It takes her a day to call Adam, but Santana schedules the surgery. It's ten days before Liam's birthday, and he assures her that she'll be up and able in time for the party that they've invited ten kids to. Santana is skeptical, but she's not the surgeon, she can't second guess anything that he says, or else she'll abandon the idea of having it completely.

It's a rough two weeks leading up to it. The first week, Brittany works nights, and they spend barely an hour a day together, mostly with Liam curled between them in bed. He seems to always end up in bed with Santana when Brittany isn't home, and barring a few incidences where he wets through his pull-up and soaks the bed, Santana wouldn't have it any other way.

The next week, Brittany is in Portland. She's giving a series of lectures at the Oregon Health and Science University, and Santana isn't sure who misses her more, herself or Liam. But she FaceTimes them every night to read Liam his stories, and then she stays on with Santana until she falls asleep, knowing full well that she'd prefer not to take her Ambien when she's the only adult in charge. She sends Santana flowers, she sends Liam chocolate, and when they finally get to pick her back up at the airport, she squeezes them so tightly that Liam squeals.

Maribel offers to stay with Liam when Santana has her surgery. Santana hugs her for a long time, when they have lunch together, and she tells her everything that's going on, and her mother apologizes for everything she's gone through. Santana doesn't blame her mother, not at all. She was a victim of her ex-husband too, and difficult as it was, she did as much as she could to protect her daughter from the wrath of her father. It feels like healing, Santana thinks, and the relationship she's been rebuilding with Maribel is so important in the journey she's on.

They leave again for Boston on a Tuesday morning. Both Shelby and Chief Sylvester have been instrumental in making their absences from work for a week run more smoothly, and Santana sends them both cards to thank them for it. Everything falls into place, and though Santana's head is full of turmoil, the smoothness of the way the rest of her life is running makes it a little easier to bear.

By chance, they check into the same hotel room they'd been in weeks prior, and after Santana's late pre-op appointment at Brigham and Women's, she lays back on the bed, arm over her forehead, and a raging headache starting from her anxiety. Brittany is on the phone outside of the room, not wanting to disturb Santana, she'd said, and she breathes in and out, trying to calm herself down.

"Hey." She hears the door click open, and then a dip in the bed beside her. "Sorry about that."

"It's okay." Santana peers out from under the crook of her elbow, and looks up at Brittany, who sits cross legged just inches from her. "Was it the hospital?"

"It was actually Bernice, the receptionist at my lawyer's office. We got a date for the adoption hearing."

"Really?" She throws back her hand, and pushes herself up. "When?"

"Next Friday. Do you think you'll be up for it by then?"

"I'd go right from the hospital tomorrow, if I had to. So it's happening?"

"It's happening. Liam will be your legal son by next weekend."

"Wow." Santana leans into Brittany, pressing their foreheads together. "That's the kind of good news I needed to hear today."

"Good things are happening, Santana. I promise you, all the good things." Brittany kisses her softly. "You want to lay in my lap, and I'll give you a head massage."

"God, I love you."

Santana falls asleep like that, Brittany's hands on her head. She was reluctant to take her Ambien, afraid it would leave her groggy and miserable for her early check in time at the hospital, but the massage helps her sleep, Brittany's presence helps her sleep. When the alarm goes off at four-fifteen, she actually feels mildly rested, and the first thing she feels is Brittany's lips on hers.

"I love you." Brittany whispers against her lips. "My beautiful wife."

They don't talk as they get ready. Santana showers with Dial soap, just like she tells her patients they should use, and she swallows her morning pill dry. She pulls on an oversized sweatshirt and leggings, and she hopes the zipper on her coat doesn't bother her sore chest when they come back to this room later. Maybe February is a terrible time to have surgery on her breasts—and particularly, her nipple, since she shudders to think how brutal the biting cold will be on that—but she couldn't wait for summer. She has to do this now. It'll be done before she adopts Liam, it'll be done before she turns thirty-three, and she'll be able to feel like a real adult, not someone reeling from the wounds of years past.

Santana walks at Brittany's side in the hospital that's so familiar to her wife. Brittany pushes the elevator button, and Santana knows she's pushed that same button thousands of times they walk together down the hallway of the floor Brittany used to work on, they pass the office that used to be hers. It's a strange feeling, knowing how well her wife knows this place, it's a strange feeling knowing that she'll be operated on a table that her wife has probably operating on hundreds of times, but she swallows it down, just wanting to get it over with.

Brittany stays with her through pre-op. She knows most of the nurses, and she waits for Santana's nod before introducing her to them. She can tell how adored Brittany was here, she can tell that they miss her presence, and it makes her smile, it makes her relax know that she's in the hands of people who genuinely care for her wife.

When Adam comes in, he offers Brittany a spot in the gallery. They'd talked about this beforehand, and Brittany shakes her head. She'll wait as Santana's wife in the waiting room. She'll drink coffee and read one of the journals she'd packed in her briefcase, and she'll come into recovery when Santana gets out. That's what she needs, that makes her feel much better than knowing she'd be watching the whole thing.

