Chapter 7 - The Stranger At My Door

The cab sped off behind her. Addison was nearly tripping over herself in her high heels as she stomped up to the Upper West Side apartment building, she had tried to contain her upset at the way her friend - she actually thought Callie was one of her best friends - had utterly abandoned all contact with her, without so much as an explanation. And to find out she had done so in spite of clearly needing support? It was ludicrous. Unheard of.

Callie had never been the type to not want to talk it through, to the point of nearly driving Addison up a wall. She had been woken up in the middle of many a night to rants about her friend's issue-of-the-week, not that she hadn't returned the favor on more than one occasion. There hadn't been a single moment where she thought to herself that Callie did not share enough information with her. Quite the opposite, usually.

Callie was not one to just cross the line, but rather run over it at full pelt, devil-may-care. There were things about Callie (and, frankly, about Arizona) that Addison would not be able to forget, unless she was one day lucky enough to get a perfectly placed traumatic brain injury.

It felt wrong not knowing. Hearing about her fight with Robbins only solidified in her head that something was seriously up.

The manicured nail of her index finger traced down the plastic and metal beside the door until she spotted the name "Torres". She pressed the button beside it and held down firmly as she heard a buzzing rattle through the limestone and a ringing in the distance.

Her finger was getting a little bit tired and ache-y after a few minutes of holding the button when a hunched form flung the door open. Addison scrutinized the face of the figure as she delicately lifted her finger from the buzzer, meeting squinted brown eyes that flew wide in shock.

Callie had clearly opened her mouth to yell something, but the words died in her throat. She stood there wrapped in a robe and wearing gray sweatpants, leaning heavily into the door. She looked like she'd gotten run over by a bus and then hit by a stop sign in the face right after.

"Hi! Remember me?" Addison jeered, smiling sweetly.

Callie gaped for a moment, then pressed her lips into a fine line under the weight of her friend's intense gaze.

Addison grimaced and slipped into the building through the gap in the door and began to make her way to Callie's apartment. Her shoes clicked loudly down the hall, but not so loudly that she didn't hear the sounds of shuffling slippers following behind her.

"Hey, wait wh-" She heard her mumbling.

"Uh uh, nope," Addison said, letting herself into Callie's apartment, setting her purse down with a dramatic plop, and making herself at home on a barstool at the kitchen counter. She turned to glare, arms crossed, into and through the frazzled woman as she entered the apartment shyly.

"Talk. Now."

Pulling the robe more tightly around her body, as if to suffocate herself and maybe escape what was sure to be a torturous conversation, she made tentative eye contact with Addison.

"...How have you been?" Callie croaked, her voice a full octave higher than normal.

"Oh, me? I'm great. Peachy, even. I can't help but think you might have known that if you had deigned to answer one of my many calls." Addison drawled.

Her friend's shoulders tensed, but she remained silent. The lack of fight in Callie's eyes gave Addison pause and overrode her frustration with concern.

"Callie, what is going on? I've been worried sick, you have never fallen off the face of the earth like this." She got up and walked over to her friend, still huddled in the doorway. The stench of alcohol passed through her before she was even five feet away and she halted her advance in self-preservation. "Jesus Christ," she managed to choke out without gagging. Her watering eyes looked up to meet brown sunken ones as Callie pushed past her in a blur, towards the bathroom. There was a slam that resounded through the apartment and shook the walls, a quiet click, and the near immediate sound of heaving, muffled by the locked door.

Addison was stunned. "Stunned" didn't actually begin to describe it. The sight of Callie was alarming in the extreme. When George had died, she had comforted the poor kind-of-widow over the phone while she sobbed for hours on end, with some unintelligible whimpering about "doughnuts" in between. When she was passed over for attending, Addison got an impassioned earful about how insane Richard was for favoring Dr. Chang over the resident who had been effectively running his department, along with extra juicy details on the fallout of Dr. Chang's lengthy and complicated divorce, which had caused his perpetual absence.

