A/N (08/01/15): Hello friends! As hard as it is to believe, it's been about two and a half years since I last updated one of my stories. My sincere apologies to all of my loyal readers for essentially dropping off the face of the earth, and thank you to everyone who kept reading, reviewing, and messaging me while I was lost in "real life", whatever that is!

I am working my way through this story, tweaking it slightly to take it in a direction that will better bring it to the conclusion I always intended it to reach. I'll be posting the updated versions of the existing chapters in batches until it's all caught up and we get back into new material. Most of the changes are minor in the first 15 or so chapters, but there are a few slightly more substantial changes in the later chapters of this new version. So even if you've read the story before, I encourage you to start at the beginning and work your way forward - I'll date all the updated chapters as they go up, so that it is clear what has been updated. Thank you all for your patience!

Lexie shivered as the front door banged shut behind her and she stepped out onto the darkened front porch later that evening.

"We've really got to fix that porch light one of these days," she commented as she sat down next to Meredith on the bench that had replaced the swing years ago. Meredith just nodded, not looking over at her sister or making any other attempt at a response.

"I don't want to sound like a nag or anything, but it's about ten degrees out here right now," Lexie continued. "Aren't you cold?"

"It's thirty-seven," Meredith replied softly. "The thermometer on the side of the house still works."

"Do you remember when Alex bought that thing to settle that ridiculous bet he had with Mark? What was that, fifteen years ago?"

"Twenty."

"It was not that long ago."

"Alex bought the thermometer eight days after the twins' second birthday, and two and a half months before the merger."

"Right, but that wasn't twenty years ago."

"Lexie, the girls will be twenty-three in a little over a month."

"Damn," Lexie muttered. "I feel old."

"You feel old? You're not the one who birthed them, Lex. Think how I feel."

"True." Lexie smirked at the glare Meredith shot her. "Although you're not the one in early menopause, so I really don't think I'm going to let you win this one."

"I still think you should see a doctor about that, Lexie," Meredith said, turning her head to face her sister. "You're only forty-two, that's really early."

"It runs in Mom's family," Lexie said with a nonchalant shrug. "Now, about those girls of yours…"

"Don't start, Lexie."

"I'm just wondering why you're sitting out here in the cold while they're both sitting in the nice heated living room, waiting for you?"

"I think you know the answer to that one without me having to tell you, Lex."

"It doesn't make much sense to me," Lexie admitted. "Shouldn't you be glad that you don't have to lie to them anymore?"

"It's not that simple, Lexie. I've spent twenty-three years pretending that Derek Shepherd never existed and now…well, there are some memories that are easier to just bury and never deal with again."

"Oh my God," Lexie frowned and stared incredulously at Meredith. "You were in love with him, weren't you?"

"It was a long time ago, Lexie."

"Still…I think that's the sort of thing the girls deserve to know."

"Maybe."

"Besides," Lexie paused for a moment. "I promised Annie I wouldn't go back inside until you did, and it is freezing out here. So can we please just go inside and you can get this over with?"

Meredith shifted nervously in her seat, perched on the edge of the couch as both her daughters stared at her, Annie from the other end of the couch and Evelyn from the overstuffed chair across the room. She felt a bit like she imagined a witness must feel like in a courtroom, fearing they were about to be crucified on the stand by some overzealous defense attorney.

"So…" she said cautiously. "Where do you want to start?"

"How about the part where we skip all this crap and just acknowledge that he's a jackass who didn't want us?" Evelyn asked, her arms folded over her chest as she stared pointedly at her sister.

"Oh, grow up, Evelyn," Annie snapped.

"Me? You're the one who's been throwing the world's biggest temper tantrum for the last four years!"

"I have not!"

"Have too!"

"Have not!"

"Enough!" Meredith shouted. "Both of you, stop it right now. If you want to fight, save it for another time. Don't make me ground you both."

Annie rolled her eyes. "Mom, I'm twenty-two years old."

Meredith frowned and arched an eyebrow at her daughter. "And your point is…?"

Annie groaned and leaned back in her seat. "Fine."

Meredith nodded and turned to Evelyn, who also looked far from happy.

"Fine," she grumbled.

"Good," Meredith said with a sigh. "So, as I was saying…where do you want to start?"

"I want to know if any of what you told us was true," Annie said. "Was it all a lie? The whole story?"

