Maggie and Amelia were waiting for her downstairs. For morale support, they'd claimed, but she had a feeling they wanted to interrogate her while her walls were down. They hadn't been satisfied at all by, Um. You guys know I'm bisexual, right? That's come up?

Maggie hadn't flat-out asked Zola's question, but Meredith had seen it cross her face. That for a moment, this thing about her—this truth that was one-hundred percent about Meredith and Meredith alone—had to say something about their mother. Her mom. Her instinctual response belonged to the snideness she developed as a teenager—but came by honestly. She can't say her mother didn't give her anything good. It's not positive; the opposite, really. But it kept her from being the pushover people expected a waifish blonde to be—What does it matter to you, Maggie? You're straight. With Lexie, she'd wondered. It shouldn't have made a difference. It didn't…but it did.

For so long, Ellis was my mother in her head; sharing her was incomprehensible. Is. Maggie had been in her life a long time. Longer than Lexie got, and sometimes Meredith almost forgot.

It's entirely possible she never learned to share. Kindergarten was a weird year.

Did Grandma Ellis know? If she did, was it okay?

Maggie was holding a glass of Merlot that she held up to Meredith before pouring another for herself. Amelia held up her wine glass of water. She always looked like she thought she was going to be challenged over it.

True addiction, drinking for the sake of it, no matter what your life looked like at that point in time wasn't Meredith's particular cross to bear, and she was grateful. It was a cliff she could've toppled over a long time ago, before she even knew she could've inherited the gene from her father—and now she'd never know if his had been a situational case, or if she should already be asking Richard to have a conversation with the kids within the next few years. Both, probably. The talk Amy would have with them would be different. Drugs were different. That hole, Meredith had come far closer to falling down.

"It's hard to buy that. I mean, I've seen you with a bottle of tequila," Cristina had once claimed, when Meredith confessed this during a long night in the medical library. "But I can't imagine you as a junkie."

"When I drink, I'm trying to escape. To get as far away from the pain of my life as possible. Exactly how easy do you think it is to say 'no' when pure escapism is on the table?"

Cristina being Cristina, the conversation devolved into her listing off substances and demanding that Meredith describe their physical effects. "Not the blurry lights, 'I'm so free' mumbo-jumbo," she'd clarified. "The tremors and sweats that make you not want to do it again."

If she'd had a goal, aside from collecting first-hand knowledge to impress an attending in the OR, it could well have been to remind Meredith of why she'd left that lifestyle behind. She hadn't seemed to be judging her, at least. Not even when she'd clearly expected her to start saying, "I haven't tried it," and she hadn't.

Maybe Amelia's unspoken challenges were her way of reminding herself why she'd scaled the cliffs that Meredith had successfully run away from. If so, she wasn't going to get anything but support, whether or not she believed that.

"So?" she demanded, once the three of them were settled on the sofa.

"It went fine. Better than, actually."

"Of course it did. You've got great kids, Grey."

"All thanks to their cool Aunt Amy?"

"You said it." Amelia's tone was glib, but her smile was genuine. She probably would've been willing to move on from there, but Maggie's eyes were narrowed, and Meredith knew what that meant.

As hard as Lexie had worked to get past her walls—She shouldn't compare them. She shouldn't. She did.—Meredith wasn't sure her ability to drill would ever have held a candle to Maggie. Meredith would never, ever admit it, but the truth was, once had Lexie gotten past her defenses, she'd more or less stayed there. Maybe because Maggie was older when they met; because they'd been raised as only children; because Maggie's family was closer to the ideal she'd once projected onto Lexie. Maybe a million things.

She didn't like comparing them, but when discussions repeated themselves it was hard not to.

"If the kids handled it so well," Maggie said, steepling her fingers. "Why are you still so wound up?"

"I'm not—"

"My toddler is not yet diurnal. Let's not do the false denial, we wear you down thing," Amelia demanded.

"Diurnal," Maggie repeated. Amelia gave her a look that made Meredith glad she was sitting between them. She didn't grow up with siblings, but sometimes it was obvious that Maggie hadn't spent much time with other kids. Usually, when she was provoking Amelia.

Meredith sighed. "Yeah, okay. Just… give me a minute." She drained her glass, and then held it out to Maggie to pour her another. It'd been years since her life was all tequila and poor decisions, but sometimes it still took something to make it possible for her to share things that she felt sure Ellis Grey wouldn't want told.

