Some answers, some new questions.

Enjoy!


"Do you do this often?"

"Mere...what?"

"Do. You. Do this often," she stares up at him from the soft chair she's sunk into in what seems to be Addison's picture-perfect living room, feeling like it's trying to swallow her up. "You know, run away from your life. Your wife. Find new ones?"

And a kid thrown in for good measure!

But she doesn't say it, because maybe, just maybe, God is cutting her a break and he doesn't have a secret child.

Yeah right.

Just like he didn't have a secret wife all those years ago.

"I can explain." he says, his eyes earnest, leaning over her with his hands on the arms of the chair. "Let me."

"Like hell you can," she snarls, pushing at his chest, wishing for more effectual fists. "How long did it take you to replace Zola?"

Because that's what it feels like. Like being replaced.

And now she can sympathise with Satan.

Great.

"Meredith, it's not what you -"

"Oh my god," she gasps, sudden realisation creeping into her mind. "All these years..."

"No," he says quickly. "I didn't know, Meredith, how can you even think-"

He looks slightly hurt, that she would think of him as the kind of person who ignored his own child for almost five years, and a very small part of her, the part that sometimes likes being called Mrs. Shepherd, feels bad.

"Derek."

She's standing in the doorway, but she doesn't look indecisive. "Can I speak to Meredith for a minute?"

He makes a sort of wordless sweeping gesture towards her, and she pads into the room in flannel slippers that look out of place on her feet.

She perches on a low pouf thing, eyeing Derek when he doesn't move at all.

"Alone."

He looks surprised, then worried. "Addison..."

"Just for a while. " she says, her voice casual but her eyes hard, and the silent communication between them leaves her feeling slightly left out.

He shrugs, leaving her alone with Addison, who shifts uncomfortably, looking like she would rather be anywhere else.

"She's his." she says suddenly, and it's like a weight has been lifted off her shoulders, the crushing weight of uncertainty, and for a brief second it feels like relief but the she feels oddly light, like she's drifting away, dissociating from what's happening.

"I'd want to know, right away," Addison's saying, her voice muffled in her ears like she's underwater. Or Addison is. One of them, anyway.

"So I thought I'd get that out of the way..." she trails off, looking up. "Meredith."

"Yeah?" she jolts back to reality.

"He didn't know," she says firmly, slightly desperately. "You need to know...that he didn't know. About her, he's not that person, and...well, you just need to know there is no way that he would have left."

"Then why," she asks, voice trembling embarrassingly. "Did you never tell him?"


"Bet you wish you were dead right about now." Mark says, only a little maliciously.

"Yeah," he says fervently. His ex and current wives are closeted in a room together. Probably plotting the best way to kill him and dispose of the body.

"I hear the woods behind your house is a great place," Mark says casually. "Quiet. Not too many people."

And now Mark is reading his mind again. He's forgotten how close the three of them used to be.

"How do you know about my woods?" he asks, sitting down at the table as he hears telltale creaking sounds coming down the hall.

"We've been talking," Karev grins as he walks into the kitchen, wheeling a delighted Rosalyn.

"Alex is a neonatal surgeon like Mommy." she informs Mark as she's pushed up to the table.

"Yeah? Did he tell you he wanted to be a plastic surgeon like me?" Mark smiles, lifting her carefully into a booster seat.

"Really?" she cranes her neck at Alex. "Did you?"

"For a while," he says, clearly trying not to laugh at her interest. "But I thought your mom was way cooler."

She grins at this, and Mark looks discomfited.

She goes back to her soggy cereal -muesli, his four year old eats muesli - and Alex excuses himself to make a phone call.

"Who's that lady?" she asks when she's done, an adorable milk moustache decorating her face, and he's seized with the urge to take a picture but she dabs it away with her sleeve, Addison and him combined in one gesture.

"Which one?" he asks as Mark deposits the bowl in the dishwasher.

"The one I almost bumped into?"


"What was it like, growing up with Ellis Grey?" Addison asks finally, after a long tense silence.

"Excuse me?"

"You know, I met her once." she says, settling back and looking , for a moment, like she's far away, somewhere else.

"When I was - when we were interns," she smiles at some memory. "She lectured about...oh, I can't remember, and I scrubbed in on some procedure with her - Derek was so mad I'd stolen it - and I didn't recall, you know, until Seattle, when I met you, that I spent three days with Ellis Grey, most of them in an OR...and not once did she let on that she'd left a child in Boston. You must have been what, sixteen, maybe? So that's why I'm asking, what was it like to grow up with Ellis Grey?"

What was it like?

It was a nanny at first and a key round her neck by the first grade, it was tucking herself in at night and bananas for dinner, it was drowning in expectations and suffocating in the guilt of being an obligation, it was pink streaked hair and tequila doused nights of escape and finally it was merciful forgetting, as she slipped away.

"Cold." she offers when it becomes clear Addison has no inclination to proceed unless she gets an answer.

"Would you want that for Zola?" she asks, and a shudder runs down her spine.

She went out and bought an actual book of nursery rhymes, devoured them the way she did anatomy texts, and she's so good now she can make some up on the spot if she needs to. She buys organic baby food and has endless discussions about diaper rash and spit up and she bends over backwards most weeks to fit her schedule around Zola's daycare. She tries, actively, every minute of every day, to not be her mother.

So no, she wouldn't want that for Zola.

