Don't lose your faith in me
And I will try not to lose faith in you
Don't put your trust in walls
Cause walls will only crush you when they fall
Be here now, here now
Meredith had almost forgotten what her cell phone ringtone sounded like. It had been so long since she'd heard the simple, cheerful trills of a few repeated electronic notes that it took her a moment to register that someone was calling her. Somehow over the past six weeks, she'd grown accustomed to it being just the three of them, and sometimes forgot that there was an outside world that her friends and her job and the rest of her life were still very much a part of.
She momentarily abandoned her project of packing a picnic lunch and fumbled through her purse, looking for the phone, and by the time she found it, it was already halfway through its second cycle of ringing. The name 'Cristina' flashed across the cover screen and Meredith suddenly realized that so much time had passed since they'd last spoken. She'd told her not to call, that she would if she needed her, and so far, she hadn't. Called.
"Congratulate me," Cristina said after a quick hello, like no time had passed at all.
She positioned the phone between her cheek and shoulder, holding it in place with her chin while she went back to layering turkey and cheese on three slices of bread. "Congratulations. What did you do?"
"You're speaking to your new official superior. If you ever decide to come home."
"You got chief resident?" Meredith asked.
"You're surprised?"
"No," she replied immediately. "I just forgot that was coming up."
"Mer, it already happened. Two weeks ago. I figured you'd call me to see which one of us kicked Olitzer's ass."
"Two weeks ago?" How had the date that would have defined her professional career up to this point come and gone without her even noticing?
"Yeah, Mer. July first," she said, like she could barely believe it didn't register immediately in Meredith's mind. "Mer, you should have seen it. They post the announcement and Olitzer's in surgery doing his 80th rotator cuff of the week, and when he comes out, he thinks he's got it. So he's strutting around, and he turns the corner and sees me shaking hands with the Chief. It was. So. Great."
"That does sound pretty great," Meredith replied, with a slight, halfhearted chuckle.
"You really are just in your own little world out there, aren't you?" Cristina asked.
"Yeah, I guess so. Kind of," Meredith realized aloud. "So how is it calling the shots?"
"Oh, I'm totally drunk with power. Olitzer is literally hiding from me as we speak."
"So things are going well," Meredith smiled.
"Oh yeah, you know what? You get tough with people and you get a lot of things done. It's amazing. How you managed to deal with Bowman for a year though, I'll never know. The man is a complete idiot."
"He's not that bad," she chuckled.
"Well he's not an intern anymore, so he's developed a bit of an ego."
"Says the one who has her colleagues cowering in fear."
"I put in my time," Cristina said defensively. "Besides, Izzie, George, and Alex aren't cowering. Well, George kind of is, but other than that, it's been fine. Bowman is just a man-child. He's a man-child with a scalpel."
"Yeah, I guess he is."
"Meredith, the rest of residency is smooth sailing."
"For you, it is," she replied. She spread some mustard on three more pieces of bread and sloppily flipped them on top of the other slices. A bit of mustard splattered on the counter, and she dabbed at it with a paper towel before slipping the sandwiches into plastic bags.
"Well for you, it will be too."
"I'm not chief resident."
"Yes, but your best friend is."
"Are you telling me you're willing to give me special treatment?"
"Everything has its price, Meredith."
"Oh, so I have to buy you off?"
"Chief resident comes with a big headache, not a big pay raise."
"And yet it's worth it to you," Meredith prodded playfully.
"You're damn right. So will you ever be coming home?" Cristina asked.
Meredith cut an apple into slices, and dumped those in another plastic bag.
She was happy to see that Cristina was still Cristina, so complicated and yet so refreshingly not that way at all. Cristina worked hard for something, and it came to pass. She was rewarded. Meredith thought that was probably what Cristina liked about medicine in the first place – you could know the answers. They were right there in the book to be studied and memorized, and if you followed proper procedure, complications were much less likely to arise. Like Cristina, this was something that Meredith found easy to do. The problems came when you moved away from the realms of science and academia and medicine, and let yourself get invested in matters of the heart. Then it became complicated, and the answers were much less concrete. Maybe that's why Cristina preferred to stick to hearts made of muscle and sinew, tucked away in the same location behind every single human being's ribs.