Even in the midst of Callie's own divorce, she had clung to her routine of expressing every single thought that happened to scamper across her brain. She had been in the uncomfortable position of knowing Callie's marriage was over even before Arizona did.

Despite the inconvenience and the abrasive nature of this particular personality quirk, it was one of the reasons why Addison had come to love Callie so dearly in the first place. She could always trust that she wouldn't sit on information, even if it was hard to hear. More importantly, the Callie that Addison knew didn't know how to hide her feelings, especially not with her friends, which was what made this silent treatment the most confusing.

Addison's heart clenched as she heard Callie retching, and she cautiously walked over to the bathroom, leaning back on the wall beside the door. The noises from through the wall continued for what felt like far too long before she heard water running from the sink, along with some splashing.

Light peeked out through a crack in the door and Addison was on it instantly, prying it open and out of the resistance of Callie's hand.

If she thought her friend looked small before, this was a new low. Strands of dark hair were plastered to the mottled skin on the sides of her face, but the rest was a coiling mess that was pulled back in a messy ponytail. Her face and neck were flushed from exertion to match puffy, burning red eyes.

"You look like shit," Addison said, gently.

"You look like shit," Callie muttered.

"Seriously, Callie, what the hell happened?"

"Addie, please-"

"No, I'm not going to let you stand there not telling me exactly what has got you like... this," she insisted, gesturing vaguely. "What is going on? Are you on drugs? Are you sick? Is it terminal? How could you not talk to me? For months I've been working off the assumption that you suddenly hate me, and then I find out from Arizona you're acting weird, and then I see you acting weird. And you're weird enough as it is. This is next level weird, Callie, really," Addison continued at a break-neck pace as she felt the need to speak life into all the gaps, the silence from her best friend deafening.

Callie sighed and walked over to her couch, where Addison saw a tequila bottle still sat on the coffee table, noting its emptiness. The couch also looked to be sagging in the middle, and Callie tossed a misshapen pillow from the armrest to one of the chairs on either side. After she plopped down on one seat, she patted the spot next to her. Addison approached and sat gingerly, and Callie pulled her legs up under her. She watched the somber woman's expression shift dozens of times over the next second and Addison sat patiently with her.

"I... I lost a patient," Callie confessed finally.

"...That's it? Callie, are you serious? I'm not trying to be insensitive, but we're surgeons! And you've lost patients before," Addison questioned, still deeply confused.

"It wasn't… She didn't die in my care," Callie whispered.

"Did you get attached, is that what this is?" Addison asked. She reached out to grab Callie's hand, stilling it's fidgeting. "I'm really trying to understand here."

Callie stiffened and swallowed hard, and Addison saw tears filling her brown eyes. She closed the distance between them and wrapped a comforting arm around Callie's shoulder, and a head of dark hair buried itself in the crook of Addison's neck, warm droplets seeping through the fabric of her shirt.

"Hey, okay, it's okay. We don't have to talk about it. I know it's hard, no matter how it happens." Addison said, rubbing her friend's back. Sounds of sniffling died down and Callie lifted her head, eyes shining with tears and a hint of gratitude. The moment was cut short by the sound of stomach rumbling. Addison barked out a laugh at her now blushing friend.

"Should we take this party out to eat?"

Green eyes stared in shock as Callie bit into her bacon egg and cheese, only stopping every so often for a sip of coffee. Addison set down her cappuccino before breaking the silence.

"Geez, Callie."

"Yeah."

"... I mean, we all hated her, but you guys seemed happy."

"Oh, trust me, I know," Callie said, rolling her eyes. "No one let me forget that 'Perfect Penny' was the enemy. Meredith seemed to make peace with her toward the end, but that was it."

"I'm just saying. I never liked her."

"You never even met her!" Callie laughed. Addison smirked in return.

"I didn't have to, she sucks. I hate her. Good riddance!" she said, lifting her takeaway cup in a toast.