"Exactly," Addison says, and she turns towards her; in the dim early light she can't quite tell if the shape of her mouth is a smile or a grimace.

"What are you trying to say?" she asks, annoyed. She's having a moment here, possibly the most momentous moment of her life, and Addison wants to discuss her childhood ?

"I mean, I had a miserable childhood, yeah, I have mommy issues and daddy issues and whatever... what has all that got to do with you not telling Derek about his own daughter?"

She really does smile this time, almost pityingly. "Come on, Meredith, it has everything to do with it. I'll bet you drive yourself crazy trying not to be like your parents, don't you? You say you had a miserable childhood, I know a bit about that myself, so yeah, I was just ...trying not to be my parents."

"You?" she says incredulously, a laugh bubbling up; she swallows it. "You?"

As far as she knows, Addison is the poster child of a privileged upbringing. Like, guilt inducingly privileged, the kind of privileged that opens doors the rest of them don't even know exist.

She looks a little confused at the shock in her voice, so she clarifies. "Addison, my father left my mother and I when I was five."

"When I was five I caught my father screwing my nanny and didn't sleep for weeks." she says calmly.

Okay, so she wins that round.

"My mother had an affair with Richard Weber. Who left her."

"My mother had an affair with her secretary. Who was also a woman. For the last twenty years, actually... they're married now." she looks slightly surprised at this, like she'd momentarily forgotten the fact.

Wow.

"Well, my mother tried to commit suicide. In front of me." she challenges. This game is pathetic, back at Joe's they call it Whose Life Sucks The Most, but that doesn't mean she's not playing to win.

She always wins.

"So did mine," Addison rolls her eyes. "I wasn't exactly a child then, and I managed to save her... but I get that, too."

"My father left my mother , never tried to see me and then married another woman and had two kids that he loves."

"I spent most of my life lying to my mother about my father's affairs and then I found out she was the one who cheated first and that he lived practically his whole life hoping she'd come back to him... and that I'd spent all those years hating him for no reason at all." she arches one perfectly shaped brow, tucking her feet underneath her,looking like she's settling in. "We could go all day, Meredith. Or you could just, for once, accept you're not the only one who knows what you're going through."

"I get drunk and sleep with inappropriate men," she tries one last time before she realised what that sounded like. "I mean, I used to, anyway."

"Me too." Addison says, deadpan. "I mean, I used to too, but..."

"Mark was your last inappropriate guy?" she feels her lips contorting into a smile.

"Yeah."

"Okay, so we've established that you're pretty much the third twisted sister...was there a point to this?"

"Yes." Addison rolls her eyes; they could be standing in an OR, she could be frustrated at her surgical ineptitude for all the emotion her tone holds. "I was trying not to be my parents...and he would never have left."

It hits her all at once, what Addison's trying to say. "You didn't want him to stay?"

"I did," she says, and her voice is impossibly soft, barely audible, she's looking down into her lap now, fidgeting with the fabric of her worn shirt. "I wanted him to stay, but what you want isn't always the best thing for you and I wasn't ... I wasn't trying to hurt anyone, but I couldn't be selfish, I couldn't weigh him down like that Meredith he was miserable," she looks up now, and her eyes are dark with pain.

"He was miserable and I was hurting and you were caught up in the middle of it all, and it wasn't a place I'd want to bring a baby into, so I made a decision, and it wasn't the easiest or the best but I would still stand by it today."


"She's... my wife," he says finally, for lack of a more tactful way to explain Meredith. She is, anyway.

"And Zola's mom?" Ro asks, leaning her elbows on the table, eyes wide. "Is she sad? That Zola isn't here?"

"Yes, she is," he says carefully; she's empathetic, this tiny girl, so mature for her age...but how well is she going to take it if her mother has to leave her in order to go get Zola?

"Just like your mom would be sad if she couldn't see you," Mark explains, staring right at him.

"I'd be really sad too if I couldn't see Mommy," she says thoughtfully. "Or you, Markie."

Mark doesn't need to say I told you so. His face says it for him.

And then she looks at him, little forehead wrinkled in thought. "And a little bit you too."

He's saved the embarrassment of tearing up in front of Mark when his phone buzzes, and he picks it up immediately, grateful to whoever it is.

"Derek, you didn't show. Again."

Nancy sounds resigned this time, like he's proven her right about something she didn't want to be right about.

"Nance, I'm sorry, but-"

"The apocalypse is the only acceptable reason for you not being here, you little ass, do you have any idea how scared she was?"

Guilt settles heavy in his stomach at the thought of his mother being...interrogated? He has no idea how any of this goes.

"They're talking about neglect, Derek," she's saying, her voice issuing tinnily from the phone, and he steps away from Mark. "Pressing charges, and stuff."

"They wouldn't," he says, wanting to calm his sister down, but deep down he knows he can't be sure.

They wouldn't...would they?

"That's not the last of it, or the worse, Derek."

"Huh?"

"She...she's been seeing Archer about it but-"

There's a piercing shriek from the kitchen, followed by the crashing sound of something being hurled against a wall, the thump of something soft hitting the ground - and then Mark is yelling for him.


Like I said, some answers and some more questions.

I know Addison hasn't fully justified herself yet in some of your eyes but she's getting there.

Hit that review button to make my heart happy and my fingers fly!

And as always, much love to my regular reviewers.