"I don't think my mother was homophobic. The opposite, really," she said, cutting a glance at Maggie. Sometimes, she triggered Meredith's instinct to defend Ellis. Sometimes the opposite. Tonight, Meredith was probably trying to convince herself. "She openly, and vocally, treated AIDS patients. Boston isn't the most diverse city in the world, but except for that first apartment, we lived on Beacon Hill, because Ellis Grey could not live more than ten minutes from the hospital. A lesbian couple ran the coffeeshop across the street. My best friend was the boy next door. His family moved out to the suburbs when we were twelve; his parents got tenure at MIT. We never talked about it explicitly, but if I had to bet…."

It'd been a long time since Will made a cameo in her thoughts, with his too-big front teeth, and single dimple. Meredith's first suspension had been over a fight with a pair of fourth-graders started by making fun of Will's lisp, as though half of the class didn't stumble over "r"s or "d"s, and then started using words that made the playground monitors pay attention.

"Damn, I bet Ellis Grey went off on you over that." Amelia raised her glass in a only slightly mocking toast.

"I see how you'd get there, but actually—"

"What?" Maggie choked on a sip of wine. No. No, 'actually.'"

"Protect your fingers. Never let someone touch you without permission. Don't initiate. Don't punch down. In that order. It took me so long to figure out why I got worse punishments for low grades than fighting." She paused. Never let it be said that she didn't appreciate drama. "We did Christmas at my aunt's. When I was nine, I showed up with a massive scratch on my forehead. The suture kit Mom put in my stocking started as a…she didn't joke, but… a reference—I'd finally learned to do my own hair to, well, not to her standards, but to a standard. Why not do my own sutures?— I got more into it than she expected. Cut my fingers up. Anyway, she wouldn't admit to it, but from what my aunt let slip punishing me for playground tussles would've been hypocritical even for Mom."

"You mean…?" She'd never seen Maggie's eyes get quite that wide.

"The word 'scrappy' was used."

"No!"

"Personally, I was more of a brawler, but yup. Before Ellis Grey out-performed the boys, she beat them up."

The laughter got loud enough that she was surprised she didn't hear a kid creeping down the stairs to investigate.

"So. It was the late-eighties, early nineties. My mother was a doctor. The fights I got into tended to center around certain topics, and she made sure I knew what I was talking about." They nodded, and enough of what she didn't want to say must've gotten across, because they didn't push. "I brought my friend Tucker home from Dartmouth a couple of times, too, when I needed a holiday drinking buddy, and he didn't want to go back to his bigoted parents. Mom definitely thought we were bad influences on each other—"

"Were you?" Maggie asked.

"Hell, yes. But, I dunno, I never got that she was uncomfortable with him being flaming gay, and he'd turn up the heat whenever she and I argued."

Amelia snickered into her glass. "That's fantastic."

"The camp was all that got me through more than one Christmas," she admitted. "He's in Dallas now, working at a theater for queer youth."

"Good for him," Maggie said.

"Mmhmm." She considered going into the rest of it. After Tucker's first appearance freshman summer, there'd been others who needed shelter that didn't come with questions. He'd been the constant, though, and the only one she could say interacted with her mother for more than a minute or two.

"Okay, Ellis never said anything about your friends," Amelia said, a dog picking up Maggie's dropped bone. "What about you?"

"I don't know," she admitted.

The repeated cycles of therapy with Dr. Wyatt told her that she shouldn't be angry at how small the words sounded to her ears. They weren't the words of an award-winning surgeon who headed up the general surgery department, dabbled in neurosurgery, and was raising three kids as a single mother. They were residual from the intern who believed her happiness wasn't enough for her mother; the young adult whose mother told her that she'd never make it through med school, so she might as well be gallivanting off to Europe with that girl; the teenager whose mother never understood that she didn't alter her school uniform for the boys—she did it because otherwise she faded into the woodwork.

"Mom didn't have much family," she said, because she had to go at this story sideways if she approached it at all. "Her parents were gone by the time I was born, and they'd left her this—the—house. From what I can put together, that caused a major schism between her and her sister, especially after we'd moved to Boston, and Mom held onto it. After the… the few months after… that…when she stayed with us, I saw her at Christmas, and that was it. She contracted uterine cancer while I was in college. I don't know if they talked during that period. Seems unlikely."

"And she didn't have kids? No long-lost Grey cousins out there?"

Meredith appreciated that Maggie tried to sound jokey, but she could hear the mix of hesitance and hopefulness in her voice. "No. I guess I'm the last person who can say something is impossible, but that…. She had a roommate who was her executor. She left me my grandmother's pearls."

It'd been satisfying to be given such an heirloom right under her mother's nose, but Ellis wasn't wrong when she told the lawyer he might as well have tossed them in the Dumpster for all her daughter would appreciate them.