Penny wasn't a bad person, even Callie knew that. The way she treated Penny toward the end, and honestly in the beginning, too, wasn't fair to her. She knew enough to understand she had driven her ex-girlfriend away in no uncertain terms.

The one thing that bothered her was that she couldn't find it within herself to feel hurt by the cheating. The principle of it was enough to upset her a bit, but it didn't make her feel sick to see Penny. She didn't go numb imagining strange hands having their way with her.

To be fair, she "cheated" on me in much the same way I "cheated" on George. Not sure if adultery by miscommunication counts.

She could rationalize her lack of reaction so easily, in spite of how awful actually seeing Penny made her feel. Like a bad dream was paying her a special visit during her already god-awful waking hours.

"I never should have come here," Callie muttered, staring down at her food.

"We can find another bodega, it's not a big deal."

"No, Addie," Callie shook her head and chuckled mirthlessly. "I never should have come to New York. It was stupid and impulsive, and someone should have stopped me."

Addison reached out to rest her hand on Callie's. "I should have said something. I thought getting away would be good for you the way it was for me." She squeezed the tan hand beneath hers. "I should have known better."

"I never should have taken Arizona to court," Callie sighed, closing her eyes.

Each time Callie had walked the halls of Grey-Sloan Memorial, she felt on edge; she seemed to see Arizona constantly, blue eyes finding her when she was least expecting it, blonde hair disappearing around every corner. It started after the divorce, but it only continued as she began dating new people.

Meeting Penny, before all of the bullshit of Penny meeting everyone else, Callie felt like she had finally found an escape into simplicity, a light at the end of a dark and suffocating tunnel of loneliness, to the point that her new girlfriend had become somewhat of a crutch by the time she announced that she had won the Preminger Grant. It was too soon to commit to moving across the country with her - their relationship was so fresh, it had only been a matter of months - but it wasn't too soon to try to escape the drowning feeling of working so closely with her ex-wife.

She couldn't stand the thought of not having her daughter, and when Arizona had offered encouragement, she took it as a wholehearted endorsement to bring Sofia with her. Whether that was because she heard only what she wanted to hear, or that she didn't listen because it was easier than trying to convince Arizona that she wasn't doing this for all of the wrong reasons, she still wasn't totally sure.

By the time Callie realized how wrong she was, Arizona had already lawyered up, and she had no choice but to do everything in her power to not lose custody entirely. She was so bitter about Arizona's reaction - how dare she try to rip away her one chance at happiness without her? - that she gave her lawyer the go-ahead to use any argument that would give her the best chance of winning.

"It didn't feel like you, if I'm being honest," Addison commented. "I thought maybe you were just really into Penny, but you barely talked about her. I knew Arizona's star chart after a couple months, and in all the time you were seeing Penny, I didn't know her last name. Amelia was the one who ended up telling me when you all found out about her being there when Derek…" she trailed off, biting the inside of her cheek and letting her eyes fall to her coffee.

The two of them sat in silence for a beat, almost in reverence.

"She said she still loves me," Callie whispered. "Arizona, I mean."

"Good god."

"Exactly!" Callie scoffed, throwing her hands up. "How am I even supposed to respond to that? She's been here a week, and she says all this, and then, what? We're just supposed to ride off into the sunset? And then she blew up on me, when she's the one that said she wanted to try again. I mean, Jesus, I thought she was coming back from Malawi again, only this time there wasn't a door for me to slam in her face," she said, rubbing her face before dropping her hands to take firm hold of her cup.

"Well… do you love her?" Addison probed after a beat.

Callie was thrown by the serious stare Addison gave her as she waited for an answer. "Of course I do," she said softly, fidgeting with the coffee cup in her hands. "But I loved her when I left, too. I just can't… There's more to it than that."

