A/N (12/05/15): 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!
As he pulled his rental car up to the curb across the street from Meredith's house and put it in park, Derek took a moment to look around the neighborhood. He was somewhat surprised he'd be able to find it so easily after all these years, with only one minor wrong turn on his way from the airport. He supposed there were just some things you didn't forget, even after more than two decades.
The neighborhood looked almost exactly as he remembered it from all those years ago. A few of the houses had fresher coats of paint, a few yards had been spruced up, but for the most part, it felt a bit like stepping back in time. He could see that the non-functional swing on Meredith's porch had been replaced with a bench, but beyond that, he couldn't see any changes to the house, at least not on the exterior. Meredith seemed to have left things as they were.
Assuming she even still lived there, he thought to himself. It hadn't occurred to him until his flight had landed that morning that perhaps he'd jumped the gun by rushing out here. What were the odds that after all these years, she'd still be living in that same house? Other than driving straight to Seattle Grace-Mercy West, though, he couldn't think of any other place to start looking – and he thought he knew Meredith well enough to know she certainly wouldn't want their first meeting to be someplace as public as her workplace.
After almost an hour of staring at what looked like an empty house, wondering if he was ever going to get up the nerve to walk up to the front porch and knock on the door, he started to think that maybe he'd made a mistake. Maybe it would have been better to wait for Mark to arrange it all, for him to talk to Meredith and work everything out for him. What had he been thinking, flying out without warning? And two days before Christmas?
He was just beginning to think about driving away, getting a hotel room somewhere for a few days before possibly trying again after the holidays, when the first car pulled up in front of the house. A petite young woman with a long ponytail of dirty blonde hair popped quickly out of the passenger's side door and hurried around to open the trunk. Derek found himself holding his breath as he watched her – he knew Mark had said that Evelyn looked like his sister, but this young woman looked so strikingly like Meredith, he had to wonder if maybe he was remembering the wrong details. This had to be the daughter he'd never seen.
At least, that was what he thought until a few moments later, when the driver's side door finally opened and another young woman stepped around to the back of the car. There wasn't a question in his mind that that was his daughter. As he watched her grab a bag from the trunk and jog up the front walk after the other woman, he had to lean back in his seat and force himself to breathe. He wasn't sure what he had expected when Mark had said she looked like Amelia, but to actually see her, he almost felt as though he'd jumped back in time and was looking at her again. He immediately found himself wondering if she had her smile, her laugh, or even her cutting glare when she was annoyed…and if she did, how was he going to handle it?
As he sat there debating that question, the sound of a car door slamming pulled him back to the moment and he cracked his window and turned his head to see a minivan that had pulled up in front of the house.
Mark stepped out of the driver's side, laughing about something as he pulled open the sliding door to the back seat. Derek could honestly say that was a sight he'd never thought he'd see – Mark Sloan, the ultimate Manhattan playboy, driving a minivan. He almost wished he had his phone handy to snap a picture - he knew Addison would just die if she could see what he was seeing now.
He hadn't asked Mark if he and his wife had children, but it still surprised him when three boys, all probably about ten years old, piled out of the back seat – at least until Mark said something, and he heard the three exclaim "Uncle Mark!" in unison. That brought a laugh from the woman who'd stepped around the side of the car, presumable from the passenger's seat. Her short blonde hair was streaked with gray and her face tinged with wrinkles, but he still thought he saw a striking resemblance to Meredith. He knew Mark's wife was her sister, but he'd met Alexandra Sloan several times over the years, and Mark's wife was tall, brunette and slender. This woman, while not unattractive, was shorter, grayish-blonde and a bit soft around the middle – not overweight, perhaps, but definitely showing the results of carrying several children.
"George, Charlie, stop horsing around and get back here and give me a hand with these suitcases!"
Derek thought he also recognized the voice and face of the man removing bags from the trunk of the minivan, although he couldn't quite put a name to it. It was one of the other interns from Meredith's year, he was sure of that. Something with an 'A', he thought…Alan, maybe?