Pearls were a symbol of the patriarchy. That's why she'd worn them to her first interview with Janet during the process of Zola's adoption. They were the most straight, maternal WASP item she owned, and after that day she cherished them for the part in her getting her daughter.

"And they were roommates, huh?" Amelia raised her eyebrows.

Meredith shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe. Probably. I don't…." She let her wine glass rest on the coffee table and pressed her fingers against her forehead. "For all that Mom and I fought when I got older, I rarely openly defied her. I believed the hype. The great Ellis Grey who knew everything about what it took to be an independent woman. If she had a grudge against someone, I assumed they deserved it. And she never let a grudge go. Took me a long time to understand that was a way of protecting herself. She might've been cold; she was cold, and hard, but she had feelings. In some ways, she was even sensitive. You don't…Do what she did…." The memory of that day in the kitchen flared in the front of her mind, but she didn't want to go there. It wasn't part of this story, although she'd long ago accepted it was part of her story. "She couldn't have loved the way she loved Richard, either. She came to hate that part of herself. Enough that she never forgave anyone who wounded her. That way, they could never do it again."

And Meredith had never questioned it. Not when she found the paperwork that showed that Thatcher had originally sued for joint custody. Not when her mother stopped telling her that Uncle Richard would be joining them in Boston. Not when her mother went from drinking wine and typing up data in the living room with Marie Cerone six nights a week to coming and going alone. People left. They left without telling Meredith, and they never returned for her sake. Meredith hadn't considered that her mother had a hand in keeping them away, and if she had she would've decided Ellis didn't care enough to control who had access to her daughter.

"I see the logic," Amelia said. "But it's a lonely way to live."

"It is," Meredith agreed. Maggie looked between them, lips pursed, like she couldn't quite imagine it.

"All right, enough about Ellis. What was her name?" Amelia said before the silence got too heavy.

"Hmm?"

"How many times, Grey? Toddler mom. We're not playing dumb. The way you're evading, it's obvious. You don't know what Ellis knew about your sexuality, fine. But you wanted her to know at least once. What. Was. Her. Name?"

Another gulp, long enough to pretend it had the power of a shot. "Layla."

Amelia pulled her feet up onto the couch with a Cheshire Cat smile, and held her hand up to Maggie.

"No high fives! I've been trying to tell you since we sat down. I just got interrupted… and… and not even Derek knew all of it."

"Really, now?"

"Shut up. it's not some epic teenage love story. it's…. I was fifteen." How was it possible for that sentence to relieve the weight on her chest? She hadn't even realized… COVID screwed with her expectations when it came to getting enough air, and part of her found it far too easy to accept the tightness as normal. A part Dr. Wyatt taught her not to ignore.

"Mom brought us here for the summer; she had a major paper to write, and some other research project Seattle Grace agreed to host, probably already trying to woo her, not sure. I was very big on purposefully not listening.

"I knew…. I'd known that I liked girls for a while. Even had the word for it, thanks to the coffeeshop. And I knew Mom was…. tolerant. But I also knew who she wanted me to be, and… she hated the boys, but they never…." Meredith shook her head. "It was always a big deal only if someone she knew could've seen me 'acting like a little whore.' I don't think she actually cared. She was far more invested in my report card.

"She didn't date. Knowing I'd never seen her in love with Thatcher, I assumed for decades that she didn't give a shit about relationships, maybe couldn't love that way at all. It's more understandable when you consider the shell she retreated into post-Richard. There was no getting past that, but she didn't…. Mom wasn't a rah rah women's lib fighter, but she was a feminist, and a scientist. She acknowledged that women had the same desires as men. She didn't…. We were Greys. We had an image to uphold.

"Right when I got my period, we had a very short discussion that established that if I started having sex, I would add condoms to the shopping list. She'd get me set up with the pill. If something happened…" Meredith glanced at Maggie, who was turning her wine glass between her fingers. "She'd pay, but only if she knew it wasn't a result of my carelessness."

"Way to be sex positive, Ellis," Amelia drawled.

"Sex realist. It didn't mean there weren't comments about how often I bought Trojans. For god's sake Meredith, you don't need to throw yourself at them. Have some self-respect!

"Anyway….In Boston, I was under surveillance. It's incredible, all the hospitals in the city, all the med students flowing through, and every single attending physician, surgical nurse, researcher, orderly…they all knew my mother, and for someone who insisted she didn't listen to gossip…. I genuinely thought she might be omniscient. I know that it sounds ridiculous to complain I clearly wanted attention, but…."

