Kindly Stop for Me

by Chicleeblair

What kind of person flees on the night of her husband's funeral and ends up hitting overwhelmed twelve-thousand miles away to her ex-lover's city? A Meredith Grey type. A "What Happened in San Diego?" fic. Mer/Der Past Meredith Grey/Sadie Harris

3. April 2014 (Part II)

Meredith sat on the beach blanket, staring at the blank page of the notebook she'd brought out to list off things she had to get done to be able to do nothing. She'd gotten as far as labeling the first few pages—financial, work, shopping, Zola & Bailey…—Maintenance on the house and land had been pre-scheduled. All the bills already went through digitally. Investments, her mom's estate, the kids' savings accounts, all the disgustingly adult things that came from having money they didn't need coming from different sources; they'd all keep until she wanted to deal with them. Insurance had been taken care of last…in March, and she wasn't going to think about that debacle.

The splashing in the surf kept drawing her attention, and every time she glanced up, it took an interval of blankness to concentrate again. Enough time that another crashing wave or wild shriek would make her head shoot up. Her heart lived in her throat these days, but it would threaten to choke her, until she identified the scrape of Zola's shovel. She'd spend far longer watching Bailey let handfuls of sand trickle out of his fist, his face screwed up with deep curiosity when it blended into the beach again.

Did they make sand-coloring? That would blow his mind. Also, be good to teach them about experimenting with, but she was trying not to take shame in vicarious amazement. What else did she have to be awed by? How quickly she'd gone from being a successful, energetic person to considering getting off the couch for anything a minor triumph? That she actually had started shaking in the cereal aisle of the grocery store yesterday? She'd held off the actual crying until she'd checked out, but there'd been very narrow margins.

Would she have been able to suppress it all and stand at an operating table with sharp eyes and unyielding focus? At the worst moments, when she was fucking wailing into a pillow in the bathroom, because there was: it's good for them to see you cry, and there was: this is the fourth time today Mommy has lost it, should we be scared now? she was sure she would have. It scared her. A person shouldn't be able to shunt aside pain like this. Ellis Grey hadn't been able to, or she would've chosen to work—wouldn't she? Had Maggie been an excuse to indulge?

There'd been other times, though. She tried to keep Meredith in the dark, but growing up, she heard. She always heard; she was pretty sure. There were times right after her diagnosis when she'd broken down, and let Meredith put a hand on her shoulder without shrugging her off.

No. Ellis Grey hadn't been capable of that level of suppression. Meredith was. Sure, she wouldn't have been able to ignore it all forever, but that was where the detachment came in, the denial, the drinking. Without the hope she hadn't been able to snuff out in the past, she could numb herself to the point that no one would see her hurting.

It made her sick to admit that the idea held appeal. Derek would say what mattered was that she was making the choice. That choosing to face up to the loss made the path she hadn't taken inconsequential. Didn't it say something that there was a universe where losing the person she loved most didn't devastate her? Wasn't her love warped in some way if it could be suppressed? And if, somewhere, she'd known Sadie lived here; had called the clinic expecting the Sadie she'd known, had she been trying to reverse her decision? Had Sadie ultimately been the one to reject numbness for her?

Maybe. On Monday, maybe. On April tenth, the first significant day of this Derek-less percent of her life. On the day that had meant some amount of disappointment for at least twenty out of thirty-five…thirty-six years; maybe she had wanted to make a different choice. But she hadn't, and she'd survived the day. If she kept surviving, living might follow. It'd happened before.

Down by the water, body-boarders rushed out to catch a series of rolling waves. Meredith shook her head like she needed to clear a screensaver. Child check, Bailey needs one of the sand-toy sets with a sifter. Zola….

"Zo, bum on the blanket, please." Without shifting her focus from pouring water from one bucket into one half-full of sand, Zola plonked herself down. "Thank you, good listening."

She couldn't see her little girl's face, but from the way the set of her shoulders changed, Meredith could imagine the smile she'd gotten. Praising her constantly didn't make up for the times she'd snapped—far too often, over the stupidest things— she could only hope it helped. Any signs of skittishness from Zola put her into a tailspin, certain that she'd entered the hot-cold stage that preceded her mother's full icing over. Most of the time, she couldn't finish the spiral before her daughter had plopped onto her lap with a book, or kissed her on the cheek, or done any of the myriad habitual things that proved she hadn't been fazed. How many free passes did she get?

"B and Z, look at me." Two pairs of eyes looked to her. Looked to her constantly. Needed her for everything. They needed her to keep going. "I love you."

"Yeah, love you," Zola said, her focus back on the clump of wet sand she was blending into the wall of her creation.

"Mama luv-vu." Bailey crawled over to her, and she moved the notebook just in time for him to sprawl in her lap. His t-shirt got bunched up, and she tickled the bare skin. On a stretch of beach that seemed moderately crowded for a Thursday in April, the only sound that mattered was his giggling. She would never take those casual reactions for granted. As long as Mommy's love was an indisputable truth for them, she could absolve herself from minor missteps. Long-term, there was far more to it. Love didn't ensure successful parenting any more than it kept a relationship going, but it gave her the confidence to face the next situation. So often she overestimated the possible effects of her actions, and now there wasn't anyone to check her.

Bailey sat on her crossed legs; his sandy knees bent. "Big water do whoosh." He used his whole arm to demonstrate a wave.

"It does. Those whooshs are called waves. Can you say 'wave?'"

"Zoie!" he said. When his sister looked up, he waved at her

"Hi, Bay, I see you!"

"Zoie see, Mama!"

"She does," Meredith said. "We'll accept that for today. Maybe find some about the ocean videos tonight." There'd been a time where blood had bothered her. She hadn't known until sixth grade. Her school was one that considered itself innovative and up-to-date because they had a lot of equipment to let the kids loose on and assigned far too many group projects in middle school. That led to incidents like allowing an eleven-year-old to work a paper-cutter with a twelve-inch blade.

Meredith, the surgeon's daughter, had yelled the rest of their groupmates out of the room; she'd had gloves in her backpack, though nothing more than band-aids for first-aid. By the time the nurse came running, she'd used the finger of a glove to create a make-shift tourniquet around Ben's index finger and was holding it over his head. "That can't stay on; I only understand the theory, it might hurt him. It needs pressure."

Between the hubbub of getting Ben to Mass Gen and someone remembering that Meredith Grey's mother should be called, she was sitting in the office in her gym clothes, hair dripping onto her shoulders. She wasn't shaking anymore.

That had been the one time her mother said she might just have what it took to be a surgeon.

She'd learned everything she could about blood. She'd gotten the upper hand.

Looking out at the ocean, it seemed like that might be harder to get the upper hand over.

Bailey leaned against her arm, holding up the toy he was holding. "What t'at?"

"That's a froggy. Watch." She pinched the rubber frog and held it in the water bucket she'd filled from as far back on the sand as she could, with Zola and her brother all but blood-swearing to stay on the blanket. Funny, how once it was contained, the water bothered her not at all.

Once it filled, she took it out and squeezed a tiny stream of water against Bailey's cheek. He went wide-eyed, and then giggled delightedly. "You want to try?"

"Want try!"

Meredith gave it to him and prepared to be squirted.

Sentences were a new milestone—a month, exactly a month—marked by announcing "Daddy home!" when Amelia came in for breakfast on the morning after Meredith told Derek she didn't ever want to live without him. All three adults had made such a fuss that he'd spent the whole day saying it tirelessly. She hadn't gotten tired of hearing it, and she didn't think Derek had ether. Not even Amy lost patience with him, and she'd hung around more than she usually did on Saturdays.

The next language milestone would be all hers.

Breathe. Be here. Rough grains of sand had been blown onto the blanket and rubbed against her palms. Bailey's cheeks were pink in the shadow of his floppy green hat. Warmth penetrated the sunscreen she'd slathered onto her skin when she'd otherwise been constantly cold. Above and in front of her was…gray.

She knew the white light of the sun was sitting in the center of a cloudless blue void, and that its heat was seeping into her sunscreen coated skin. It was like the fog that'd moistened their living room windows that morning had wrapped around her while it dissipated everywhere else, and what she knew to be blue felt gray.

From her bag, she retrieved the phone she'd bought earlier in the week, using a different carrier than she did in Seattle. Maybe a camera would've been a more reasonable way to take pictures of the kids without being flooded with missed calls, texts, and messages in every app she'd ever downloaded, but easy won out.

She snapped a picture and stared at it. Definitely blue. Definitely bright. She sent the picture to Sadie, not bothering to caption it.

SADIE HARRIS: A good thing.

MEREDITH GREY: Only took me a week

SADIE HARRIS: No negative-talk about today's thing.

Proud of you, D.

Meredith wanted to scoff, but for all the spite flowing through her—her Kübler-Ross for the week was definitely anger, mostly at herself—she couldn't. Sadie Harris, once seen as the wildest child of them all, was sincerely proud of her for getting two kids out of the door of their rental; a door she could currently see. They were closer to the condominium than the water. She'd been equally sincere yesterday, when Meredith's One Thing had been going out to a passing ice cream truck.

So far, keeping up the deal had been easy enough. The preliminary appointment with the psych-person had mostly been going over the paperwork it'd taken her an hour to fill out online. She'd been on the sofa while Sadie sat on the coffee-table, cutting out Play-Doh shapes for Bailey, and reading Meredith's screen. She was letting her; she needed to be sure she was making sense, but that meant hearing, "what about…?" and having to come up with better answers than "Idiot husband + t-boned porsche = bad."

The One Thing texts weren't part of the bargain—but what was the bargain, really? Do these things, or what? You'll become a shell of yourself, and your kids will be love-starved at minimum? —It'd taken two days for Sadie to be confident leaving her, and if she hadn't had a meeting in Taipei, Meredith imagined she'd still be on the couch, possibly with Fatimah, who was lovely, and did not deserve to be saddled with her.

On her way out the door, Sadie had grabbed her hand and said, "One thing. It's something I tell my patients, but I'm cribbing one of my rehab counselors."

The more things change, huh, Die? Meredith had almost raised an eyebrow, but control your face was a strong enough instinct that she only had to bite back the bitter words that came with the thought. She'd been standing in the doorway of a furnished condo that she wouldn't have if Sadie hadn't owned it. Collecting the bare necessities and then some for the three of them hadn't involved driving in an unfamiliar city, or even going in the store if she had "one of your ridiculously detailed lists." That the charges hadn't shown up on the card she'd folded the pieces of notebook paper around was something Sadie probably assumed she wouldn't notice. They were approaching the black more quickly than she'd have thought Sadie capable of a decade ago.

She wasn't being fair. Fair was something she couldn't see, and wasn't at all sure she believed in.

