Thank You for Hearing Me

by Chicleeblair

The death of one of Meredith's role models makes her consider what her generation is passing on. Mer/Der (Set in an AU post-season 19 where Derek is alive.)

Sinéad O'Connor is dead. Meredith has fifteen notifications conveying the news. She skims articles, mentally judging them on the judgements they make; the assumptions based on nothing but the confirmation of her death and sensationalism. The Guardian gives two pages to her diagnostic history, and highlights the express mention of her son's suicide last year, as though they must be related. The nicer ones still have an undertone. None of them can be convey internationally renown singer and activist reported dead from unknown causes, a year after losing her beloved son.

Meredith doesn't know what happened. She can't imagine how she'd go on without one of her children. Medicine can't make up for years—generations—of oppression and abuse. Plenty of damage befall a fifty-six year old woman, even one who hadn't faced mental health issues and COVID. Not that Meredith will ever find that out firsthand.

She texts the nanny and Venmos her a bonus for changing her schedule on a whim. It makes her feel better about playing merry hell with her already bumpy schedule—Meri-deth wreaks merry hell!was a playground taunt she'd forgotten until hearing her newly assigned researchers say they were "off to merry hell" en route to her lab. Six months in, it's an inside joke with her team; their determination has become near-demonic.

On her way out, she pauses at Jackson's door. It's closed, the half-shut blinds showing a meeting with a besuited man, likely a donor. Their eyes lock over the tailored shoulder, and for a moment they travel back almost exactly fourteen years.

She'd seen the headline on a chyron, curled in on herself in an ICU recliner while Derek slept, and a delegation of Shepherds stormed toward LaGuardia. She'd been sure Catherine Fox Avery would've been on a red-eye out of Logan even sooner, if not a chartered jet. There'd been any number of reasons not to bother hauling her aching body upright and breeching the halls where the staffs of what had once been three area hospitals bumped into each other. What were the chances he was even there?

It'd taken her ten minutes to locate him, and five were taken up with changing into a clean pair of the black sweats April had brought her, and another diaper-sized pad.

No diapers. Not yet.

Maybe not ever. What kind of mother puts herself and her child in front of a gunman?

The kind who knew she couldn't be a parent without Derek. And her miscarrying hadn't been some hand of the almighty thing. It'd been stress. Hormones. Medicine.

She pressed her back against the wall beside the door to the staff lounge, yesterday's desperate thoughts replaying in her mind. The pleas, the bargaining, the begging. She'd thought she knew Derek's fallibilities. That he was just a man. She'd pushed away the knowledge that he was a person in a body.

You had to, or you went crazy.

Jackson's head shot up at the sound of the door, and then he slumped again at the sight of her. He wasn't on the floor, and she sat stiffly in one of the chairs—they must've been given attendings' break space.

"Chapel too crowded?" she asked, and he gave a wet scoff. So, still not his thing, not just avoiding the attention. She smirked at the thought, remembering a burgundy suit and a murmur—was it her mother?—that he'd do well in plastics, where there were mirrors everywhere.

"Not my thing," he said, echoing her thoughts." Or yours?" he asked, his eyelashes lowered in uncertainty.

It'd been a long time since they'd noticed each other daring to look around during a prayer at some event, just old enough to disdain a room of scientists bowing their heads—and maybe a little jealous. She'd wanted that net, for sur. While she'd been abroad, she'd visited huge cathedrals, beloved synagogues, and gorgeous mosques. She'd been awed by the beauty, but it was the human endeavor that mystified her, not some mythical mystical presence.

"Not my thing," she agreed.

Please, Cristina. I'll do anything. I'll be a better wife. Desperate thoughts with the cadence of prayer, that was all. Hadn't she been there to make Derek face up to his God-complex?

And yet. Be more than a man. Be invulnerable. This guy blames you for taking life? Fine. We made life. You're not just a guy, okay? You're a legend. Most legends are dead! A living legend!

"How screwed up is it," Jackson asked, "That my roommate died yesterday, anåd I felt totally numb, but I'm falling apart over a pop-star?"

I'm the kind of girl who laughs at a funeral, don't ask me.

He was asking her, though. He didn't know it'd taken her weeks to cry for George. Her friends had made it, yesterday, but he was still looking at her for experience, like he was five and asking if having his wiggling tooth come out would hurt.

(She'd performed her first surgery under the water fountains at a hotel. He'd insisted that his tears were a deflex, and offered to split his spoils from the tooth fairy. Mom said the tooth fairy was designed to let parents deny that their children were growing up. She got the coins by her cereal bowl, so don't say I'm depriving you. She hadn't told Jackson any of that. She'd been too busy examining the tooth, wishing she had her coin purse; she'd have given him double the going rate.)

"Jackson, the first time I remember seeing you, you were moonwalking away from your mom at some event to get to the dessert table while she mingled," she said. "I don't know if he's actually your namesake, but I bet it didn't matter in school in the eighties. You were, what, two when Thriller came out?"

"About. Mom says she's surprised I didn't come out singing 'Rock with You,'" he acknowledged.

"You ever see him live?"

As she'd expected, his face lit up. "Yeah, uh, in Paris, the summer I was seventeen. He hardly ever toured the States," he added. Rich-kid defensiveness. "It was…it was every emotion all at once—just being in his presence." He shook his head. "I sound like my grandma after Black church. He was just a person. A person with a talent, and an abusive dad, and he might've been a pedophile."

"Yeah," Meredith acknowledged. "But he was a person who made you feel all that. I think…I think for people need something to…to be holy, and for someone like you or me, who don't buy into the religion thing...I think we have to find it somewhere else. So, we find it other places. There's a reason religions have hymns and chanting. This is Your Brain on Music, or whatever Something is ready to register talent as divine, and if you don't believe in that…Then it's a human…a guy with a rough life…producing it….My mom would've had me say I worship science, or…or reason, at a stretch, but that's…that's not where the sense of wonder comes from.

"Think about Mark or Derek at their most bow down to me, peon, I'm a surgery god. They're not going on about the power of medicine. We put faith in that, yeah, but what's…what's wonderful is expertise. The kind that seems inhuman. You have to learn to recognize that, and performers are right there." She shrugged. "I'm rambling; they gave me pain meds, too, for...you know." She bit her lip. It'd been a daunting idea to imagine telling people she was pregnant; she didn't know how to talk about losing it, especially in the face of everything else. "I just know how I feel watching incredible surgeries, and at concerts is pretty similar, even if I know the person on stage is a major dick. Or has one," she added.

He coughed on a laugh. "Wow, Grey, way to read the room."

"It makes my point. And it was a better speech than telling you what you know; you were probably in shock yesterday. Percy's death hadn't really registered, and it probably still hasn't, because someone you know isn't just there, or not; they're woven in, and it takes a while to find all the little holes. That any other time you would've turned to music that comforts you, but now it's just going to be a reminder."

"Yeah. Yeah, I…I'm here because I can't stand the apartment. We already renewed the lease, but I don't know…. I spent fifteen minutes last night expecting him to come through the door, and then decided I'd hang out here until my mom manages to convince me to stay at the Archfield with her. Then, she'll try to actually convince me to go back east. Funny, they spent my whole life assuming I wasn't going to follow in anyone's footsteps, and now she's desperate to fit me into the shoes. My father's, I guess. Harper Avery…." He snorted. "I was gonna say they'll never be empty, but that's not true."

"No."

"Did you idolize your mom?"

Meredith blinked, not at the question, but at the speed of it. "Yeah. I did. For a long time, I did."

Jackson nodded and touched his thumbs to his lips. "Because, I was just thinking…in a way, that's what Clark did. He didn't blame God, or nature, or our limited understanding of science. He blamed the doctors. Like we're sitting here doling out life and death for inscrutable reasons, not trying to save every person who comes through the door. He didn't think they were apples to take out of the barrel; he wanted to punish them." He turned to her, his normally bright eyes burning. Truly smoldering."You have it right, then."

"Me? What?"

"Deifying people. Idolizing them. It's just as dangerous as religion." There was an edge to his voice that she didn't like, and definitely didn't want to be responsible for.

"No one's perfect," she agreed, carefully. "And the higher the pedestal you put them on, the higher you'll both fall." He was nodding along like a bobblehead, and she held up a finger. "But that just means you can't expect everything from someone. They can't be everything. That's how you get Clark." Or my father. She didn't say it, not knowing what Jackson might repeat to Lexie. "But you can't be everything for yourself, either."

"Why? Seems like it'd be less painful." She didn't reply immediately, and he sighed. "No. I know why. Because you do that, and the next thing you're holding a baby over a balcony—"

"That might be taking—"

"I used to be the one saying we should give the guy a break. We didn't know what his life was like; what kind of hormones they gave him; he'd never been treated like an adult. It was one thing when people were giving him shit because they didn't understand vitiligo. Not being white enough; being too Black, I understood that. But it's a pretty simple thing to know not to hurt people. Not to scare them. Not to act like they're yours to do wot as we please. Except...that's what Clark thought we did."

He pressed his clasped fists against his forehead, and Meredith put a hand lightly on his shoulder. She'd gone through a spiral like that last year, around William Dunn's execution. Maybe they all had to face it, to some degree.

"We do, but it's a direct result of trying to improve or preserve their life. Specifically," she added, thinking of all the stories she'd read of divas having every whim catered to, because their talent was a gift, or whatever. "Surgeons haven't always worked like that. I think the best we can do is re member that it only takes a second to put us in the place of our patients or their families. We want someone skilled doing the work; someone whose ability seems divine, but not a god."

"Charles. He was gonna be a great surgeon that way."

"George, too."

"Reed could be a bitch, but she was good at meeting patients at their level."

Meredith laughed, and after a moment Jackson smiled, too.

"If you need somewhere to stay, while you're looking for a place, or whatever, we have space."

"You don't have to ask Shepherd about that?"

"Eh. He'll be here for the next two weeks. Besides, he brought Lexie home. It's my turn. And my house. Should I…?" She paused, exhaling slowly as a cramp took her back to that OR, and April's wide-eyed sympathy transitioning into determination. "I'll extend the invitation to April."

"Her thing for him was just hero-worship. She'd never—"

"I know. And he'd….Well. You never know what someone will do, but she's not his type. She was just what everyone thought I was. The obsequious student who only sees his expertise. It wasn't like that. I've never…." She ran her tongue over her lips. They were flaky from biting them constantly over the course of the past twenty-four hours. "I admire him. I have faith in what he can do." You're too important to die like this. Too necessary. Patients need you. I need you. "But I don't idolize him. If anything, I love him because I knew him as a man first."

"Still. It can't have been easy to see…to have gone through yesterday."

"Decidedly not." Once-upon-a-time, she'd had furious thoughts about the existence of his heart. She took all of them back. "Knowing he's mortal versus…versus facing it." The sound of the heart monitor alarm crept up on her, and she shuddered like she could shake it off. She hadn't credited him enough for making it through the day she drowned. "But he's gonna be okay. Our lives will keep going. I'm grateful for that."

He nodded, and went quiet for long enough that she considered making her exit.

"So...to whom—or what?—are you grateful?"

"Him. Cristina. You. Hunt…. C-Clark, in a way. If he'd wanted more than warped justice, he would've just wiped us all out. No one force is responsible." If she said that enough—to him, to herself—maybe she could believe it of the miscarriage, too—or at least put more blame on Clark, where logic told her it belonged.

Derek didn't always go to logic first.

They'd been sitting there in silence for another couple of minutes when Jackson's phone went off, playing the opening of "Thriller." When Meredith raised her eyebrows, he shook his head, ruefully. "Percy. Our first Halloween shift. I keep meaning to change it," he said, before flipping it open. "Hey, Ma. Yeah, I'm okay. With a friend. Just get here safely, okay?"

She'd heard the tinny strains of the midi file until he'd become victim to the smartphone revolution.

If she waits outside of his office, they'll have some meaningful conversation about the time that's passed, but she can't—by letting Willa the nanny off the hook, she's made herself late for pick-up at Zola's summer program, and that's only the first domino.

"Is this music from the singer who died?" Ellie asks before her booster seat buckles click. Sometimes, Meredith imagines herself at eight, in a cab with no restraint, or the front seat with her mother at the wheel. She regrets losing the scenery of Seattle driving, and appreciates the steal her mother had in Beacon Hill, close enough to walk to to her school and MGH. Brookline STEAM is too far from the Fox Foundation for that. Brookline isn't the suburbs, but it is the Greenline, and that overgrown trolley is reserved for weekend adventures.

She rode the T alone at twelve—supposedly only the red and orange that kept her on train tracks navigable from MGH. She'd obeyed the sanctum for a long time, and then another long time when a bag from a store in Brookline, actually, gave her away.

(Sadie lived on the Green Line. Meredith left her tickets in plain sight and discovered Sadie wasn't just trying to make herself look better on the grape vine. Mom hadn't been paying attention. She got lucky sometimes, like anyone. Talk about a crisis of faith.)

She doesn't love the return to Masshole traffic, but at least her children are better protected than she was.

From traffic, anyway.

"Yes, sweets."

"We danced to her song in warm-up. The one the prince dude wrote for her."

"Prince," Zola corrects. "He didn't write it for her, and that was just his name.."

"Not always," Meredith notes. It's the easy avenue to go down in a conversation about Sinéad and Prince, considering she accused him of harassment in her memoir—and, really, at this point, what benefit would she have gotten from a lie?—Both girls would have more understanding of the story than she wants for them, but they've grown up in the Me, Too era, and she's noticed too many boys being given a reactionary message, one that only seems to double-down on toxic masculinity.

("Of course they are," Cristina said, the last time she shared a variant of the observation. "The only thing men are more afraid of than losing their power is thinking that they gave it away." It'd sounded like something Meredith's mother would say, but also depressingly true.)

"I don't know that I like this song," Bailey ventures, a minute or so after his rapid recounting of everything he picked up over the day. He chose a program focused on a multidisciplinary approach to Boston history, saying he wanted to know about where he'd be living. Originally, she'd thought he liked the idea of being outside all day, most days, but the way he goes over his notes has mad her wonder if she should tell him no one will be testing him on local lore the first day of school.

"B.B., you can't say that! She's died," Ellis chastises, every syllable more shocked than the last.

"That doesn't matter. It's art," her sister counters, and then she holds up the phone she received on the first day of summer. "Besides, she didn't write it."

"Not all singers are Taylor Swift," Meredith says, in response to her disdain. "She wrote a lot of songs. What don't you like, bud?"

"It's what she's saying. 'How can you tell me you're lonely,'" he imitates, a warble in his still-high pitched voice. "'And say for you the sun don't shine.' Like, just because other people have it worse, you can't be unhappy."