Meredith finished packing the lunch, and just stood at the kitchen counter, talking to her best friend. She stared out the kitchen window, the one with the slightly chipped paint and the plastic cup of dandelions on the sill, at the ocean as it rolled in, while she held in her hand the connection to the old life that felt at the same time both distant and familiar. She felt stretched, like she was straddled between two worlds.
"After Emily's birthday, I think," she finally replied, "The Chief was ok with giving us time off until Labor Day weekend, and we have the house until then."
"Basically, you don't know."
"Basically. I actually kinda like it here. It's nice."
"But you are coming back, right? Don't tell me you've abandoned surgery to go live on the beach and drink things out of coconuts with straws."
"I don't think I've actually seen a single coconut since we've been here, but I'll try to keep that to a minimum."
"What have you been doing then? How do you fill up that much time? No surgery for three months? I'd slice my leg open just to give myself something to suture."
"Just mostly beach stuff," Meredith replied with an appreciative laugh. "Derek is fishing with Emily right now. I'm supposed to go meet them with lunch in a minute. Yesterday, we read the paper in bed and then went shopping in town. And I don't think I've slept this much since I was Em's age."
"And you like this?"
"I didn't think I would. But Emily loves it, and Derek has…I don't think I've ever seen Derek like this."
"Like what?" Cristina asked. "You've seen Shepherd pretty much every way there is to see him. No, you know what, I don't even want to know."
"No," Meredith laughed. "Not like that. He has this whole rugged surfer side of him that I never knew about."
"What, like child of the ocean?"
"Yeah. It's actually really sexy. Like I notice his arms a lot now. He's got these really strong shoulders and his biceps are like…."
"Meredith," Cristina interrupted. "No." She changed the subject. "How's Em?"
"She loves it here. She's been in the water almost every day jumping waves and boogie boarding. Derek taught her. It's like she's not afraid of anything," she said proudly. She hesitated before she asked, "How come you haven't called sooner?"
"You told me not to," Cristina reminded. "You said you'd call if you needed to."
"Oh," Meredith sighed. "That's right."
"Have you needed to?"
She needed her those first few weeks, when she and Derek danced around each other, close-lipped. But since then, things had slowly started to improve. She missed Cristina, and she missed the hospital, but she was not desperate for them. She did not feel utterly lost here, alone with her husband and daughter. She no longer needed the hospital to serve as a distraction for all the things she did not want to face. She actually felt almost…comfortable.
"How is Project Fix Our Marriage working out?" Cristina pressed.
Meredith paused. She was learning him all over again, studying him like they had just met. She likened their situation to how couples on their first few tentative dates behaved towards each other, in a way—timid, reserved, overly conceding—tiptoeing around each other like they were trying to do their best not to offend, to see if it was worth going to the next level. Of course, this was all based on imagination, since her first something serious had been Derek, and they'd bloomed from one too many tequila shots and an illicit one night stand. Derek had never been hesitant with her, and she'd been at least as open as she'd ever been. But they were both timid now, trying as hard as they ever had to make the other one understand that they still wanted this.
She felt like she had almost made her peace with the baby, like she was finally allowing herself to stop grieving over what was not to be. Sometimes, when she really stopped to think about it, which was actually quite often lately, she realized that she let the baby go months ago. She understood now that what she was really missing, what she was really grieving over so bitterly, was partly the loss of the baby, but it was mostly the loss of Derek, and the intimacy in her marriage—which had come so close on the heels of the miscarriage that she hadn't seen it slither in at the time. She felt this most acutely when Derek hugged her, or crawled into bed flush next to her after reading, or poured her coffee for her in the morning. It was only in the little things that he had started to do again that she understood the enormity of what they had allowed themselves to lose.
Now she understood what this was about, why Derek had been so adamant about coming here, and why he had literally begged her. They had wanted that baby. They'd cried, and laughed, and agonized, and suffered over it, but in the end, if they were ever going to move forward, they had to make their peace with the fact that it was irretrievably lost.