"I asked her," Sadie continued, and if Meredith had had shame left, she would've felt it. "Your goal every day is to do one thing. That's all. For people dealing with major executive functioning issues, that one thing can be as small as brushing their teeth. Your bar is higher, with B and Z buzzing around, but the philosophy applies. No day is wasted if you can do one thing that isn't absolutely necessary. One thing that felt impossible a week or a day ago. Some days, you're not going to manage it. That's okay. Trying can be progress."

Meredith's opinion leaned more toward Yoda, there. Trying wasn't doing. She'd been trying when she operated on Danny, Alex's hockey-obsessed patient, and a kid died. A young woman who'd already lost her parents lost her sibling. It didn't matter to her that Meredith tried. Every doctor in Derek's OR had been trying, however poorly.

But this wasn't surgery. Or, if it was, she was an intern. Overwhelmed, a breath away from giving up. Try might be all she had.

She'd stopped putting off logging into her account on the hospital system—Damn it, since when did this thing have a messaging system, and how did you block it?—and put in a leave request. "Bereavement leave." "Retaining privileges." "…contract allowing up to a year's sabbatical…" Details she hadn't known three years ago came easily to her fingers, far more easily than her answers to questions about herself.

She hadn't put in for time off to arrange her mother's estate. Why bother when she was on two weeks of medical leave already, and she could make all the necessary phone calls from the couch? Derek hadn't exactly gone ballistic when he discovered that she only had two weeks' leave, and that was because she'd been injured on-the-clock.

"I'll brace, Bailey will put me on scut, and I'll be…I'll make it through. I can handle it."

"You don't have to, though! No one should. You're not asking off for a cold; you're risking puncturing a lung! Does that not bother you?"

"Of course, it does! Which is why I'll be careful. I don't know what else I can do!"

"Wait, what about your mother? Doesn't your contract have bereavement leave? Mine did."

"It does. I…I made sure. But it's not long, and it'd overlap with the medical leave, so—"

"It wouldn't have to. I'll talk to Richard."

Richard had promised to "arrange things" with HR. She'd humored him for Derek more than herself. She hadn't been able to understand or accept a lot of the ways Derek loved her, but she wouldn't have said he was too protective. There hadn't been concerned looks when she came in a week post-appy, and when the bomb going off left her mildly concussed, he'd cleared her himself the next week. This situation had been different. Whether or not it'd been his compressions that caused her broken ribs, he'd obviously felt responsible. Pointing out that he'd saved her life took them too close to the argument neither of them wanted to start. The one about why she'd needed saving. She hadn't figured out how to tell him how things had changed while she hadn't been breathing, let alone conscious. If having her not go back to work for an extra two weeks helped him; she'd do it. It wasn't like she'd been living up to the Grey standard, anyway.

It'd been the plane crash that made her familiarize herself with the bereavement leave clause in her attending contract. Once they'd decided to take over the hospital, it'd topped her list of antiquated policies, unspoken judgements, and this is how we've always done it HR attitudes to overhaul. Richard had obviously molded it like clay for her in light of Ellis Grey's death. The situations were entirely different; she hadn't known Lexie yet then, and it still felt like taking advantage of that had been a betrayal to Lexie. It didn't matter that there'd been almost a month between the end of her residency and the day she signed her contract as an attending. That she hadn't taken what she was allocated felt like a betrayal to Lexie. Everything felt like a betrayal to Lexie.

When she wasn't beside someone's bed at the hospital during that time, she'd been with Zola, trying to be as honest as she could on an eighteen-month-old's terms. Derek had had enough going on, with Mark wobbling on the line between life and death. Lexie was Meredith's little sister. She'd been the most logical choice to start this particular life-long conversation. She'd thought it would be an abstract for a long time afterward; something that happened to patients, who weren't entirely real to Zola. She hadn't imagined she'd been prepping her for something worse.

Practice loss.

Practice sister.

No. She wasn't. Lexie wasn't their fake, or practice, or half anything. She was Zola's aunt; her full little sister, and she was dead. Just like Derek.

Meredith pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes until the color behind her lids exploded in a starburst. That color wasn't brighter than the colors spilling out in front of her, not in a measurable way. Wherever was keeping the light away from her had nothing to do with what she could see.

Watching Bailey happily squirt his frog at the sand, Meredith thought of the frog in one of the word problems from elementary school, used to teach numberlines, subtraction, even basic equations. According to those narratives, either frogs tended to fall into deep wells, or one frog had some really bad luck. Due to the slick walls of the well, every day he climbed upward a certain distance, but every night he slipped down a smaller distance. If he goes up two feet and down one foot, and the bottom of the well is "stupid dead neurosurgeon husband" feet deep, how long does it take our friend Froggy to reach the top?

"Mommy, lookit, I did a castle!" Zola held her arms out to frame her creation in a ta-da!

"That's so cool! I like the tower."

"I used this one." She held up one of the shapes that'd come with the sandcastle set she'd picked out. "It looks like an ice cream cone."

"It does. You picked the right tools, huh?"

Zola nodded, shovel in one hand, and rake in the other.

There'd been much deliberation over the beach store's toy collection. The kids had been in the stroller, and Meredith would allow that it couldn't have been easy to make a choice with your little brother pointing at buckets over your shoulder and declaring their color names over, and over. She drew the line at slapping at his hand, though, and Zola knew it. She'd been in tears before he could work up to a wail.

"I sorry Bay-Bay! I not meana hurt him. Momma, Momma, I didn't wanna be mad!"

Bailey started howling, and they became the most interesting thing in the store. They were blocking the most heavily trafficked aisle, too. Three weeks ago, her go-to move was to take them to the car to calm down, but they'd walked here. Going outside wouldn't give them a familiar location, and she didn't have a fraction of the wherewithal to worry about other people's convenience. Zola was far too worked up to be reacting to a scolding she hadn't gotten yet. She'd been showing no signs of crankiness, and this didn't match the flow of the tantrums that were rare-but-not-extinct. To determine what was upsetting her sobbing older child, she had to soothe the screaming younger one.

She lifted him out, arching him high over Zola. He struggled, his hands extended—he was a hair puller—and leaving the bedroom that morning began to feel like the stupidest decision Meredith had ever made.

She needed an extra stroller. She needed a grown-up. She needed Derek, but that was a thought she couldn't follow.

What did they have? Her wallet, a phone with zero of the toddler-wooing apps, the small diaper bag—was there a paci in there? That could be a rabbit hole, and he might not want it. He'd stopped asking for "bink-bink" around Christmas, and she'd been thrilled to have one less thing—ha! No paci, but there was a tiger Wubba-Nub clipped to the inside zipper.

"Bailey-bird, look who I found! It's a tiny Tiggy!"

He'd grabbed for it, but she'd held it just a little bit out of reach. Not enough to frustrate him. "Tiny Tiggy wants to know why you're so sad. Can you tell her?"

He would keep yelling at Meredith, making Zola feel worse, but Bailey was soft with his stuffies. It's made her hope that if they'd had anoth…nope. Not happening, not thinking about it. Three public tantrumers. That's what it would've been. (She'd have figured it out.)

"Bailey what arrrrrre you so sad?" she asked in a fake-tiger voice. She'd liked peds, especially older kids. If it wouldn't have pitted her against Alex, maybe she'd have considered it more post-neurosurgery. Post-neurosurgery was post-Zo, who'd had her giving voice to a plastic giraffe within twenty-four hours and skyrocketed her confidence with the littler ones. Kids didn't think you were ridiculous. They didn't care if your cartoon voices all sounded the same. Kids were so much better than grownups. Maybe that was why she'd taken hers and run.

"Owie! Sissy owie." Bailey had held his hand up to her. She wasn't sure it was the one that'd gotten smacked, but Mommy kisses were transferable.

She kissed both sides of the proffered hand, and then held it, examining it. "Hm, not seeing any contusions," she said. "Slight redness of the derma, no additional concerns. What do you think, Nurse Tiny Tiggy?"

"Tiny Tiggy prrrrrrescribes cuddles." She danced the toy up to Bailey, having it give him cheek kisses before he grabbed it. He immediately started talking to Tiny Tiggy and didn't react to being put back in the stroller. To protect them all from a sudden retaliation, she opened the plastic container of Puffs and handed it to him. While he chomped down and made munching noises for Tiny Tiggy, Meredith crouched in front of Zola. The little girl threw her arms around her, and she changed tactics, standing up with Zola in her arms,

"Zoie-Z, meant-to-be," she intoned, a simple, quick reassurance. "Bay's okay. You should say 'sorry,' but his feelings were hurt more than his body."

Zola wasn't crying loudly at this point, but there were tears and gasping sniffles. Meredith rubbed her back and hummed in her ear. "It's okay. Momma's not mad. I'm proud of you for seeing that hitting was a bad behavior. Were you frustrated?"

Zola sat up, and the tear-streaks on her face were heart-breaking. "A-kinda."

"But not a-totally?"

Zola smiled shakily. "No."

"What else?" Zola had sniffled and Meredith anticipated another round of tears. "Try to use your words, big girl. Just try."

"The-the boxes are bad!"

The boxes? Meredith scanned the shelf of sand toys. All of them had similar cardboard wrappers featuring the contents being played with on a studio beach. The small ones only had kids filling buckets with correspondingly colored shovels. Any of the bigger sets featured families of four, with the dad either building a castle or being buried while mom looked on over a magazine. There were any number of problems with them, in her opinion, but she knew what had set Zola off.

"Lotsa families on here. But we need the toys. Which one do you like?" Zola pointed and Meredith took the box down, flipping it to show the contents pictured without the nuclear families; while Zola explained her preferences, "This one has a rake but we'd have to get Bailey-bird his own shovel," Meredith flipped a few of the other sets.

"A watering can! That's so cool. But this one has a water wheel. A dumping truck! Bay-Bay, do you want a dumping truck?"

Meredith had hugged Zola close. Was it wrong to look up to your preschooler?

"Zo-Zo. You're being so thoughtful, but remember you want castle toys. You'll have to share, but if there's only one good part of a set we can buy it separately. See, over there? They've got extra buckets and shovels. We want to get the set that has the most things you want."

The choice was made, and before taking it off the rack, Meredith put Zola down next to the stroller. "Okay. What do you say?"

Zola had been through this countless times in twenty-three months, and the way she held Meredith's arm was unprecedented. Sometimes she needed help saying sorry to Sofia, her equal, but her baby brother was a plebe. Not anymore, it seemed. Not when Meredith had made them all the other had. She thought of Derek and Amy, bonded but also estranged due to shared trauma.

Did tragedy have to be trauma?

