Boston 18 months earlier…

Running away was easy. She had left in a hurry after Jackson had helped her get a new job at . He had assured her that her secret would be safe with him. But there was a secret that she had just uncovered herself.

No, total accident"
„So are we happy about this or are we exercising our legal right to choose?"

It had turned blue about twenty minutes ago. Meredith was holding a pregnancy test in her hands. This couldn't be right. Her hands were shaking. She had a hostile uterus and they had tried everything - she had almost gone blind. Tears ran down her face. The day she had held a test like this had been the most horrible day of her life. Gary Clarke had shot several people and she had seen her husband die. The heart monitor had started to beep and she had looked at the line go flat and one minutes later she had felt blood running down her thighs. Now she sat on the toilet of her empty apartment wishing it was that day again. She had gotten Derek back -right now it felt like he was gone -gone forever.

I was pregnant that day. I was pregnant and I lost it"

She finally put the test into the bin next to her toilet and brushed her teeth. It was her first day of work and she wasn't going to be late – not like in Seattle. At least she hadn't slept with her boss prior to working at the hospital this time which was an improvement over last time. Had they found the note yet she wondered?


Seattle – the present day

"Do you ever think about what happened to her?" Lexie looked at Mark and put down the pregnancy test she had just taken. She kissed his temple and sat down next to him "She's my sister, I really wanna tell her, but she just vanished. She's going to be an aunt and…"

"We are having a baby" Mark smiled "Sofia will be the best big sister he could dream off.".

"How do you know it's a he? Besides, I'm the best older sister anyone could dream of" Lexie wondered. "I have to go, Derek wants me to do a shunt insertion. It's going to be my first solo neuro surgery. Isn't that amazing?"

"You are amazing, Dear." Mark said.

"Do I tell him?" Lexie wondered."He's been acting weird ever since the ceremony"

"Why wouldn't you?" Mark wondered „Zola is going to have a cousin. Isn't that something worth mentioning? Or are you embarrassed it's my baby?"


Boston 18 months earlier…

"Oh my God" the resident next to her stuttered. "Grey? As in Ellis Grey? As in the Ellis Grey? I can't believe I get to work with her daughter. It's such a pleasure. She's such a role model for any surgeon. I mean she won the Harper Avery twice." Upon singing praise on her mother's achievements the chubby brown haired Caucasian guy got paged and excused himself. Meredith looked around the resident locker room when she was interrupted by a voice. "Seems like you have a fan already." A woman noted "I'm Dr. Pierce, a cardio thoracic fellow. You are with me today." She was young- very young in fact. Meredith looked at her.
"If you think I'm young – you are not mistaken, but do not mistake me for being weak. When I page you, I want you to show up, when I leave a patient in your care, I want you to take care of him. Understood?"

"Yeah" Meredith nodded "Not killing patients." For a minute she thought whether it had been a good idea to accept the opening in Boston, but here she was – as pregnant as her mom and as lonely.


Seattle – the present day

"What are you doing?" Mark wondered when he walked into Derek's house. He had sold the land in the woods shortly after Meredith had left and was now living in midtown Seattle. As he walked in he noticed that Derek was sitting at Zola's play table wearing a princess crown drinking tea.

"What can I say? If the only lady in my life asks me to have tea with her, I do." He said. "What are you doing here?"

"Can't your best friend come over every once in a while to check on you?" Mark said. Checking on his best friend was something he had done very frequently in the past 18 months. "We haven't been out in ages because you burry yourself in cases that nobody else even wants to get near to. You should spend more time outside of that OR again. You haven't been out much since the divorce. You should get out -one of the nurses has been asking if you were interested"

"I don't want to go out, Mark" Derek said "I just feel like Seattle doesn't feel right for me anymore."
"Well, at least you get to go to Boston for the Harper Avery ceremony next week" Mark smiled "and you will see her"


Boston 18 months earlier…

First patient and it already started to get tricky. If the test earlier this morning had been correct, she wasn't supposed to be in her while they were doing "I can't be in here without a lead wrap." Meredith said. She knew she had to protect that baby. While Derek might have left, this baby was theirs and it was worth protecting.