"Well, yeah, but…"

"Addie," Callie warned, hoping her friend would take the hint. It was all a bad idea. Nothing good could come of trying to work it out with Arizona. Her ex-wife couldn't exactly leave again, at least not as easily as she had before, but that made things harder, not easier. Callie was barely holding it together for Sofia as it is. The thought alone filled her with unease.

"Just asking," Addison held her hands up in surrender. "As if you would tell me, anyway," she muttered under her breath.

Addison, a WASP to her very core, hid under an air of unflappable grace and poise, but Callie could tell she was hurt, and she didn't blame her.

It wasn't that she didn't want to talk to her. Finding the words was hard, and for the first time in her life, it felt impossible to talk it out. Sharing that she had lost a patient was a huge milestone on its own, without going into detail. The only people who knew about it were her coworkers and her bosses, and they didn't understand why it affected her so much. So the powers-that-be at Columbia let her play around in a research lab to make up for losing faith in her surgical skills, and each day she lost faith in herself as a doctor, as a mentor, as a mother, and as a person. Each day she knew she deserved it.

"Listen, I'm sorry, Ads." Callie reached across the table to take a manicured hand in hers. "I'm not… It's been a rough couple months."

"Don't shut me out again, because seriously, I will come back, and I won't be nearly as accommodating," Addison said, raising a brow in challenge while she lovingly squeezed the life out of Callie's hand. "I will haunt your ass."

"Unfortunately, I believe you," Callie laughed halfheartedly.

"And if you want to talk about anything," Addison looked at her friend knowingly, "you know where to find me."

Callie fought the urge to tense up, instead plastering a smile on her face and nodding.

Arizona felt the familiar dull ache beginning to flare up in the space just below where her left knee used to be. It never really made sense that the pain hit her so sharply in the area of her shin when it was the whole leg that was missing, but she hadn't exactly had the time today to consider the psychological factors involved in her freaking non-existent leg hurting like she had just run ten marathons back-to-back. She would have to check her pedometer later, because with all of the incoming traumas she'd seen today and the consults she felt like she was always running late for, she was certain she'd fall somewhere between twenty-thousand and twenty-bajillion steps. She was in a rush even now, as she headed toward her last consult for the day, and she made use of her Heelys to avoid putting repeated pressure on her left side.

Despite how little time she'd had to think over the course of her day thus far, she couldn't get her conversation with Addison out of her head. For as long as she had known Callie, she and the neonatal surgeon had been inseparable. Whenever there had been new drama at work, and there was always new drama, she would hear her ex-wife gushing over the phone about it when she would walk in after her own long day at the hospital.

She'd thought it was sweet that she had someone who she could talk to about anything, even sweeter that it wasn't Mark, who at the time had been failing to make eye contact with anything besides her chest.

Addison made her worried in a slightly different way, in that she always struck Arizona as someone who was confident enough in herself that she half expected her to walk in one day with a younger woman on her arm, out of nowhere and to everyone's shock.

She wasn't jealous back then. Okay, maybe she was a little bit, or incredibly, jealous. It was hard not to be when one of your girlfriend's best friends had seen her naked countless times, and the other was a bombshell of old-Hollywood-era proportions, who could silence a cricket with the flip of her luscious auburn hair.

That wasn't what bothered her now, though. No, now she couldn't understand why Callie would suddenly stop talking to Addison. Of course, it wasn't like she had been keeping track of the status of her ex-wife's friendship with her colleague, let alone the status of her ex-wife in general, but it still threw her that it had been so long since they had spoken.

Arizona was frustrated. She was getting so hung up on an issue that she could not change, and in more ways than simply not being on good enough terms with Callie to expect a straight answer about it. It clearly wasn't her problem to get hung up on. As far as she was concerned, the only thing she needed to think about in regards to Callie was their custody agreement, because that seemed to be the only thing the two of them would ever agree on, and even that had been subject to a full-on legal battle.

With her white coat flapping behind her, she came to a rolling stop in front of the door and knocked lightly before stepping inside.