"Constant criticism isn't quality time," Amelia suggested.

"Bingo. Fundamentally, I let her make her assumptions and didn't deviate. Wasn't deviant. But, here, that summer. No one knew me. Mom didn't give a shit about the neighbors, because she wasn't making nice to find emergency babysitters anymore. If Seattle Grace gossip was anything like it became, I guess she was too shut in her lab to be in the loop. I never went there. It felt… almost too familiar. Besides, I had Seattle to explore."

"Exactly how grunge were you?"

The answer was very. That summer had been about girls in more ways than one for her. It was the flashpoint of riot grrrl culture, and to Meredith, that had been everything. "I met her at a Hole concert."

"Shut up! Shut up, you saw Hole? Here?" Meredith smiled smugly, and Amelia gave another exasperated squawk. "You did not see Nirvana."

"Okay."

"You did? Bitch!"

And Bikini Kill. 7 Year Bitch. Heavens to Betsy. Dozens of other groups of girls and girl-ish teenagers raging at the patriarchy and every double standard that insisted they be everything except the angry, wild creatures they were.

"Was Layla in a band?" Maggie sing-songed.

Meredith's mind flashed to curls that disobeyed the laws of physics; fingers callused by electric guitar strings; a voice so resonant that it filled dark crevasses in her mind that she hadn't even known about.

"She so was," Amelia crowed. Meredith did an instinctive check for tiny humans, and then flipped her off.

"I never brought guys around intentionally while Mom was home. There were… encounters. I'm sure she thought I was parading them under her nose to get a reaction, but really I knew better. She didn't care about anything but propriety."

This time, even Amelia gave her a few moments before she prodded, "But Layla was different?"

"Yeah. I could've just pretended she was a friend. Brought her in through the front, and Ellis would've been none the wiser. I'd done it in Boston. My first time kissing a girl was actually when she came over to write up a lab report."

Maggie snorted. "Romantic, Mer."

"I didn't believe in romance."

"Why are you blushing, then?"

"It's the wine."

Both her sisters gave her the same bullshit expression. Maybe they were right. She hadn't believed in sacrifice for love, or whatever the draw of Romeo and Juliet was meant to be. But how else could she explain the way she'd felt at different points that summer, especially the handful of nights when it hadn't rained. She and Layla would climb out onto the porch roof and lie with their shoulders pressed together, and fingers untwined. Everything she'd said to the stars when she could've been naked in her bed one floor up, or slamming shots and dancing out their misery in any of a dozen clubs that didn't care about their ages or genders. It was romance.

Usually, Meredith had been desperate to overwhelm her senses with pounding music and writhing bodies, letting the sting of alcohol cleanse the wounds no scans would reveal. Staring at the pinpricks of stars and passing a joint back and forth with Layla was the exact opposite of that. Weed wasn't her usual poison; slowing the world down didn't often serve her purposes. But with Layla, she wanted every minute to take an hour. She wanted to soar up into the sky and find a pocket universe like in one of the superhero comics she used to read with Will at Newbury Comics before the records snared her attention.

The first time Meredith earned a black-eye on the playground, her mother made it clear that Grey's did not hit first—not physically, anyway. Somewhere in that conversation had been directives about not being a bully, and remembering that you never knew what someone had been through. At fifteen, Meredith fully understood the hypocrisy of Ellis Grey saying "hurt people hurt people," and it was everything she could do to keep the frissons of constant fury stoked by every barb contained until she could discharge it in a way that didn't hurt anyone outside of a mosh pit.

Layla didn't soothe her wounds, or anything like that. Meredith could still hear the only words her mother had said to her in two days—We're out of milk. Is there any chance that can change by tomorrow morning? in that tone that 1. Didn't require an answer and 2. Implied that she absolutely couldn't, because her daughter wasn't even competent enough to remember to go to the bodega.

"It makes me want to ignore her for being such a bitch, but then I prove her right."

"And that makes you the bitch," Layla pointed out, punctuating the observation with a cloud of smoke.

"You like me bitchy."

"Duh, but there's bitchy and there's petty, killer. She's baiting you. Show her you're too smart to take it."

"She'll just say I got the wrong size, or become suddenly lactose intolerant," Meredith grumbled. Layla had rolled onto her side, ashing the joint off the roof at the same time. In Boston, Meredith collected and trashed the buds guys left behind on the stoop, but she couldn't bring herself to care if her mother noticed some flecks of gray in the overgrown flower pots.

"Such a pessimist," Layla teased.