"What do you mean?" Dr. Pierce wondered.

"I can't be in here while we do this." Meredith repeated and looked at one of the nurses. The red haired nurse in her 40s understood and looked at Dr. Pierce and pointed at Meredith's flat stomach with her eyes.

"Are you saying you are…?" Maggie wondered without saying the word.

"I might…" Meredith said. It was her first day of work and she had to admit that she was the pregnant resident.

"Get out now" Maggie said harsh. Meredith eyes filled with tears as she walked out the door, but she heard that Dr. Pierce added "and come back in once we are finished with the scan."


Seattle present day

Derek looked at his phone. Two missed calls from a blocked number. "Meredith will be there." Derek looked at the invitation. He was asked to fill a table and it was a little harder than he had expected it to be. He would ask his mother, Mark and the resident who had supervised the pretrial stage. At least Callie had volunteered to look after Zola, so that was one concern less. But there were two other seats at his table and he was once again reminded of how lonely he really was. If he had received news like this a year ago, he would have gone home with a bottle of bubbly and they would have celebrated. She would have sat next to him at the ceremony and she would look into his eyes while he thanked everyone - at least that's what he pictured it to be like.

"That's to be expected. She worked on a project that got a nomination. They might have cured diabetes. Pretty cool." Mark noticed the look on Derek's face "What are you afraid of?" Mark wondered. After their brief encounter in Boston he knew that she was in a good place - at least that was what she had made him believe.

Derek thought about the prom. Their eyes met on the dancefloor and they forgot the people they were dancing with. He didn't want to love her back then, he was forced to. It had felt like a gravital force had pulled them to another. It had been magic. "Her eyes don't light up when she hears my name anymore. She doesn't get chills when I walk by and her heart doesn't race when I smile at her." Derek said "I'm afraid that I'll feel like I'm drowning when I look at her."

"Right." Mark nodded. Twelve months out and Derek was still hanging on to the thought of a happily ever after. "You won't get to her like you used to. You're just a bad memory in the back of her mind." Mark told him. "So, don't be surprised next time you make your way past her, she doesn't even glance your way. You divorced her. Remember? You told her to leave."

"So you are trying to tell me that I shouldn't bother talking to her at the ceremony?" Derek looked at his friend. "That she's over fighting the same losing battle? How do you know?"

Mark had not told Derek about whom he had met in Boston. He couldn't know anything about the father of Meredith's baby, but from looking at her he figured that she was happy in Boston. "Derek, the saddest part is, you have no one to blame but yourself. You could have picked up the phone and called her. When she screwed up, you didn't even give her the benefit of a doubt"

"I gave her every chance you could ask for."

"Not when it mattered. You told her to leave and…" Mark paused. He could have thrown everything at him, but chose to honor the promise he had given to Meredith.

"She fucked up every time. She shouldn't have tampered with my trial." Derek tried to pick a fight, but Mark was calm enough to resist.

"You wouldn't be here if she hadn't. In my mind she walks around with nothing but a smile on her face, and she laughs louder than ever before." Mark told him. "She's not dark and twisty anymore. She found someone to love. Don't ruin that for her."


"Every part of a trauma tells a different piece of the story and until you look at each and every injury, you can't see what went wrong. We talk about the mechanism of injury, about where it all started, but the truth is, it's sort of a myth. We can't boil every injury down to one single blow. What hurts us is cumulative. It happens over time. We absorb blow after blow, shock after shock, painful hit after hit. But even then, even if we know exactly how we got here, it doesn't mean we can fix it. We can't heal every wound and that's okay. I have to believe it's okay. I have to believe that even if something seems like it cannot be fixed, it doesn't mean it's broken."