Regardless of his name, the two blonde boys seemed to respond quickly to his instruction, and he heard one of them call him "Dad." There was a strong resemblance between the former intern and the two boys, and Derek supposed it wasn't unreasonable to assume that they were, in fact, his sons. The third boy, though, didn't seem to quite fit in with the other two. Whereas they were loud and boisterous, he seemed almost withdrawn, and hung back, hovering quietly near Mark, offering up only a half-smile at what Derek figured were Mark's attempts at a joke.
It was only a few minutes after the group finally disappeared inside the house that the next car pulled up. By this point, there were only a few spaces left near the house, and Derek began to wonder why no one had parked in the driveway. He supposed there must be some general understanding about it being reserved for someone.
He held his breath as Annie stepped out of the car, looking even more pregnant than she had the last time he'd seen her. A tall, dark-skinned young man hurried around to help her out of the car, and he almost laughed at the way she tried to swat away his arm, which he wrapped protectively around her waist. An argument seemed to ensue over who would carry a bag that she was trying to pull out of the backseat. All the while, a little boy with golden corkscrew curls and olive skin ran circles around the car, his arms stretched out like he was about to take flight.
All of a sudden, Derek had to turn away from the scene, leaning back against the seat and squeezing his eyes shut while he forced himself to breath. It felt as though someone had slammed a brick into his chest as the thought hit him – this was his family. That was his daughter, his son-in-law, his grandchild. He'd gone from being alone to being a father to being a grandfather so quickly his head was spinning.
When he finally looked back across the street, two more cars had pulled up in front of the house. The occupants of one must have already gone inside, but standing next to Annie, with his grandson in her arms, he recognized the small but powerful figure of Miranda Bailey. He'd known from the first day he'd worked with her that she was going places, but even he couldn't have predicted her almost meteoric rise from attending to Chief of Surgery to Chief of Staff. The sheer speed of it all had left the surgical community stunned, but he had yet to meet anyone who had ever worked with her who would deny the merits of her promotions.
Eventually, the trio of adults took the little boy and made their way into the house, leaving Derek to stare across the street at the house as the sun began to set. He wondered if Meredith had returned in that brief moment he'd had his eyes closed. Had he really missed her? And if she were home, did he even want to risk trying to talk to her with all these people around?
The streetlights had turned on by the time a small four-door sedan pulled up to the house and into the driveway. Derek wasn't sure why he'd been expecting a Jeep to pull up. As much as she had loved that car, he knew it wasn't the most child-friendly vehicle, and he supposed it was probably one of many aspects of Meredith's life that had gotten the boot when the girls had arrived. He waited anxiously for the car door to open so he could catch a glimpse of her, but although the headlights turned off, the doors remained closed for what seemed like an eternity.
In reality, it was closer to five minutes before the driver's and passenger's side doors opened almost simultaneously. An older woman Derek didn't recognize slowly exited from the passenger's side, and just a moment later, Meredith emerged from the driver's side. When she stepped into the spotlight cast by the streetlight, Derek almost smiled. There were a few streaks of gray in her shoulder-length hair, but from that distance, she looked almost the same as the woman he'd last seen nearly twenty-three years earlier. When she turned her head to the side, though, he could have sworn it looked as though she'd been crying.
Meredith silently maneuvered her car into the driveway, putting her head back against the seat and sighing as she put it in park and pulled the keys out of the ignition.
"Sweetheart, are you sure you don't want to have Molly and Alex and the boys stay with me? You look like you could use a break."
Meredith slowly turned her head to the side and smiled wearily, knowing there were a lot of implications hidden in that offer.
"What are you really trying to say, Mom?"
"I'm not…"
"Just say it, whatever you want to say to me."
"I'm worried about you, Meredith," the older woman admitted. "You can't keep going on like this. You're about to fall apart."