"Realist." In the distance, a bevy of sirens cut through the heavy summer air. "Sounds like another shift," Meredith noted. "At this rate, whatever I get will've turned by the time she opens it."

"Mer…"

"It's happened! And she told me that if I wasn't going to even break the seal, I should've waited to buy it!"

"You're always saying she says not to prey on the weak. Doesn't that suggest that she understands that you're strong enough to take it?"

Meredith had thought of that. All things considered, her mother seemed to put her in the same category as a med student or an intern; someone who was capable of rising to her level, but only if they retained every instruction she gave. Criticism she gave her students wasn't personal, so anyone who took offense misread her intent. Anytime anyone commented on her training methods she'd say, I'm their instructor, not their family. When Meredith overheard that, and the flat, fake laugh that went along with it, she'd ducked into an empty exam room and screamed into the pillow.

"What if…. You're not right, but if you were… what if I don't want to be strong all the time?" Heresy for even an agnostic member of the Church of Ellis Grey. She almost expected lightening to shoot down from the unusually clear sky and send her ashes into the flower pot.

Layla's laugh was as full-throated as her singing voice, and if she'd responded by laughing Meredith wouldn't have minded. It was absurd; didn't they spend most nights yelling about how strong girls could be? She didn't, though. She'd scooted over until she could put her arm around Meredith's shoulder. The handful of chestnut curls that brushed Meredith's face smelled incredible. Something floral that made Meredith's next exhalation end in ah. Hopefully, that'd help her lungs forgive her for the pot smoke.

After moving her own hair off Meredith's face, she'd traced her cheek, and then her lips. "That means that you are someone who can handle so much that she needs someone to remind her that flaws are what make us human. That you could probably turn yourself into a robot the way your mom has, but you don't want to be one. You have emotions—big ones—and you don't actually want to get rid of them. You want to feel, because that's what lets you empathize, and you like being to see the world from other perspectives. You just wish that sometimes someone would bother to look at it from yours."

Meredith's heart was pounding like she'd made it to last-call after a show full of songs that demanded full-on participation. The things Layla was saying, it felt like she'd found one of the open wounds inside of her, put the blood in a centrifuge, and now she was reading out the resultant diagnosis.

"It would overwhelm most people, you know." Layla's breath tickled the inside of her ear, and Meredith relished the way the sensation made her shiver. Those endorphins were so much easier to trigger.

"What?"

"How much there is to the tiny chick who'll fight for her spot in the pit like it's life-or-death."

"Psh, like you're not right there next to me!" Meredith objected, and pushed up enough so that she could catch Layla's lips. When Layla broke the kiss to breathe, Meredith moved her lips to the full apple of the other girl's cheeks. They were freckled, and soft, and she could've spent as long mapping them as astronomers spent with the stars and not have been satisfied.

"Hey," Layla murmured, one hand holding Meredith's shoulder to push her back an inch. A flash of frustration-anger-fear made Meredith try to jerk away further, but Layla's grip was strong, and she stroked Meredith's arm with her thumb. "Don't pout, killer, I just want to say something." Meredith twisted her lips into a deeper scowl—a scowl, she didn't pout.

"You are brilliant, and smart. Stubborn. Determined. If you want to become a doctor, you'll be a great one, but even if you don't, you're going to do something amazing. Something that helps people. Just…don't let everything you do for others overwhelm who you are."

"Fat chance of that," Meredith said. Her throat felt thick, like maybe the smoke she'd inhaled hadn't gone all the way down into her lungs. "I'm Ellis Grey's daughter, whether she likes it or not."

"That's not exactly what I meant."

Meredith cut her eyes over to glance at the streetlights below them. Even this late into the night, she could hear traffic, but it didn't go down their street as much as it did in Boston. "I know."

When she turned back, Layla was smiling, and Meredith gasped a little. It was impossible that that smile was for her. Before she could translate her wonder into action, Layla dipped in and kissed her nose. "Boop," she said. Then, she darted forward again, her lips landing just to the right of Meredith's ear. "Beep."

"What are you doing?" Meredith asked, pretending to try to avoid the next kiss, but pausing her wiggling long enough for it to land on her forehead with a "beep."

"Seriously."

"If your mom's a robot, I assume it's genetic. I'm pushing your buttons. Boop." She kissed Meredith on the lips this time, and when Meredith parted hers, Layla gently pressed her tongue purposefully against her front tooth. Meredith couldn't stop a giggle from coming out of her open mouth.

"You want to program me, huh?"

"If: I touch you here. Then?" Layla slid her hand under Meredith's t-shirt, the chill of the rings she wore making her squirm away a little when all she wanted was to press closer.