"Go on, Zo," she prodded. She tried not to feed them phrases. Better for them to understand what they needed to get across and come up with their own words. Not learning to do that well had been an issue for her. She tried to model thank yous and apologies in play, and a gratifying amount were echoed in what she'd call real life situations—it was all real to them.

"I'm sorry for being mad, Bay."

"Zo, you can't help your feelings."

"But I didn't wannabe mad! I just-just was and the mad was so fast I couldn't do a breathe or say I needed out. I didn't choose bad behavior!" She was on the brink of tears again, this time from frustration. Meredith understood her meaning; she'd might as well have been tied to a wheel of fortune divided into "angry, helpless, devastated, guilty, fragile, exhausted, overwhelmed, listless, irritated, hopeless" with a couple lucky "kids" triangle between them.

"Feelings can happen all of a sudden," she acknowledged to Zola."That's why it's important to be thoughtful of your actions all the time. If you're really angry at someone, and they come around a corner, all the anger could come up in you so fast that you want to hit. That doesn't make it okay. Words always come first. Your actions are your actions, and if someone is hurt you need to say sorry."

"But—"

"Do you feel bad that his hand was hurt?"

"Uh-huh! I didn't mean to—"

"How did it get hurt?"

"My hand smacked him."

"By itself?"

Zola's lips pursed on the left side, and she blew out until her puffed cheeks were empty. "My brain made it happen?"

"That's right."

"What about de-flexes?"

Meredith clenched her jaw. Frustration was proving contagious, but she was also fighting not to smile, a strange sensation when in any other moment she couldn't imagine her facial muscles moving that way.

"A reflex has to be stimulated. It has a cause. Dr. Kwan taps your knee, and your leg kicks out. It's physical," she added.

"He was being 'nnoying and—"

"He didn't do anything to your hand to cause it to smack. You could've asked him to stop. You could've asked to get out or told me he was bothering you. Hitting is not an option. It hurts, and pain makes people afraid."

"He's gonna be 'fraid of me?" Zola's voice was wavering again.

Great job, Grey. "Not if he knows you won't do it again."

"Bay-bird?" Zola approached the stroller cautiously, like she was afraid, but Meredith was pretty sure they were outside of the retaliation window. "I'm sorry my hand slapping yours made you get hurt. I shoulda asked you stop. You were doing a good job with your colors."

Meredith kept a hand on Zola's shoulder, waiting to prompt Bailey, whose focus was mostly on balancing the lid of the Puffs container on the head of the stuffed tiger. "Hat," he informed his sister. Then he held up the snack tube. "Zoie eat Puff?"

"Good sharing, Bailey," Meredith praised. She put the sand toy set Zola had picked in the empty front seat of the stroller, and let Zola walk alongside, passing the Puffs back and forth with her brother. They collected a few more things, and Meredith had no doubt they'd be back. On the way to the register, she returned to the sand toys.

"Hey, Zo?" She turned over the set that'd been in contention whenever the commotion started. The picture featured a general four-person family, and the dad was noticeably dark-haired in comparison to a lot of the more-Aryan featured men on other boxes. "Wanna know a secret?"

"What kinda secret?" The suspicion on her little face looked too serious, and Meredith wondered if there'd been a betrayal of confidences in the day-care gossip chain. Might not be the worst thing to keep her out of it for a while.

"Not a bad one. See all people in these pictures? They're models. Do you know what that means?" Zola's head was leaning against Meredith's hip as she rolled it in a no. "It means, that all these people-" She touched each separate image on the cardboard. "-were hired to come somewhere and have their picture taken. They're not a real family. Someone whose job it is to find people who look like they could be a family asked them to come somewhere where they set up a fake beach and pretended."

Zola studied the image. "So, that's not their daddy?"

"Nope. They all have different families."

They could have families that looked exactly like the one they were posed with in the interest of selling shovels, but Meredith remembered being comforted by the fact that the perfection on TV was imaginary. It made it easier to acknowledge the good parts of her own life, if she wasn't trying to match a constructed standard.

Zola's had. For most of the time in her memory, her family had very closely resembled the structure celebrated on those boxes, and to her mind they'd been as happy. Meredith was relieved of the anxiety she'd carried for months, that Derek's absence through the winter would have long-term effects on them. It was like having a splinter taken out of a finger when a jagged piece of metal was jammed into her side.

"Mommy, my castle has a garden, see?" Zola pointed to two rows of sand molds lined up in a broad, raked area off to the side of the two lopsided lumps that formed the base of her castle. She dunked the watering can into the water bucket, and then sprinkled its contents on brightly colored shapes that represented everything from a turtle to a boat to a rubber duck, and recited, "Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow, with sea shells by the seashore," which didn't sound quite right to Meredith, but she'd have to Google to correct her, and what would the point be?

Zola put the watering can to the side and began plucking up the molds. A few cracked without the plastic to hold them in place, and others hadn't had every nook or cranny filed, but once her whole garden of creatures was revealed, Zola was gleeful, grinning up at her; two rows of perfect baby teeth.

Meredith would have to do the tooth fairy thing. She hadn't had a tooth fairy. She'd have to stay one step ahead of all the childhood-should-be-magic things she'd missed; to be informed enough to make all the choices, without someone with first-hand experience getting an equal say.

There were going to be more Elf on the Shelf-type things that'd never crossed her radar—that was onedecision, she had made, unilaterally. She didn't believe in curses, but they were not having one of those cursed things in the house "I'm not gonna tell them Santa can see them while they're sleeping, either. That's wicked creepy."—but there were so many things that would require decisiveness. She wouldn't always be able to tell what Derek would've done or be able to do what they would've done together. They matched each other in so many ways, but in this they'd grown up on opposite ends of the spectrum. Her mother had uniformly rejected anything whimsical, and while Derek had a point about Meredith's readiness to reject what her mother had done, she wasn't as likely to disagree with what she hadn't done.

"What, exactly, is the benefit of thinking a human-sized rabbit breaks into your house because some guy came back to life. I did tha-mmph —"

He'd taken his lips off hers far too quickly. "You had the benefit of a twenty-first century hospital, and with your record, you really want to take the risk of comparing yourself to Jesus?"

She'd dumped another handful of jelly-beans into the plastic eggs she'd picked up at CVS on the way to the ferry dock that Friday night. "I'm not against the candy, and the egg dyeing thing was cool. Be better once she doesn't try to drink the vinegar. That face is gonna be my favorite image for a long time. I'm only asking why we have to involve Frank the Rabbit."

"What?"

"Donnie Darko? No? Really?"

"It is kind of creepy," Lexie had commented from where she was sitting on the island overseeing the basket construction with a bag of Reese's eggs in her lap. "Think of the hospital's Easter Bunny costume."

"You mean the pictures I have of you wearing it?"

"You do not!"

"It was a high point in a week that included be proposed to by the wannabe woodsman who took a tumor out of my colleague's head."

"How do I take that?" Derek had asked. "Really, I have no idea."

"Colleague?" Lexie added.

"We're only people she worked with," Meredith had said, scowling at her phone. "Oop, here we go, 'Look at Lexie Cottontail, hopping down the bunny trail.'"

Lexie tossed a yellow wrapper at her. She'd started to grab a hunk of the plastic shreds lining the Easter basket, like it was a disproportionate cage for the elusive rabbit. "Don't!" Lexie and Derek had both cried; Derek going so far as to grab her wrist.

"What?"

"You never get rid of it."

"It spreads."

"We'd find Easter grass in the cabinets next Christmas."

"I'll…If I pass the boards, I'll be doing my fellowship next Christmas. The house will be done. We probably won't be here either way."

"Exactly," Lexie had said.

"So why are we putting it in a basket for our toddler?"

Derek had looked at the open packet of magenta "grass," and then up at Lexie. "Tissue paper," she suggested.

"We have ton leftover from her birthday," Meredith said. Derek had gotten up, and Lexie slipped into his chair. "Seriously, will she be missing out if the basket comes from us?"

Lexie'd shrugged. "There's the 'what about the Tooth Fairy? What about Santa?' slippery slope, but I 'caught' the Tooth Fairy…Dad tripped over my doll bed, shocker… and I still believed in Santa for another few years. Might've gone longer, but if you're nine in sixth grade it's hard to stay naive." She'd popped one of the eggs open and filled the bottom half with Craisins. "Blah, blah appropriated pagan ritual, blah, the Easter Bunny stuck because it got kids on board for a church holiday. Wear the uncomfortable dress and the tights; get the sugar rush. They're not bribing you; the giant fertility symbol happens to show up on a holiday that falls on a different date every year."

"We'll have to figure out how to avoid 'No, Sofia, there is no Easter Bunny,' and make sure she doesn't think she's being shafted, but I'm not into going her nightmares, either."

"She's not going to know the difference this year," Derek had pointed out, returning with a stack of tissue paper packets. "She's too little to ask, but I don't know what to tell her about how he gets into the house. There's not a chimney thing…or any kind of generally accepted mythology, actually. Let's table it." It was a careful way to avoid putting it all on her, and her refusal to do 'what was done.' "I'll look it up. Maybe there's some clever Easter Bunny backstory we all missed."

"Best way to go if there's any risk of her seeing someone put on that costume. Who lost the bet your year?" Lexie asked.

Meredith reached for her phone again; going into the photos that'd come off her computer from before smartphones. Capturing Alex putting on a rabbit suit had been worth lugging her camera to work.

So far, Zola hadn't been overly concerned about where here Easter basket came from, and if it was pathetic to hang around in limbo, Meredith was willing to be a coward. There were still plenty of these choices they hadn't made four years into being parents.—No. No lies. Three years and six months. Officially, her daughter had her father for three years and (almost) six months— Creating traditions had been new to her when she and Derek became more family than just a couple. Post-Derek, she'd have to use what she'd learned. She'd figure out what worked for their family of three, without the chorus of opinions in Seattle, and next year it'd be easier to say: This is how we do it.

Tradition. Routine. Consistency. That was going to be her focus for…for how long? She hadn't been gone two weeks. She could give herself a reprieve on that decision. Filling out the sabbatical request had put it in her mind; that was all. She could be totally incommunicado with Seattle for a year and have a job. Staying away that long would've seemed ridiculous, except that in three months it'd be late June, and she was woman enough to accept that she didn't want to be in Seattle the day the residency year rolled over.

September would be good to aim for, Zola could move up to the Pre-K program with Sofia. But to go back with Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Zola's birthday, and his birthday hitting one after another, and "one year" looming….

Maybe she'd be able to picture it in July.

She'd go back. It was home.

She hoped they knew that. She hoped Alex knew that. He didn't deserve to be ghosted again; not by someone who'd seen how hard he'd taken Izzie's disappearance. She wouldn't say it helped her understand the other woman. The way she'd looked Meredith in the eye and lied to her was something she would never excuse, would never understand, and if it ever came up, would take a lot for her to forgive.