"I just have to get through the next couple of weeks, Mom…"
"And how many times have you said that this year? Meredith, you haven't slowed down for one minute since the shooting. You're starting to – and please know that I say this because I love you – you are falling apart at the seams, sweetheart."
"I'm doing the best I can," Meredith insisted.
"I know you are, sweetheart. I just think you need…I don't know, some time off or something to really process everything. You spend so much time worrying about the kids, you need some time to focus on yourself."
"How do you know that will help?"
"Because I've been where you are, Meredith. After your father died, I thought that was it…I thought I'd never be able to be happy again. And there isn't a day that goes by that I don't miss him and wish he were here to see you and Lexie and Molly, and all his grandbabies. But as much as it still hurts, it does get better, if you just take the time to let it. It gets better."
Meredith nodded, biting her lower lip to try to stop the tears she felt coming. "I hope so, Mom. I really hope so."
"Oh sweetheart, come here."
Meredith finally stopped biting her lip and started to cry as she reached across the seat and let herself be pulled into a tight embrace. She supposed that there should be something strange about it, but even at nearly fifty years old, there was nothing quite like a mother's hug.
Of course, Susan Grey wasn't Meredith's biological mother, but it had been years since that distinction had seemed to matter to anyone. Meredith hadn't exactly warmed to Susan when her father and stepmother had popped up in her life out of the blue all those years ago. They'd had a cordial relationship – if you could call a few hospital visits and one fairly disastrous at-home dinner an actual relationship. But then her father had gotten the hiccups, and Susan had brought him to Seattle Grace on the off chance they'd run into Meredith, even if she was technically on leave. And then, because nothing in Meredith's life could ever be simple, those hiccups had killed him.
So she had done what she assumed was the "good" daughter thing – she had put on a nice black dress and shown up at the funeral, been awkwardly introduced to the sisters she'd never met, and stood politely in a receiving line as strangers told her what a wonderful man her father had been. Afterward, she had hugged Susan briefly, told her to call or drop by if she needed anything, and assumed that that was the last time she would ever see her stepmother. After all, people didn't tend to stick around in Meredith's life for very long, and she had no reason to assume Susan would be any different.
It had taken nearly a decade of Susan dropping by with groceries, babysitting the girls, buying birthday presents and showing up for every holiday imaginable before Meredith truly accepted that she had been wrong, and that Susan Grey wasn't going anywhere. She still wasn't quite sure when exactly she'd stopped thinking of her as her stepmother, or 'Thatcher's wife,' and begun thinking of her as family.
Somewhere around the twins' tenth birthday, though, she'd found herself arguing with Lexie over some stupid thing. Susan had stepped in to play peacemaker, and before Meredith even realized what she was saying, she'd snapped "leave it alone, Mom," in her direction. There had been a brief awkward pause, and then Lexie had jumped right back into the argument as though nothing had happened. There was never any discussion of it, but from that day on, Susan hadn't been anything other than 'Mom' to Meredith.
"I'm really glad you're here, Mom," Meredith whispered.
"You know I wouldn't be anywhere else." Susan smiled as she pulled back gently and wiped away a few of Meredith's tears. "Come on. What do you say we go inside and see if the boys have torn apart the house yet?"
Derek glanced at his watch and then back across the street at the house. It had been about half an hour since Meredith had gone inside, and he still wasn't sure what his next move should be. Go knock on the door? Come back another day?
Eventually, he decided there were simply too many people there that evening. If no one even knew he existed, how much chaos would it cause for him to ring the bell and announce himself? No, it was best if he waited and came back in a few days, when things would hopefully be a bit quieter. It would mean spending Christmas alone in a hotel room, but he supposed it wasn't really all that much different than what he'd have been doing back in New York.
He was just about to reach across the seat to where he'd tossed the keys when a sharp, sudden knock on the window caused him to nearly jump out of his skin. Quickly, he rolled down the window and squinted to see who was standing there in the darkness.
"You've been sitting out here like a creepy stalker all afternoon. Were you planning on staying all night too? Or were you actually going to get off your ass and do something?"