"That's not what it is!" Zola's objection overlaps her brother's last word, and Meredith taps her hand at a stoplight. "Sorry for interrupting," she grumbles, pushing the three words togeher into one. "I don't think that's what it is. I think she…the song…just wants you to think about it. Like, the examples are kind of…a soldier, unhoused people, a man having tea alone, they're…they're just, like…images. Not…if she didn't say it was London, it could be anywhere, at any time. So, it's like, people are always gonna have it worse than you. Maybe it is kind of saying, hey, think about whether you really have it that bad, but not…the way it says, 'let me take you by the hand,' that's a friend thing. All these people, they're in different situations. What they have in common is that they're lonely, and doing the same thing every day. 'Yesterday's paper, yesterday's news.' But you don't have to be alone. You can take her…the singer's…hand, and do something different. Get out of the rut."

"They're not looking, too," Ellis says. "The sad people. The lady 'has no time for talking…'just keeps right on walking,' as an instance, I think she doesn't notice the old seaman. Anyone can lose their home, like in a fire, or their memories, like Alzheimer's, and you can't say the sun don't shine now because at least you have a friend, and maybe…maybe, if you keep noticing the sad people, you don't become them, because you keep making friends."

"Our friends always have somewhere to stay," Bailey says.

"Not everyone will have a loved one to take them in every time they need it," Meredith puts in, a form of gentle reminder she's been working in more since they moved into a house that's not so much bigger than the old one as more spread out, which makes it feel huge. "I think this song probably does want you to be aware of unhoused people. You're right that it's a timeless issue, Zo, but it was also a big issue in London at the time that this came out.

"We can't solve our problems by saying 'my arm might be broken, but at least I have one,' right? Everyone comes with their own experience and tolerance. But sometimes it's good to acknowledge the privileges you have, because often they mean that things can improve. Also," she notes, turning into their driveway. "Whether or not she wrote it, the singer went through periods of being unhoused herself. Does that change anything?"

The kid unload with faces scrunched up in almost farcical thoughtful expressions.

"Yes and no," Bailey says, in rhythm with the security code. "Because you can take stuff from the song without knowing that. But if you do, it's kinda saying that people didn't notice her, or wouldn't have once she got old, except she can sing, so now she's showing everyone what she saw."

"Good thoughts," Meredith praises. "It's early. If I have all hands on for dinner, we can use the pool after."

There's a surge of activity as they rush through hanging up their bags, and she posts herself at the fridge to hand over ingredients, lest they unload the entire thing in their exuberance. The chicken breasts are in the oven when Zola says, "So she's talking to herself in the London song? Like a there by the grace of God thing?"

Wrong angry Irish person, Meredith thinks. She'll save Flogging Molly for tomorrow. That she saw them on the Warped tour is not a brag they'll be impressed by—not at this age, anyway. "I think you can hear it that way."

"She just got lucky, though, right? Not completely random, because she had talent, but she wasn't a lot more privileged."

"She…." Meredith thinks as she unwraps Saran Wrap from the chicken. Even when she first learned about Magdalene Laundries, where women charged with crimes, or just guilty of having babies out of wedlock worked their hands raw, they seemed to belong to another world. It frightens her that her children might feel less distance. "Being unhoused was just one thing she went through. Her parents divorced, and her dad moved here…Virginia, I think. Her mom was abusive. I think she had mental illness, which doesn't excuse hurting anyone, but it affected her ability to keep work. There weren't as many services, or treatments, then. Her mother taught her to shoplift, maybe out of desperation, but when her dad came back, she went to live with him, and she got in trouble for it."

"She had to adapt," Ellis said, decisively. "Like Joey."

"Yes," Meredith wishes she had a hand free to run through her daughter's hair, which is flying out of its headband. She can only smile at her. That's one thing she hopes they can rebuild here; a cluster of people whose experiences and families are different enough to give them those insights to draw from. Undoubtedly, their classmates will all have their own challenges, but Seattle was still a melting pot of a city. Rarely did her coworkers come from there, and so many were first or second generation doctors. Jackson was working to shape the Foundation similarly, and Brookline STEAM isn't Boston Prep. They focus on the student's needs and abilities, meeting families where they are, but cost of living in this city is so absurd, she's sure that someone in her mother's place wouldn't have been able to afford it.

They're going to be reminded that money won't buy happiness, but they'll also see what it can buy. She wants them aware of their privilege, but not to limit their abilities, or downplay their difficulties.

"She got sent to a place that was sort of a cross between juvie and a group home, run by nuns," she explained, carefully. "They'd been around for centuries, and they became pretty miserable places."

"Like a workhouse?" Ellis asks. "The real one," she adds, turning her stare on both her siblings, who do look ready to jump over each other to point out Oliver! does not depict reality.

"A lot like that," Meredith agrees. "They stemmed from the same attitudes toward poverty, for sure. But only for women. Girls. By the time she was there, in the eighties, the world knew that mistreating kids didn't help them, and it still happened. I imagine that in the sixteenth-century, there were people who could see that children weren't tiny adults, and hurting them was wrong. They probably helped a significant amount of individuals. One person can do that. They didn't manage to spread the understanding, or overtake the people in power. One person can make a stink, but making change takes…?"

"Allies," Zola offers

"Cussedness." Bailey savors the word she borrowed from his namesake.

"Irritation?"

"Not untrue," Meredith tells Ellis. "But I was looking for 'irreverence.' Which means?"

"Not accepting that anyone's better than you because they're the boss," Bailey answer.. "Respect is earned."

"What about before you know what someone's like?"

"Be polite," Zola says. "Model it. But don't tolerate being dismissed."

"Don't cow-tow!" Ellis giggles.

"Excellent. So, Sinéad went to one of those places. Whenever she spoke about it, she'd say she wasn't abused. Physically, it seems that's true, and it was common in the past. But she also describes the misery of being kept from her family, says there was no therapy or rehabilitation, and the girls there were told that they were bad people."

"That's emotional abuse," Zola says. "Isn't it?"

"I would say yes. I'd say there was probably neglect. And the girls there hadn't all done something that we'd consider breaking the law. The Catholic Church was in charge. Teenagers were punished for being sexually active." Whether it was their choice or not. "In her book she mentions a girl who was there because her she needed a series of surgeries on her hip." Zola pauses her lettuce shredding and glances up, but starts up again once their eyes meet. "She focuses a lot on how, she benefited. A teacher gave her her first chance to sing for people. She went to school; where most of the girls were taught on-site. Her family could afford to take care of her—in fact, they'd paid to send her there, believing it would help."

"That still happens, doesn't it?" Bailey murmurs. "Zeke? At my old school? That's like the place his sister got sent."

Meredith presses the side of her hand against the bridge of her nose. The girl came into the Grey+Sloan ER after ODing on fentanyl. Her parents had thought she was seizing, which got Amelia involved, but the parents had been terrified. A couple of weeks later, Zeke came to school talking about the big men who showed up to take his sister "to get help." That they didn't send the two younger kids to Grandma's or something adds to the criminality to it, in Meredith's opinion. They'd seen it as a deterrent. She doesn't tell her children that places like that, and the conversion camps that are being slowly outlawed are as bad, or worse, than the descriptions she's read of a Magdalene Laundry in the seventies.

"Similar. Those places are specialized. They prey on desperate parents. The nuns were charged with taking care of women without somewhere else to go. There were older women who lived there, too. Eventually, she found out it was a hospice. Do you all know what that is?"

They've seen more death than she'd anticipated for them; but unlike her experience having neighbors who wasted away from HIV/AIDS, it has been of the here-today, gone-tomorrow variety.

"Palliative care," Bailey says. The word doesn't fit in his mouth, and she thinks she can see the brochure he's picturing, one of many along the far wall in one of the Grey+Sloan elevator bay.

"That's one part."

"Right," he agrees, looking down to straighten the knife he's just put down next to Ellis's plate.

"It means you're dying," Zola says. "At a place, or at home, and the home nurse is a hospice nurse."

"That's it. Palliative care is making sure that someone who is terminal—who can't be treated without doing more damage than good—doesn't suffer. That's…it's sort of a new concept, too." She finishes seasoning the chicken before explaining, Some people would say they're too young for all of this. Sinéad O'Connor went through it at fourteen, though, and it's story-time compared to what a ten-year-old girl can be put through in this country. "One story she tells is about one of the last times she runs away They punish her by making her sleep in the hospice.

"When she talks about lying there listening to these women cry out, afraid and no one calling out. She wonders why she got this punishment, when the usual one is sleeping on a mattress outside the door and eating alone—being isolated—and she concludes that the head nun wanted her to see that if she didn't stop running away, she'd become one of those ladies."

"Like the song," Ellis murmurs, amazed. "Except, 'cause she didn't write it, it's not just about the girls."

Let me take you by the hand, and lead you down the streets of Dublin…. Meredith imagines it for a second; the girls and woman who populate those chapters filled in for the seaman and the tea-drinker. Instead, a twenty-two year-old woman who shuffles like the older women; the violent girl who she realizes is actually small and scared, and her first friend; an Irish traveler, who gives birth while she's there, and is utterly unprepared to have her baby taken away.

"I makes me think it's a lot like Zo said," Bailey says. "She's reminding herself. 'You could be an old person, dying alone.'"

Meredith laughs to herself under the sound of the lid of the trashcan slamming over the packaging she's disposing of. She's doing her best to give him tactics for living in a brain that often works more like hers than the other two.

"Everyone expects famous people to be happy," Ellis says. "Because they sing and dance, which is fun, and have money, but it still takes all your energy, and you have bad days. And messed up feet." She wrinkles her nose, and Meredith kisses the top of her head. She never thought ballet would become Ellis's focus, but while her classmates were mostly inspired by the days they spent shadowing the junior high girls learning to dance en pointe, she came home full of questions for Jackson, and Aunt Callie, and do we know a foot doctor?

"It happens," Zola says. "Like in Miss Americana, and to Selena, and all those other Disney Channel girls."

"She had some experiences in common with them, for sure."

"How? They're all nepo babies," Bailey asks. "Lucas said that's what we are. Medical nepo babies."

"Does he? Well, it won't help you through med school, that I promise you."

"Selena's not, anyway," Zola says. "She mom was a teen pregnancy, and poor, and stuff. Her mom did act, though, right?" she asks, turning to Meredith.

"I only know what the documentary said, bug, which is less than you." She doesn't know for sure that Zola knew much about Selena Gomez prior to watching My Mind & Me, but it had a definite effect on her. "But that sounds right. It's like…"

She hesitates before Miley Cyrus's name slips out. No doubt they've all seen more explicit videos than "Wrecking Ball," and there's an interesting debate for when they're older: Miley says she was owning her sexuality; her shaved head was an homage to Sinéad; Sinéad shaved her head to be judged for her sexuality, not her talent, and Miley's unwittingly feeding into the system. Just, even in a letter written "in the spirit of motherliness and with love," the words prostitute and pimp come up in almost every paragraph, and she'll happily keep living in a world where the younger two don't know those concepts. If she's denying that they're growing up, so be it.

"What's her name? With the brother...Fergus? Finnegan?"

"Billie Eilish!" they chorus, and Bailey adds, "Finneas. He makes beats."

"Right, right, I knew that!" She smiles at Zola's narrowed eyes and puts an arm around her. "Don't give me that look, Zo. I know the names of more angry rockers than you've heard, I promise. There's just a layer of medical jargon that makes it harder for new ones to stick."

"You knew the medical jargon when you were little," Ellis protests. "Like us!"

"You'd be surprised," Meredith murmurs. "We taught you that stuff. I overheard it. That's harder to remember. Anyway, Billie Eilish. She gets criticized for her look, a lot, yeah?"

"Uh-huh, she wears big sweatshirts and stuff, and people say she doesn't look like a girl. Would they say that if she wasn't?"

"Sure, guys wear stuff like that," Bailey says.

"They go on red carpets looking like the gym," Zola mutters.

Meredith raises her eyebrows. That's absolutely Amelia. "I guarantee," she says, "That anything Billie Eilish or…. Give me a boy."

"Danny Lux?" Zola offers.

"Sure. Anything they wear costs more than anything in your closets. Dress codes are arbitrary, which is why they've changed. My mom wore heels every day of her career."

"You still dress nice," Ellis points out.

"I'm wearing jeans, El. Nice ones, sure, but they wouldn't have flown not that long ago. They say it's about respect, but since 'nice' clothes tend to be expensive, I think that might be a fib. If you like how you look after putting effort into it, and it's not an uncomfortable distraction from your work, that's one thing. But I imagine that if sterility hadn't been an issue, Mom would've operated in pumps, because arguing with the men wasn't worth her time, and that would've made it harder for someone like me, who can't stand them more than a few times a year. Enough about me. Billie Eilish, criticized for wearing comfy-looking hoodies to tedious events. What about…what was it, last month you showed me that instagram post?"

"Oh, yeah!" Zola says, her finger flying on her phone screen. "That was hi-lar-i-ous. Here." She holds it up, showing off a picture of the singer in a funeral black gown, complete with lacy evening gloves. She wouldn't have been out of place among goths who Meredith had known, or the emo looks starting to pop up in clubs when she'd stopped going.

"Her eyes are really blue," Bailey notes. "You wouldn't notice it if she had full sleeves, but with how pale her shoulders are they stand out."

"Yours are more blue," Ellis says, looking between them. "I like how she says she doesn't have to prove she's a tomboy. Can I say that at Little League when they say, 'you dance?'"

"Absolutely," Meredith says. "You can also say that you're a girl, not any kind of boy, if you want to. Or not. I liked being called a tomboy, sometimes, but mostly because you had to be to play with the boys."

"There aren't tomgirls," Bailey says.

"No, because it's for girls, and boy is always the default," Zola snaps. She's sitting at the island next to the salad she's put together, while her brother is leaning against the set table. She doesn't see his face, but Meredith does.

"You mean there's no term that makes it acceptable to hang out with the girls, bub?"

He nods. "No one here is supposed to say anything, but, like, it's…implicated. And it's not like I'm playing dolls or…or that that would be bad. Just that I'm listening to the guides talk about the buildings, or saying the willows are nice. It's arbitrary," he finishes, with a mix of confidence and frustration that keeps her from correcting implicated. "I don't think it'd be wrong to be a tomgirl, or not either like Kai—"

"That's what I meant," Ellis puts in. "Non-either, like Kai!"

"And Aunt Callie," Zola says.

"Yeah, duh, but they like wearing girl dressy stuff."

Okay, they'll be diving into gendered fashions, and the expectations cropping up for nonbinary people. The conversations she and her mother had about heels and dresses were all snide remarks about giving into the patriarchy—which she stands by—and insistences that some things aren't worth the time—which she understands, begrudgingly, more every year, even if she'll never agree.