"Mmm. Trial by error," she said. "No user's manual."

"That's okay." Layla's other hand moved idly down and she hooked her thumb behind the waistband of her leather pants, tapping the studs on her belt rhythmically, like they were some kind of keyboard. "I know where to find the refresh button."

Damn, her lines were so corny. If they were coming from some guy, Meredith would've shut him down—ha!—at the start. She could tell by Layla's tone that she knew that, even though she kept her expression earnest. That, and the way that the bit hadn't come out of nowhere, it came from the kind of conversation she didn't have with any boy. Even the ones who considered her one of the guys when they hung out at a Red Sox game, or threw a Super Bowl party in her unsupervised living room, they didn't see her as someone to talk to—and she didn't want to be.

Layla was different. Layla kissed her lazily while they lay on the floor listening to Nevermind, and playfully while Meredith dissected Liz Phair lyrics—it wasn't her fault that they referenced The Picture of Dorian Gray—she also knew Meredith's favorite track in the album was "In Bloom," and "Polly" sometimes made her tear up, with anger she insisted. She hadn't known anything about Oscar Wilde, but the next day she got off the bus carrying The Importance of Being Earnest. She was interested in Meredith as a whole, which wasn't something she could even say about herself some days.

She also knew when the joke was over. After one last boop on the tip of Meredith's nose, she moved her lips down for a long kiss and slid one of legs in between Meredith's. They were dressed to go out, an endeavor they took on before bothering to check the alt-weekly Layla had picked up to discover there wasn't anything they desperately wanted to see—at least not more than they'd wanted to end up exactly where they were.

Meredith was trying to figure out if she could wriggle out of skin-tight leather on the angled roof without ending the night with her mother being paged to the ER when the honk of a car-horn directly in front of the house startled them both. Layla's head slammed into Meredith's chin, and where Meredith had been lightly tugging her lip with her teeth to avoid drawing attention from any neighbor out for a smoke, she bit down, then shouted at the double-whammy of pain.

"Anyone ever tell you how sharp your chin is?" Layla grunted, and before Meredith could get her brain on track to make words she raised her head to kiss the spot of collision. "Boop."

She rolled off. Meredith was preoccupied with pressing her fingers to her rapidly swelling lip, so she slid her bra strap up, and automatically double-checked the drape of her neckless t-shirt when she noticed how far down the marks Layla's lips had left on her chest went. Damn it, if whoever was in that car wasn't her mother, she was going to kill them.

"Mer-ry!" A voice called, in a singsong-tone that made no question about how they were pronouncing the hated nickname.

"Carson." She groaned, even as she started crawling over shingles. "But Yorick's with him. Bet his stepdad caught them again. C'mon."

"See? Empathy."

Meredith rolled her eyes, and let her legs dangle over the edge of the roof. Layla scooted over quickly, grabbing her wrists to steady her as she lowered herself to stand on the railing. Her foot kept slipping; the roof had been dry, but the wood of the porch must hold water for longer. Once she had her feet planted, she struggled to find her balance, but the only time she really thought she might fall was the heartbeat it took for her to grab the railing after Layla let go.

"Uh, I hate to point this out to the mistress of B&E, but the window is still open." The boy in the car pointed up to the master bedroom, which was the only one that gave porch-roof access.

"Shit," Meredith spat.

"I'll get it, killer." Layla made the descent in two drops, without any of the flailing, and wrapped her arms around Meredith before jogging back into the house. Meredith looked after her, amazed that three seconds of kiss-less contact could make her so warm.

She didn't relate all of those details to Maggie and Amelia, but once she started, she definitely shared more of the memory than she'd planned on. It was strange—maybe unprecedented—for both of them to be at a loss for words, but it was a good minute before Maggie broke the silence.

"So, what happened?"

Meredith finished her wine, replacing the glass on the coffee table to keep her from refilling it. "That night? Carson said something stupid about Layla being half my weight, and Yorick slept here for a week under Ellis's nose."

"Rewind: Yorick? Like the no-more-men comic, or like 'alas poor?'"

"Y: The Last Man didn't start until 2003," Maggie said. "Not that I read it. Or that I'm watching the adaptation. Nope."

"You grew up in Boston," Meredith reassured her. "You can't escape without being into comics more than most people. And, I dunno, he shaved his head and had a thing for skulls. He had the nickname before I showed up. The stepdad, too, unfortunately. His dad wasn't super accepting, but he didn't want him sent to conversion therapy, which was better than the stepdad."