The sooner she went back, the less pissed off he'd be, but she couldn't go back until she was sure she'd regained her ability to take his rejection. To apologize and make him listen. Tell him she was sorry again and again and again until he listened.

How contradictory could you get? Meri, Meri, quite contrary.

She should've texted him, but when she'd turned her phone off again in the dark hotel room, she hadn't anticipated how overwhelming the idea of powering it up again would be. Going through information on her—on the day she called Sadie had been a convenience thing. When the guy at AT&T asked if she wanted to transfer anything over, she'd remembered the onslaught of messages, and the wallpaper she'd changed within minutes of hearing a woman's voice answering his phone…. Facing it for long enough to give her person the reassurance he deserved might not put her into the state she'd been in on the hotel room floor, but she'd lived through every day, hour, minute, second since then, and she didn't want to revisit any of them.

"Momma? Do animals eat sand?"

"Something somewhere does, probably." Did crabs? She didn't know. She could pick up the phone next to her hand and search it, but better to have another thing to do inside.

"Okay. That's good." Oh, uh-uh. There was too much relief in her little voice for that to be an idle question.

"Zola, why are you asking?"

"Um, because I don't think Bailey all-the-way pretended to eat the ice-cream." She held out the hollow cone. That indent in the sand at the top could absolutely have come from a lick.

Meredith stood Bailey up and turned him to face her. There were a few pieces of sand below his mouth, but nothing more than she would expect from the fact that his hands were usually in that vicinity. She stuck her tongue out at him, and he copied her, wiggling it too much for her to spot wayward grains, but if he'd gotten more than that in his mouth, it was gone.

Great job, Meredith. Way to pay attention.

Time to go in. They could Google animal diets, watch Bailey for signs of poisoning, go over the beach rules a few dozen times. Sand is not food would have to be moved up on the list. Don't feed your brother sand. Don't let him eat it. Tell Mommy while he's eating it. Licking counts as eating. Derek might've joked about her annotated lists, but they'd been training for outlining acceptable behavior once Zola started discovering loopholes.

She'd included sand is not food in the first place. If fairness existed, she'd get credit for that.

The spigot next to their door had seemed strange when she'd noticed it—on day two? three?— Now it not only made sense, it was a saving grace.

An hour ago, she'd told herself she'd be able to take them to rinse the worst of it off at the edge of the water. They might not have made it down to the beach prior to this afternoon, but she'd given them the macaroni she'd made the night before at a picnic table on the building's communal deck. The salt air, the slight itch of sand blown onto her skin, even the view of the water closer to low-tide had been nice. It was far more reminiscent of being on a Mediterranean beach than a dock alongside Elliott Bay.

That had changed while she filled their bucket, not as the water washed over her ankles, but as it withdrew. There was no strength in it. She was standing on sand that didn't get wet with every broken wave, but the instinct telling her to run had been almost as strong as the one that sent her away from Seattle. She'd kept control on her return to the blanket, strolling past other family's encampments and planting the half-full bucket firmly down next to Zola. It was only once she wasn't the focus of anyone's attention that she let her legs start shaking.

She had to get over it. Bringing her children to a beach and not letting them in the water was definitely depriving them.

Another day. It could be a thing for another thing.

"Zola, can you hold Bailey's hand while we rinse off?"

Zola obeyed, closing her brother's palm in her fingers, much more her usual self than she'd been that morning. Meredith positioned them so that they could approach the spray rather than having it hit them at whatever temperature it came out. The tap didn't turn easily. How long had it been since this unit last had a tenant?

She hadn't asked Sadie why Harris Whatever —Foundation? LLC? She called it Harris Corp in her head, but she was pretty sure that came from having spent too much latchkey kid time at Newbury Comics—had real estate. Was it a financial, investment in property thing, a housing out-of-town doctors thing, or a Ronald McDonald House thing? She hadn't asked. Hadn't cared.

On the morning of the eleventh Sadie had her car keys by the time she woke. Sadie taking Meredith's keys, a definite switch. — "Get your stuff packed. Tell me what to do, I'll do it. Leave it up to me, you're spending a week in our guest room. Minimum. I'm willing to play by your rules here, Death. Prove to me I'm no crazier than I was two days ago."—She'd gotten one suitcase closed, and Sadie had "helped" Zola with hers. They'd been nearly done by the time Meredith managed to ask Sadie to retrieve the flannel shirt she'd flung onto the closet shelf she couldn't actually reach they night she'd realized it was April. His scent on it too much, and not enough, and she'd wanted to scream, but both kids were asleep, so all she'd been able to do was throw the thing out of sight and collapse in the bathroom.

The flannel. However cold she'd felt, it was too hot to wear it outside. Inside, they had central air. She needed to get inside.

"Okay, let Momma feel. Nope, not too hot, not too cold. Zola stick your right foot in, pull your right foot out—"

"That's the Hokey-Pokey!"

"Isit? What comes next?" If they hadn't taken so much delight in filling an adult in on something, it would be cruel to take advantage of how easily children believed everyone was clueless as often as they were.

"Shake it all about!" Zola demonstrated, and Bailey imitated her. Once he kicked his leg under the spray, Meredith tried to brush all the sand from under the folds of baby skin. The bottom of the tub would still become its own beach, but at least she'd made an attempt.

She might not be on Yoda's side after all.

"You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around—come on, bud, turn with Momma, all the way—That's what it's all about!"

"Yay!" Bailey clapped with Zola's hand still in hers, and Zola giggled.

"You're silly, Bailey-bird."

In college, one of Meredith's women's studies professors had a postcard that said what if that is what it's all about? taped to her door. It'd appealed to her nihilism, but she'd also contended that whoever came up with it shouldn't have kids. No one deserved a parent who mocked the hokey-pokey.

She'd never considered that there'd be a point in her life where she'd cling to the joke. Here, in a way, the hokey-pokey was what it was all about. Every moment that was true was a moment that she'd lived through, breathed through, without Derek.

As an adult who respected the hokey-pokey, she determined that the joke wasn't a mockery of the rhyme. It was mocking humanity. The meaning of life was as simple and meaningless as a children's rhyme. The most anyone could do was follow simple directions.

That putting body parts in and shaking them was what it was all about. The hokey-pokey, if you know what I mean. Shit, she already thought she was screwed up for noticing how often these things sounded dirty out of context; noticing it while the majority of her thoughts were about her dead husband took it to a new of twisted. Kinked? She'd left that behind a long time ago. Coiled. Matted.

Unravelling.

She unclipped the carabiner keychain Sadie had given her from the belt loop of her shorts and unlocked the door and stepped aside to avoid getting bowled over.

"Tub time!" she yelled after them, and then listened to make sure their footsteps were heading in the correct direction. Within a minute, Zola would turn the water on herself to be "helpful," and in maybe thirty seconds that would somehow become a mess.

Her sixth sense in regards to her children freaked her out sometimes, but she'd yet to predict exactly what she'd find in response to, "uh-oh…. Momma!"

Two or three mornings ago, she'd heard the first scrape of the chair against the floor. The distance between her bedroom door and the kitchen was about thirty feet, and by the time she'd gotten there, a bowl sat on the counter half full of…yup, that was a breastmilk bag. Bailey was trying to get into a packet of oatmeal, a box of Frosted Flakes was pouring into the sink, and Zola was standing on a chair in front of the microwave crying because the door had sprung open and clipped her forehead. It'd been like a puzzle from the magazines on the peds floor waiting rooms:

Mommy left Zola and Bailey unsupervised for thirty (30) seconds. Zola is three (3) ft tall. Tell us! what's wrong with this picture?

1. Zola knows she is not allowed to use a microwave.

2. Zola should not have been able to move the chair from the table, to the bowl cabinet, to the microwave that quickly

3. Check the Frosted Flakes in the original image. Notice something about the box? It hasn't been opened!

4. Why was Meredith able to get everyone soothed, cleaned, and fed without losing her chill, when the next morning she'd snapped at Zola for picking up the orange juice box without putting the cap on?

Whatever the reason, she couldn't trust her own shenanigan tolerance, and anything they got up to would actually be her fault for not following them at speed.

She nabbed the flannel off the back of the couch and shimmied her arms into the sleeves, trying to rid her skin of any lingering sand.

In her first sweep of the house that night, tossing apart every hamper and drawer she could had given her five of these. Three, she'd sealed in plastic bags. One, she'd worn almost continuously until she'd torn it off in the hotel bathroom. The final one, she'd left there. It wasn't impossible that it might be what compelled her back to Seattle.

This one had already lost most of his scent

"I'm glad to see you again, Dr. Grey."

"Is the ghoster aura that strong? Could be. I've officially ghosted everyone in my life. They're safer that way. People close to me have a tendency to become ghosts."

"You have suffered a significant amount of loss in a short period of time."

"It doesn't feel short. Except, it does, because Derek…. This whole part of my life started the night we met. Coincidentally. Kinda. But I think of it that way, and I…I don't really…I'd rather not think of the future in terms of how long it's been since he died."

"Is that why you're here?"

"I'm here because I have a deal with Sad—Dr. Harris. She does that thing with her eyes. I wouldn't call it coercion, but…it could be called coercion."

"Sadie's persuasive, undoubtedly, but I've had coerced patients. You don't strike me as one of them, Dr. Grey."

"Meredith. For now…until…I don't…I'm just Meredith."

"All right, Meredith. I go by Beni, Benicia, or Dr. Klein. You can call me whatever you like, particularly when this gets difficult."

"Which it probably will."

"Yes. And it will get easier."

"Are…um…. Does it always?"

"Unless someone has or develops an underlying condition that requires more expertise than I have, but I have plenty of expertise. Prolonged Grief Disorder is a specialty of mine, and a DSM-V condition, but nothing makes me think you need to be too concerned. No particular risk factors."

"Really?"

"Nope."

"Does that… I-I mean…what if…? Damn it. Sorry. I leak. I've never been a crier. Not... not where anyone could see. Now, my kids are telling me it's not something to be ashamed of, because I cannot seem to fucking…um…."

"I would not be doing my job if I censored my patients."

"That's logical. My last shrink…the last one I went to without needing something signed…she's…I owe her a lot, but she reminded me a little of my dead stepmother, and…whatever. It's not constant, but it feels like that, because there's always…always something, and I gave up on concealer at the funeral. Hey, that's what the crowds expected, right? I think my friends were sort of spooked, which is part of why….

"What if I tell you I'm not sure I want it to get easier?"

"I would say it sounds like you loved your husband very much."

"That's…that's all?"