"Nothing's wrong with it," Bailey repeats. "Or with liking girls—which, these guys say they do, but they act like we're different species."

"Maybe none of them have sisters," Ellis suggests.

"Statistically unlikely," Zola says. "Some boys are just…like that. Like in an old movie where it's all girls rule, boys drool."

An old movie. Meredith has not avoided the pitfalls of working too much to be there for her kids every time she should've been, but moments like that give her hope that it's balanced out.

She wishes the Brookline STEAM course for Bailey's year hadn't been full; they had a course with a modeling focus, which he would've loved. The program he's in seems to pull from the small Venn diagram of private school students whose schools don't offer summer programs, likely because most students don't stick around. She's pretty sure Boston Preparatory Academy, her alma mater, is one of them, and it'd taken a brief scan of their website to be sure that there would be no legacies.

"Do the girls act like you shouldn't be hanging out with them?" she asks.

"No."

"So, who do you want to hang out with?"

"The people who like me, but..some of them say it's nice to have a boy whose cool around. I'm not that, either. They don't even know I like art and stuff. I just said I used to do baseball." Nah, Mer, you're cool! You're a bro!

"Wear your Yankees hat, see how that goes," Zola suggests.

"Sweetie, I know you're joking, but we are trying to keep your brother from being jumped." Meredith manages to inject a belated thread of humor into that, but she's also going to stash the hat somewhere for a while, at least until the next Series is over. "You're not just that," she corrects her son. "You are a boy who is cool. There are reason some boys and girls get weird around each other at your age. They start to have feelings that are more than just thinking someone's cool, and those trip you up. They just do. They mess with your brain. So, sometimes boys who like boys hang with the girls, and vice versa. Sometimes not, because a person can handle the hormones, or they care more about what they're doing, or don't have feelings for any of the doofuses they go to school with." Ellis giggles at 'doofus.' "I know it's cliché for us to tell you that your real people will love who you are, but remember Uncle George?"

"He died," Zola murmurs, like it's a part of his name. My uncle George who died.

"He did. But he…he grew up with two brothers and a dad who were into hunting, and football, and had pretty firm ideas about what a man was. Uncle Alex was sort of like them; more than he is. He made assumptions about who Uncle George liked based on those things. Inaccurate ones.

"Uncle George was sweet, like you, and soft-spoken, not at all like you, and when it comes to characteristics that are supposedly manly, he had more of them. He was smart. Clever. Funny. He was brave, in a way that encouraged other people to be brave, too. You know you're named after Miranda?"

"No, never heard that story," he says, and belies the sarcasm with a brilliant grin at her laughter. "She saved you after I came out."

"After my spleen came out." She's not going to let that hint of her type of guilt linger in his voice. She's barely adjusted to Zola starting to question the stories she's heard her whole life, but as usual, her brother is right behind her. "It was cramping your style."

He giggles. Still a kid, for now.

"Tuck is named for George. William George Bailey-Jones. Because there was a storm the day he was born, a lot was going on at the hospital, and without him, Tuck might not have been born, or Miranda might've been in trouble. Sometimes people say baby stuff is for girls, don't they?"

He nods, but his lips twist, uncertainly. "But…women weren't surgeons just to deliver babies."

"No," she admits. "When we started doing surgery, men were obstetricians—the doctors who deliver babies—the same as anything. They were gynecologists, the doctors who deal with the female reproductive system. And that's all right, in cases. Dr. Fox is a urologist, and treats male reproductive organs."

The oven beeps, and she wonders if the family they bought the house from had conversations like this. They were lawyers, so she doubts it.

"Relative to what we're discussing, they're not binary things. But she listens to her patients. She doesn't see them as other, or make assumptions about their organs without tests."

Zola makes a humph noise. If Meredith hadn't been next to her, she might've missed it, but Bailey runs on her frequency. "Peanut gallery?"

"Just…she's a Black woman, she worked at The Brigham, she could've done so much as an obstetrician! Black women die four times as often in labor, and it's not like white ladies don't! You almost did!"

"I was very well taken care of by crack first responders," she says. "But that's true, and it's true no matter what kind of education or bank account someone has. It is improved through midwifery, and having doctors of color, so, you're right. There's systemic racism in obstetrics that goes back to the days when those male doctors weren't listening to the enslaved women they did tests on, without anesthesia. I was getting to that.

"Bay, there was a point where male doctors took over delivery, because of what they believed about women's sensibilities. But for centuries prior to that, it was the last place you'd find a guy, even the father. Not for the reasons we're seeing in studies; operating too soon, not listening to patients—sexism, racism, classism. Babies are a fraught subject. But what is really beneficial in there is what George had. He was steady. When he said it'd be okay, you believed him.

"He wasn't perfect. He had to gain confidence, for one, because he'd listened to too many people who told him what a man should be. He could be a jerk, usually because he kept listening to them. Like I said, Uncle Alex had some of those opinions, too. But ask him now. He'll tell you, they were both good men. Just did it in different ways. If they hadn't wanted to be seen that way, I'd say they were good people, because that was true, too.

"Those guys are going to see a lot of ways someone can be a boy before they're grown. How they react to it is up to them. One summer of seeing how much more fun you have actually engaging with your surroundings and learning all that stuff might not change their attitudes, but it'll help. If you're in a situation where you can't hang out with anyone else, ask questions. See if they have sisters, or if they've seen Return to the Spider-verse."

"Tell them about the time we faced down a bear at the house in the woods," Zola adds.

"I don't remember that."

"Are they gonna know?"

"I'm not a great liar."

"That's the truth. I'll tell them. Act like you're too modest to brag. It's not like you'll have to prove it."

He laughs, and pretends to show how he'd react to a bear, and since they really won't be seeing one outside of a zoo, she doesn't remind them of true bear etiquette.

The conversation shifts, but Zola keeps eying her in that way that means she has a question she's not ready to ask. Meredith can only guess at what it might be. Googling Sinéad could've taken her down any number of alleys.

Her role transitions from music analysis instructor to referee for an evening of overseeing activities that mix Marco Polo, the mesh-mesh of games the three of them have made their own, and even go back to when Zola and Bailey got their baths together, and made up an under the sea world of their own. She barely has a moment to think before bed-time.

She has work to do and emails to check, but she ends up taking Sinéad O'Connor's book off a shelf, and sitting in the master bedroom, flicking through texts. It surprises her, a little, how many people thought of her. The first message had come from Taryn Helm. There are rumors that she has a Songs from Dr. Grey's ER playlist. There are worse ways to have an impact.

She puts the phone to the side at the sound of the security system being disarmed. Her heartbeat surges, but her shoulders relax. He didn't call, or text just to say hey, I saw the news. He's just here, where he's supposed to be. And he's holding a half-pint of strawberry ice cream, which is not insignificant.

"There's a plate in the oven," she says, but she leans into him when he lies on the bed with an arm around her.

"We'll give it to the dog."

"Which we don't have."

"Yet. But look at that yard." He waves a hand at the dark window. "It's perfect. And it'd give us a reason to meet the neighbors."

"Neither of us was supposed to be home before seven tonight," she reminds him, but she's losing this battle. They've kept three kids alive this long, and all three of them are old enough to pitch in. She should be long over any residual guilt she feels for Doc. It's just tied up in so much else.

What isn't? she wonders, as she briefs Derek on the day, particularly the conversation with their son. "Are they getting it more? The gender stuff? But then I think, no, Sinéad O'Connor's shaved head was done because men weren't listening to her, and then she was silenced anyway, over a picture of a bald guy…. Is that…? I should probably avoid talking that way for a few weeks, huh?"

"Not if it's Carolyn Shepherd you're worried about," Derek assures her, kissing her temple.

They're spending the last three weeks of summer at beach cabin on the beach in North Carolina. Her time off is a gift from Jackson—"We'll at least pretend I had to woo you"—but he, April, and Harriet are joining them for part of the chaos of September first, the day almost every renter in Greater Boston Area participates in a miserable game of musical apartments. ("Like Intern Day?" Bailey asked, the first time she tried to explain.

"Worse," Derek, who helped Amelia move in undergrad, said, ominously.

"It's the Dead Baby Bike Race with U-Hauls," Meredith added. "And the bus drivers keep it up for a while to mess with freshmen."

All three kids' eyes widened.

"You don't think that's exaggerating?" Derek asked.

"My mother told me to watch out for traffic in the first week of September through my senior year," she said. He confirmed their reservation through Labor Day.)

The guest rooms are going to house a carousel of visitors from New York, Seattle, and, though the kids don't know it yet, Kansas. She's tried to talk Cristina into a couple of days, but "I grew up in L.A.; if I'd was a beach person, do you think I'd have followed that with Smith, Stanford, and Seattle?" Meredith hasn't pointed out that their first vacation together was to Hawaii; she knows that was Burke's choice, Besides, there's not much comparison between being two thirty-something women at a resort and helming multiple generations out of a rental. This year or next they'll finally make a winter trip to Switzerland. That's part of the deal with this move. They've taken the kids out of the small world they'd built for them in Seattle, and as young as they are, it's clear that they're not sure the broader one is good for much. She understands the sentiment; she protested and picketed in her adolescence, and Zola has claimed her patched-up denim jacket, one of those patches reading Save the Whales! There's more literally on fire these days, but there's also beauty. It's not fair to tell the next generations that it's up to them to fix the damage previous generations of humans have wrought without showing them the beauty that's out there.

And, yes, she's not just supporting her children's traveling; she's going with them. If she makes it to when Ellis is twenty-five and revealing that she's going to travel the subcontinent with an accordion before med school—or not—she'll feel superior saying, "Okay, baby, just keep in touch. We want to know as much as you want to tell," but if she doesn't, they're all going to know that she would. They'll have as many good memories as she can give them, and she'll cling to them by the tips of her fingernails.

Even the ones that include Derek's mom. She's coming down with Sofia, who will stay through the last weekend, which her moms are spending at a B&B down the road—Meredith wonders if it was serving as a long-belated babymoon—She's spent a few weeks in her mother-in-law's presence over the past decade, but the few times they haven't had at least five other Shepherds to provide a buffer, the conversation rarely shifts away from the kids, Derek, or Meredith's career, with some memorable showdowns over Amelia. When Derek objected to that, she pointed to all the times he'd made her liaise with his family.—"She liked that I made you see past the extremes; it's never too late for her to realize you got more than your hair from her.—That said, she knows about mothers and daughters. Faith and popes? Not so much.

"Mom thought it was, um…gratuitous, I think she said, at the time," Derek recalls. "But she followed the Spotlight revelations pretty closely, and she funded #HometoVote tickets for both the abortion referendum and same-sex marriage."

"Yeah, I remember that." Her bisexuality has never come up with Carolyn, though enough other Shepherds know that she probably does. One of Kath's daughters and her wife gave her the first great-granddaughter, and even Amelia was explicit about Kai's pronouns with her. Still, she could be the type to compartmentalize; to excuse the pontiff as "a symbol" or a "product of his times."

"She liked John Paul well enough, but she's not the type to excuse people in authority," he continues, and Meredith smiles as she swallows a bite of ice cream. She doesn't wonder if he could read her mind these days; their thoughts just run on increasingly parallel tracks. "She used to get in trouble, actually, for insisting that there was no way the New Testament hadn't picked up errors in the millennium before the printing press; she couldn't copy over a recipe without transposing a number."

Meredith laughs.

"And, Dad used to say that she asked so many questions in confession that the priest would say, 'Carolyn Maloney, if I didn't know that voice, I'd think one of Rebbe Macauley's bat mitzvah students lost her way at the crosswalk.' I don't know how true that was, but they were good friends with the rabbi who took over when I was a kid. She believes, but I think at this point she goes along with the ritual because it's a way of enacting that belief, not because she's sure it's correct.

"She doesn't tell the heathens among us that we're going to hell, or try to convert the kids."

"True." She hands him the spoon, just realizing they've been passing the container steadily without having to think about it. Little moments like that hit her more lately, maybe because it proves that they really weren't a Seattle=exclusive phenomenon. She's not sure how much she worried about that, but it'd been more of a relief than she anticipated, telling the Brigham no ten years ago. That she grew up enough to be open to bringing her family here makes her kind of proud. "You remember seeing her rip up the pope's picture? Or did you just hear about it?"

"I remember; I got Mom's reaction in real time. —Sinéad O'Connor had been played on college radio for a while; I knew who she was, and Amelia saw her in New York."

"Lucky bitch," Meredith mutters. Thanks to the SNL backlash, it'd been 1997 before she'd seen her perform on a festival stage over the summer.

"I'm sure I've told you, SNL was a whole thing for my sisters and I. Mom acted like she didn't want us seeing it, so of course we'd sneak downstairs and gather around with the volume as low as possible. No universal closed captioning."

She makes a face at him. She had her hearing literally knocked out of her; he can complain about volume, or he can deal with "watching the script."

"We got away with it enough that as an adult I called her out, and she said she appreciated anything that got us interested in the world outside of Manhattan."

"How'd that work out?"

"Hey, I was interested," he says. "And—

"I went away for college," she says with him.

"Nyah, nyah, nyah," he grumbles. "You've lived in the two cities where you grew up, too, missy."

"I studied abroad."

"For a semester."

"Still counts."

"Tell yourself that. It's not like we always got away with it. If Amy heard us, we'd be sunk; she always showed it the next morning. She never slept well, but that was different from flat-out staying up. But it ended up being something we could talk about when I called, no matter what else was going on. When I came home, I went over there almost every Saturday night. Stayed on the couch, even with my room there. Amelia was never oblivious, but she could never say I wouldn't e doing it if it didn't keep her home for an extra couple hours on a Saturday. But once I started my internship, I wasn't there as much. Mark would go, but she was better at talking her way past him."

She put the empty carton and spoon on the bedside table and rolls to face him. "So, you worked overtime and traded shifts, and did all you could do to be free Saturday nights," she concludes. "There are people who wonder if you're stepping out on Addison. Richard Webber asks you about it, and you're the first person at the hospital who knows he's worked the steps."

His smile softens some of the crags in his face, and deepens the lines by his eyes. She loves them; loves knowing that she's been there to watch some of them form. That her face shows marks from the same storms, weathered together.

"Amelia's overdose put the brakes on her future. That segment was in the fall; she should've been here, a freshman. Instead, she deferred; maybe she was barely out of rehab. It's ninety-two. She insists she only takes pills; otherwise, why would she have ever bothered with a hot-of-the-presses prescription pad she knew would be missed? But aside from still being pissed that it was your pad, your name, your pride, she stole, your car she crashed, you're scared. They did tests at the hospital, but you've seen more in the pit in the past three months than you did in four years as a med student. AIDS can be fast; HCV treatment's about a year old. You have to keep checking on her, even though you're mad as hell.