Both of her sisters made faces, but the way Amelia shuddered made her wonder how close some of her rehab programs had come to the horror stories that'd always kept Meredith from anything close to troubled teen program levels of acting out. Ellis might've been disengaged, but that made her more worried that the wrong suggestion from an authority figure might tip the scales.

"Did…was there a chance that Ellis thought he was the one you were with?" Maggie asked.

"No," Meredith said. She was certain, but if they needed proof—No, she acknowledged as she went over to the bookshelf across the room. She didn't need an excuse for this.

It wasn't like she hadn't looked at these pictures in thirty years, or whatever. Derek had seen them, and sometimes one of the kids would be interested in the albums that didn't actually have feature them. But then, maybe they hadn't pulled down this one specifically, otherwise wouldn't questions have been asked?

"Here." She flipped through the plastic pages quickly, not wanting to discuss the few repetitive images from Christmases and birthdays, almost all of them taken by her aunt or a baby-sitter. Her aunt had also been the giver of the camera that significantly increased the volume of photos. Ellis had been as dismissive as possible while also demanding manners from her child, but for once Meredith had been genuinely grateful—and her best memory of her aunt came from the next year when she'd thanked her again, because without that camera the memories of her summer in Seattle would've been all the more ephemeral.

"Oh my God, you're babies!" She expected the extreme reaction to come from Maggie, but it was Amelia who had her hands cupped over her mouth. Meredith put a hand on Amelia's leg, and jerked her eyes away from the page for just long enough to make eye contact. Did she see that same innocence when she looked at herself at that age, or the maturity she'd deluded herself into seeing in the mirror?

Showing Derek these photos had been like looking at that one dress online; sometimes she saw herself, the same sharp cheekbones and untrusting stare. Now, there was only the child, Ellie with a few years less baby fat.

"Puberty didn't do all that much for me," she joked, although she knew exactly how much stood between the ten-year-old on a horse at the top of the verso, and the saucy cocked hip that the fifteen-year-old on the recto almost didn't have to think about anymore.

It took her a few breaths to be able to shift her attention from the hand resting on that hip and follow it to its owner. The picture hadn't come from that night on the porch, but it was possible that it was from one of them. They'd ended up there at the edge of morning at least twice, once somersaulting into the window together right as her mother's car came around the corner.

Did she see?

However hard she'd believed herself to be, this girl was shiny compared to the one she'd find if she turned the page. She didn't. She drank in the sight of her teenage self, sitting on another girl's lap, her arms looked around her neck. The boy with the shaved head standing next to them might as well have been in another picture entirely.

Aside from the inevitable fact of being younger than she could believe, Layla wasn't any different than Meredith remembered. In the washed-out light of the diner where they'd taken the picture, it was obvious that she had Puerto Rican heritage, but her skin tone was much closer to her mother's than her father's.

One night, she'd admitted how much she hated being paler than her sisters. "Oh, sure, white boys see me and it's all 'e-spicy mamasita,' but then my sisters say I'll never know how it really is to be a brown girl, because I can pass. There's no in-between."

"I hate that for you."

Meredith had been baffled by the way Layla kissed her in response, even after she'd tried to explain, "You didn't say 'I know.' You just listen."

"I'd change it if I could! I'd tell them—"

"I know, killer," Layla had laughed, filling Meredith's empty places. "I know you would."

"Those curls," Maggie said, drawing Meredith back to the present again.

"They tickled."

"I'll just bet," Amelia teased.

"They were fifteen, Amy!"

"Your point? I'm not perving on them."

"You never did answer the question, Mer. What happened?"

"Summer ended. We said we weren't going to try to be anything, but I mean, fifteen. Even I had fantasies…. At first, I racked up the long distance bill, which Ellis loved, let me tell you. There were a few letters. In January, I started trying to subtly lobby for another summer here. 'Let's check on the house we left empty for ten years!' 'I think I'd study better for the SAT somewhere less distracting!'"

"Wow, that didn't convince her?" Amelia said, dryly.

Meredith scoffed, and the wetness of the sound surprised her. She pressed the back of her hand against her mouth. "Sorry. Sorry, it's just… I think I may have been getting somewhere. I found correspondence from Seattle Grace on her desk, and a couple of things she said, I thought, maybe. But then…. Well. April." When she didn't get a reaction from either of them, she sighed. "April 5th, 1994?" A flicker of recognition flashed on Amelia's face, but it wasn't certainty. Maggie's face was blank.

Meredith took a deep breath. They hadn't been connected to Seattle at all. Amelia overdosed that year, she couldn't be responsible for recalling dates related to pop-culture, even if it was something fundamental to anyone who—okay, apparently between memories and wine, she'd regressed, but the indignation was comfortingly familiar.