"Can I give you a kiss?" Brittany asks Santana before she leaves the room.

"Please." She nods in response, squeezing Brittany's hand one last time. She takes a breath, and closes her eyes, feeling Brittany's lips brush against hers. "I love you."

"I love you too, Santana. I'll see you when you wake up."

Adam jokes with Santana a little when they go into the OR, but she's not really capable of bantering back. She looks around the operating room, vision blurred without her contacts in. She imagines she's on the other end of her surgery, imagines she's tying her new Doc McStuffins scrub cap around her head, imagines she's at the sink scrubbing her hands, imagines the stinging snap as she slips into her gloves. She could prep for a surgery with her eyes closed, but instead, she's in far less comfortable territory, as she lays back on the table and closes her eyes, as the anesthesiologist puts the mask over her face.

Everything is fuzzy when she wakes up. Her medicated mind can't really put together where she is, and she looks around frantically, until she figures it out. There's so much pressure on her chest, and when she starts taking deep breaths to try to alleviate it, she's hit with a wave of nausea.

"Gonna throw up." She cries out, and before she can vomit all over the floor beside her bed, a nurse is there, holding a pan, and helping her lift her body just enough to vomit. "Ugh. Ow. Fuck."

"Here, how about we get you some water, Dr. Lopez?"

"I'm going to—" Santana doesn't get the words out fast enough, and she vomits again, bile stinging her throat as she does. "Fuck."

Once the nausea subsides, Santana sinks back into the crisp white sheets, and squeezes her eyes shut. Everything hurts, and it takes everything in her power not to cry. She's seen children handle being in recovery better than she is, she's seen her own son, for that matter, but thinking about that only exacerbates the pain in her chest.

"Hey, you." Brittany enters the room and quickly comes to Santana's bedside, lifting the hand that has her IV in it, and rubbing the palm with her thumb. "How are you doing?"

"Peachy." She tries to laugh, but ends up choking, and then reaching for the pan to vomit again.

"Here, sweetheart." Brittany pulls her own hair loose, so she can gather Santana's up off her face. When she's finished, and Santana's vomiting has ceased, she takes the cup of water the nurse left by her bed and holds it to her lips. "Drink a little."

"I fucking hate anesthesia." She slurs, licking her dry lips. "And puking after chest surgery should be classified as torture."

"Lay back down, let me see if I can get you a lemon ice before Adam comes in."

"Just…stay." Santana's voice cracks as she looks into Brittany's eyes. "Please."

"Okay." She sits on the edge of the bed, careful not to jostle Santana as she strokes the loose strand of dark hair from her cheek. "I'm not going anywhere."

Santana closes her eyes, slowly inhaling and exhaling. When Adams Crawford comes in the room, she mumbles her responses, and she hopes Brittany is listening to him talk about how the surgery went. He knows they don't need to hear him talk about aftercare, they're well aware of it, so he saves them the time of listening. Santana just wants to go. She wants to leave the hospital and get back into that hotel bed. She wants Brittany to lay down next to her and hold her hand for hours longer. She wants Brittany to look, to tell her that it's okay. Adam may be her surgeon, but it's Brittany who she trusts the most.

Finally, she can go. The nurse wheels her outside, and Brittany helps her into the car, reclining the seat far enough back that Santana doesn't feel the pull of her breasts. She's in agony, but she bites her tongue. She'll take another pill when she gets to the hotel. She'll take an Ambien too, and maybe when she wakes up, she won't feel like someone has taken a saw to her chest.

Brittany helps her use the bathroom when they get up to their room. Santana is mortified by it, but Brittany's her wife, Brittany is a surgeon, there's nothing she could see that would shock her. Then she helps her into bed. When she tucks Santana's pillow from home beneath her head, and Liam's soft blanket from the car over her, Santana feels an overwhelming surge of gratitude. This is nothing like her last surgery, nothing like it at all, and she falls asleep, knowing that she's safe, knowing that she's loved.

In the morning, Santana is still bandaged when Brittany helps her get back in the car to go home. She'd offered numerous times for them to stay another night, if Santana isn't ready for the long drive, but Santana refuses. As comfortable as Brittany made her in the hotel, she wants to be home, in her own bed. She wants to see Liam, and she wants to move on from this.

"Are you comfortable?" Brittany asks, getting in the driver's seat.

"Mmhm. Comfortable as I can be. Thanks for bringing my pillow."

"I know you're particular about it." She puts her hand over Santana's, and smiles at her.

"Honestly, Britt, this surgery was in a whole different universe than my last two. I felt like the world would just swallow me up then, and maybe I wanted it to."

"You don't have to talk about it, if you don't want to, Santana."