"So's she, of course. She knows what she's lost more than anyone; the escape she had, and the escape she should've had. She's afraid of slipping up, afraid she'll never get rid of the pain again, and as often as she tells you to fuck off; she wonders if her memory always tells her the truth.

"All either of you can do is cling to the tradition, so you sit in the living room, and force laughs, and ignore each other. Then, this woman who you mostly know from a power ballad turns out to be a spitfire from the land of the ancestors—" He rolls his eyes, and she winks. "—sings 'War,' and destroys a picture not unlike the one hanging on the wall by the TV. You both turn to your mom.

"'Gratuitous,' she says. 'But if anyone can call the Church an enemy, it's probably an Irish woman.'

"It doesn't make things better with Amelia. Maybe you didn't even see the follow-up interviews; you just absorbed it all over the past couple decades. But for a moment, the problems in the world were bigger than yours, and it was surprisingly reassuring."

His lips part for just long enough before he kisses her that she knows he's covering for speechlessness. She'll let it slide. "Okay," he says, his thumb running its usual path over her cheek. "Nineteen ninety-two. You were fourteen. A freshman, which you'd thought was an overblown concept, but it turns out the upper school is a little overwhelming. There are new students, different classes, and people are already talking about 'when we get out of here.' Your future has been spelled out for so long. The idea that it could be different is enticing during the day, but home with your mom it seems as impossible as the original whenever she says she expects better.

"It's fall. A Saturday. You've said she always tried a little harder at the start of the year; even she knows your leash is too long between the Fourth and Labor Day. Usually, you avoided her, but the TV in your room is too small, so you chance the living room. Maybe she doesn't even show up until the end. It took the whole album for you to be sold on her—'Nothing Compares to You' is good, and all, but it's a love song. It's a while before you figure out love songs don't have to be about romance.

"You've heard 'War,' and you catch the lyrics she changes to reference child abuse; you recognize the pope; you're in Boston, after all, not even all your BPA classmates are WASPs. You think you get it, but before she can tell you to go to bed, you ask something like, 'Did she mean men in power? Because they make wars? And...kids are hurt?' It's a decent conclusion; Ellis recognizes that. Otherwise, she would've said something dismissive. You wouldn't want to remember."

She wishes it didn't sound true—how fickle!—but she was new to deep devotion to musicians at fourteen, and still openly her mother's acolyte

"You say she appreciated Margaret Thatcher's existence in spite of her politics…." His eyes tilted to the side, and she could see the equation in his head, the one, unlikely to ever be solved.

Of all of Meredith's sisters, Maggie had the least connection to Thatcher, but he must've signed something to waive his rights; she might've obviously not been his, but the laws favored the ex-husband. Particularly pre-DNA, his name would've gone on her birth certificate for up to a year post-divorce. ("Do they even know how pregnancy works?" Amelia grumbled, looking over her paperwork from Owen. Meredith and Derek, who could imagine divorce sex? easily enough had stayed quiet. That was part of how they'd stayed together; both knowing they couldn't beat another "last time.")

It was possible Maggie's name was a complex homage. Ellis had loved Thatcher once. Respected him. Maybe she appreciated that he didn't fight. Her vitriol had been meant for Richard, after all. Still, Meredith hopes there's a Nurse Margaret out there who was punctual with the ice chips.

Who held Ellis's hand while she gave birth alone. That would've shaken even her, Meredith knew. Ellie's appearance had gotten her and the kids in an air ambulance with some sort of unspoken deal with Seattle Pres. She'd been on her own until she was lying in a clean bed, their second daughter asleep in her arms. She'd come to appreciate the comfort people could give. He mother took it as proof that she could handle anything.

"Yeah," she murmurs. "Mom said she believed in all women…. She did to a degree, but deep down she thought she was cut from a different…whatever…so she had to succeed or other women would never be given a chance."

"Hence why you had to be a surgeon; you were made of her."

"You make her sound…. Yeah."

He smoothes her hair off her forehead. "How close did this come?"

"A year from fighting dress code. Started with the shoes."

"I forget you had a uniform," he says. Probably because of the start of their relationship, they've never gone for the school-girl/teacher thing. Maybe that should change. "I might've learned a lot of the backstory second-hand—although, I do know Amelia read me part of the interview over the phone. Probably for the same reason you, at fourteen, poured over entertainment news for weeks. Sinéad O'Connor was intimidating. She'd been married, had a kid, remarried Peter Gabriel—and she always spoke her mind. I remember that she called the national anthem racist."

"She did. At the time…well, she reminded me of Mom. I was about eighteen months off from realizing how often my mom let shit slide. I…finish your story."

"Your story. I'll presume that The Troubles weren't Ellis Grey's expertise, but there were some grim voyeuristic opportunities for doctors. Hunger strikes. Force-feeding. With what you'd gleaned at school and muted hospital TVs, she says that most of the Irish Nationalists are Catholic, while the English supporters tend to be CoE Protestants. Independent Ireland is fighting to govern themselves, but they're a majority Catholic country. Some say that allowing the Church the power it has in the state is trading one form of colonialism for another—opening their arms to it, even. The Church is just as oppressive, particularly when it comes to women and children—How long could you bring up related facts and hold her attention?"

"Two Current Events reports," she admits. "I'd started my history essay when I got a B- on a Bio quiz and was told that if I wanted to help down-on-their-luck women and deviant girls, I should work on not becoming one."

There'd been multiple types of "scared straight" institutions then, too. Meredith had known she wasn't that bad, but she hadn't been sure Ellis wouldn't convince herself she was at the end of her rope.

"By then, I had the NME and Rolling Stone subscriptions. I was following the scenes out here. And if she hadn't shut me down, I'd have gone straight to her when they found that mass grave at a Magdalene laundry in ninety-three. How the bodies would've been identified and stuff. I was a morbid kid."

"Was," he repeats. "Sure."

"Now I'm just raising them."

"I don't think they're getting it more. I was in Bay's situation, with more sisters, friends with plenty of girls my age, or a little older, in Liz's class. And we were magnetized to opposite walls at school dances. Although…. No guys were out, then. Nothing close. But retrospectively, Liam Taggart says he knew he wasn't going to end up with a girl, if it meant taking off to San Francisco, and he was in the same awkward cluster as the rest of us. It probably has something to do with expectations; someone having to lead; someone having to ask, when no twelve-year-old wants to be in the spotlight like that. The roles we were put in…they were rules to follow. We didn't question them. As close as we were, I wouldn't have been that open with my parents."

"You liked Little League. And there was Mark."

"Yeah, hanging out with a kid two grades below me made me super popular. And I was enthusiastic about Little League I…I guess there were still some risks Mark didn't take with you." He turns to the ceiling, and runs a hand through his hair, revealing the multitude of gray stripes. "I didn't hit a run that got me home until junior high, a team I wouldn't have made if Coach didn't come into the store every Saturday."

"Seriously? Did you tell B. that?"

"No, I'd have told you. Always that I played because I liked it. When he settles into something. I'll tell him he had a higher batting average than me."

"It might take another four years for that to happen."

He'd only liked soccer more because he had friends on the team, trying to go from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts during COVID had only taught him to set fires. He'd been dragged to them by both sisters when Zoom had made the art lessons he'd been so excited about into a chore. ("I really, really wanted it to be fun, but I'm better when I do it on my own—"

"—the computer man is mean to him, Momma. He just says, 'circles, circles, circles!"

"I do need fundamentals, Ellie, but—"

"You need to tell that guy if he tells you you're a Shepherd not a sheep one more time, I'll get Aunt Jo to teach me to Doxx.")

"Ellie's on track to be better than Mark was."

"Crap. If I ever remember to call and sign her up. We're gonna have to buy a team," she grumbles. Nepo kids.

"I'll do it. Call, not…" He shrugs. She doesn't get everything she wants, but they do want to encourage her to keep playing along with dance. "I'm off tomorrow."

("So weird, you doing research and him working shifts," Maggie said a few weeks ago. "You know, because when I met you…? Obama llama drama?" Meredith laughed. Those six months were a dark spot she could pretend she hardly remembered when really she avoided thinking of them. In the seventeen year epic of their relationship it's a reminder, but not a trap she worries will snap again.)

Meredith nods, brushing her fingers over the photograph on the book-jacket. "I was right that they were similar; I just had the wrong reasons. They told themselves it could be worse. That they made choices, and were better off than some people. As much as they fought the system, and tried to get the next generation not to buy in, they couldn't show how far it goes. How no one escapes the oppression fully. From the church, the state, the industry…." She rolls her forehead over her shoulder. "She got through so much, but losing her kid…. Whatever happened, heartbreak takes a toll on the body. It's not the same thing," she adds, in response to the depth of his frown. "But if I'd known…. Mom wasn't a sixteen-year-old in one of those places where they put you in a room, and someone maybe checked on you. Where you maybe saw your baby—or maybe worse, saw them for a couple of years before they were adopted. But depending on the hospital, she might've been alone, with a crucifix on the wall, listening to other women scream.

"It followed her as much as those places followed the women who spent a lifetime there, whether they slept with a married man, or were grabbed in the dark. She couldn't have told me then, of course. If you're trying to reassure your fourteen-year-old that someone her age won't have to have a baby, alone, and then give it away, you don't bring up being in a similar situation in your thirties."

"No," he acknowledges. "But letting you in on something—anything—would've gone a long way. That's why you spent the whole evening teaching the kids about a singer you loved at there age, on a level they understood. You didn't unload everything on them at once, but if Zola picks this up—" he put his hand over hers on top of the book "—she's going to know she can talk to you about it."

"She's gonna try to get me to take Purple Rain off my phone."

"You'll tell her about how many hundreds of times your friend Tucker watched it to survive high school. You love it when they challenge you. It's happening more these days, but you know what?"

"Hm?"

"I don't think we'd be here if you weren't ready to start telling them about when you were there age." She frowns at him, doubtfully. "I had the typical-looking childhood," he elaborates. "True. But at fourteen I was taking out my emotions on the ice, and we've ruled out contract sports." He kisses the top of her head, and she rolls her eyes. She's not the only one who's faced multiple concussions in this marriage. "Although…Nan's kids did karate after the oldest got in trouble for lashing out against kids bullying him—they got that taken care of. None of them actually used it, that I know of, but all four gained self confidence."

Meredith has fifteen notifications to that effect by noon. News articles that cast only on where and how vague their assumptions are. The Guardian gives two pages to her possible diagnosis, and almost ties off to the express mention of her son's manner of death. As though they must be related. The nicer ones still have an undertone. Not a superstar died of unknown causes, a year after losing her son.

Meredith doesn't know what happened. She can't imagine how she'd go on without one of her BEZ. Medicine can't make up for years—generations—of oppression and abuse. Plenty of damage befall a fifty-six year old woman, even without mental health issues or COVID.

Not that Meredith will ever find that out first-hand.

She texts the nanny and venmos her the usual bonus for changing her schedule on a whim. It made her feel better about playing merry hell with her already bumpy schedule—Merry hell with Meredith was a playground change she'd forgotten until crossing the country and having new researchers give her lab the nickname. Sux months in, it was an inside joke with her team. Several of them are near-demonic in their determination, at any rate.

She pauses only at Jackson's door. It's closed, the half-shut blinds showing a meeting with a besuited man, likely a donor. He meets her eyes over the tailored shoulder, and for a moment they travel back almost exactly fourteen years.

She'd seen the news on a chyron, curled in on herself in an ICU recliner while Derek slept, and a delegation of Shepherds stormed toward LaGuardia. She'd been sure Catherine Fox Avery would've been on a red-eye out of Logan even sooner, if not a chartered jet. There'd been any number of reasons not to bother hauling her aching body upright and breeching the halls where the staffs of what had once been three area hospitals bumped into each other. What were the chances he was even there?

It'd taken her ten minutes to locate him, and five were taken up with changing into a clean pair of the black sweats April had brought her, and another diaper-sized pad.

No diapers. Not yet.

Maybe not ever. What kind of mother puts herself and her child in front of a gunman?

The kind who knew she couldn't be a parent without Derek. And her miscarrying hadn't been some hand of the almighty thing. It'd been stress. Hormones. Medicine. That was where her faith lay.

She pressed her back against the wall beside the door to the staff lounge, yesterday's desperate thoughts replaying in her mind. The pleas, the bargaining, the begging. She'd thought she knew Derek's fallibilities. That he was just a man. She'd pushed away the knowledge that he was a person in a body.

You had to, or you went crazy.

Jackson's head shot up at the sound of the door, and then he slumped again at the sight of her. He wasn't on the floor, and she sat stiffly in one of the chairs—they must've been given attendings' break space.

"Chapel too crowded?" she asked, and he gave a wet scoff. So, still not his thing, not just avoiding the attention. She smirked at the thought, remembering a burgundy suit and a murmur—was it her mother?—that he'd do well in plastics, where there were mirrors everywhere.

"Not my thing," he said, echoing her thoughts." Or yours?" he said it with a short lilt, uncertain. It'd been a long time since they'd made eye contact during a prayer at some event, just old enough to disdain a room of scientists bowing their heads—and maybe a little jealous. She'd wanted that certainty. While she'd been abroad, she'd visited huge cathedrals, beloved synagogues, and gorgeous mosques. She'd been awed by the beauty, but it was the human endeavor that mystified her, not some mythical mystical presence.

"Not my thing," she agreed. Please, Cristina. I'll do anything. I'll be a better wife. Desperate thoughts with the cadence of prayer, that was all. Hadn't she been there to make Derek face up to his God-complex?

And yet. Be more than a man. Be invulnerable. This guy blames you for taking life? Fine. We made life. You're not just a guy, okay? You're a legend. Most legends are dead! A living legend!

"How screwed up is it," Jackson asked, "That my roommate died yesterday, anåd I felt totally numb, but I'm falling apart over a pop-star?"

I'm the kind of girl who laughs at a funeral, don't ask me. He was asking her, though. He didn't know it'd taken her weeks to cry for George. Her friends had made it, yesterday, but he was still looking at her for experience, like he was five and asking if having his wiggling tooth come out would hurt.

(She'd performed her first surgery under the water fountains at a hotel. He'd insisted that his tears were a deflex, and offered to split his spoils from the tooth fairy. Mom said the tooth fairy was designed to let parents deny that their children were growing up. She got the coins by her cereal bowl, so don't say I'm depriving you. She hadn't told Jackson any of that. She'd been too busy examining the tooth, wishing she had her coin purse; she'd have given him double the going rate.)