"None of it was a lie. It was all true, to a point. The story was just…incomplete, I guess you could say."

"What does that mean?"

"I met your father the night before my internship began, at Joe's bar after a hospital mixer, just like I told you I did. We were both more than a little drunk that night, and he ended up coming home with me. And when I woke up the next morning, I couldn't remember his name."

"That's the same story you've been telling us for years."

"Exactly," Meredith said. "I just left out the next part, where I showed up at the hospital for my first day as an intern, and Derek turned out to be the new neurosurgery attending. I…"

"Wait, he was your boss?" Evelyn interrupted.

"Technically, Miranda was my boss. Derek was Miranda's boss."

"So you slept with your boss's boss?"

"I didn't know who he was," Meredith said defensively.

"What happened after that?" Annie asked. "You didn't keep seeing him, did you?"

"At first, no, I didn't. He asked me out numerous times, and made it perfectly clear that he didn't care if he was my boss…or my boss's boss…or whatever he was. I told him there wasn't a chance in hell of anything happening, and I really did mean it."

"But…"

"But Derek was nothing if not persistent," Meredith admitted. "He was handsome and funny and charming as all get out, and he was incredibly attentive. He made me feel special, which was something I wasn't used to in my life. At that time, I probably couldn't even remember the last time I had felt like someone actually cared about me."

"Mom…"

Meredith shook her head as Annie reached over for her hand.

"No, I'm not…I'm just telling you how it was for me," she explained. "My point is, when you're that starved for affection, what Derek was offering can be very seductive. After a couple of weeks of refusing, I fell for it…I fell for him."

"Did you fall in love with him?"

Meredith frowned and hesitated for a moment. "I honestly don't know. For a long time, I thought I had. I really thought I was in love with him. Looking back on it now, though, I'm not even sure I knew what love was back then. Derek and I…I'm not saying I couldn't have loved him, I'm just not sure we had enough time to go from passion and infatuation to actual love."

"But were you happy?" Annie pressed. "Were you a normal, happy couple?"

"Not normal," Meredith said, shaking her head and chuckling slightly. "It's hard to be normal when your relationship has to be a secret. But when we were together, yes, we were happy."

"So what the hell happened?"

Meredith shrugged. "He disappeared."

"He what?!"

"It was about a month after we'd started seeing each other. Without warning, he called in and cancelled all of his surgeries, stopped picking up his phone, just dropped off the face of the earth. There were all sorts of rumors floating around the hospital, of course, but they were all pretty far-fetched. He was just…gone."

"Where'd he go?" Evelyn asked in confusion. "People don't just disappear, Mom, and obviously he came back at some point if we know where he is now."

"I know," Meredith agreed. "And he didn't disappear, not completely. He'd missed about a week and a half at the hospital when I came home one night and found him waiting for me…"

Meredith frowned as she walked up the steps to her house and saw Derek leaning against the front door, the flickering porch light casting shadows across his face.

"Derek?" she said hesitantly, almost unsure that he was really standing there. "You can't be there, what if George or Izzie had come home first?"

Derek shrugged. "It was a chance I had to take. I had to see you, Meredith."

"You could have seen me at work if you hadn't cancelled all of your surgeries."

Derek sighed as Meredith stepped around him and unlocked the front door, leaving it partway open for him as she stepped inside the house and tossed her bag to the side.

"I guess I deserve that," he said. "I did leave without explanation."

"When are you coming back?" Meredith asked, her voice rising as she walked into the kitchen while Derek remained in the entryway.

"I'm not."

Derek shifted his weight nervously as a long silence ensued, until Meredith finally appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, an empty glass in her hand.

"What do you mean, you're not coming back? You have a contract, Derek."

"Richard agreed to let me out of it. He wasn't happy about it, but he understands the position that I'm in right now."

"And just what position would that be?"

"I'm married."

Meredith didn't even flinch as the glass in her hand slipped to the floor and shattered. She stared at Derek, waiting for a grin to flicker across his face or for his laughter to fill the air as he announced his joke.

"You're serious," she finally said, her voice shaking.

"I'm sorry, Meredith. I didn't think…I was sure my marriage was over."

"And now?"

"It might still be over, I don't know. But I've been married for eleven years. She's my family, Meredith. I can't just walk away without at least trying to salvage what we once had. I owe my marriage at least that much."

"Well, that's very honorable Derek. Were you thinking of what you owed your marriage when you were screwing me?"