"Kurt Cobain," she said. Amelia's confusion faded. Maggie's eyebrows were still drawn together, and Meredith clenched her fist against the flannel of her pajama pants. I swear to god, Maggie….

"Right, Nirvana, right!" Maggie blurted. Meredith decided to pretend she didn't hear the question mark at the end of the exclamation.

"Good save. I really thought we were about to enact all the sibling fights you two never had."

Maggie laughed. Meredith did not.

"I didn't think Mom knew what I listened to. Hell, it's possible she didn't, because I blew up that day, and it wasn't exactly a mystery as to why. She said that we weren't going to go to Seattle on some sort of pilgrimage for me to mourn a self-absorbed rockstar who couldn't handle his own success. Like she—"

Meredith cut herself off, blinking until the photo in front of her was no longer blurry. She'd been less than sober at the point that Ellis delivered that rant, and it'd been everything she could do not to enumerate all the attributes her mother shared with Kurt, particularly the willingness to die rather than raise a daughter. At least she'd had that much of a sense of self-preservation.

"Anyway. We didn't go. And I wasn't…. Things weren't good for a long time, after that." She started to close the album, but then hesitated, her fingers sliding under the protective plastic before she really knew what she wanted to do. "I found her on Facebook around the time I started med school, before I got lost in that void." Strange, how her four years of college, and four of med school could be such a blur for such different reasons. Being the life of the party, versus trying to shut down her mother's life; both while keeping her grades gliding over the surface—afloat was never good enough. "She and her wife have a horse farm. If any of the kids ever decides they want to ride…."

"It'd be Bailey," Amelia said. "He plays with Zola's old Breyer horses all the time."

"He does, doesn't he?" Her son hadn't shown a lot of affinity for any particular after-school activity. Maybe…. "So. That was Layla." She closed the album on her lap, the photo resting on top. "What my mother knew, or didn't know, about us is a mystery, and I can't think of any other time I flaunted being bi in front of her. Not that I hid it, necessarily. Or maybe I did. I don't know. Sometimes my motives from back then are just as undeterminable as hers, and I wasn't diligent about keeping a diary."

She ran through a final mental Rolodex of memories. Dancing around the kitchen making pancakes and making out—I hope you know you're cleaning those dishes!—Long mornings basking in the morning sun cracking each other up with stories about their respective schools—Meredith Grey, get up and make that bed—Layla holding her hair back when the tequila and the ride home didn't mix.—Is there a flu going around I didn't know about?

Meredith smiled. If she really leaned into that one, she could feel the other girl's grip on her shoulder. "Calm it, killer. She wants you to incriminate yourself!"

While Amelia and Maggie cleared away the glasses, Meredith re-shelved the photo album and then followed them into the kitchen. Without saying anything, she slipped the photo under a magnet, next to one of her favorite pictures of Lexie and Zola. There were so many faces up there that the kids wouldn't see often enough otherwise, but this one was for her.

As she turned to leave the room, her eyes met Lexie's. You would've known the significance of April 5h before I got the words out, she thought. A well-adjusted Seattle girl is still a Seattle girl.

Not that Lexie turned out to be all that well-adjusted. Meredith didn't know Molly all that well, but as Grey sisters went, that contest was between her and Maggie.

One last survey of the kids rooms, and Meredith found herself alone in the master bedroom. The roof of the porch—an overhang, really—seemed much further down than it had when Layla clambered out before her and held out her hand.

She needed to go to bed. Mondays were hard; Ellie especially had inherited her penchant for sleeping in, but weekends made all three of them hard to rouse. Even knowing that, she couldn't help drifting over to her closet and tugging a box down off the shelf. The composition book lay close to the bottom, and the paper had gone yellow a long time ago, but her penmanship had always been firm. Not having a doctor's handwriting became important to her around the time she started having to read her mother's shopping lists.

She told her sisters she wasn't good at keeping up a diary, but that didn't mean she hadn't tried. The current record of patients, research, and occasional anecdotes lived in her desk at the hospital, but she'd never gotten rid of the thirty-odd years of aborted attempts; although, at times she'd been tempted to set the box on fire.

She put the notebook on the bedside table, and then slid the box under the bed. Before she went to sleep, she'd spend a little more time with her 1993 self, the girl who'd been brave enough to hope her mother would ask about her girlfriend. That kid had a lot going for her. It would take almost thirty years and multiple near-death experiences for her to get that brave again, but the time had come, and this time she wasn't going to put it back in the closet.