"Jackson, my first memory of you is of you moonwalking away from your mom at some event to get to the dessert table while she mingled," she said. "I don't know if he's actually your namesake, but I bet it didn't matter in school in the eighties. You were, what, two when Thriller came out?"

"About. Mom says she's surprised I didn't come out singing 'Rock with You,'" he acknowledged.

"You ever see him live?"

As she'd expected, his face lit up. "Yeah, uh, in Paris, the summer I was seventeen. He hardly ever toured the States," he added. Meredith nodded. Rich-kid defensiveness. "It was…it was every emotion all at once—just being in his presence." He shook his head. "I sound like my grandma after Black church. He was just a person. A person with a talent, and an abusive dad, and he might've been a pedophile."

"Yeah," Meredith acknowledged. "But he was a person who made you feel all that. I think…I think for people need something to…to be holy, and for someone like you or me, who don't buy into the religion thing...I think we have to find it somewhere else. So, we find it other places.

"There's a reason religions have hymns and chanting, and stuff. This is Your Brain on Music. Something in our brains is ready to register talent as divine, and if you don't believe in that…Then it's a human…a guy with a rough life…producing it….My mom would've had me say I worship science, or…or reason, at a stretch, but that's…that's not where the sense of wonder comes from. Think about Mark or Derek at their most bow down to me, peon, I'm a surgery god. They're not going on about the power of medicine. We put faith in that, yeah, but what's…what's wonderful is expertise. The kind that seems inhuman. You have to learn to recognize that, and performers are right there." She shrugged. "I'm rambling, I just know how I feel watching incredible surgeries, and at concerts is pretty similar, even if I know the person on stage is a major dick. Or has one," she added.

He coughed on a laugh. "Wow, Grey, way to read the room."

"It makes my point. And it was a better speech than telling you what you know; that you were probably in shock yesterday. That Percy's death hadn't really registered, and it probably still hasn't, because someone you know isn't just there, or not; they're woven in, and it takes a while to find all the little holes. That any other time you would've turned to music that comforts you, but now it's just going to be a reminder."

"Yeah. Yeah, I…I'm here because I can't stand the apartment. We already renewed the lease, but I don't know…. I spent fifteen minutes last night expecting him to come through the door, and then decided I'd hang out here until my mom manages to convince me to stay at the Archfield with her. Then, she'll try to actually convince me to go back east. Funny, they spent my whole life assuming I wasn't going to follow in anyone's footsteps, and now she's desperate to fit me into the shoes. My father's, I guess. Harper Avery…" He snorted. "I was gonna say they'll never be empty, but that's not true."

"No. It's not."

"Did you idolize your mom?"

Meredith blinked, not at the question, but at the speed of it. "I…Yeah. I did. For a long time, I did."

Jackson nodded and touched his thumbs to his lips. "Because, I was just thinking…in a way, that's what Clark did. He didn't blame God, or nature, or our limited understanding of science. He blamed the doctors. Like we're sitting here doling out life and death for inscrutable reasons, not trying to save every person who comes through the door. He didn't think they were apples to take out of the barrel; he wanted to punish them." He turned to her, his normally bright eyes burning. Truly smoldering."You have it right, then."

"Me? What?"

"Deifying people. Idolizing them. It's just as dangerous as any religion." There was an edge to his voice that she didn't like, and definitely didn't want to be responsible for.

"No one's perfect," she agreed, carefully. "And the higher the pedestal you put them on, the higher you'll both fall." He was nodding along like a bobblehead, and she held up a finger. "But that just means you can't expect everything from someone. They can't be everything. That's how you get Clark." Or my father. She didn't say it, not knowing what Jackson might repeat to Lexie. "But you can't be everything for yourself, either."

"Why? Seems like it'd be less painful." She didn't reply immediately, and he sighed. "No. I know why. Because you do that, and the next thing you're holding a baby over a balcony—"

"That might be taking—"

"I used to be the one saying we should give the guy a break. We didn't know what his life was like; what kind of hormones they gave him; he'd never been treated like an adult. It was one thing when people were giving him shit because they didn't understand vitiligo. Not being white enough; being too Black, I understood that. But it's a pretty simple thing to know not to hurt people. Not to scare them. Not to act like they're yours to do wot as we please. Except...that's what Clark thought we did."

He pressed his clasped fists against his forehead, and Meredith put a hand lightly on his shoulder. She'd gone through a spiral like that last year, around William Dunn's execution. Maybe they all had to face it, to some degree.

"We do, but it's a direct result of trying to improve or preserve their life. Specifically," she added, thinking of all the stories she'd read of divas having every whim catered to, because their talent was a gift, or whatever. "Surgeons haven't always worked like that. I think the best we can do is re member that it only takes a second to put us in the place of our patients or their families. We want someone skilled doing the work; someone whose ability seems divine, but not a god."

"Charles. He was gonna be a great surgeon that way."

"George, too. Reed..."

"Oh, she could be a bitch, but she was good at meeting patients at their level."

Meredith laughed, and after a moment Jackson smiled, too.

"If you need somewhere to stay, while you're looking for a place, or whatever, we have space."

"You don't have to ask Shepherd about that?"

"Eh. He'll be here for the next two weeks, at least. Besides, he brought Lexie home. It's my turn. And my house. Should I…?" She paused, exhaling slowly as a cramp took her back to that OR, and April's wide-eyed sympathy transitioning into determination. "I'll extend the invitation to April."

"Her thing for him was just hero-worship. She'd never—"

"I know. And he'd….Well. You never know what someone will do, but she's not his type. She was just what everyone thought I was. The obsequious student who only sees his expertise. It wasn't like that. I've never…." She ran her tongue over her lips. They were flaky from biting them constantly over the course of the past twenty-four hours. "I admire him. I have faith in what he can do." You're too important to die like this. Too necessary. Patients need you. I need you. "But I don't idolize him. If anything, I love him because I knew him as a man first."

"Still. It can't have been easy to see…to have gone through yesterday."

"No. Definitely not." Once-upon-a-time, she'd had furious thoughts about the existence of his heart. She took all of them back. "Knowing he's mortal versus…versus facing it." The sound of the heart monitor alarm crept up on her, and she shuddered like she could shake it off. She hadn't credited him enough for making it through the day she drowned. "But he's gonna be okay. Our lives will keep going. I'm grateful for that."

He nodded, and went quiet for long enough that she considered making her exit.

"To whom—or what?—are you grateful?"

"Him. Cristina. You. Hunt…. C-Clark, in a way. If he'd wanted more than warped justice, he would've just wiped us all out. No one force is responsible." If she said that enough—to him, to herself—maybe she could believe it of the miscarriage, too—or at least put more blame on Clark, where logic told her it belonged.

Derek didn't always go to logic first.

They'd been sitting there in silence ofr another couple of minutes when Jackson's phone rang.. it played "Thriller." When Meredith raised her eyebrows, he shook his head, ruefully. "Percy," he said."Our first Halloween shift. I keep meaning to change it."

For at least a year, she'd caught the tinny recording coming from his cubby.

If she waits outside of his office, they'll have some meaningful conversation about the time that's passed, but she can't—by letting Willa the nanny off the hook, she's made herself late for pick-up at Zola's summer program, and that's only the first domino.

"Is this music from the singer who died?" Ellie asks before her booster seat buckles click. Sometimes, Meredith imagines herself at eight, in a cab with no restraint, or the front seat with her mother at the wheel. She regrets losing the scenery of Seattle driving, and appreciates the steal her mother had in Beacon Hill, close enough to walk to to her school and MGH. Brookline Steam is too far from the Fox Foundation for that. Brookline isn't the suburbs, but it is the Greenline, and that overgrown trolley is reserved for weekend adventures.

She rode the T alone at twelve—supposedly only the red and orange that kept her on train tracks navigable from MGH. She'd obeyed the sanctum for a long time, and then another long time when a bag from a store in Brookline, actually, gave her away.

(Sadie lived on the Green Line. Meredith left her tickets in plain sight and discovered Sadie wasn't just trying to make herself look better on the grape vine. Mom hadn't been paying attention. She got lucky sometimes, like about a crisis of faith.)

She doesn't love the return to Masshole traffic, but at least her children are better protected than she was.

From traffic, anyway.

"Yes, sweets."

"We danced to her song in warm-up. The one the prince dude wrote for her."

"Prince," Zola corrects. "That was just his name."

"Not always," Meredith notes. It's the easy avenue to go down in a conversation about Sinéad and Prince, consideringng she accused him of harassment in her memoir—and, really, at this point, what would there have been to earn from a lie?—Both girls would have more understanding of the story than she wants for them, but they've grown up in the Me, Too era, and she's noticed too many boys being given a reactionary message, one that only seems to double-down on toxic masculinity.

("Of course they are," Cristina said, the last time she shared a variant on the observation. "The only thing men are more afraid of than losing their power is thinking that they gave it away." It'd sounded like something Meredith's mother would say, but it'd also sounded depressingly true.)

"I don't know that I like this song," Bailey ventures, a minute or so after his rapid recounting of everything he picked up over the day. He chose a program focused on a multidisciplinary approach to Boston history, saying he wanted to know about where he'd be living. Originally, she'd thought he liked the idea of being outside all day, most days, but the way he goes over his notes has mad her wonder if she should tell him no one will be testing him on local lore the first day of school.

"B.B., you can't say that! She's died," Ellis chastises, every syllable more shocked than the last.

"That doesn't matter. It's art," her sister counters, and then she holds up the phone she received on the first day of summer. "Besides, she didn't even write it."

"Yeah, that's still pretty common, bug. Not all singers are Taylor Swift. What don't you like, bud?"

"It's what she's saying. "How can you tell me you're lonely,'" he imitates, a warble in his still-high pitched voice. "'And say for you the sun don't shine.' Like, just because other people have it worse, you can't be unhappy."

"That's not what it is!" Zola's objection overlaps her brother's last word, and Meredith taps her hand at a stoplight. "I don't think that's what it is," she corrects. "I think she…the song…just wants you to think about it. Like, the examples are kind of…a soldier, unhoused people, a man having tea alone, they're…they're just, like…images. Not…if she didn't say it was London, it could be anywhere, at any time. So, it's like, people are always gonna have it worse than you. Maybe it is kind of saying, hey, think about whether you really have it that bad, but not…the way it says, 'let me take you by the hand,' that's a friend thing. All these people, they're in different situations. What they have in common is that they're lonely, and doing the same thing every day. 'Yesterday's paper, yesterday's news.' But you don't have to be alone. You can take her…the singer's…hand, and do something different. Get out of the rut."

"They're not looking, too," Ellis says. "The sad people. The lady 'has no time for talking…just keeps right on walking,' as an instance, I think she doesn't notice the old seaman. Anyone can lose their home, like in a fire, or their memories, like Alzheimer's, and you can't say the sun don't shine now because at least you have a friend, and maybe…maybe, if you keep noticing the sad people, you don't become them, because you keep making friends."

"Our friends always have somewhere to stay," Bailey says.

"Not everyone will have a loved one to take them in every time they need it," Meredith puts in, a form of gentle reminder she's been working in more since they moved into a house that's not so much bigger than the old one as more spread out, which makes it feel huge. "I think this song probably does want you to be aware of unhoused people. You're right that it's a timeless issue, Zo, but it was also a big issue in London at the time that this came out.

"We can't solve our problems by saying 'my arm might be broken, but at least I have one,' right? Everyone comes with their own experience and tolerance. But sometimes it's good to acknowledge the privileges you have, because often they mean that things can improve. Also," she notes, turning into their driveway. "Whether or not she wrote it, the singer went through periods of being unhoused herself. Does that change anything?"

The kid unload with faces scrunched up in almost farcical thoughtful expressions.

"Yes and no," Bailey says, in rhythm with the security code. "Because you can take stuff from the song without knowing that. But if you do, it's kinda saying that people didn't notice her, or wouldn't have once she got old, except she can sing, so now she's showing everyone what she saw."

"Good thoughts," Meredith praises. "It's early. If I have all hands on for dinner, we can use the pool after."

There's a surge of activity as they rush through hanging up their bags, and she posts herself at the fridge to hand over ingredients, lest they unload the entire thing in their exuberance. The chicken breasts are in the oven when Zola says, "So she's talking to herself in the London song? Like a there by the grace of God thing?"

Wrong angry Irish person, Meredith thinks. She'll save Flogging Molly for tomorrow. That she saw them on the Warped tour is not a brag they'll be impressed by—not at this age, anyway. "I think you can hear it that way."

"She just got lucky, though, right? Not completely random, because she had talent, but she wasn't a lot more privileged."

"She…." Meredith thinks as she unwraps Saran Wrap from the chicken. Even when she first learned about Magdalen Laundries, they seemed to belong to another world. It frightens her that her children might feel less distance. "Being unhoused was just one thing she went through. Her parents divorced, and her dad moved here…Virginia, I think. Her mom was abusive. I think she had mental illness, which doesn't excuse hurting anyone, but it affected her ability to keep work. There weren't as many services, or treatments, mother taught her to shoplift, maybe out of desperation, but when her dad came back, she went to live with him, and she got in trouble for it."

"She had to adapt," Ellis said, decisively. "Like Joey."

"Yeah." Meredith wishes she had a hand free to run through her daughter's hair, which is flying out of its headband. She can only smile at her. That's one thing she hopes they can rebuild here; a cluster of people whose experiences and families are different enough to give them those insights to draw from. Undoubtedly, their classmates will all have their own challenges, but Seattle was still a melting pot of a city. Rarely, did her coworkers come from there, and so many were first or second generation doctors. Jackson was working to shape the Foundation similarly, and Brookline STEAM isn't Boston Prep. They focus on the student's needs and abilities, meeting families where they are, but cost of living in this city is so absurd, she's sure that someone in her mother's place wouldn't have been able to afford it.

They're going to be reminded that money won't buy happiness, but they'll also see what it can buy. She wants them aware of their privilege, but not to limit their abilities, or downplay their difficulties.

"She got sent to a place that was sort of a cross between juvie and a group home, run by nuns," she explained, carefully. "They'd been around for centuries, and they became pretty miserable places."

"Like a workhouse?" Ellis asks. "The real one," she adds, turning her stare on both her siblings, who do look ready to jump over each other to point out Oliver! does not depict reality.

"A lot like that," Meredith agrees. "But only for women. Girls. By the time she was there, in the seventies, the world knew that mistreating kids didn't help them, and it still happened. I imagine that in the sixteenth-century, there were people who could see that children weren't tiny adults, and hurting them was wrong. They probably helped a significant amount of individuals. One person can do that. They didn't manage to spread the understanding, or overtake the people in power. One person can make a stink, but making change takes…?"