This trip, a retreat back to simplicity, wasn't about that, and it took Meredith this long to realize it never had been. This was about taking back what could be taken back.
"Meredith?" Cristina jarred her out of her thoughts.
"Um," Meredith stumbled over the words that were sorting themselves out in her head. "We've been talking about some stuff. We're doing better. I don't know, it's hard to explain, Cristina. It's a lot."
"You're gone six weeks and all you can say is you're doing better?" Cristina asked indignantly. "Well, at least you can have all the sex you want. You've got the time. That has to help with the reconnection process."
"Actually, we haven't quite gotten there…we haven't done…we're not that much better yet."
"Are you kidding me?"
"No, but it's not really about that though."
"Of course it's about that," Cristina cried. "It's about the connection crap or whatever. Isn't that what you told me you were trying to do? Reconnect? Plus, come on, it's you and Shepherd…. Dirty, dirty sex is like your thing."
"That makes me feel great," Meredith said sarcastically. "By the way, I hope you have some semblance of privacy wherever you are. I don't need the whole hospital thinking that the Chief let us take leaves of absence to we could go on some wild sex romp."
"I'm not going to lie to you, I thought that would be a big part of it," Cristina said.
"Well, it hasn't been," Meredith countered.
"It begs the question then—what are you waiting for? Reconnect and come home. Pastern is saying I'm like the new Bailey. I think they're conspiring to create a new secret nickname for me. It's great. I'm finally getting paid to be a hard-ass."
"It's just not…" Meredith began, but she dropped it as soon as she started it. "I still…. You know what, nevermind. We'll be home in a few weeks."
"What, Mer?" Cristina asked, growing serious.
"It's stupid. It's nothing," she replied, audibly flustered. "Congratulations on Chief Resident, Cristina. That's great. Really, really great," she said with as much sincerity in her voice as she could dig up. "I actually have to go, but I'll call you. Sooner this time. We'll be home soon."
"Meredith."
"I have to feed Emily. She hasn't had lunch yet. Cristina, I'm fine. Seriously."
"Ok," Cristina sighed.
"I'll see you soon," Meredith assured her, and hung up the phone.
She gathered up the food, dropping the sandwiches and fruit along with a few water bottles into a larger bag stuffed with towels and sunscreen, and padded on to the back porch, pulling the door closed behind her. She set off down the beach to the jetty, where Derek had told her they would be.
The slick black rocks of the jetty jutted out at odd angles, and she had to climb about eight feet to get to the top, but once she navigated her way up there, it became a much smoother path, despite some deep rivulets between the rocks. The past several days had been filled with sunshine, and that day was the first overcast one that they had had in awhile. That, combined with the fact that the air got incrementally cooler the further she went out, made her thankful that Derek had suggested that she wear a long-sleeved t-shirt.
The jetty extended as a solid rock formation for nearly 30feet in front of her. It was about 15 feet wide, and as she kept walking and the waves rolled against the sides of it, she had the strange sensation that she was almost walking on water. From her vantage point, the jetty looked like it was stabbing the horizon like a knife, like when the sun began to set later that night, she could walk right out to meet it. At the end of path, she could see Derek and Emily together, so distinctly recognizable even by the backs of their heads. Emily was situated in the exact middle of the jetty, like Derek had planned it that way so that the jetty itself formed a natural barrier between her and the water. She was playing with something that Meredith couldn't make out yet. Her pink hooded sweatshirt hid her curly hair from Meredith's view, but Derek's shock of wavy black hair was unmistakable. Derek, wearing shorts and a long-sleeved gray t-shirt that almost matched the sky, stood at the end of it, almost past where the path itself stopped and the jagged rocks began. His rod was cast into the ocean, and he was simply standing there patiently, waiting for something to happen.