"I know, but it's you, and…I don't know, maybe I feel like I need to or something. I mean, it's like this thingthat hangs over my whole existence, so, maybe if I just talk about it, it'll help." Santana shakes her head, pressing the ice packs Brittany gave her a little higher up under her breasts. "I know that it was abuse. I'm a mandated reporter, and if I saw a sixteen-year-old kid at Columbia getting a boob job, I'd be on the phone with ACS and the surgical board in a second. But, whatever, no one there really cared, and…I was struggling with my sexuality, trying to get male attention. I was the first one in my school getting new tits, I wasn't exactly fighting it."

"Oh, Santana."

"I think…I think him and my mom must have had a fight about it, because two days before my surgery, she was suddenly going to Scottsdale to see my aunt. You didn't…he didn't take no for an answer on things, so…I went to the hospital with him when he went to work, and he dumped me off at the plastics wing. His friend who I'd watch draw up my new boobs two weeks earlier was grinning at me while I got put under, and…when I woke up, I had silicone in my chest."

"Silicone?"

"I know. But do you really think the guy who did a boob job on a sixteen year old was suddenly going to care that he should have used saline because I was so young?"

"No, I just…" Brittany trails off, biting her lip and murmuring something about first do no harm.

"My father worked a sixteen hour shift that day, so I laid in the recovery room by myself. I was in excruciating pain, but I refused to let myself cry. I went up to my room when I got home, and I couldn't even manage to go down and get new ice packs for myself. I was a mess, but I knew exactly how he'd act if he saw me like that, so I shit up and dealt with it."

"I'm sorry." Brittany laces her fingers with Santana's, squeezing a little harder. "No one should have to go through that, especially not as a child."

"Honestly, Brittany, it was mild compared to the rest of my life." She shakes her head, trying to forget. "I went back to school a few days later, but my boobs weren't what I expected them to be at all. They still hurt like hell, and my nipple was hot to the touch. Now, as a doctor, I know I was exhibiting every sign of infection, but I kept ignoring it. It wasn't until I passed out during cheerleading practice that I finally confessed to my mother that I thought something was wrong with my boobs."

"How long after was that?"

"Sixty-one days. I was counting them, telling myself okay, at thirty days, they'll be better, at sixty days, at ninety days. It was 1999."

"So obviously you weren't checking your symptoms with your iPhone."

"Exactly. We had a computer in my father's office, and it wasn't like I was going to go in there and search the internet for answers. My mom took me to the emergency room, and I had a hundred and five fever. My nipple was so infected that I'm lucky I didn't go septic, and of course, because the implants were way too big for me, I had grade four capsular contracture. Even that asshole knew he had to take the implants out, but…" Santana shakes her head again, swallowing the lump in her throat. "He was so nasty to me, when he was asking questions about my bathing habits, and the kind of sex I was having…I felt so degraded that I couldn'tgo back to get another surgery when it healed. I was terrified. Britt, until you, I couldn't even look at a plastic surgeon."

"I understand that, Santana. My blood is boiling." She clenches the steering wheel with her left hand, and Santana watches her knuckles turn white. "It's doctors like that who make a mockery of what I've worked my whole life to accomplish. His license should be stripped, and he should be in prison."

"Well." Santana forces out a laugh, but it sounds more like a hiccup. "If you count a multi-million dollar mansion in Boca as prison, he's there."

"Of course he is. You deserved so much better than that."

"You've shown me that, Britt. You…just loving me as I am, it's shown me so much more than I thought was real. Even…especially yesterday, the way you took care of me afterwards…"

"I'm always going to take care of you. I promise you that, and I'm always going to love you."

"I know." She nods, shifting a little from the discomfort in her chest. "I think…even from that time I walked into your office like a lunatic and lifted up my shirt, I knew on some level. I'd been hiding what happened for so long, hooking up with my shirt on, padding my bra, but then you came along, and as much as you made me crazy, you didn't…I don't know, I didn't feel threatened by you. You had Liam, and I watched you with the Martinez girls, and…I knew you were different. I didn't treat you like it, but…"

"Santana, I get it. When that's your experience with my field, I get it."

"I know you do…I just wanted to tell you."

"I appreciate that, a lot."

"Will you look later…at my breasts?" Santana looks down at her lap. "I know it's not sexy, and…you already have to look at them all the time, and they're…whatever…but…."

"I just need to set the record straight." Brittany glances from the road, and over at Santana. "I think that you're incredibly sexy. Your breasts have never turned me off, okay? And they won't start now. Of courseI'll look at them later, I'll look at them like a doctor, and like a concerned wife who wants to make sure you're okay, and then, the next time I make love to you, I'll still think that they're incredibly sexy, that you're incredibly sexy. I know you're insecure about them, I feel you flinch whenever I lave attention on them, but I love them, and I love you."

"Britt?"

"Yes."

"I still don't know why you're like this."

"I know, but I'll keep showing you that I am, okay?"

"Yeah…I'd like that a lot."