Derek winced and shook his head. "Meredith, I am so sorry, you have to believe me."

"What was I, Derek? Your midlife crisis?"

"No, Meredith, nothing like that. When I came out here, I'd lost my faith. I'd lost my belief that there was still good out there, that there was still hope for love and happiness…and you showed me that there was. I was drowning, and you were like coming up for air. You saved me."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better, Derek? Is that somehow supposed to make me feel less dirty? Because that's what you've done, Derek, you've made me a dirty mistress."

"Meredith, you are not…"

"Just go," Meredith interrupted harshly. "I don't want to hear your excuses. Just go. Go back to your wife, go back to New York or wherever the hell you're going…just please go. Leave. Please leave, Derek."

Derek nodded, but took a step forward first, leaning across the broken glass at Meredith's feet, kissing her on the cheek when she turned her head away from him.

"Go, Derek," she whispered urgently.

"Goodbye, Meredith," he whispered back, turning and quickly walking out the front door.

Meredith gripped the edge of the doorway as her whole body began to shake with sobs as soon as the door was closed behind him. She silently cursed her own stupidity, thinking anything in her life could actually have a happy ending. And with the sudden thought, a flood of nausea rushed over her. She turned and ran to the downstairs bathroom, making it just in time to forget Derek for a few wretched moments.

"He was married? The little bastard," Evelyn muttered.

"Did he know you were pregnant when he left?" Annie asked"

"No," Meredith said. "I didn't figure it out until a week or so later."

"But you did tell him?"

Meredith nodded. "I tried everything I could think of to reach him for months," she said. "I called his cell phone, his old practice in New York, everywhere, but he never called back. Eventually I started getting the message that his cell phone had been disconnected, so I started writing letters. I wasn't even completely sure I had the right address, but I figured if I had to, I'd send them to every Shepherd in the New York area. And then a few weeks after you two were born, he wrote back."

"What did he say?"

"I don't think…"

"You said the whole truth, Mom," Annie reminded her.

Meredith nodded, but still hesitated before finally speaking. "He said that you…that you girls were a mistake best left in the past, that he needed to focus on his wife and their future. And then he asked me never to contact him again."

"He said we were a mistake?" Evelyn asked in surprise.

"It fits," Annie said. "He was a jackass when I met him."

"Are you sure he wrote the letter?" Evelyn asked. "Maybe his wife…?"

"No, he wrote it." Meredith shook her head and smiled sadly. "I thought the same thing until I had Mark look at them and confirm that it was his handwriting."

"How would Uncle Mark know?"

"As it turns out, Uncle Mark grew up with your father. They went to school together for years and years, from high school all the way through medical school. He was even the best man at Derek's wedding. It's one of the reasons I asked him to be Annie's godfather long before he'd even met Lexie. I wanted you to at least have some connection to Derek, even if it was small and you'd never know it."

"Do you still have the letter?" Evelyn asked.

"No. I got rid of it a long time ago."

"Who else knew about Derek being our father?" Annie asked.

"Just a few people," Meredith said. "Cristina knew about my relationship with Derek from the beginning, so she's known all along. Miranda found out around the time you were born. And Lexie and Jackson knew as well."

"Jackson knew?" Evelyn asked in surprise.

Meredith nodded. "I told him right before we got married, when we started looking at having him adopt the two of you."

"Wait…that's why he couldn't, right? Because Derek's name was on our birth certificates?" Evelyn asked.

"When you were born, I though I was doing the right thing, in case Derek ever wanted to be a part of your lives. And then by the time I realized he didn't, it was too late…and when I finally found someone who did want to be your father, I'd messed it all up. We decided getting Derek's consent for the adoption wasn't worth the risk that the two of you would find out in the process and get hurt."

"I always wondered why you dropped that idea so quickly," Annie said. "I thought maybe he changed his mind about wanting us or something."

"Oh sweetheart, never. I hope you know how much he loved you." Meredith grabbed Annie's hand as her daughter scooted down the couch to be at her side. "How much he loved both of you."

"We knew," Evelyn assured her.

"We only wanted the adoption in case something were to happen to me," Meredith continued. "Even without it, you were his daughters in every way that mattered, and he loved you just as much as he loved Suzie and Jack. There was no difference to him, none at all. As far as I'm concerned, Derek or no Derek, you two grew up with a father who loved you and that's what you should remember."