"Allies," Zola offers

"Cussedness," Bailey says, savoring the word she borrowed from his namesake.

"Irritation?"

"Not untrue," Meredith tells Ellis. "But I was looking for 'irreverence.' Which means?"

"Not accepting that anyone's better than you because they're the boss," Bailey says. "Respect is earned."

"What about before you know what someone's like?"

"Be polite," Zola says. "Model it. But don't tolerate being dismissed."

"Don't cow-tow!" Ellis giggles.

"Excellent. So, Sinéad went to one of those places. Whenever she spoke about it, she'd say she wasn't abused. Physically, it seems that's true, and it was common in the past. But she also describes the misery of being kept from her family, says there was no therapy or rehabilitation, and the girls there were told that they were bad people."

"That's emotional abuse," Zola says. "Isn't it?"

"I would say yes," Meredith says. "I'd say there was probably neglect. And the girls there hadn't all done something that we'd consider breaking the law. The Catholic Church was in charge. Teenagers were punished for being sexually active." Whether it was their choice or not. "In her book she mentions a girl who was there because her she needed a series of surgeries on her hip." Zola pauses her lettuce shredding and glances up, but starts up again once their eyes meet. "She focuses a lot on how, she benefited. A teacher gave her her first chance to sing for people. She went to school; where most of the girls were taught on-site. Her family could afford to take care of her—in fact, they'd paid to send her there, believing it would help."

"That still happens, doesn't it?" Bailey murmurs. "Zeke? At my old school? That's like the place his sister got sent."

Meredith presses the side of her hand against the bridge of her nose. The girl came into the Grey+Sloan ER after ODing on fentanyl. Her parents had thought she was seizing, which got Amelia involved, but the parents had been terrified. A couple of weeks later, Zeke came to school talking about the big men who showed up to take his sister "to get help." That they didn't send the two younger kids to Grandma's or something adds to the criminality to it, in Meredith's opinion. They'd seen it as a deterrent.

She doesn't tell her children that places like that, and the conversion camps that are being slowly outlawed are as bad, or worse, than the descriptions she's read of a Magdalene Laundry in the seventies.

"Similar," she agrees. "Those places are specialized. They prey on desperate parents. The nuns were charged with taking care of women without somewhere else to go. There were older women who lived there, too. Eventually, she found out it was a hospice. Do you all know what that is?"

"Palliative care," Bailey says. The word doesn't fit in his mouth, and she thinks she can see the brochure he's picturing, one of many along the far wall in one of the Grey+Sloan elevator bay.

"That's one part of it," she says.

"Right," he agrees, looking down to straighten the knife he's just put down next to Ellis's plate.

"It means you're dying," Zola says. "At a place, or at home, and the nurse is a hospice nurse."

"That's it. Palliative care is making sure that someone who is terminal—who can't be treated—doesn't suffer. That's…it's sort of a new concept, too." She finishes seasoning the chicken before explaining, Some people would say they're too young for all of this. Sinéad O'Connor went through it at fourteen, though, and it's story-time compared to what a ten-year-old girl can be put through in this country. "One story she tells is about one of the last times she runs away They punish her by making her sleep in the hospice.

"When she talks about lying there listening to these women cry out, afraid and no one calling out. She wonders why she got this punishment, when the usual one is sleeping on a mattress outside the door and eating alone—being isolated—and she concludes that the head nun wanted her to see that if she didn't stop running away, she'd become one of those ladies."

"Like the song," Ellis murmurs, amazed. "Except, 'cause she didn't write it, it's not just about the girls."

Let me take you by the hand, and lead you down the streets of Dublin…. Meredith imagines it for a second; the girls and woman who populate those chapters filled in for the seaman and the tea-drinker. Instead, a twenty-two year-old woman who shuffles like the older women; the violent girl who she realizes is actually small and scared, and her first friend; an Irish traveler, who gives birth while she's there, and is utterly unprepared to have her baby taken away.

"Does it change anything about how you think about it?" she follows up with the kids.

"Not always," Bailey says, slowly. "Because you can hear the song and not know it. But also, the other hand, it makes me think it's a lot like Zo said; she's reminding herself. You could be an old person, dying alone," he sings.

Meredith laughs to herself under the sound of the lid of the trashcan slamming over the packaging she's disposing of. She's doing her best to give him tactics for living in a brain that often works more like hers than the other two.

"Everyone expects famous people to be happy," Ellis says. "Because they sing and dance, which is fun, and have money, but it still takes all your energy, and you have bad days. And messed up feet." She wrinkles her nose, and Meredith kisses the top of her head. She never thought ballet would become Ellis's focus, but while her classmates were mostly inspired by the days they spent shadowing the junior high girls learning to dance en pointe, she came home full of questions for Jackson, and Aunt Callie, and do we know a foot doctor?

"It happens," Zola says. "Like in Miss Americana, and to Selena, and all those other Disney Channel girls."

"That's good insight," Meredith says. "She had some experiences in common with them, for sure."

"How? They're all nepo babies," Bailey asks.

"Where'd you hear that?" Meredith asks, years of practice going into not openly laughing at him.

He shrugs. "Lucas said that's what we are. Medical nepo babies."

"Does he? Well, it won't help you through med school, that I promise you."

"Selena's not, anyway," Zola said. "She mom was a teen pregnancy, and poor, and stuff. Her mom did act, though, right?" she asks, turning to Meredith.

"I only know what the documentary said, sweets, which is less than you." She doesn't know for sure that Zola knew much about Selena Gomez prior to watching My Mind & Me, but it had a definite effect on her. "But that sounds right."

She hesitates before Miley Cyrus's name slips out. No doubt they've all seen more explicit videos than "Wrecking Ball," and there's an interesting debate for when they're older: Miley says she was owning her sexuality; her shaved head an homage to Sinéad; Sinéad shaved her head to be judged for her sexuality, not her talent, and Miley's unwittingly feeding into the system. Just, even in a letter written "in the spirit of motherliness and with love," the words prostitute and pimp come up in almost every paragraph, and she'll happily live in a world where the younger two don't know those concepts.

If she's denying that they're growing up, so be it.

"It's like…what's her name? With the brother named Finneas?"

"Billie Eilish!"

"Right, right, I knew that!" She smiles at Zola's narrowed eyes and puts an arm around her. "Don't give me that look, Zo. I know the names of more angry rockers than you've heard, I promise. There's just a layer of medical jargon that makes it harder for new ones to stick."

"You knew the medical jargon when you were little," Ellis protests. "Like us!"

"You'd be surprised," Meredith murmurs. "We taught you that stuff. I heard it. That's harder to remember. Anyway, Billie Eilish. She gets criticized for her look, a lot, huh?"

"Yeah, she wears big sweatshirts and stuff, and people say she doesn't look like a girl. Would they say that if she wasn't?"

"Sure, guys wear stuff like that," Bailey says.

"They go on red carpets looking like the gym," Zola mutters.

Meredith raises her eyebrows. That's absolutely Amelia. "I guarantee," she says, "That anything Billie Eilish or…give me a boy."

"Danny Lux?" Zola offers.

"Sure. Anything they wear costs more than anything in your closets. Dress codes are arbitrary, which is why they've changed. My mom wore heels every day of her career."

"You still dress nice," Ellis points out.

"I'm wearing jeans, El. Nice ones, sure, but they wouldn't have flown not that long ago. They say it's about respect, but since 'nice' clothes tend to be expensive, I think that might be a fib. If you like how you look after putting effort into it, and it's not an uncomfortable distraction from your work, that's one thing. But I imagine that if sterility hadn't been an issue, Mom would've operated in pumps, because arguing with the men wasn't worth her time, and that would've made it harder for someone like me, who can't stand them more than a few times a year. Enough about me. Billie Eilish, criticized for wearing comfy-looking hoodies to tedious events. What about…what was it, last month you showed me that instagram post?"

"Oh, yeah!" Zola says, her finger flying on her phone screen. "That was hi-lar-i-ous. Here." She holds it up, showing off a picture of the singer in a funeral black gown, complete with lacy evening gloves. She wouldn't have been out of place among goths who Meredith had known, or the emo looks starting to pop up in clubs when she'd stopped going.

"Her eyes are really blue," Bailey notes. "You wouldn't notice it if she had full sleeves, but with how pale her shoulders are they stand out."

"Yours are more blue," Ellis says, looking between them. "I like how she says she doesn't have to prove she's a tomboy. Can I say that at Little League when they say, 'you dance?'"

"Absolutely," Meredith says. "You can also say that you're a girl, not any kind of boy, if you want to. Or not. I liked being called a tomboy, sometimes, but mostly because you had to be to play with the boys."

"There aren't tomgirls," Bailey says.

"No, because it's for girls, and boy is always the default," Zola snaps. She's sitting at the island next to the salad she's put together, while her brother is leaning against the set table. She doesn't see his face, but Meredith does.

"You mean there's no term that makes it acceptable to hang out with the girls, bub?"

He nods. "No one here is supposed to say anything, but, like, it's…implicated. And it's not like I'm playing dolls or…or that that would be bad," he adds, in Ellis's direction. "Just that I'm listening to the guides talk about the buildings, or saying the willows are nice. It's arbitrary," he finishes, with a mix of confidence and frustration that keeps her from correcting implicated. "I don't think it'd be wrong to be a tomgirl, or not either like Kai—"

"That's what I meant," Ellis puts in. "Non-either, like Kai!"

"And Aunt Callie," Zola says.

"Yeah, duh, but they like wearing girl dressy stuff."

Okay, they'll be diving into gendered fashions, and the expectations cropping up for nonbinary people. The conversations she and her mother had about heels and dresses were all snide remarks about giving into the patriarchy—which she stands by—and insistences that some things aren't worth the time—which she understands, begrudgingly, more every year, even if she'll never agree.

"Nothing's wrong with it," Bailey continued. "Or with liking girls—which, these guys say they do, but they act like we're different species."

"Maybe none of them have sisters," Ellis suggests.

"Statistically unlikely," Zola says. "Some boys are just…like that. Like in an old movie where it's all girls rule, boys drool."

An old movie. Meredith has not avoided the pitfalls of working too much to be there for her kids every time she should've been, but moments like that give her hope that it's balanced out.

She wishes the Brookline STEAM course for Bailey's year hadn't been full; they had a course with a modeling focus, which he would've loved. The program he's in seems to pull from the small Venn diagram of private school students whose schools don't offer summer programs, likely because most students don't stick around. She's pretty sure Boston Preparatory Academy, her alma mater, is one of them, and it'd taken a brief scan of their website to be sure that there would be no legacies.

"Do the girls act like you shouldn't be hanging out with them?" she asks.

"No."

"So, who do you want to hang out with?"

"The people who like me, but..some of them say it's nice to have a boy whose cool around. I'm not that, either. They don't even know I like art and stuff. I just said I used to do baseball." Nah, Mer, you're cool! You're a bro!

"Wear your Yankees hat, see how that goes," Zola suggests.

"Sweetie, I know you're joking, but we are trying to keep your brother from being jumped." Meredith manages to inject a belated thread of humor into that, but she's also going to stash the hat somewhere for a while, at least until the next Series is over. "You're not just that," she corrects her son. "You are a boy who is cool. There are reason some boys and girls get weird around each other at your age. They start to have feelings that are more than just thinking someone's cool, and those trip you up. They just do. They mess with your brain. So, sometimes boys who like boys hang with the girls, and vice versa. Sometimes not, because a person can handle the hormones, or they care more about what they're doing, or don't have feelings for any of the doofuses they go to school with." Ellis giggles at 'doofus.' "I know it's cliché for us to tell you that your real people will love who you are, but remember Uncle George?"

"He died," Zola murmurs, like it's a part of his name. My uncle George who died.

"He did. But he…he grew up with two brothers and a dad who were into hunting, and football, and had pretty firm ideas about what a man was. Uncle Alex was sort of like them; more than he is. He made assumptions about who Uncle George liked based on those things. Inaccurate ones.

"Uncle George was sweet, like you, and soft-spoken, not at all like you, and when it comes to characteristics that are supposedly manly, he had more of them. He was smart. Clever. Funny. He was brave, in a way that encouraged other people to be brave, too. You know you're named after Miranda?"

"No, never heard that story," he says, and belies the sarcasm with a brilliant grin at her laughter. "She saved you after I came out."

"After my spleen came out." She's not going to let that hint of her type of guilt linger in his voice. She's barely adjusted to Zola starting to question the stories she's heard her whole life, but as usual, her brother is right behind her. "It was cramping your style."

He giggles. Still a kid, for now.

"Tuck is named for George. William George Bailey-Jones. Because there was a storm the day he was born, a lot was going on at the hospital, and without him, Tuck might not have been born, or Miranda might've been in trouble. Sometimes people say baby stuff is for girls, don't they?"

He nods, but his lips twist, uncertainly. "But…women weren't surgeons just to deliver babies."

"No," she admits. "When we started doing surgery, men were obstetricians—the doctors who deliver babies—the same as anything. They were gynecologists, the doctors who deal with the female reproductive system. And that's all right, in cases. Dr. Fox is a urologist, and treats male reproductive organs."

The oven beeps, and she wonders if the family they bought the house from had conversations like this. They were lawyers, so she doubts it.

"Relative to what we're discussing, they're not binary things. But she listens to her patients. She doesn't see them as other, or make assumptions about their organs without tests."

Zola makes a humph noise. If Meredith hadn't been next to her, she might've missed it, but Bailey runs on her frequency. "Peanut gallery?"

"Just…she's a Black woman, she worked at The Brigham, she could've done so much as an obstetrician! Black women die four times as often in labor, and it's not like white ladies don't! You almost did!"

"I was very well taken care of by crack first responders," she says. "But that's true, and it's true no matter what kind of education or bank account someone has. It is improved through midwifery, and having doctors of color, so, you're right. There's systemic racism in obstetrics that goes back to the days when those male doctors weren't listening to the enslaved women they did tests on, without anesthesia. I was getting to that.

"Yes, there was a point where male doctors took over delivery, because of what they believed about women's sensibilities. But for centuries prior to that, it was the last place you'd find a guy, even the father. Not for the reasons we're seeing in studies; operating too soon, not listening to patients—sexism, racism, classism. Babies are a fraught subject. But what is really beneficial in there is what George had. He was steady. When he said it'd be okay, you believed him.

"He wasn't perfect. He had to gain confidence, for one, because he'd listened to too many people who told him what a man should be. He could be a jerk, usually because he kept listening to them. Like I said, Uncle Alex had some of those opinions, too. But ask him now. He'll tell you, they were both good men. Just did it in different ways. If they hadn't wanted to be seen that way, I'd say they were good people, because that was true, too.