She entered to see a woman in bed, one hand resting on her very pregnant belly. Her deep brown eyes were warm and tired, and the man sitting next to her held her other hand between his own and looked at her like she was the only other person in existence.

"Mrs. Mustafi? And Mr. Mustafi, I'm guessing?" She smiled and let her dimples pop. "Hi, I'm Dr. Robbins, I'm going to be your baby's surgeon," she said, holding her hand out to the woman in the bed in front of her.

Her patient had long, wavy black hair shot through here and there with a few wiry strands of gray that contrasted her deep taupe complexion. Her hand was soft but rough in Arizona's.

"Please, call me Rubina." She lifted her hand, still intertwined with his. "This is Arjan, my husband."

"Sure thing, Rubina, Arjan," Arizona said with a small smile. She walked over to the computer to pull up the images from her patient's files and pulled the monitor over for Rubina to see. "So, after looking over your chart, I see you were referred to us by your obstetrician. They found a vein of Galen malformation on one of your ultrasounds, and we're going to perform surgery after delivery to correct the abnormality here," she said, indicating the location near the back of the fetus' head on the ultrasound. "Did your doctor go over the risks associated with the procedure?"

"It's dangerous for the baby, I know. It's the only option we have, though," Rubina said, looking to Arjan for strength. He nodded to her and placed a comforting hand on her shoulder.

"They told us that the… embolization? That it could cause damage to the brain, or the baby could die from it. They also told us he will die for certain if he doesn't get the surgery," said Arjan as he looked to Arizona, his eyes glowing with determination.

"That's right. It's a very risky procedure, but you did the right thing by coming here," Arizona assured. "We have a very capable department, and we'll be monitoring you right up until your delivery. We'll perform the procedure right after the baby is born, and we'll keep him here under observation to check for any complications."

Rubina relaxed noticeably, much to Arizona's relief, and Arjan seemed invigorated by the confidence that she had portrayed. It was hard to feel as confident as she sounded, but that was just the nature of this particular procedure. She was thankful she had at least been able to perform it once before, though the precise location of the fistula varied slightly from patient to patient. The baby she'd performed it on had lived, but he suffered severe delays in psychological and motor development, a complication that was fairly common with this procedure.

She had done her best to look through as many case studies as she could manage without her eyes glazing over staring at her laptop, but she knew she had turned her brain into soup when she was listening to Sofia talk about her friends from school and all she could think about was what approach she would take to embolize that was best suited for their head shape. That was when she finally rested her mind and decided to approach this case with fresh eyes, focusing only on what was in front of her and not fixating on the details of patients that had never been her responsibility.

Rubina took in a breath that seemed to go down wrong, and she began coughing. Arjan was up from his seat in a heartbeat and began rubbing his wife's back, his face twisted in concern, before she was finally able to cough up the word "water". With his mission delivered, he ran for the door.

"I'll be right back," he said, rushing out and jogging down the hall.

She was still coughing a bit as he sprinted off, but a small smile crept across her slightly pained features as Rubina watched her husband go. She cleared her throat successfully after a handful of tries and took a deep breath, releasing a quiet sigh.

Arizona was in awe of the connection between her patient and her husband. It wasn't that she had never seen it before, but the two of them seemed to have been together for a while, and she was used to seeing this kind of affection between newlyweds or couples becoming new parents. It was like a more mature version of that honeymoon phase that always had a way of coming to a crashing halt once Arizona was forced to deliver the worst news a parent could ever hear.

"What's the secret?" Arizona asked.

"What secret?" Rubina answered, confused and still struggling a little to breathe normally.

"You two absolutely adore each other; it's sweet. So I'm curious, what's the secret?"

Rubina smiled and made a show of searching around her for onlookers before beckoning Arizona to sit next to her. She obliged happily, taking a careful seat on the bed beside her patient.

"We choose each other," Rubina revealed with a conspiratorial grin. Arizona, however, completely deflated.

