Thank you all, again, so much for reading and commenting. I am not easily hurt, and especially appreciate constructive criticism, if you want to give it. I'd also like to know, again, what other pairings you'd like to see and how much of an emphasis you'd like to see on the medicine. Please let me know.

In the next chapter—chapter four—you're going to see a comeback of the Gizzie friendship. As much as they're embroiled in this triangle, Izzie still needs her best friend with this new twist. And for better or worse, her best friend is George.

- Leems

Chapter Three

Izzie's pager went off on the bedside table, vibrating itself down onto the floor. She picked it up.

"Crap. George, I've got to go." He didn't move. "I have to change," she explained.

"Fine." He was studying the ceiling and his voice was hazy from preoccupation. Izzie sighed and stripped off her pajamas, replacing them with jeans, a t-shirt decorated with a watery image of a Japanese koi, and a canvas jacket. When she was done, she kneeled back on the bed.

"Married men don't watch ex-lingerie models take their clothes off," Izzie whispered to him. Then she smiled at George as she left, trying to disguise the nervousness growing in the pit of her stomach, and didn't turn around to see his reaction.

You gave him an ultimatum, she told herself, walking down the hallway. He'll make a choice… but you've got to know it won't necessarily be on your side. Izzie pulled her rain boots over her feet and left, grabbing someone's umbrella from the stack by the door.

Why is it always raining here? She grumbled, turning the ignition and maneuvering along on the slippery road. This is the first time I've had to buy new boots because they've worn out, not because they've gotten moldy or I've lost them or something.

Izzie pulled into the Seattle Grace parking lot and sprinted for the door, where Bailey stood waiting. The lobby was nearly empty, the OR board unusually sparse, and the cavernous lobby held only Izzie, Bailey, and a couple doctors asleep in chairs with cups of coffee slipping out of their loosening grips.

"Listen to me," Bailey began, more quietly than her normal authoritative boom, "I did not call you in here for surgery. I understand that you are not on call right now, and that you do not want to be dragged out in this endless rain to come back to the hospital. However," she continued, "Hannah is here, and I think you need to see her. Her parents wanted you to see her, before she…" Izzie's intestines clenched as she tried to steel herself for what she knew Bailey was going to say next. "Izzie…" Bailey said, gripping Izzie's long hand, "I am so sorry. Right now, you need to take every ounce of courage, and self-control you possibly have, and hold it together for your daughter. She needs you. Her parents—her adoptive parents—need you. You can do this."

Izzie nodded, nauseous. She stared at the ceiling—glass, impractical, badly insulated and dark with nighttime sky. A few floors up, Izzie's daughter—the product of an unexpectedly unpleasant night with the dark-haired boy next door who was just a little too pushy—lay in bed, expecting someone she had never met to comfort her through the impossible.

Several miles away, George was lying on her bed, his mind spinning with a question to which he knew there was no answer. And Callie, probably in her hotel room, struggled with losing a kind, intelligent, loving man she'd thought she could trust.

She wiped their faces from her mind. This was about Hannah.

"Okay," Izzie said, and Bailey led her to the elevators. On the fifth floor, they entered a corridor of harshly lit pastel walls and came to Hannah's door.

"Behind this," Bailey warned, "is a very, very sick child. A very, very sick child who you may well feel a strong connection to. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Okay."

Bailey pushed open the door, and Izzie managed to take a few steps inside before she froze. Hannah was very, very thin, and her narrow limbs were covered in tracing-paper skin and dark, inky bruises. She had an IV taped to either arm and monitors stuck to her sunken chest. She had hair like an infant's, spare, wispy and colorless. After a second, Hannah managed a smile at Izzie, and revealed that an incisor and two molars had fallen out from the chemotherapy. Izzie's stomach lurched again, but with Hannah's parent's encouraging eyes on her, she crossed the room and put her arms around the little girl, who felt fragile and weightless against Izzie's body.

"I'm Isobel," Izzie said to Hannah.

"You're my birth mother," Hannah said, "I know. Thank you for coming to see me. If I were you, I'm not sure I'd be able to."

"Thank you, Hannah," Izzie said, perching on the edge of the hospital bed. "Thank you for letting me come." Hannah nodded, so sage and calm, an adult by virtue not of how long she had lived, but by how much time she had left.