She had always known that Derek loved to fish, but she had never quite understood why. Derek was the kind of man that liked to take control, who liked to do things and say things and be things, and fishing, though she had never really tried it, seemed like it was about the exact opposite. Fishing involved a lot of waiting, seeing what the current was going to bring you. It was about letting the fish come to you, and the impossibility of actually going to get the fish yourself. Derek had tried to explain that when he got a bite, it was hardly inactive, and it took the right kind of skill to reel a fish in, but Meredith still didn't quite understand how a few moments of action would be enough to satisfy an always-voracious man like Derek. Since they arrived here, and Meredith had gone with him to watch him fish several times, she was starting to understand a little more. Maybe this was his escape, the one time where he didn't have to be in control, because no one expected it from him. The situation did not allow for him to take control, so it was ok to just let it be. Derek didn't have to be anything, or do anything. He just had to be there.
When she reached the end, she set her bag down on the ground, and went to Derek first. He turned a little when she touched his side, and one arm curled around her waist while the other kept a firm, steady grip on his rod and his eyes stared out at the water. With one hand on his stomach, and the other around his back, she rested her head on his shoulder. The whole embrace lasted about ten seconds before she pulled away and he turned to fully face her.
"Hi, Mommy," Emily exclaimed, looking up from her toys, which Meredith could now clearly see were a few spongy fish-shaped stuffed animals. Her own miniature fishing pole was propped up on the other side of Derek, though the line was still in the water. Emily had probably gotten bored holding it and decided to move on to something else.
"Hi, Em," she said brightly.
"Where were you?" Derek asked. He hadn't shaved in a day or two, and the stubble that had grown in since then contributed to the fisherman image.
"I'm sorry," Meredith said. "Cristina called and was talking about," she hesitated, "Things. And I got held up."
"Cristina called? Is everything ok?"
"Yeah, everything's fine. She just wanted to tell me that she got Chief Resident."
"It's the middle of July, that should have been decided weeks ago," Derek mused.
"It was, but when I didn't call, she just decided to…I mean, I guess she got tired of waiting to tell me. She was pretty happy about it. She figured I would have called, but then I didn't, so…."
"You haven't talked to her at all since we've been here?"
"No," Meredith replied. "Just me, you, and Em." Come to think of it, she hadn't seen Derek take a phone call either. Occasionally, his cell phone rang, and sometimes he'd talk for a minute or two, but most of the time he would inspect the caller ID, and then disconnect the call. He'd taken steps to isolate them from all distractions, and without even really realizing it, she had done the same.
"How is everything at the hospital?" Derek asked.
"She's loving the job. When she called, she said Olitzer was hiding from her, and Bowman was, I believe she used the phrase, 'cowering in fear.'"
"I can't say I blame them. If I were a resident, I'd be hiding from Cristina too," Derek laughed. "Bowman is an idiot though."
"That's what she said," Meredith said amusedly. "Olitzer is just licking his wounds. He'll be fine. I think he was the only one in the hospital who thought he actually had a shot. Everyone knew Cristina was a lock."
"Cristina is good," Derek agreed. "Why didn't you call her sooner?"
"I guess I just wasn't thinking about it," Meredith admitted. "And I guess Cristina thought that maybe I would be jealous or something, so she didn't call. It kind of sounded that way."
"Are you?"
"No, not really," she replied. "I mean, of course it'd be a big honor and probably kind of fun in a way, but I'm not jealous. I wasn't expecting to get it."
"Well, it's not because you're not good at what you do. You're just as good as Cristina."
"I basically took myself out of it when I decided to come here. The Chief wasn't going to choose me." She shrugged noncommittally and turned to Emily. "Em, are you ready for lunch?"
Emily looked up from her toys; she was making the fish swim by moving them through the air with her hands, up and down, back and forth.
"I guess I eat now," she said.
"You guess you'll eat now?" Meredith asked amusedly as she sat on the ground and unpacked the bag. She passed a sandwich up to Derek, and Emily scooched to sit next to her. She opened her mouth and Meredith offered her an apple slice. She took a satisfying bite, and chewed and talked at the same time.
"Mommy, these my fish," she said, holding up the two stuffed animals she still had in her hands.
"They are? Where did you get those?" Meredith asked. She waited for Emily to swallow before she unwrapped the sandwich, broke off a bite-sized piece with her fingers, and held it out to her.
"I get them at the," she took a bite of the sandwich, "I get them at that place with the whirly whirl."
