When I went to visit my sister again after my lunch break almost seven hours later, my mother was sat with a newspaper and some coffee, Tom was out in the hallway on the phone to his mother and Isabella jumped up into my arms while I looked at my sister's chart. An hour ago she was only four centimetres dilated and she'd been like this since three in the morning.
"Alex! Alex! Where's Alex?" Isabella questions and I frown.
"Isabella, what are you talking about? That is Alex." Louise laughs and the four year old begins to repeatedly shake her head and repeat the word no.
"No, no, that's Alex!" She exclaims, pointing to Alex Karev as he walks into the room. Isabella jumped down and rushed towards him and he instantly picked her up, smiling at her. It was weird seeing him so...good, with my family, when at the minute he didn't particularly want to talk to me.
"Ouch, I've been replaced." I laugh and put my sister's chart back.
"What can I say? I'm a catch." Alex shrugs and Isabella wraps her arms around his neck, interlacing her fingers together as she hugs him.
"Alexandra, can I talk to you outside for a second?" My mother questions and I nod, my heart rate beginning to quicken.
"I'll step outside for a second, it's alright. I've got her." Alex assures, looking at me for a few seconds before leaving. I take a seat on the chair next to the bed and wait for her to begin talking, although I already know what she wants to talk about.
"I want to talk to you about Jack, and your engagement." She begins.
"No, we're not engaged anymore and before you try to convince me to take him back, I'm going to tell you right now that I'm not going to." I state, completely monotone. She sighs and folds her arms.
"Jack is a good man, Alexandra. He has a good job, he's a good man. There was no excuse for you to end the engagement so abruptly, you were supposed to get married in the winter. Why did you break off the engagement? And please, make it reasonable." My mother's condescending tone and ignorance to the situation pains me.
"Do you want to know why I ended my engagement, Mom? I ended it because he cheated on me." I say and her face falls and I know that I have hit close to home because my Dad cheated on her. "It was our anniversary night and he slept with a waitress at the restaurant we were supposed to eat at."
"So you weren't there." She states.
"It wasn't the first time, he's done it before. I had to cancel on him because there was a catastrophic car accident with multiple victims and I had to stay here. I saved three people's lives, one of which was a seven year old girl. My absence for one night was not an excuse for him to go and sleep with somebody else. He came here, got in to a fight with Alex and told me that he was glad that we were no longer engaged, that I was horrible to put up with and he didn't want to marry me anyway. So don't try and portray the devil as the victim, Mom. I thought that you would understand." I explain and Louise reaches out to hold my hand. "If you just came to Seattle to tell me what a disappointment I am, then maybe you should just go back home."
She stands there, stunned in silence and I walk out, avoiding Alex's calls for my attention. He grabs my wrist as I open the door to the stairwell and I attempt to snatch my hand away from him, glaring at him.
"Are you okay?" He asks, letting go of my wrist. He looks at me genuinely and everything makes my heart ache, but I remember the torture he's been putting me through for the last few weeks and it suddenly is replaced with intense anger.
"Oh, so you've finally decided to start talking to me now?" I question and he sighs. shaking his head.
"No, I just -"
"Don't, Alex, just don't. You don't get to ignore me for almost two weeks and then try to act like everything is okay between us when it's obviously not. You don't get to ignore me because you don't know how I feel about you, when even I don't know how I feel about you, okay? That's not fair. Especially when I don't know how you feel about me. So from this second on, I'm going to ignore you until you decide to tell me how you feel about me." I snap and turn back around and continue to make my way up the stairwell, ignoring his calls.
"My mother hates me, Alex hates me, I hate me." I sigh as I tie my hair back and prepare for surgery with Dr. Shepherd. "I don't know what I'm going to do, I don't know how to fix these kinds of things. I've never had so many problems before, I don't like it. I wish there was some kind of drug or cure for these things to make it go away."
"Everybody has issues with their mother, she doesn't hate you and you're not a disappointment. You just need to air things out with her. She only wants what is best for you, you're her daughter." Meredith assures me and I nod. "But Alex -"
"Don't even get me started on Alex." I warn her and she laughs.
"You like him." She smiles.
"I can't like him, I just got out of an engagement with a guy I was in a relationship with for almost four years." I shrug and begin to wash my hands.
"That doesn't matter, you said yourself in the way you described it that it was basically over before you even ended it. You don't need to let him hold you back, even if it has only just been a month or so. You can move on when you decide to move on, not when you think you should."