"That's it?"

"That's it! Each day, each hour, each minute. No breaks."

Arizona considered what it would mean to choose someone, to really dedicate the energy to picking a person over and over again, no matter what happened, every moment, until the end of time. She could choose herself easily, she had a lot of practice with choosing herself.

You make it sound more selfish than it is, she thought grimly. Choosing herself meant predictability. It meant being able to prevent the hurt that came from choosing someone else, from the raw reality that she couldn't possibly know someone enough to know they would never hurt her. It meant she was in control, and it meant that no one could take that control away from her.

"You can't just do it when it's fun," Rubina continued. "It doesn't work if it's only for fun. But the alternative… That's harder."

"Being alone is harder?" Arizona laughed incredulously, before she straightened her face and looked down. "Sorry, that's- it's just hard to believe," she said softly.

"You know on those baking shows, how the cakes will have those incredible decorations made out of sugar or fondant or marzipan?" Rubina asked, her eyes seeming to search the room around them for the right analogy. "It's like that. The extra bits don't make the cake taste good, and they only make the cake beautiful if the baker has a lot of time, patience, and skill. Otherwise, it looks sloppy, and it distracts from everything underneath. Love isn't the icing, it's those bits on top. We practice patience a lot," she said. "We also watch a lot of baking shows," she grinned.

Arizona offered a small smile and reached out to take Rubina's hand. "You two sound like two halves of a whole."

Rubina broke out in a loud laugh, so loud that Arizona was embarrassed for a moment, sure that she had just made a fool of herself. Her patient shook her head and rolled her eyes a bit.

"He doesn't complete me, Dr. Robbins. He knows me. He gets me, sometimes better than I get me. And he chooses me."

It didn't compute. None of it did. Arizona's confusion must have shown on her face, because Rubina just gave her a look that made her feel like she was about to be lovingly scolded by someone else's mother.

"We could live our entire lives without each other, and maybe after a while we wouldn't know the difference," Rubina said with a glint in her eye. "But why would we choose that?"

"Maybe after a while we wouldn't know the difference."

Out of every part of the conversation from earlier, those were the words that echoed in Arizona's head as she sipped her drink. It was a bit difficult to admit that the rest of the wisdom her patient had shared fell mostly on deaf ears, but this single phrase filled her with a hope she couldn't put into words, so when Sofia asked to sleep over at a friend's house, she didn't give it a second thought. She scoped the area around her, grateful the dance music was a bit less overwhelming in this part of the bar as she considered which of the many beautiful women around her to approach.

Arizona didn't have a type, she didn't think, or if she did, the type was broadly "beautiful women''. And they didn't even have to be into women themselves, if she played her cards right.

She spotted someone at the counter across the room, a woman in a short black dress and brown hair sloping down her back as she giggled with a small group of friends. The woman turned in her direction and Arizona made a point of smiling as their eyes found each other.

Setting her drink down, she walked towards the woman, and she saw her shoo her friends away as she watched Arizona close the distance between them.

"You come here often?"

The strange woman grinned seductively. "Yeah, I do, actually. I've never seen you around before though. I'm Jules."

"Arizona. Can I buy you a drink?" She chose not to get into the fact that she had never been to this bar before because she just moved to New York for the sake of her daughter, to be near her ex-wife, who may or may not absolutely hate her guts. Probably wasn't the best conversation starter.

"Wait, like the state? That's so weird!" Jules laughed in her face. Arizona hid her annoyance behind an unreadable mask with the practice of any well-trained military brat.

There was no need to prove anything or get to know this woman. All she needed to do was figure out how to get her clothes off and get back home in time for a full eight hours of sleep.

"Yeah, so weird!" she forced a smile as she waved over a bartender. As Jules took a seat on the stool next to her and began spouting off about some obscure hobby or career or something else she had already been determined not to listen to, Arizona felt an unmistakable weight settle in her gut.

Because it had been a while, but she still knew the difference.