Meredith smiled, remembering Emily's amazement the week before at what she had to admit was a pretty impressive gumball machine in front of the toy store.
"And did Daddy buy them for you?"
"Yup," Emily nodded, slowly but surely making her way through the sandwich as Meredith talked to her.
"Do they have names, Em?" Derek asked.
While Emily pondered the question, Meredith took the opportunity to get another bite of apple in her. Emily chewed thoughtfully, swallowed, and took another bite before she finally answered. Some flecks of apple came out of her mouth as she announced, "Daddy and Mommy."
"What, Em?" Meredith asked.
"That their names," Emily declared. "That one Daddy," she said, holding up the blue fish with green spots, "And that one Mommy," she said, raising her other hand, which held a pink fish with a few purple stripes. They were nothing one might expect to find in the wild, but Emily seemed interested enough in them as things to play with.
"Those are good names," Derek grinned, swallowing a bite of his own sandwich.
"Why is that one Mommy and the other one Daddy?" Meredith asked.
Emily held up the blue fish. "This one is Daddy cause he the stwongest." She switched to the red fish, "And that one is Mommy cause she the pwettiest. That a princess fishie."
"Is Mommy a princess?" Derek asked.
Emily took another bite of her sandwich, and shrugged, her hands up in the air. "I sink so but I not know," she said with her mouth full.
"Well, what about the Daddy fish?" Meredith offered. "Is he a princess?"
"No," Emily laughed gleefully.
"Why not?"
"Daddy is a boy!" she cried.
"Oh, so only girls can be princesses?" Derek asked. He crumpled his plastic bag in one hand.
"Yeah, only girls," Emily said decidedly.
"Are you a princess?"
Emily scrunched her shoulders and wrinkled her nose. With a wry, slightly devilish smile, she said, "Yes."
"I see," Meredith said. Her voice was as light with amusement. "So what are Mommy and Daddy Fish doing today?"
"They swimmin' in the ocean."
"Do they like the water?"
"Yeah, cause it's cold and they can swim in there," Emily replied, and she moved the fish in her hands through the air a little bit. "See?"
"Oh, ok," Meredith smiled.
"Who is the best swimmer?" Derek asked. "Mommy or Daddy Fish?"
Emily paused, and took a big bite of her food while she considered the question. "Daddy is the best swimmer."
"Why?" he asked, but he was clearly even just the slightest bit proud that Emily had said that.
"Cause the Mommy sinks that ocean is so chilly."
Meredith couldn't resist. Sometimes she and Derek just questioned Emily endlessly, just because they found her so interesting and startlingly smart and funny, that they just wanted to see what she would say.
"Does it ever get too cold?"
Emily shrugged, and tilted her head to the side and thought about it. "Sometimes."
"What happens when that happens?" Meredith asked, now actually genuinely curious as to what Emily would say.
"The Daddy Fish helps the Mommy Fish swim cause he is the stwongest."
"Does the Daddy ever get tired of swimming?" Derek asked.
"No," Emily said decidedly.
"Why not?"
"Cause he got these dots," Emily said, motioning to the green polka dots on the toy. "And they go woosh." She swung her arms in a half circle, swinging the fish with her. "See?"
"You're right, it's just like woosh," Meredith laughed. "What does the Mommy Fish do?"
"She makes the Daddy happy," Emily said. "Happy, happy, happy," she cried, her voice lifting with the last word. She paused for a moment, and looked at first Meredith, then Derek. "I sink I done my lunch."
"One more bite," Meredith insisted. There was only a little left of Emily's half of the sandwich, and after she took one last big, chomping bite, Meredith started on the other half for herself. "Ok, you can be done."
"Daddy, I can hold this now," Emily said. She grabbed her fishing rod and stood next to Derek.
"Ok, remember what we talked about?"
"I stay so still," Emily nodded.
"Yes, and I don't want you to walk around too much because it's slippery."
"Ok," Emily agreed seriously.
While Meredith finished her lunch, the second half of Emily's sandwich and just a few bites out of her own, she watched Emily and Derek fish. She was still seated on the hard rock floor of the jetty behind both of them, and they faced away from her, out towards the horizon. Derek held his rod in his right hand, and rested his left on top of Emily's head. He stayed incredibly still, moving only occasionally to recast his line. Meredith stood up when she was done eating, and positioned herself on the other side of Derek.