"Meredith, you planned for Derek to be part of your future for a long time. Losing him isn't simply not having around anymore. You have also lost your understanding of what the rest of your life would look like; what your children's lives would look like. What your husband's life would look like. You may want to feel, or think you deserve to feel, devastated for a while. As time passes, and you have a new perspective on those futures, there will be less immediate pain, but there will still be sadness. There may always be—in fact, will always be—sadness attached to a significant loss. What I hope to help you discover is how to balance that sadness with happiness."

"Not my strong point."

"That's why you're here."

There hadn't been many beaches in Meredith's childhood. She'd taken a couple trips to Revere with friends' families, but there hadn't been beach vacations until college. Then there'd been a friend whose parents had a place in New Hampshire. Spring Break in Panama City. Ibiza. She hadn't made it to Greece with Sadie, but she'd been to Italy multiple times. It'd always felt like the furthest possible place from her mother, who'd wanted her to continue on with French if she insisted on going to a school that didn't offer more Latin than she'd already had. That may have biased her against the side of the Med that splashed onto southern France. Sicily had been the first place she'd felt relaxed since some time in college, if not since she was five years old.

The dialect around her might not have always matched what she'd gotten in class, but she hadn't had to do the awkward "anyone speak English?" thing since the border. Her fluency wasn't perfect, but she'd gotten by without a professor or a host-family there to save her. Speaking a language wasn't anything close to practicing medicine, but it'd buoyed her confidence. Made her remember that she could be a capable person. Laying on a towel in front of topaz waters, she'd decided to let go of the fight with her mother. Either she'd get through med school and put her skills to use, or she'd prove Ellis right. Her mother won either way. Meredith only won if she tried, and she was going to do it.

She'd lost a lot of certainty after Amsterdam; after a summer spent taking notes in specialists' offices, and reading things that weren't supposed to make sense to her for three more years. In the way that she wasn't sure why she'd ended up in San Diego, she wasn't sure that she hadn't planned on getting through med school similarly to the way she got through undergrad—Hey, it wasn't like her mother would know, at least not for much longer!—Then, midway through September, she'd gone into Boston for the weekend. After her mother spent dinner belittling the one professor who'd acknowledged Meredith's work, not her name, she'd activated the new security system on the old door and gone out to meet a few of the friends who'd been more hers than Sadie's at a sports bar.

How Sadie had been informed of her whereabouts she had no idea. It was not somewhere she would've gone on her own. She'd more or less fallen on Meredith. "Grey, you look like death! Must be all the studying. Got that MD yet?"

Meredith had frozen.

Someone else had said something snarky about how much Sadie must've been jonesing for Death if a few weeks felt like four years.

"You all know me," she'd said. "I'm always jonesing for death." She'd met Meredith's eyes, and for a heartbeat, Meredith expected her lips would follow. That she'd do it here, as a gesture. An apology for never kissing Meredith in public, sober—not that she'd been sure she was sober—and a declaration that she understood why Meredith had gone home in response to Ellis saying, "I need you here."

Sadie had looked away first. She'd shoved against the table and tossed an arm up in the air, gesturing for someone. Meredith didn't remember what he looked like. Broad and brunet in her mind. The opposite of her, in every conceivable way. A clear statement.

When she'd been making her way to her room sometime between that day and the next, her mother had glanced up from her desk, and asked if she was the babysitter filling in for Leona. It could've been what made her give up, if she hadn't returned to a Mediterranean beach in her dreams that night. She'd been on the beach, but instead of discussing volcanos, and pasta, and putting all her skills at euphemism to work, the conversation had been about anesthesia, and the way it changed the meaning of surgery. She hadn't been able to see who she was talking to due to the smoke of the bonfire they were sitting around, but it hadn't mattered.

It didn't matter. She might be the only person who cared if she succeeded in graduating, much less becoming a surgeon, much less being certified, but she did care. She could be all she needed. Late Sunday night, she'd taken the bottle of tequila stashed in her dorm and hidden it in the one sanctioned place she'd haunted for her first four years at Dartmouth, the Rainbow Alliance meeting room. Giving the new kids a treat was how she thought of it; a tribute to her time as one of them. She could buy another bottle. It was symbolic. She just hadn't bought them quite as frequently. Maybe all of Seattle could be explained by a decrease in her tolerance.

San Diego was supposed to have a Mediterranean climate. Hadn't she read that somewhere? But she wasn't going to find certainty. The beach outside her window had been carved by the Pacific, and she'd still reacted to the water like it was the Sound. She didn't think anything on the San Diego or Mission Bay would be better.

The irony of her kid ending up with a name that shortened to "Bay" hadn't escaped her, but the paperwork had been done when Zola had first said "Bay-Bay!" proudly combining "bay-bee boy" and "Bay-lee"—occasionally "Boy-lee," "bay-bee-boy-lee," or the one she was proudest of: "bay-boy lee-lee"—It'd taken Derek longer, but they'd always referred to the incident differently. "The ferryboat crash on the Sound," versus "the time I drowned in Elliott Bay."

"I can work with Zo on his actual name, and there are other nicknames. Kate still turns if you say 'Moo' in the right tone."

"Tell me the story one when your child isn't sucking milk out of my boob, and it'll probably be funny. It's fine. I am. Not like the pool thing."

"Not my best idea."

"It shouldn't matter. I should be over it."

"Why? Mer, you…. I've never asked if the ferryboats bother you. We take them every day."

"I'm fine in the car, and if I'm not, you're with me. I'm…I'm safe. If I'd been in the crash…but I wasn't. Uh…, and since people named Bailey like to deprive me of sleep, I'm not dreaming, but when I do it hasn't been any more frequent, so—"

"You still dream about it?"

"You sleep with me every night."

"Ah, I sleep beside you every night. Now, if you wanted…."

"Hands off, bub."

"Yes ma'am."

"I figured…well, we never really talked about my dreams after that happened, but we do with the other stuff, and you were there when they started…I figured they looked different, and you didn't want to go there."

"They don't. I used to ask you, to try to get you to talk them out before you went back to sleep, but it felt pushy, and I don't think it helped. It's better for you once it's daylight."

"So…I'm the one who didn't bring those up. Huh, well. They're not the worst."

"Do you…. There have been a lot of the other things."

"They're there. The shooting. The plane crash. Bomb guy. The one where Janet's at the door holding a pizza."

"Mer—"

"Stupid, right? They'd stopped when we got her birth certificate, but while I was pregnant…. I really thought we'd lost her."

"I really thought I'd lost you, back then. And I got so fixated on that…"

"But I survived, and we've kept surviving. We found Zola. We made him. If this little Bay is a reminder of anything, it's that we're alive."

"I like that. But... Mer, if you do start dreaming about it again, tell me, okay? I'm sorry you couldn't tell me, then."

Not I'm sorry you thought you couldn't tell me then.

He hadn't accused her of seeing what wasn't there. That'd been enough for her. Her dreams mattered far less than that conversation. Anything unsaid should've been said years ago. Discussing it more would only make him broody. He'd never liked acknowledging that she'd died.

Turns out I'm not crazy about the reverse, buckoo.

Meredith is drowning. Everything around her is darkness, and her body is unaccountably heavy, every piece of clothing down to the eyelets on her Converse are unexpected anchors, dragging her further down. She tries to push up, tries to remember anything from her YMCA swimming lessons fifteen years ago, desperate to get out, to get away from the cold. Unidentified objects slam against her out of nowhere whenever she thinks she's getting somewhere. She's not sure she's moving upward anymore; there's no light. there's no sun. Her lungs are burning.

This is where it's supposed to end. The darkness takes over, but Derek saves her.

Derek….

Derek is there in the darkness; she can't see him, but she knows he's there. She wants to lunge for him, to scream his name. She needs him to get her out, so she can breathe. She doesn't want to die. He should come to her; she doesn't want to die.

A rush of water, she's flipped over and over, she has to breathe, to get something in her lungs. Derek is…Derek is gone. Derek isn't saving her. She's falling again, down, down into the darkness, and she is alone.

Derek wasn't sleeping next to her anymore. He wasn't there to hold her, ensuring that she fell back into a safe sleep. The nightmares held her instead; the images lingered. Night after night, she lay awake as the ceiling became more and more visible; still shaking, gasping, seeing Clark's gun, the flatlines; Derek lying on an ICU bed, gone before she could say goodbye.

Eventually, she'd be joined by one kid, then another, and they had to be fed. She'd make them dress, for the distraction of curling feet and bent limbs, the routine, the sense of doing something. In the living room, she nested on the sofa, where Bailey brought her "book story"s, and Zola curled against her, occasionally needing to be guided through part of an educational app. Her phone alarm became the only interruption, and they'd switch off. The amount of fussing depended on the activity. With all screen-time rules suspended, Zola was a little more magnanimous, but Bailey protested her handing Meredith a book more than he disliked relinquishing the tablet. He did prefer picking what was playing on the TV.

One morning the Sesame Street sing-along he'd hummed along to on and off ended while Zola tried to hand off the iPad. He squealed, shoving it away.

"No tab-it!"

"We're gonna watch Doc Stuffins," Zola informed him. "It's still my turn for TV if you don't want the tablet."

"No tab-it, t'ank you."

"Bay?" Meredith said, clearing a pile of plastic wildcats and a gazelle off her lap. "It's your turn with the tablet, but you don't have to play with it. You have lots of other toys."

He'd stared at her. "No tab-it?"

"Not if you don't want. We can read another book, or you can build with Duplo."

"Do cull-cans?"

"We need to get crayons," Zola said. "All we have are the four from lunch with Miss Aunt Sadie."

Meredith twitched for her phone, and then grabbed her notebook off the end table. The new phone reminded her of everything she wasn't doing as much as the old one. "You can use what we have," she said, while adding art supplies to the shopping list.

"No tab-it turn," he said, decisively. "Read Lilly?"

"We can." Meredith accepted the copy of Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse that'd been on the bedtime pile she'd stuffed into the front pocket of her suitcase. They'd become a playground merry-go-round; she'd read that one three times that day. She wasn't immune to the repetitiveness, but she understood why they liked going into something knowing what would happen. The lack of uncertainty made her less irritated whenever they hit replay on a TV show or said 'again!' at the end of a book.

"We have that book on the tablet, too," Zola pointed out.

"No tab-it."

"I like real books more sometimes, too, Bay-Bee, but Zola's right. That's something we can do on your iPad turn. When it's Zola's turn, you only have the paper one."

He climbed onto her lap with the hardcopy. By the time the timer sounded again, he'd shifted to the floor to chase a marbleized ball he'd happily pulled out of a cage of bouncing balls at Target. It was big enough to be relegated to outside at home, but there was nothing in the condo she couldn't afford to replace. Nothing inanimate, anyway.