"Those guys are going to see a lot of ways someone can be a boy before they're grown. How they react to it is up to them. One summer of seeing how much more fun you have actually engaging with your surroundings and learning all that stuff might not change their attitudes, but it'll help. If you're in a situation where you can't hang out with anyone else, ask questions. See if they have sisters, or if they've seen Return to the Spider-verse."

"Tell them about the time we faced down a bear at the house in the woods," Zola adds.

"I don't remember that."

"Are they gonna know?"

"I'm not a great liar."

"That's the truth," she acknowledges. "I'll tell them. Act like you're too modest to brag. It's not like you'll have to prove it."

He laughs, and pretends to show how he'd react to a bear, and since they really won't be seeing one outside of a zoo, she doesn't remind them of true bear etiquette.

The conversation shifts, but Zola keeps eying her in that way that means she has a question she's not ready to ask. Meredith can only guess at what it might be. Googling Sinéad could've taken her down any number of alleys.

Her role transitions from music analysis instructor to referee for an evening of overseeing activities that mix Marco Polo, the mesh-mesh of games the three of them have made their own, and even go back to when Zola and Bailey got their baths together, and made up an under the sea world of their own. She barely has a moment to think before bed-time.

She has work to do and emails to check, but she ends up taking Sinéad O'Connor's book off a shelf, and sitting in the master bedroom, flicking through texts. It surprises her, a little, how many people thought of her. The first message had come from Taryn Helm. There are rumors that she has a Songs from Dr. Grey's ER playlist. There are worse ways to have an impact.

She puts the phone to the side at the sound of the security system being disarmed. Her heartbeat surges, but her shoulders relax. He didn't call, or text just to say hey, I saw the news. He's just here, where he's supposed to be.

And he's holding a half-pint of strawberry ice cream, which is not insignificant.

"There's a plate in the oven," she says, but she leans into him when he lies on the bed with an arm around her.

"We'll give it to the dog."

"Which we don't have."

"Yet. We have a yard again."

"Neither of us was supposed to be home before seven tonight," she reminds him, but she's losing this battle. They've kept three kids alive this long, and all three of them are old enough to pitch in. She should be long over any residual guilt she feels for Doc. It's just tied up in so much else.

What isn't? she wonders, as she briefs Derek on the day, particularly the conversation with their son. "Are they getting it more? The gender stuff? But then I think, no, Sinéad O'Connor's shaved head was done because men weren't listening to her, and then she was silenced anyway, over a picture of a bald guy…. Is that…? I should probably avoid talking that way for a few weeks, huh?"

They're spending the last three weeks of summer at beach cabin on the beach in North Carolina. Her time off is a gift from Jackson—"We'll at least pretend I had to woo you"—but he, April, and Harriet are joining them for part of the chaos of September first, the day almost every renter in Greater Boston Area participates in a miserable game of musical apartments—"Like Intern Day?" Bailey asked, the first time she tried to explain.

"Worse," Derek, who helped Amelia move in undergrad, said, ominously.

"It's the Dead Baby Bike Race with U-Hauls," Meredith added. "And the bus drivers keep it up for a while to mess with freshmen."

All three kids' eyes widened.

"You don't think that's exaggerating?" Derek asked.

"My mother told me to watch out for traffic in the first week of September through my senior year," she said. He confirmed their reservation through Labor Day.—

The guest rooms are going to house a carousel of visitors from New York, Seattle, and, though the kids don't know it yet, Kansas. She's tried to talk Cristina into a couple of days, but "I grew up in L.A.; if I'd was a beach person, do you think I'd have followed that with Smith, Stanford, and Seattle?" Meredith hasn't pointed out that their first vacation together was to Hawaii; she knows that was Burke's choice, Besides, there's not much comparison between being two thirty-something women at a resort and helming multiple generations out of a rental. This year or next they'll finally make a winter trip to Switzerland.

That's part of the deal with this move. They've taken the kids out of the small world they'd built for them in Seattle, and as young as they are, it's clear that they're not sure the broader one is good for much. She understands the sentiment; she protested and picketed in her adolescence, and Zola has claimed her patched-up denim jacket, one of those patches reading Save the Whales! There's more literally on fire these days, but there's also beauty. It's not fair to tell the next generations that it's up to them to fix the damage previous generations of humans have wrought without showing them the beauty that's out there.

And, yes, she's not just supporting her children's traveling; she's going with them. If she makes it to when Ellis is twenty-five and revealing that she's going to travel the subcontinent with an accordion before med school—or not—she'll feel superior saying, "Okay, baby, just keep in touch. We want to know as much as you want to tell," but if she doesn't, they're all going to know that she would. They'll have as many good memories as she can give them, and she'll cling to them by the tips of her fingernails.

Even the ones that include Derek's mom.

She's coming down with Sofia, who will stay through the last weekend, which her moms are spending at a B&B down the road—Meredith wonders if it was serving as a long-belated babymoon—She's spent a few weeks in her mother-in-law's presence over the past decade, but the few times they haven't had at least five other Shepherds to provide a buffer, the conversation rarely shifts away from the kids, Derek, or Meredith's career, with some memorable showdowns over Amelia. When Derek objected to that, she pointed to all the times he'd made her liaise with his family.—"She liked that I made you see past the extremes; it's never too late for her to realize you got more than your hair from her.—That said, she knows about mothers and daughters. Faith and popes? Not so much.

"Not if it's Carolyn Shepherd you're worried about," Derek assures her, kissing her temple. "She thought it was, um…gratuitous, I think she said, at the time, but she followed the Spotlight revelations pretty closely, and she funded #HometoVote tickets for both the abortion referendum and same-sex marriage."

"Yeah, I remember that," Meredith acknowledges.

Her bisexuality has never come up with Carolyn, though enough other Shepherds know that she probably does. One of Kath's daughters and her wife gave her the first great-granddaughter, and even Amelia was explicit about Kai's pronouns with her. Still, she could be the type to compartmentalize; to excuse the pontiff as "a symbol" or a "product of his times."

"She liked John Paul well enough, but she's not the type to excuse people in authority," he continues, and Meredith smiles as she swallows a bite of ice cream. She doesn't wonder if he could read her mind these days; their thoughts just run on increasingly parallel tracks. "She used to get in trouble, actually, for insisting that there was no way the New Testament hadn't picked up errors in the millennium before the printing press; she couldn't copy over a recipe without transposing a number."

Meredith laughs.

"And, Dad used to say that she asked so many questions in confession that the priest would say, 'Carolyn Maloney, if I didn't know that voice, I'd think one of Rebbe Macauley's bat mitzvah students lost her way at the crosswalk.' I don't know how true that was, but they were good friends with the rabbi who took over when I was a kid. She believes, but I think at this point she goes along with the ritual because it's a way of enacting that belief, not because she's sure it's correct.

"She doesn't tell the heathens among us that we're going to hell, or try to convert the kids."

"True." She hands him the spoon, just realizing they've been passing the container steadily without having to think about it. Little moments like that hit her more lately, maybe because it proves that they really weren't a Seattle=exclusive phenomenon. She's not sure how much she worried about that, but it'd been more of a relief than she anticipated, telling the Brigham no, ten years ago. That she grew up enough to be open to bringing her family here makes her kind of proud.

"It was her mother's picture. She took it off the wall when she died and planned to destroy, because it represented lies and abuse." It was a totally different situation; even after all she'd said to the kids, Meredith's mind kept playing Sinéad singing nothing compares…nothing compares…over and over. It didn't compare, but she got it. Independent of all the history and cultural baggage, she understood the desire to destroy something that symbolized her mother's neglect; the choices she made, and didn't make. To do it in front of countless witnesses.

Had she been doing that while she missed her flight to the Harper Avery awards? To differentiate herself by refusing to let her focus turn to accolades?

Nothing compares….

But, really, weren't comparisons the only way people with different lives could understand each other?

"You remember seeing her rip up the pope's picture?" she asks. "Or did you just hear about it?"

"I remember; I got Mom's reaction in real time. —Sinéad O'Connor had been played on college radio for a while, and Amelia saw her some time in ninety, ninety-one."

"Oh, believe me, I know. Lucky bitch." Amelia's tastes ran far more metal, but she'd been getting scalped tickets to whatever got her in a club before Meredith had been old enough to consider asking for concert tickets. "Thanks to your people, I didn't get to see her until, like, ninety-seven."

"At Lilith Fair?"

"No, she headlined in Bos—you're mocking me. I will not let you mock me. I went to Lilith Fair, and Lollapalooza, and the Warped tour, and any other festival I could get to between final exams and move-in day. They were gross, and cooperate money-grabs, and loud, and incredible. I make no apologies. You're just jealous that you were stick in stuffy, smelly Manhattan."

He's grinning; she's been baited as easily as Ellie whenever she exclaims that Daddy is so "in-FURY-ating," and she doesn't care. He's heard stories from those summers: the great shows, the bad trips, the decent strangers. He's seen her pictures from Red Rocks, and heard her wonder at how she always ended up working the first-aid tent, even the times she'd been taken there after misjudging the heat, or taking an elbow somewhere soft.

He has his own stories about Manhattan at the tail-end of the punk wave, and "vacationing" with friends who went to the Jersey Shore, and others who'd become his social circle in the Hamptons. But the extra seven years between him and Amelia make it easier to soothe the bitterness of envy. At thirteen or fourteen, she'd been to at least one show, (The Go-Gos at the Orpheum, her twelve-year-old friend's long-suffering older sister in tow). She'd have been happy as a wide-eyed wallflower. At eight? Even she would not have enjoyed seeing the Clash at CGBG.

"Maybe so," he admits. "I certainly wasn't going to concerts in ninety-seven. I

"Nah, just a fellow in neurological surgery, saving for your own practice."

"Networking. So much networking."

"I feel you, bub," she says, and his laugh is followed by a quiet moment, where she remembers how panicked she'd once been at the expectations she'd face as the Interim Chief's wife. Ten years later, she'd filled the position, and she hadn't lost herself, something she'd been afraid of, under her insistence that she'd ignored every shred of etiquette she'd seen at banquets in her childhood, and was sure to say something humiliating.

She puts the empty carton and spoon on the bedside table, and rolls onto her side, propping her head on her hand. "What about in ninety-two?"

His smile flattens out, a little, and his eyes flicker as he forms the memories into a narrative. "I'm sure I've told you, SNL was a whole thing for my sisters and me?"

"Mm."

"Mom acted like she didn't want us seeing it, so of course we'd sneak downstairs and gather around with the volume as low as possible. We got away with it enough that as an adult I got her to admit that she appreciated anything that got us interested in the world outside of Manhattan."

"How'd that work out?"

"Hey, I was interested," he says. "And—

"I went away for college," she says with him.

"Nyah, nyah, nyah," he grumbles. "You've lived in the two cities where you grew up, too, missy."

"I studied abroad."

"For a semester."

"Still counts," she insists.

"Tell yourself that. We couldn't be too obvious. If Amy heard us, we'd be sunk; she always showed it the next morning. She never slept well, but that was different from flat-out staying up. Once she was older, it ended up being something we could talk about when I called, no matter what else was going on. When I came home, I went over there almost every Saturday night. Stayed on the couch, even with my room there. Amelia was never oblivious, but she could never say I wouldn't e doing it if it didn't keep her home for an extra couple of hours on a Saturday."

The past weighs heavy on his voice, but she thinks of the future. Their oldest might need a year or so before she's ready for sleepovers and secrets, or she could find her place the first week. Seeing past eye-rolls and sarcastic responses is going to be their job, exclusively. He shouldn't have had so much experience in the role, but it's been a while since she was sure his experience would make a difference.

"Once I started my internship, I wasn't there as much. Mark would go, but she was better at talking her way past him."

He falls quiet again, and she catches a flash in his eyes. That's not how he would've always said that; he'd have blamed Mark for not being able to play disciplinarian—not feeling that obligation.

She doesn't know this story, but she knows him.

"So, you worked overtime and traded shifts, and did all you could do to be free Saturday nights," she concludes. "There are people who wonder if you're stepping out on Addison. Richard Webber asks you about it, and you're the first person at the hospital who knows he's worked the steps."

His smile softens some of the crags in his face, and deepens the lines by his eyes. She loves them; loves knowing that she's been there to watch some of them form. That her face shows marks from the same storms, weathered together.

"Amelia's overdose put the brakes on her future. That segment was in the fall; she should've been here, a freshman. Instead, she deferred; maybe she was barely out of rehab. It's '92. She insists she only takes pills; otherwise, why would she have ever bothered with a hot-of-the-presses prescription pad she knew would be missed? But aside from still being pissed that it was your pad, your name, your pride, she stole, your car she crashed, you're scared. They did tests at the hospital, but you've seen more in the pit in the past three months than you did in four years as a med student. AIDS can be fast; HCV treatment's about a year old. You have to keep checking on her, even though you're mad as hell.

"So's she, of course. She knows what she's lost more than anyone; the escape she had, and the escape she should've had. She's afraid of slipping up, afraid she'll never get rid of the pain again, and as often as she tells you to fuck off; she wonders if her memory always tells her the truth.

"All either of you can do is cling to the tradition, so you sit in the living room, and force laughs, and ignore each other. Then, this woman who you mostly know from a power ballad turns out to be a spitfire from the land of the ancestors—" He rolls his eyes, and she winks. "—sings 'War' and destroys a picture not unlike the one hanging on the wall by the TV. You both turn to your mom.

"'Gratuitous,' she says. 'But if anyone can call the Church an enemy, it's probably an Irish woman.'

"It doesn't make things better with Amelia. Maybe you didn't even see the follow-up interviews; you just absorbed it all over the past couple decades. But for a moment, the problems in the world were bigger than yours, and it was surprisingly reassuring."

His lips part for just long enough before he kisses her that she knows he's covering for speechlessness. She'll let it slide. "Okay," he says, his thumb running its usual path over her cheek. "Nineteen ninety-two. You were fourteen. A freshman, which you'd thought was an overblown concept, but it turns out the upper school is a little overwhelming. There are new students, different classes, and people are already talking about 'when we get out of here.' Your future has been spelled out for so long. The idea that it could be different is enticing during the day, but home with your mom it seems as impossible as the original whenever she says she expects better.

"It's fall. A Saturday. You've said she always tried a little harder at the start of the year; even she knows your leash is too long between the Fourth and Labor Day. Usually, you avoided her, but the TV in your room is too small, so you chance the living room. Maybe she doesn't even show up until the end. It took the whole album for you to be sold on her—'Nothing Compares to You' is good, and all, but it's a love song. It's a while before you figure out love songs don't have to be about romance.