At first, she didn't speak, feeling like if she did, she would interrupt something inexplicable as the three of them stared aimlessly out at the endless ocean. But after awhile, when neither Derek nor Emily had caught anything, she couldn't be silent any longer.
"Is it supposed to take this long?" she asked quietly. She didn't look at Derek when she said it, and her voice came out disjointed and distant as she spoke. As the words left her lips, she realized that she'd wanted to ask this very question for so long, that it had flitted through her thoughts so many times in one form or another, yet had never been articulated.
"What?"
"Fishing," Meredith supplied after a silence that was probably barely noticeable, yet felt unbearably long to her. "Shouldn't you have caught one by now?"
"Patience." Derek watched the water. "Sometimes it takes awhile. But today is pretty slow. Slower than I thought it would be."
"Oh," was all she could think to say, and they sunk back into a sudden stillness that wasn't uncomfortable, yet not altogether easy either. Meredith was very aware that Derek was not touching her.
Emily started to hum a song to herself, nothing Meredith or Derek recognized, just a jumble of nonsense words and syllables tumbling out blissful and fast. Meredith wished that she had thought to bring a book or something, because Derek seemed content to just stand there, immersed in his own thoughts. He didn't mind if she was there, but she was pretty sure that it wouldn't bother him if she wasn't. He was ok with the quiet, ok with just letting the moment fill him and take him away. Maybe Derek's thoughts were a safer place to be than hers were.
"I was thinking," she cut the silence again like a beam of light through a thick fog, "When we get back, what do you think about getting a dog?"
"A dog?"
"Yeah, I think it would be good for her. You had a dog growing up, didn't you?"
"First Parker, then Sam," Derek said. "They were both big dogs though, Mer. Labs. Do you think we can take care of a dog right now?"
"We had Doc when I was an intern. Well, you had Doc, in that trailer no less."
"That's true," Derek conceded.
As Derek considered her proposition, she thought about why she wanted this for Emily. The few hours after school sometimes seemed unbearably daunting when it was just you and the babysitter. There was something to be said, she thought, for having a companion. There was something to be said for someone to share sandwiches with, to play in the snow with, to cuddle with in the middle of the night. And though Meredith demanded more from herself than what her own mother had ever given her, there was no way that she could fill every single instant of her daughter's life by herself. All of her reasons swirled around in her head, long white filaments of thought twisting and turning, and forcing themselves out in one hesitant breath.
"I don't want Emily to grow up alone," she supplied.
"Oh." Derek looked away, first at Emily and then out at the ocean, and focused intently on his fishing line, slack and dangling into the water.
She studied him, the way the expression on his face became ever so slightly wistful, like he was trying to hold something in. He adjusted his line a little, reeling in just a few inches or so for no particular reason except to give his hands something to do.
Her voice was softer than it normally was, because she didn't want Emily to overhear their conversation, but she raised her voice just slightly when she said, "I just think it would be good for her to have someone to play with."
"It would be good for her."
He watched her, until his gaze became almost uncomfortably penetrative. He didn't look angry, just wounded, like she was actively reaching into his chest and squeezing his beating heart. He opened his mouth just once, as if he was about to say something, but quickly swallowed whatever it was back and returned to fiddling with his rod.
"I guess we can get a dog," he finally said, except it sounded more like a surrender than anything else.
"Should we get a puppy, or should we get an older dog, so we don't have to housebreak it or whatever?"
"It doesn't matter," he said. "Bean, turn your reel a little bit. Wind it up," he instructed. Emily twisted her rod a just slightly. "There you go."
The silence returned with a vengeance, planting itself firmly between the two of them for a solid five minutes. Meredith shifted her weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other, standing awkwardly beside Derek and transferring her gaze from him to her, then back to her again. Emily was walking back and forth, just a few paces to the left and then to the right, dragging her pole behind her. Even Meredith knew that she'd never catch anything if she didn't stay still, but Derek didn't say a word to her.
