in the supply closet, staying until he had mostly calmed down. He hadn't told her anything, something he felt a good amount of guilt about. How did he even begin to tell her?
He had seen someone erasing Webber's surgery off the board and checked her room number. A nurse was inside the room. Shepard's name had also been listed, which explains the generous amount of gauze wrapped around her head.
It was like seeing a ghost. Hell, it WAS seeing a ghost. They had buried her, had had a service. The flowers. He remembered red. They were tulips, her favorite flower. Nathan could still smell thing. He hadn't had a chance at the funeral. No, he mentally berated himself. Not a funeral. You can't have a funeral without a body. It had been a memorial service. Owen had been so blindingly angry with him then, refusing to see reason. So instead of giving condolences, instead of receiving them like a part of the family, Nathan skirted the room, observing but not participating. Kind of like now.
He enters the room and the nurse looks up."We need to change the name on her charts. This woman is not a Jane Doe."
"Meredith" Amelia calls out. Her sister-in-law is moving quickly down the hallway, no doubt towards the daycare on her way home. Meredith stops and pivots to face her.
"The girl from the car accident, she has meningitis."
"Sorry to hear that. Look Amelia, today has been long and I'm just trying to get home with the kids."
"DeLuca finally got her fever down and she's starting to remember the accident. She was answering questions for the police just now. It wasn't the home care nurse driving."
Amelia continues, telling Meredith what the girl had said. Meredith's face widens in shock. She wants to run to Nathan, to let him know. But would he even want to see Meredith?
Owen wakes to his pager going off. He is out of bed and out the door in no time. He flies past the rest of the ICU, ignoring two rooms with alarms going off.
Amelia is standing at the nurses' station just outside of his mom's room when he arrives. Evelyn's room seems quiet, his mother still asleep. He can see her trach is out.
"Why did you page me? What changed?!" He asks, out of breath.
"Your mom is fine," Amelia says hesitantly.
"Then what is it?" Owen is slightly exasperated at being woken for no reason.
"There's another patient that you need to see."
"Okay, which room?"
"1324." she directs him. He begins walking towards the room, and she follows shortly behind.
The room he arrives at holds a woman whose head is wrapped in cause, clearly having recently undergone brain surgery. The digital placard outside the room lists the patient as Jane Doe, but a glimpse of red hair catches his eye. He'd know it anywhere.
"Megan?" He croaks out. Amelia nods in assent. Owen crumbles to the floor.
"It's really her?" He asks Amelia.
"It's her." A male voice answers. It's then that Owen realizes Riggs is in the room too. The other man's voice wavers. Owen doesn't know how long he's been here, how long he's known Megan was back. His blood boils. Had he known before they even got in the accident? And where had Megan and their mom been going?
Nathan wonders the latter. But also whether Megan will remember them. Will she remember him? She had been gone for so long. Who knows what she had been through?
Amelia's heart hurts for both of them. She doesn't question how Megan got back or how she got here. Amelia knew hardship, and she knew one could come out on top, even when others thought you were through. But she didn't know how to help these two men that had become her family.
They sat quietly in Megan's room, only the beeping of her machines breaking the silence. Megan was in a coma and all they could do was wait for her to wake up.
One thing was for certain though. None of them know where to go from here.
Surgeons aren't good at geometry. Anatomy, obviously. Biology, naturally. Maybe physics, probably algebra. But which one is a parallelogram? And how is that different from a trapezoid again? Sure, angles benefit you if you're a physical therapist. But ask us to compare an equilateral triangle to a scalene one? We surgeons don't know what to do.
Meredith should have known it was too good to be true. She's had her, albeit brief, happiness with Derek. She had just left dark and twisty behind, thinking she could maybe have a happy ending.
But here she was, three kids, past forty, and vying for the attention of a man against a woman in a coma. A woman with whom the object of her affection had serious history. Literal explosive history. You didn't just turn your back on that. Meredith knew life wasn't fair, but really?
She knows she should be the bigger person and be there for Nathan, for Owen too, in this time of turmoil. Alex is standing in the attendings ' locker room pulling on a sweater when she pushes the door open. It's clear from the look on his face that he has also had too long of a day.
"I heard," he begins.
"I know. Everyone has by now." Meredith pushes her sneakers off and starts changing.
"I had the kid that caused their accident. Fucking DeLuca saved her in the nick of time."
"How was working with him?" She inquires.
"It was like…" he shakes his head and trails off.
"I should stay, right? I should stay," Meredith says, trying to convince herself.
"Probably."
"Probably."
"Tequila?"
"I thought you'd never ask." Meredith slips her boots on and the pair descend the elevator in silence and walk back to the car.