Maybe this was what would make her embrace being Mrs. Shepherd; confirming the whispers speculating about gold-digging, her marriage erasing the way they used to project her mother's net-worth onto her.

Bailey took his next turn with the iPad to play a shape matching app. It seemed like he'd just needed to know he wasn't required to tap on a piece of glass every thirty minutes.

The day continued. Sometime in the week, she forgot to restart the timer. There were disputes to referee, and she redirected if it stayed in one pair of hands too long, but mostly they drifted back and forth to it like any other toy. At least her selfish choices weren't ruining them.

She watched over their shoulders while they tapped. She rolled the ball toward the opposite wall. She gave voice to animals, clicked together Duplo, and ate far more pretend food than she did of the lunches she put together. Sometimes, she lost herself, staring out the window with her mind hundreds of miles away. Certain tones in their voices always broke through to her, but that didn't stop her from berating herself whenever she blinked to find them playing with a different set of toys. Often, that provided the motivation she needed for the short walk to the playground, no matter if it felt like she was walking through syrup; if her head felt like she'd put in a too-tight ponytail when her hair was loose, or if she didn't remember the last time she'd actually eaten. She'd learned how to scrape the bottom of her reserves years ago.

Cristina was right, she thought on one of those three-block walks where the amount of light pouring into her eyes made her squint, but nothing seemed brighter. He's gone, and the sun is still here.

That didn't make nearly as much sense as it had when it was purely symbolic.

"…you are serious."

"I'm always serious about this."

"De-unh—debatable—but…oh yeah…oh-oh, fuck. Oh, yes"

"Feels like you're pretty serious, too."

"That…that's not…fuh—not the—oh, yeah, yeah—crap—you're gonna have to…if your goal is getting me…fuck…Oh, oh, yes, yes, yes."

"That's it. That's it, Mer. Move your arm. I wanna see you."

"I…mmph...the kids…."

"The kids? They're with Lexie"

"L-Lexie?"

"Mmhmm."

"Ohh, shit, that-that-that…do that aguh—uh— wait. Derek…Derek, .Lexie's dead. She can't ha—ah—have them."

"What? Oh. They're with Sadie. Are you using something new on your hair?

"No. Sadie? Why would they be with…? Oh, no."

"It's not bad. Different. Like lemons."

"No. No. No, no, no, no."

"Meredith? Baby, what is it?"

"Nononononono."

"Mer? Look at me. It's okay. Look at me."

"I can't. I can't. I can't, because you're dead, Derek. You're dead, and this isn't even…you can't be here. "

"I'm here. I'm right—."

"Shut up. Shut up. You died. You fucking died, and we're in San Diego. I'm dreaming. I have to be dreaming. Wake up, Meredith. Wake up. Wake up. Wakeup. Wakeupwakeupwake…"

Derek is dead. Derek died. Derek will always be dead.

Derek had been dead for less than a month, and Meredith was facing the first holiday without him. No matter how minor a task would've seemed a month ago; no matter which parent's responsibility it would've been, everything was a first time—The first time pushing Zola on a swing since Derek died. The first time Bailey fell asleep into his dinner since Derek died. The first time she made a blanket nest—it didn't make it to fort—and microwaved popcorn for a movie night since Derek died. Sometimes, the second and third repetition of a task were equally challenging—her sixth nightmare about drowning since Derek died—but most of the time, knowing she'd lived through the first makes the second easier.

She wasn't sure if it was better or worse that Easter wasn't significant for her.

"Spring is the season when lotsa nature resets after winter it's too cold to grow, and in spring there's rain and sun, and lotsa trees and flowers get all bright again, and animals have babies, like bunnies. People like celebrating pretty colors, and no more snow, and sometimes babies too, but Bailey is not born in spring because spring. He was just ready to be born."

Meredith listened to Zola's paraphrasing—not parroting, she understood— the content of the books they'd read together to provide context for this event. Her monologue to Sadie the previous week had been about Passover, cribbed mostly from the Rugrats episode some brilliant person had uploaded to YouTube, but Meredith supplemented it with blurry memories from the couple of seders she'd intended. She truly wouldn't have minded if that was the tradition her atheist ass had been raised to appropriate. If you had to have a holiday where you sat around a table, having a script for it wasn't a bad idea, and she was all for using historical traumas as an excuse to drink four glasses of wine. Best of all, Elijah did not leave a basket, or a stocking, or whatever, and learning that the chair was a symbol wasn't likely to cause a childhood-ruining chain reaction.

"Death, let's go!"

Meredith dragged herself up to the sink of the bathroom attached to the master bath. The low level of queasiness she'd lived with all month wasn't time-sensitive, or tied to specific sensations the way her bouts with morning sickness had been. It surged without warning. She didn't know that bypassing her toothbrush to squeeze a minimal amount of toothpaste on her finger and rubbing it over her tongue and the front of her teeth to override the acidic aftertaste was necessary, but it didn't bring on a second wave of nausea. Neither did swishing and spitting a handful of water.

She lingered with her face pressed against a damp washcloth. She could tell Sadie she wasn't feeling well, to take the kids to the Easter egg hunt without her. It'd give her two hours alone, with the hope for two hours of the daytime sleep, which came with fewer horrors.

She wouldn't manage it. Not even with the constant exhaustion. She'd be too preoccupied, knowing that was the first step down the slope. How long until Zola stopped asking whether or not Mom was going too? That wasn't going to happen. That wasn't how things were going. Not this time. Not for her.

"All right, let's go hunt some Easter bunnies!" She swiped the baskets that'd started the morning full of hollow eggs full of Goldfish crackers, Puffs, Reese's cups, Jelly Bellies, and M&Ms.

"We hunt the eggs, Momma," Zola said. "I tol'ed you that."

"Did you?"

"Mmhmm, yeah, and we watched the Max and Ruby, and the Paw Patrol yesterday. More than two-ce!"

"Twice, Zo. One is once, two is twice, three is thrice. And we watched that so many more times two times," Meredith added, once she'd closed Zola's door. She went around the car plotting the best way to take Bailey from Sadie and get him into the despised car seat he before he caught on. She arrived to find him all buckled in.

She gaped at Sadie. "How'd you do that?"

"Tab A into slot B.

"He's been going boneless whenever I open the door! We hardly go anywhere because the idea of loading him in the car overwhelms me seventy-five percent of the time." She tried to make checking his straps look causal while she deposited the Easter baskets at his feet. He grabbed her hand, frowning, like he was trying to figure out why he'd let himself be tamed so easily. "It's okay, bud." Meredith kissed him on the cheek. "She does a thing with her eyes. Guess falling for it is genetic."

During the few times she and Lexie had discussed the secret skills cabal, the blank Lexie had drawn at the eyes made Meredith satisfied that they didn't have the same type. Then she'd discover something else Sadie'd talked Lexie into, and wonder—

"Mer!"

"Hmm?" She was still hovering over Bailey, who'd taken the opportunity to grab his favorite piece of her hair. Sadie had a hand on her shoulder. "Oh. Sorry.…getting this." She held up the single piece of candy that'd been left in Zola's basket after she cleared their hoards into baggies. A Reese's cup. Of course.

"Momma was having sad thoughts," Zola informed Sadie. "About Daddy. I think because he took'd me to the egg hunt last year."

"He did take you." Meredith leaned over Bailey to kiss Zola. "But I was actually thinking about Aunt Lexie." She hated the immediate sense that she was doing it wrong. She should be thinking about Derek. She should always be thinking about Derek. She was always thinking about Derek. She had an equal right to think about Lexie, didn't she? Lexie, who never got enough of her time, not in life or after it.

"Aunt Lexie would lo-ove my dress," Zola said. "We love purple."

"That's why I picked it," Meredith admitted. "You look very powerful and…positive in pristine purple." Find a new word for this afternoon, she told herself, pretty sure pristine wouldn't apply anymore.

She'd bought the dress right after the Easter Egg Roll appeared on the hospital calendar. Theirs wasn't the only family picking and choosing from the watered-down pagan rites of the day, but all the children would be dressed like they'd spent the morning in a pew. Meredith was a WASP. She could play that game. Its color had definitely reminded her of the days Lexie got Zola dressed and exclaimed over how purple suited her.

Once, Meredith had almost intervened—she'd heard "pretty" a few too many times without the addition of "inside and out"— and then Lexie had continued, drowning out Meredith's low throat-clearing.

"Purple makes you powerful!" Zola, sitting at the table with a cup of dry Cheerios, had tapped he cup on the tray. "Proud!" Zola had giggled and tapped. "Protective!" Tap! "Um…patient!" Tap!

"Puh-puh?" Tap! "'On-Ecksy, puh-puh?"

"Proactive!" Tap! "Persuasive!" Tap! "Phlegmatic!" Tap!

Meredith had smiled to herself when she announced "peculiar!" with the same enthusiasm, finally coming in to distract the baby around "Peerless!" Lexithaurus was looking low on adjectives that were "positive."

Meredith pressed her back against the car. It was solid. A huge, solid block, containing tons of metal that people were so careless with. They should all have to see what their cars, their planes, and trains, and damned semi-trucks could do to the human body. She glanced upward, letting the supposedly-bright sun burn off the mist in her eyes. The gray haze wasn't any different on this gorgeous blue day than it'd been the one before. Sadie's hand was still on her shoulder, and at some point, the other had detached Meredith's keys from the belt loop on her jeans. "I'm driving."

"Not gonna argue."

Sadie squeezed her shoulder and headed around for the driver's seat. Meredith got in, hooked her seatbelt, and just let herself ridefor a few minutes.

"Fati has a bag of 2T clothes for B, don't let me forget."

"I can get them clothes."

"Next time you feel like browsing at Carter's, she'll tell you where to pay it forward."

Meredith sighed. It wasn't like she hadn't taken hospital hand-me-downs. "We're going to the school where she works?"

"Yup."

"But she's a social worker?"

"She's the school to Health and Human Services go-between. Anchor Beach's charter has a provision stating that they prioritize providing a consistent education for kids in foster care. It was proposed by one of the administrator's daughters after her adoption was finalized. They've got five teenagers; they adopted her biological brother, and the twins came to the family at about Zola's age."

"What about the fifth?"

"Wife's bio-kid from her first marriage."

Zola and Bailey could be "from her first marriage" one day. Couldn't it? Or would the thought always make her slightly dizzy and cause sweat to collect on her palms?

"Bi-pan?" she asked, trying not to show that she'd lost her hold on placid disinterest.

"Hanging out in the denial section of her walk-in."

"You must have so much to talk about."