"What?" Meredith asked, even though she was pretty sure she already knew.
"You're never going to want to have another baby, are you?" he asked. There it was.
"Derek…."
"Meredith, I'd rather you just tell me so I can stop hoping, if that's how it's going to be."
"I can't," she finally said.
"You can't?"
"I don't want to," she said defensively.
When his voice softened, he surprised even himself when he asked her tenderly, "Are you scared?"
"No," she said as quickly as she could, to stop an accidental yes from bubbling out as something she didn't care to share with him yet.
"Why, Meredith?"
"I just…" she trailed off.
Emily had propped her pole back on the makeshift stand Derek had made for it and had her stuffed fish in her hands again. She paced around a few times in the same circular path around the jetty, stopping only to hastily push the sleeves of her sweatshirt up when they slid down to cover her hands. She twirled once more, and her hood slipped off, revealing a full head of curly blonde locks, made more voluminous by the salty, moist sea air. When she realized that this happened, she stopped and shrugged her shoulders, then shot a dazzling smile up at Meredith. She plopped down on the ground, toys in hand, and she continued to play with them. She swam them back and forth through the imaginary waves in the air, and added some high-pitched squeaks and squeals as fish-appropriate sound effects, laughing at her own brilliance.
"Isn't she enough?" Meredith asked.
"Of course she is," Derek said. "Meredith."
"Derek."
"You just said you didn't want her to grow up alone," he reasoned.
"I don't."
"Well…."
"You really need another one?" Meredith asked.
"Don't you still wonder?" he asked desperately, without answering her question.
"Yeah, sometimes, but what good does that do?" she shot back.
"Exactly," he cried. "What good does wondering do?"
"I guess it doesn't," she retorted.
Wondering didn't do any good. The past year had been evidence enough of that. So what if there was an ache inside when she thought about the startling difference between what she had and what she wanted? It was there, but it gave her nothing to go on. Picturing the baby's would-be piercing blue eyes didn't make them real. Wondering when she would, or if she could ever, know that Derek still loved her didn't make it come true. She'd wasted so much time pushing reality away, and now she realized that it was imperative that she stare it in the face, if only just this once.
"So what are you saying?" she posed the question. "If I don't want to have another baby, that's it?"
"That's not what I'm saying."
"What are you saying then?" she asked, calm only for the fact that Emily, though distracted, was well within earshot.
"You won't be honest with me."
"You won't be honest with me either."
"I'm telling you right now what I want," he said, setting his pole down for the first time and facing her point to point.
"You're telling me that you won't divorce me over this. But how do I know you're not going to just resent me for it?"
"I don't know," he admitted. His expression may have been soft, but she could see the fierceness in his eyes. "Why, Meredith? You were happy, weren't you?"
"Yeah, I was," she said softly.
"Do you think it's going to happen again?"
"I don't want to find out the hard way," she admitted.
"Meredith, you know that plenty of women have gone on to have healthy babies after. You know that."
"I don't know what you want me to say," she sighed. "I can't promise you this, Derek."
"Think about it," he urged.
"I can't promise you, Derek. I don't…."
He cut her off. "Think about it." She started to say something else, but he was right there. "Please."
They left the jetty not long after, navigating their way down the rocky barriers to the smooth sand. Much to Derek's disappointment, neither Emily nor Derek had caught any fish. They hadn't even had one bite.
Their flip flops left distinct footprints in the moist sand, trailing zigzag lines behind them as they headed south. Meredith and Derek each had one hand firmly clasped in Emily's, and on the way back the house, she remained firmly fixed in the middle. More than once, she shrieked and sprinted ahead, lifting her legs and swinging them, letting Meredith and Derek bear her weight.
It wasn't a very long walk back to the house. They made it there in eight minutes. Before a string of drenching afternoon showers rolled in and settled.
Emily pulled them forward.
A/N: I am so sorry for the long wait between updates. My life is kind of insane at the moment between full-time school, an internship, and a big volunteer project on the side. I'm sure a lot of you can relate!! Thank you to those of you who checked in just to see if I was ok; that was really nice! Thank you all so much for reading, for your reviews, and for your patience!