"You've heard 'War,' and you catch the lyrics she changes to reference child abuse; you recognize the pope; you're in Boston, after all, not even all your BPA classmates are WASPs. You think you get it, but before she can tell you to go to bed, you ask something like, 'Did she mean men in power? Because they make wars? And...kids are hurt?' It's a decent conclusion; Ellis recognizes that. Otherwise, she would've said something dismissive. You wouldn't want to remember."

She wishes it didn't sound true—how fickle!—but she was new to deep devotion to musicians at fourteen, and still openly her mother's acolyte

"You've said she appreciated Margaret Thatcher's existence in spite of her politics…." His eyes tilted to the side, and she could see the equation in his head, the one, unlikely to ever be solved.

Of all of Meredith's sisters, Maggie had the least connection to Thatcher, but he must've signed something to waive his rights; she might've obviously not been his, but the laws favored the ex-husband. Particularly pre-DNA, his name would've gone on her birth certificate for up to a year post-divorce. ("Do they even know how pregnancy works?" Amelia grumbled, looking over her paperwork from Owen. Meredith and Derek, who could imagine divorce sex? easily enough had stayed quiet. That was part of how they'd stayed together; both knowing they couldn't beat another "last time.")

It was possible Maggie's name was a complex homage. Ellis had loved Thatcher once. Respected him. Maybe she appreciated that he didn't fight. Her vitriol had been meant for Richard, after all. Still, Meredith hopes there's a Nurse Margaret out there who was punctual with the ice chips.

Who held Ellis's hand while she gave birth alone. That would've shaken even her, Meredith knew. Ellie's appearance had gotten her and the kids in an air ambulance with some sort of unspoken deal with Seattle Pres. She'd been on her own until she was lying in a clean bed, their second daughter asleep in her arms. She'd come to appreciate the comfort people could give. He mother took it as proof that she could handle anything.

"Yeah," she murmurs. "Mom claimed she believed in all women…. She did to a degree, but deep down she thought she was cut from a different…whatever…so she had to succeed or other women would never be given a chance."

"Hence why you had to be a surgeon; you were made of her."

"…yeah."

He smoothes her hair off her forehead. "How close did this come?"

"A year from fighting dress code. Started with the shoes."

"I forget you had a uniform," he says. Probably because of the start of their relationship, they've never gone for the school-girl/teacher thing. Maybe that should change. "I might've learned a lot of the backstory second-hand—although, I do know Amelia read me part of the interview over the phone. Probably for the same reason you, at fourteen, poured over entertainment news for weeks. Sinéad O'Connor was intimidating. She'd been married, had a kid, remarried Peter Gabriel—and she always spoke her mind. I remember that she called the national anthem racist."

"She did. At the time…we'll, she reminded me of Mom. I was about eighteen months off from realizing how often my mom let shit slide. I…finish your story."

"Your story. I'll presume that The Troubles weren't Ellis Grey's expertise, but there were some grim voyeuristic opportunities for doctors. Hunger strikes. Force-feeding. With what you'd gleaned at school and muted hospital TVs, she says that most of the Irish Nationalists are Catholic, while the English supporters tend to be CoE Protestants. Independent Ireland is fighting to govern themselves, but they're a majority Catholic country. Some say that allowing the Church the power it has in the state is trading one form of colonialism for another—opening their arms to it, even. The Church is just as oppressive, particularly when it comes to women and children.

"How long could you bring up related facts and hold her attention?"

"Two Current Events reports," she admits. "I'd started my history essay when I got a B- on a Bio quiz and was told that if I wanted to help down-on-their-luck women and deviant girls, I should work on not becoming one."

There'd been multiple types of "scared straight" institutions then, too. Meredith had known she wasn't that bad, but she hadn't been sure Ellis wouldn't convince herself she was at the end of her rope.

"By then, I had the NME and Rolling Stone subscriptions. I was following the scenes out here. And if she hasn't shut me down, I'd have gone straight to her when they found that mass grave at a Magdalene laundry in ninety-three. How the bodies would've been identified and stuff. I was a morbid kid."

"Was," he repeats. "I was in Bay's situation, with more sisters, friends with plenty of girls my age, or a little older, in Liz's class. And we were magnetized to opposite walls at school dances. Although…. No guys were out, then. Nothing close. But retrospectively, Liam Taggart says he knew he wasn't going to end up with a girl, if it meant taking off to San Francisco, and he was in the same awkward cluster as the rest of us. I think it probably does have something to do with expectations; someone having to lead; someone having to ask, when no twelve-year-old wants to be in the spotlight like that. The roles we were put in…they were rules to follow. We didn't question them. As close as we were, I wouldn't have been that open with my parents."

"You liked Little League. And there was Mark."

"Yeah hanging out with a kid two grades below me made me super popular. And I was enthusiastic about Little League I…I guess there were still some risks Mark didn't take with you." He turns to the ceiling, and runs a hand through his hair, revealing the multitude of gray stripes. "I didn't hit a run that got me home until junior high, a team I wouldn't have made if Coach didn't come into the store every Saturday."

"Seriously? Did you tell B. that?"

"No, I'd have told you. Always that I played because I liked it. When he settles into something. I'll tell him he had a higher batting average than me."

"It might take another four years for that to happen," she warns.

He'd only liked soccer more because he had friends on the team, trying to go from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts during COVID had only taught him to set fires. He'd been dragged to them by both sisters when Zoom had made the art lessons he'd been so excited about into a chore. ("I really, really wanted it to be fun, but I'm better when I do it on my own—"

"—the computer man is mean to him, Momma. He just says, 'circles, circles, circles!"

"I do need fundamentals, Ellie, but—"

"You need to tell that guy if he tells you you're a Shepherd not a sheep one more time, I'll get Aunt Jo to teach me to Doxx.")

"Ellie's on track to be better than Mark was."

"Crap. If I ever remember to call and sign her up. We're gonna have to buy a team," she grumbles. Nepo kids.

"I'll do it. Call, not…" He shrugs. Their youngest doesn't get everything she wants, but they do want to encourage her to keep playing along with dance. "I'm off tomorrow."

("So weird, you doing research and him working shifts," Maggie said a few weeks ago. "You know, because when I met you…? Obama llama drama?" Meredith laughed. Those six months were a dark spot she could pretend she hardly remembered when really she avoided thinking of them. In the seventeen year epic of their relationship it's a reminder, but not a trap she worries will snap again.)

Meredith nods, brushing her fingers over the photograph on the book-jacket. "She and Mom had more similarities than I would've ever imagined, then. They told themselves it could be worse. That they made choices, and were better off than some people. As much as they fought the system, and tried to get the next generation not to buy in, they couldn't show how far it goes. How no one escapes the oppression fully. From the church, the state, the industry…." She rolls her forehead over her shoulder. "She got through so much, but losing her kid…." Whatever happened, heartbreak makes it harder for the body to take on harm. "It's not the same thing," she added, in response to the depth of his frown. "But if I'd known…." It must've reminded her of Maggie; for so many reasons. "She wasn't a sixteen-year-old in one of those places where they put you in a room, and someone maybe checked on you. Where you maybe saw your baby—or maybe worse, saw them for a couple of years before they were adopted. But depending on the hospital, she might've been alone, with a crucifix on the wall, listening to other women scream.

"It followed her as much as those places followed the women who spent a lifetime there, whether they slept with a married man, or were grabbed in the dark. She couldn't have told me then, of course. If you're trying to reassure your fourteen-year-old that someone her age won't have to have a baby, alone, and then give it away, you don't bring up being in a similar situation in your thirties."

"No," he acknowledges. "But letting you in on something—anything—would've gone a long way. That's why you spent the whole evening teaching the kids about a singer you loved at there age, on a level they understood. You didn't unload everything on them at once, but if Zola picks this up—" he put his hand over hers on top of the book "—she's going to know she can talk to you about it."

"She's gonna try to get me to take Purple Rain off my phone."

"You'll tell her about how many hundreds of times your friend Tucker watched it to survive high school. You love it when they challenge you. It's happening more these days, but you know what?"

"Hm?"

"I don't think we'd be here if you weren't ready to start telling them about when you were there age." She frowns at him, doubtfully. "I had the typical-looking childhood," he elaborates. "True. But at fourteen I was taking out my emotions on the ice, and we've ruled out contract sports." He kisses the top of her head, and she rolls her eyes. She's not the only one who's faced multiple concussions in this marriage.

"Callie checked the scans I sent them. Said I can start taking him rock-climbing again."

Derek hums, and she's sure that if she checks there will be a text exchange between them over the next few days. The knee that was broken when she got beaten up in the ER healed better than expected, but it's not surprising that it's a little weaker than the other. She overworked it in the move, digging through all they could salvage.

She'd once breezed through the world with a duffel bag, adding a backpack if she crossed an ocean. She'd thought her mother's souvenirs were showing off; Ellis Grey wasn't sentimental! Maybe collecting things was just instinctive as you got older. Or maybe Ellis had already been finding tactics to help her hold onto her memories.

If her thoughts show, Derek misreads them. "I really don't think I could've handled tonight better, Mer. You missed out on a lot of being a kid, but for all that they're never going to be as unsupervised as you were, you had a more typical junior high and high school life. Not all of it," he amends. "But closer."

She tries to filter out the nights that revolved around out-of-town concerts; Sadie's older friends, and the times she crossed lines at the hospital that her kids would never consider. Normal has never been her watchword. True, she didn't have a little sister clinging to her through high school—in this universe—and her chores were tampered by weekly housekeeper visits. She tested every boundary, but never totally gave up on the idea that she'd become the person her mother expected her to be. That meant not failing out of school, not pushing her mother all the way to the breaking point, even once she'd given up on impressing her. "Put us together and you get a full K-12 experience."

"Put us together, and you get three extraordinary, unique kids who need every experience we can draw on," he says. "You, your current event reports on SNL, your willingness to up end the system."

"You, your devotion to your little sister, your ability to see possibility around every corner." She kisses him as long as she can before pulling back and letting her nose brush his. "Incoming."

"No way, I would've he—" If he's going for a joke about her being half-deaf—it's ten percent on one side, and he's the one with reading glasses—he doesn't get to make it. There's a knock on the door.

"It's open, Zo!" Meredith calls, grinning at Derek's sudden dive to grab the empty ice cream container and toss it into the bathroom trash can. "Your Daddy radar go off?" she jokes as Zola climbs into the center of the bed. Zola shakes her head and nestles into her side. She settles one of the thick twists of Zola's hair behind her ear to see her face. "Bad dreams?"

"No, Momma."

"Okay, okay." I have to ask, baby. No one asked me. She can't imagine climbing into bed with her mom at fourteen, but she does remember waking up sure that she hadn't called 9-1-1. Hearing her mom cry and being sure there'd be blood seeping under her bedroom door.

"Hey," Derek gets into bed and puts his hand on Zola's back. "Mom's just checking in. Your brain needs rest, kiddo."

"Don't be a neurosurgeon at me. it's my mind not my brain."

Meredith rolls her eyes at Derek. This is what they get for teaching the kid things.

"I'm being your dad at you. You're not the first bad sleeper I've dealt with, you know."

Zola looks up at Meredith. "Hey, I sleep great, thank you."

"Or you don't," Derek says.

"Or I don't. No in-betweens, no thanks to dreams."

"Mo-om," Zola groans. Not exactly the reaction she used to have when "Mama rhyme like Dr. Shoosh!" but there's still a smile, and Meredith is still charmed by her little brat. There's a quiet moment where Derek reaches over their daughter, taking her hand. The bed is big enough that if the other two pop in, there's plenty of room, but this configuration is more common. They got her used to it, thirteen years ago, and Meredith can't find regret. It did a lot for her own nightmares. Enough that Zola doesn't realize she hasn't exaggerated this year to make her feel less self-conscious?

"It's almost like I got it from you," she says. Meredith closes her eyes, caught for a moment in a hallway under the hospital. Then Derek squeezes her hand, and she sees her daughter's smile.

"Nature versus nurture has done stranger things."

She hasn't told her, through all of it, about the day in the supply closet, or any of the other times where her chest didn't want to expand in open air. There were too many complexities, especially when Alzheimer's was already in the equation. But the content of her speech wasn't the cause of Zola's panic, and she's so strong. Stronger than Meredith was at that age, no matter what she pretended.

Tomorrow, maybe, or the next day they're alone together, shaping Mom and Zola dates in their new surroundings. Or maybe at the beach, where the waves hold a story none of the kids know, but that's essential to their existence.

Saying it aloud would make lines of sadness appear on Derek's forehead, and she fears that one day they'll stay etched there, but she is forty-six. Mom was diagnosed at forty-nine. She might not have as long to pass her stories on as she'd want—and it may take longer than she expects. She isn't a girl without a story, and she doesn't want to leave her children with endless questions.

She moves the book to the bedside table, and wonders, between it and all her songs, how many of Sinéad O'Connor's stories went unheard? More or less than a world-class surgeon who also wrote a book, and kept scores of journals, but never told her daughter what music she liked when she was fourteen?

How can you tell me you're lonely? And say for you the sun don't shine?

In her twenties, Meredith listened to that song, among others—"her depression mix" Sadie called it—and taken solace. No matter how miserable she was, there was further to sink, and, convexly, no reason to give up.

Meredith understood the singer's assertion that the shunning she faced after the SNL performance was the best career choice she could've made. She'd thought of it often while her license was on the line. Having principles that are the one consistency she clings to is something she understands fundamentally. Meredith doesn't carry that loneliness at her core these days. Seeing Sinéad's death as an omen would be to willingly misinterpret her, but whatever happened, it's a reminder that every heartbreak takes its toll.

She thinks that might be what people get out of the stories of saints, who were better than they'd ever be, but still human. Who still suffered from others' misunderstandings. That makes more sense to her than trying to wrap her mind around humans being created in the image of an invulnerable, omniscient deity. She sees far more power in people, whose imperfections exist alongside their gifts.

She slips her free hand into Zola's. She discovered so many of the world's shadows on her own. It's tempting to tug her children past them, but that sets them up to believe that they're alone with any darkness they face. For as long as she can—as long as they'll let her—she's going to be there to lead them back into the sunlight, until they can find their way on their own, or maybe, one day, find someone who will walk alongside them. Someone who they can spend twenty years with, and still not know everything.

"Hey, Zo," she whispers. "Remember when you hit that home-run in T-ball?"

Derek grumbles, and Zola's eyes open, curiosity making them shine. "Yeah. It was cool."

"The coolest," Meredith agreed. "It took your dad another five years to do that."

Their daughter cackles, gleefully. The sky outside won't be light for hours, but from Meredith's perspective, the sun couldn't be any brighter.