Sadie didn't respond. Meredith let her head rest against her seatbelt. That'd been mean. Grief had shredded her filter, or whatever her new therapist would say, if Beni said the stuff Meredith expected to hear. Trying to think of what to say only made herself think of some other claim Sadie had made. They'd been friends-with-benefits, fuck-buddies; bi-curious, she's bi and I'm curious; I'm a necrophile in love with Death—that was the closest she'd ever come, and the conversation had been about her fucking Halloween costume.

"You gonna eat that gorgeous cocktail of peanut butter and chocolate, or what?"

Meredith looked down to see she'd picked at the edges of the foil on the Reese's Cup. She tore a strip down from one edge, splitting the wrapper, and gave herself ten seconds of dread before putting it into her mouth.

The flavor was overpowering, and as she gulped to try to get the texture down her throat, she knew the active movement was going to have been a mistake. Jokes about gag reflexes aside, she absolutely did have one, and the hunk of salt-sweet-salt on her tongue would—No. Okay. Swallowing, achieved. She leaned against the window, trying to avoid reminding her body that she existed. Her working theory was that it was indulging in the denial her brain could not allow; refusing to interact with the byproducts of a world where Derek was dead.

The turn-signal clicked on, and they trundled up into a strip-center parking lot. Meredith eased upright, slowly giving up the support of the door. "Where're we going?"

"Starbucks. Look at your hands."

"Oh, that." She opened and closed her shaking hands a couple of times, and then settled her fists into her lap.

"Yes, that. God, Death, I thought you were at least eati—"

"I am! I'm…" She swallowed, wincing at the residual taste of peanut butter. "Just can't, some days, and I'm never really…I don't feel it until I'm like this." She opened a hand, let the tremor run unchecked for a moment, and clenched her fist again. "I tried to regulate by eating with them, but forcing it only makes the bad days worse."

They pulled up to the speaker, and the tip of Zola's shoe touched Meredith's shoulder as the little girl saw where they were. "Mommy? Can I have a Starbuck?"

"If you share it with Bailey."

"Yeah, I could do that."

"Will you?"

"Yessie, yessie, yes please."

"Welcome to Starbucks, can I take your order?"

Meredith leaned over Sadie to get picked up by the receiver. "Can I get a short, hazelnut steamer, kid-temp, please?"

"One hazelnut babyccino, anything else?"

Babyccino? Sadie mouthed. Meredith rolled her eyes. She hadn't named the thing. Of course, four years ago, she would've mocked it, too. She'd still mock it if she hadn't been through the experience of explaining to a toddler why they couldn't gulp the sweet, sugary drink in Mommy's cup. She ordered an additional container of milk to mix in with a tiny bit of the steamed milk and syrup for Bailey, and then sat back, letting Sadie take over.

She doctored the fake coffee for the kids, pouring Bailey's into a sippy cup while she refreshed Zola on drinking from a lid. When they were settled, Sadie shoved an open bottle of orange juice at her. Meredith sipped it, ready for it to be as difficult to swallow as the peanut butter cup. She downed half before forcing herself to put it in the cup holder. hearing Miranda lecturing a patient in the back of her mind. "The better it tastes, the more you need it."

Sadie glared at her. "You. Are. A. Doctor."

"Uh-huh." Meredith tore a hunk off the croissant in the bag on her lap. That, she halved again, rolling it into a ball. Sadie was still looking daggers at her while sipping her cinnamon dulce. "I'm a doctor who tries to avoid puking her guts out. I don't have many left." She popped the shred of pastry in her mouth, more letting it dissolve than swallowing. "Miranda keeps taking them."

"Stalling. You never vary your tactics."

"Mommy liked the orange Tic-Tacts," Zola offered. "But not since Bailey was inside her puterus."

"Uterus," Meredith corrected while unspooling another thin piece of mostly air.

"Wow, I see how it is. You have a new partner-in-distraction." Sadie blew out a breath of mock-indignance, so tame there was no mistaking it for the real thing, but somehow made Meredith feel like she was culpable for something.

Shouldn't she be less easily possessed by the ghost of her twenty-one-year-old self? There was no way she'd suffered such strong residuals of the Sadie Effect in Seattle. Now, she could acknowledge it with twisted fondness. Then…she wouldn't have acknowledged it. She'd been better at ignoring her emotions before Post-its, and babies. Also, Derek's presence, Cristina's, and even Lexie's mitigated it.

She'd hoped the "guess where I got matched?" text was a system error—"no one gets matched in late-December, right? Derek, you're old. Have you ever heard of that happening?"—but she'd taken precautions; locking most of their history into a mental steel box. That Sadie had been gone within a week of proving that she'd had the key all along had been such a Sadie thing to do. It shouldn't have been a surprise; and yet, Meredith had been shocked to come home to find the couch empty, and the backpack gone. Somehow, that led to Lexie getting the full story before anyone—Cristina would've been first, if she hadn't gotten so wrapped up in the prospect of competition that she hadn't stopped to ask, "wait, are Eurotrip girl and Richie Rich the same person?" It wasn't Meredith's fault she nicknamed characters in her stories before asking if they recurred.

It'd taken a month for Derek to bring up her absence. He'd seen there was more there was to the story, all the stories, than he'd gotten— "we were friends who fucked, did stupid shit, and were assholes to each other a lot."— and he'd waited for a night where they wouldn't be needed elsewhere. In the intervening time, he'd spun out, her friend had been diagnosed with cancer, and they'd gotten engaged. She'd told him more than either of them would've predicted. She hadn't kept much in the steel boxes, after that. Not for a long time.

"Cast me as the villain, if need be," Sadie continued, and it wasn't a stretch to believe she knew where Meredith's mind had gone, "but I know your ways. I watched you invent them. I've also been watching you hurl since we were—Ow! God, you have no fat stores, and those elbows are weapons. Eating, poor. Sleep?"

"Happens."

"Nightmares?"

"Happen."

"Want to try another week of pills?"

"I… I fall asleep on my own." As long as a kid is with me.

"Right— eat the damn shreds —- which means you're not dependent. Sleep should help your appetite, too. Period?"

"Eh. It's weird when I'm not on the pill. Tracking it when we were trying was a whole thing. I had some spottiness. I figure that's it for a month where…I mean, I'm not an OB-GYN, but supposedly stress and not eating or sleeping has an effect on your body?"

"I wouldn't have been surprised if you'd gone OB-GYN? You were always very rah-rah female bodies. And not in the sexuality way. In the, hey no one educates about this way."

"Yeah. A couple of times Derek and I would be talking about the fertility stuff, or my eternal vendetta against the fact that women aren't taught about their bodies. That clit is practically a bad word, or an unknown word. He'd get this look, and one time I just finally demanded to know what it was…he might've been in me at the time. We were weird, we talked a lot, whatever, we didn't have much spare time. He asked me how close I'd gotten to OB-GYN. Zero, really, because we didn't have a good attending, but…I took a few months of extra shifts on the floor after I dropped neuro, and you're right. I could've. I didn't, for the same reason he gave me the look. Not because he would've cared, but it would've been weird."

"Why?"

"Huh? Oh, because his ex-wife was an OB-GYN."

"Oh. That's right. What happened to you going into neuro?"

"Long story. I'm happy as a general surgeon. It was the right choice."

Sadie put her coffee down in the cup-holder, and Meredith eyed it. She couldn't figure out the rental's snooty machine, and every cup she'd managed had been burnt or bitter. When she'd decided Sadie wouldn't risk spilling it by snatching it out of her hand, she reached for it. The other woman got there first.

"Please, you're going to have to prove you deserve caffeine privileges." Sadie shook her head. "Seriously, hydration, Grey."

Meredith was on a hospital bed at Grey+Sloan, facing Owen. "—seriously dehydrated, Grey. They should've made sure you were taking water."

"I wasn't their patient."

"If you'd been here — "

"What do we say whenever we get a transfer from there? Every time?"

His hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched. "Fucking Dillard."

"Yeah. Last night, from the time the police officer told me where he was, to when the resident told me how long it took their damn neuro guy to get there…All I could think was 'fucking Dillard.' If I'd gotten there earlier…. I dropped neuro, but it's been a long time since I didn't know how to do burr holes. Don't look at me like that, I'm not exaggerating. So, yes. Being here would've been better for all involved. Now, would you please let Miranda in, because I'm sorry, Owen, I told Cristina I'd look out for you, but at this moment I kinda wanna stab you."

"Death, hey! Sad thoughts?"

Meredith blinked, totally disconnected from the beach-front parking lot they were sitting in. "No. Angry ones, actually."

"Huh, maybe that's a new tactic to consider." Sadie tossed her door open. "Made for a quiet ride, but you look far less like an extra on The Walking Dead."

"Too bad, I kinda thought this would be the right holiday for it," she shot back, and while Sadie cracked up Meredith began thinking through the logistics of getting two kids through an Easter egg hunt on the beach without taking half of the sand home with them.

Getting down to the lower-school playground turned out to be easier than she'd anticipated. It was all totally accessible, which meant she could stuff them in the stroller "Just until I have the lay of the land, Zo." until they were in the gated-off area. The upper-school was less supervised; parental waivers allowed water access before and after classes, as well as during certain periods of phys-ed. Meredith still wasn't sure how much she loved taking the kids out of their safer-than-a-car stroller with the waves crashing audibly behind them.

Sadie's partner Fatimah had come over to them. She was a bit older than Meredith and Sadie, closer to forty than thirty-five. Her hijab featured several different cartoon bunnies painting chocolate eggs, which appealed to Meredith's sense of what the holiday would be for her family. The commercialized product, spending time together, and learning to share. In that regard, the school had come up with some savvy ways to keep things fair.

Every little one got three colored stickers on their hand that matched the eggs they'd search out. An older student guided them along a "bunny trail" and replaced their treasures with alternate colors eggs for the next hunters. Once they'd gone from one side of the playground to the other, they traded their haul in for a gift bag, regardless of how many eggs were in their basket.

"We considered letting the Easter Bunny leave footprints for them to follow, but since every family perceives him differently…well, that's also why we don't have some costumed monstrosity," Fatimah explained.

"For which I'm grateful," Meredith said, lifting Bailey out of the stroller. He locked his hold around her neck, so she decided to get Zola set up first. If Bailey wanted to stay on her hip the whole time, passing judgement on every stranger they encountered, she wouldn't have minded. Unfortunately—fortunately, this is a good thing—he started squirming the second the neon-green adhesive touched Zola's skin.

"Colors," he said. "Geen, buhyew, ya-low, parple, unge."

"Good job. You wanna match colors?" Meredith smiled at the kid—twelve? maybe thirteen?— who'd come over holding Bailey's stickers. "Thanks. This is Bailey. We call him Bay, sometimes. That's his big sister Zola; he'll probably want to follow her."

