Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday!
Thank you all for being patient with me :) With the holidays and what-not this chapter took a little longer.

Again, thank you so much to all my readers and reviewers. I love hearing what you're thinking and your praise always gets me excited to write more for you!

Enjoy!

Chapter 8

After one very long plane ride and one seemingly equal, long car ride, the four very tired travelers piled out of the car Derek rented and into the home of Carolyn Shepherd.

It was somewhere around one in the morning by the time they shuffled into the beautiful two story house. It was the same home Carolyn purchased with her late husband and raised her five children in. Her children still kept their own rooms for when they came to visit and the basement was always a favorite camp out area for the grandkids.

Derek guided an exhausted Meredith up the stairs and toward his room, bidding a quiet good night to his mother and sister as they went about readying themselves for bed as well.

Meredith wasted no time in locating the queen sized bed in the middle of the room and quickly claimed her usual side.

"Mer, don't you want to change into something more comfortable?" Derek asked, setting their suitcases in the corner.

"Noh I wandgtt toh sleeumpf," came her muffle response as she burrowed deeper into the bed.

Accepting the fact that he was never going to get her up again until morning, Derek continued unpacking a few things and getting himself set for bed. Both he and Meredith managed to sleep for most of the flight, but it seemed Meredith's body was still trying to catch up on sleep lost due to long work hours and, on top of that, adjusting to having to support the baby now growing inside her.

After brushing his teeth and changing into a pair of pajama pants, he finally joined his wife in bed. The tiredness he had been feeling seemed to have disappeared while he was moving about before and he somehow felt wide awake.

After 45 minutes of staring at the ceiling he finally decided to give up on sleep for a bit and quietly crept downstairs for a glass of water.

As he rounded the corner into the kitchen, he jumped back and his hand flew to his chest in surprise when he realized the room was already occupied.

His mother sat quietly in the dimly lit kitchen. The small light above the sink behind her provided the only light illuminating a small portion of the room. She was stirring her spoon in whatever was steaming in the mug in front of her at the island located in the center of the kitchen.

"Derek," Carolyn greeted softly. "I hope I didn't wake you. I remember how lightly you sleep."

"No, no, I was already up," he said as he pulled himself up on a stool across from her at the island.

"Is something bothering you?" Carolyn asked as she started fixing her son his own mug of tea.

Derek accepted the cup before answering, "No, I'm fine." He grimaced as the words left his mouth. Now he was sounding like Meredith.

"Derek," Carolyn said with a raised eyebrow and a warning tone.

"I am," he insisted defensively. "It's Amelia's who's not fine. Me? I'm fine."

"Okay," she trailed off unconvinced. She knew when to push her son and now was not the time. After all she had all week to get him to deal with his own feelings.

"How's Meredith?" she asked, changing the subject to a safer topic. "She's sleeping okay?"

"Out like a light," he confessed with a small smile. "She's exhausted."

"Traveling takes a lot out of you, not to mention the stress she's been under," she said, taking a slow sip of her drink.

"Well, you know, as you say, you raised five doctors. Residency is tough." His mother's tone made him a little suspicious.

"That's true, but I was talking about Zola. I hear it hasn't been easy on the two of you."

"No," he confirmed, gripping the mug in front of him tightly. "We thought everything was going well but then they took her away from us. We thought we lost her for good."

"I remember," Carolyn nodded knowingly.

"How?" Now he knew he was missing something. "I never called you about that. Did Mark say something? Did he call you?"

"No. Your wife called me."

"Meredith?" he asked incredulously. "Meredith calls you?" This was obviously news to him. "Since when?"

"Since the shooting."

They were silent for a moment. This was still a potentially touchy subject for the both of them.

"You probably don't remember," she continued. "You were sleeping for the majority of the time I was there. You woke up a few times but you were still really out of it. I didn't stay for too long. Just long enough to be sure you were really going to be okay and to make sure Meredith wouldn't forget to take care of herself. I gave her my number and told her to call me with updates about you and to call if she ever needed anything. So she did. She never told you?"

"No…" This was beyond confusing, especially at two in the morning.

"It's all right. Besides weekly updates in the beginning of your recovery, she didn't really start calling for herself until Zola's first night home." She paused to send a slight glare over her mug. "And from what I've heard, you weren't really around for her to tell you at that point."

"What? She called you to tell on me when we had a fight?" He knew Meredith had called at least 12 times that night, but when the ringing had finally stopped he would have never guessed it was because she was calling his mother.

"She was not telling on you, Derek," she said firmly. "The poor girl was scared out of her mind because all of a sudden she was a new mom and her husband had just told her she was going to be a horrible mother and was nowhere to be found."

"I did not say that." This was just about the last thing he expected to be talking about with his mother tonight. "And if I had known she was calling about Zola, I would have picked up."

"You wife was calling you, you should have pick up anyway."

"We were fighting! Did she tell you? About how she tampered with the clinical trial and almost ruined both of our careers?"

"Yes, actually, she did. I got a frantic call around midnight and she told me everything. Probably painted you in a better light than you deserved at the time actually so don't go getting mad at her thinking she was trying blame everything on you. She didn't change the drugs to hurt you; she did it to help Adele."

Derek forcefully rubbed his eyes in frustration. He was supposed to be putting this behind him, not reliving it at 2am on minimal sleep.

"Oh, Derek, don't pout," Carolyn scolded with a hand on her hip. "Any new mother is terrified of doing something wrong, and from what you've told me, she has more than enough reasons to be apprehensive. I was scared out of my mind when we brought Kathleen home. The difference was my husband was right there helping and didn't just get finished telling me that all my fears were correct and I was going to fail."

"I was angry. I had no way of knowing Zola would be going home with her that night."

"What did I tell you when during my first visit? Meredith doesn't see things in black and white like you do. This is one of those things."

"I know," he conceded. "I know why she did it. She cares. She cares about everyone and gives everything she has to help people. It's one of the things I love about her," he explained with a slight shrug and smile. "I let my anger take over and we had a frustrating, horrible couple of weeks. But now we've talked and we're moving past it."

"You better be," Carolyn reprimanded with her stern gaze still in place. "I raised you better than that. And she'll be a great mom. She was scared but she has good instincts. All I really had to do was confirm that what she was doing wasn't going to break Zola."

"She is a great mom," he said with a dreamy smile plastered on his tired face. "She's perfect. Zola absolutely adores her."

He was getting more animated by second and couldn't help but gush over his two favorite girls.

"She loves Meredith's hair," he chuckled with a huge, amused grin. "She…she does this thing when Mer holds her. Whenever she's got her hair down, Zola immediately grabs for a strand of it. Not to pull on it or anything, she just holds it. Like her security blanket or something. We thought that maybe she just liked long hair, but she won't do it with anyone else and she's been doing it since the first time Meredith ever held her. I've got the cutest picture of the two of them on my phone that I'll have to show you later. Zola's sleeping with her head against Mer's shoulder and her hand wrapped around her hair, clutching it to her cheek."

He shook his head at himself. For years he had been listening to his sisters tell similar stories about their own children. He loved every one of his nieces and nephews, but how many times does someone want to listen to how cute it was when a baby played with their toes?

But now he got it. Everything your child did was sure to be the cutest thing in the world and, as a parent, you don't see how anyone could disagree with you. Thankfully his first parental gushing had been to his mother and not someone like Mark. At least with her they could forgo the hour of teasing he would have to endure with Mark.

Carolyn's scowl softened and she was now smiling proudly at her son.

"Well aren't you a proud papa," she observed with a grin. "And yes, you'll have to show me this picture in the morning. I'm surprised I didn't see it from Meredith the other day."

"This one I got from Meredith's friend, Cristina. It was taken before…uhm…well, before we…"

"While you were passive aggressively avoiding your wife?" Carolyn offered while taking a nonchalant sip of her tea.

"That's one way to put it," Derek mumbled regrettably.

"I'm sorry, you're right. You and Meredith worked it out and moved on. Just don't pull that again. She's it for you Derek. Don't screw it up."

"I know she is," he agreed sincerely. "We're good now. Great, actually."

"Good."

She moved from her stool to the sink and placed her mug in the basin.

"I'm going to sleep now, Dear. I'll see you in the morning," she promised. He moved towards her and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

"Good night, Mom," he called softly after her.

He only sat on his own for a moment longer before placing his own mug in the sink next to Carolyn's and climbing the stairs once more to join his wife.

As usual, please let me know what you think!