"Hey, that's so cool, your big sister is with my big sister, Mari." The boy—nametag says…Jude—pointed to the willowy Latina girl showing Zola a sample of eggs that matched her stickers. "Bailey, can I put some stickers on your hand?"

Bailey held out his hand without any prompting from her, and as the boy carefully placed the three stickers said, "pink, ya-low, buhyew." She'd noticed he could identify everything in the RAINBOW WORLD book that'd been in their Target purchases, but seeing it in action made her want to squeeze him with pride.

"Finger buhyew," he added, grabbing Jude's index finger. His nails were painted neon green. "Bay finger geen?"

"Sure, B." They'd get the polish at CVS, and that could be tomorrow's Thing. "He's good at matching but new. He may do better focused on one color —"

"NO! I DON'T WANNA!"

Meredith's head snapped up for her to hone in on the spot with START HERE chalked onto the sidewalk. Zola had her feet planted on the line above it, and had crossed her arms to make her point very clear to the girl holding out a hand to her.

"Zoie sc-weem!" Bailey informed her, screeching the last syllable.

"I heard, Bay, thanks. Can you help Jude find a blue egg?" She could see one on the nearest play set, and if he would just pass Zola by, maybe whatever was happening wouldn't be contagious. His empathetic tendencies could be to everyone's deficit sometimes. Lately. He needed a good day. Zola did too. If he'd just —

"Buhyew, dere!" He darted toward it, his escort following, and Meredith closed the distance to Zola, whose cheeks were already sticky with tears.

"Zo-Zo, what's wrong, sweet girl?"

Zola's guide grabbed her basket right as the little girl threw her arms around Meredith's neck, saving her from being whacked with it. This probably wasn't a tipping situation, but it should've been.

She lifted Zola and started looking for somewhere to sit. Fatimah directed her toward a bench along a side of the playground that wasn't included in the Easter Bunny's route. Once they sat down, she rubbed circles on Zola's back while she cried herself to coherency.

"I…wanted…t-to wait," the little girl finally choked out. "F-f-for my S-Sofi."

Never. It was never what Meredith expected. "Sofia is in Seattle, Zo."

"But we are too. We are, and in Sunny-Day-Go. Starbucks is, and in Sunny-Day-Go."

"We live in Seattle, yes, and so does Sofia. But right now, we are living in San Diego. Remember we went on a long car drive?" A sniffly affirmation. "Sofia didn't. She's having Easter at ho—in Seattle with her mamas."

"Why she couldn't have Easter with me?" Because Mommy is a disaster. Because we ran away. Sorry you didn't get a vote.

"Because…it's a long trip, and both her mamas have to work at the hospital."

"But…" Zola stuck her lips out in the thinking purse she'd had since babyhood. "Sofia's daddy died atta same time as Auntie Lexie."

"That's right."

"So why…. Aunt Callie and Auntie 'Zona, why are they not in Sandy DayGo?"

"Not everyone comes to San Diego when their daddy, or anyone, dies." Zola's eyes widened. Nail on the head.

Meredith shifted to put Zola on the bench, her purple tights peeking out below the hem of her dress, and pulled one leg up, glad that the professional wardrobe she'd cultivated against her every sartorial instinct was collecting dust. Being able to comfortably close the two of them off this way was a simple reminder of why simply taking off of work wouldn't have been enough. She wasn't being surveilled here; not the way she would've been at a hospital function. She could wear jeans that let her stay on Zola's level as long as either of them needed.

"Zo-Zo, we came to San Diego after your daddy died, and yeah, because he died, but it's not…. Everyone reacts differently to having someone they love die. They get sad, and angry, and tired…lots of emotions, and those change depending on…well, yesterday when you remembered Daddy at the park, how did you feel?"

"Sad, because I miss him, but also it was funny, because Daddy chased Bailey like a bear, and he was so silly."

"Right. And all those reminders…. There are a lot of them in Seattle. A lot of memories all at once. A lot of emotions. And going through a lot of feelings at once can be…it takes a lot of energy. And, you know how Mommy has a very important job, right?"

"You save people."

"I do." She fisted her hand, trying not to think about the slight tremor she could still feel. I wouldn't have gone into an OR that way. But she was going through life that way. She owed Zola an explanation. "Saving people takes a lot of energy, too. A lot of attention. That's why whenever I'm operating, I can't come out to talk to you, because I have to be thinking about what I'm doing. I have to be incredibly careful."

"Like coloring in the lines with a sharp thing, Daddy said."

Did he? Discovering little details she'd missed was like having one of those sharps swiped across open wounds, not hard enough to cut deeper, but enough to sting. "That's a good way of putting it. But my job is something he and I did together. Right now…right now it's hard for me to get past the sad, even with the happy memories. I can't do my job if I'm always thinking about him and pushing away the sad. It's not only at the hospital, because we shared our house, too. I want to remember those things, but…have we talked about what 'overwhelmed' means?"

"Gretchen at day-care has Autism. What is normal loud and bright in our classroom is sometimes too bright and loud for her. She gets overwhelmed, and sometimes she shouts to give herself control of the noise, and it is loud, and we get overwhelmed, so it is important to make sure Gretchen is comfortable, and it's not her fault, or something a surgery can fix like my spine bifda."

Her definition of "overwhelmed" was overwhelming. One day that will be how I teach her about irony. It was the first time Meredith had to admit to herself that she wouldn't simply be able to erase whatever happened in San Diego. She might've gotten off her horse, but the damn carousel hadn't stopped.

"What happens if someone realizes Gretchen is having a hard time? Before she can't handle it?"

"We say, 'do you need a break?' and listen to her answer."

"It's like that. Seattle has so many memories of your daddy, which means feeling lots of emotions at once. So many that it made me overwhelmed. I needed to take a break. I didn't want to be trying to do anything other than spending time with you and learning how to...how to be Bailey and your mommy without Daddy here being your dad."

"And in Seattle there's your job, and your co-diffi-dant ninternship friends, and Sofia, and Aunt Amy, and my aunt Maggie, and de-minders of Aunt Lexie, and wow that is overwhelming."

"It is baby." She managed the single 'ha' that passed for her laugh lately. She almost missed the half-hysterical laughter she'd pushed back much longer than anyone knew after George died.— Her mom, fine, her fake-mommy, okay, but George?—She hoped her kids didn't have to think to remember the last time they saw their momma really laugh.

Meredith did, and she couldn't be sure, not from when Ellis was lucid, anyway.

Zola went back to her egg-hunting buddy, leaving Meredith on the bench. Sadie appeared next to her a moment later "That looked intense."

"Poor kid's mom took her away from all her friends without explaining that they wouldn't be coming for the Easter egg hunt."

"Aw." Sadie put her arm around her.

Meredith stiffened at first. On the bunny trail, Zola found a lavender egg, and held it up like it was gold. Fatimah, who was nearby escorting an older boy who looked like he might have Cerebral Palsy, cheered for her before turning to give them a thumbs up. Sadie didn't move. Meredith let herself relax, resting her head on Sadie's shoulder the way she would've done with Cristina, which was the way she would've done it with Sadie.

"This won't hurt her. You only had the one move as a kid, and I know you see this as parallel to that, but speaking as the gay aunt, you're giving her what she needs. I would've been okay with the four moves pre-Boston. I didn't head off the rails until Himself got custody, and I stopped moving."

"You realize that puts the fault with me."

"It puts the fault with my abusive, misogynist, borderline masochist father."

"You never used to use the a-word." She'd gone off the times Meredith had suggested it; pointed out all the ways Ellis was negligent, even though by thirteen Meredith had understood that not even the most careful social worker would take Meredith out of her home, but showing the right bruises would get Sadie in the system instantly.

"That, my dear Death, may have been the problem."

"Buhyew, Momma!" Bailey came to the edge of the playground, holding up an egg. Behind him, she caught his escort taking an identical one out of his basket and hiding it behind a pole. This played out repeatedly while Zola carefully searched for her three colors. Bailey reacted with the same glee every time.

"I can give you another option," Sadie said, pulling into a parking space in front of CVS.

"Hm?"

She checked the backseat, and Meredith followed suit out of habit. Zola was flipping through an activity book from her gift bag. The cover advertised hours of fun. Meredith gave it three periods of twenty minutes, max, only because Zola was adamant about coloring in the lines. Bay was asleep, a blue plastic egg clutched in one hand.

"Ta-da." From her purse, Sadie pulled a bag of jellybeans. "It's even festive. It's 4/20," she added.

Meredith's brain took every thought down a side-street first—twenty-four days—so it still took her a second. "No way. B still wants boob every couple of nights, and you of all people should remember how paranoid I get on pot."

"I know," and judging by how easily her devil-does-care grin slipped away, Sadie hadn't been hoping too hard for a change of heart. "But if I stayed with you…I'm worried about you not eating. That has never been your problem."

"I think I resent that."

"You don't. You can't convince me you do, and that's…I genuinely believed you didn't deserve that metabolism until I realized you were the chosen one, the wielder of the blade, with a randomly appearing sister…."

"Two. Secret sisters. Lexie caught that, too. All the weird Buffy stuff. But I, alas, was never called as the slayer."

"You still had a destiny. Lexie had taste. All I'm saying is you've always eaten like you're slaying vampires in your off-hours. Now you look like one of those vampires, and you're not eating."

"I am fucking trying, Sadie."

"That's why it worries me. Meredith Grey tries, she succeeds."

"All streaks end."

"Let's hope not this one. All right. Different sleep script, same idea."

"You already called it in?"

"Just in case."

If you'd been this concerned ten years ago, we might've been less of a disaster.

Meredith flinched, but Sadie was smiling. Good, she hadn't said that aloud. She grabbed her wallet and got out of the car as quickly as she could manage to avoid giving herself another chance.

That tone, though, the fact that Sadie genuinely didn't seem to have some other motive—nope, not driving off with Meredith's kids—what is wrong with me? Definitely don't need THC to be paranoid—that was new.

Meredith followed the sign to the pharmacy; stopping for green nail polish. If milk or anything else they sold was on her grocery list, it could wait.

Back in the car, she presented Zola with a Dora the Explorer book, and slipped a floppy stuffed rabbit in next to Bailey. They were definitely a mix of apology and bribe, but they didn't think to question presents. They didn't question her thinking of them; why wouldn't she be? She was Mommy, and except for a few hours a week, Mommy was all she had to be.

A/N There is a slight crossover with The Fosters in here, but it's more of a character-borrowing, because the show is set in San Diego at about the same time. No knowledge of that show is needed whatsoever to understand this fic.

An alum of the Dartmouth Rainbow Alliance recalls finding a bottle of tequila in their meeting room at about the time Meredith would've gone for med school. I had to use it.