In the Grey/Shepherd household, they made a point of celebrating what they could, when they could. Some years made this more difficult than others. In the year that four-year-odd Ellis reveled her desire for her parents to have a wedding, celebrating that union proved particularly difficult. It was also a year where Meredith, who had come to embrace having a certain amount of sentimentality, thought it most deserved celebrating. That was underscored by the fact that the eleventh anniversary of what to them was a wedding—the signing of the Post-it that held their vows—was caught up in the ripples of Meredith's arrest for insurance fraud.
Though it could've made him an accessory-after-the-fact, she'd told Derek, That was better than lying, and she hadn't anticipated the fallout—Do you ever?—She had expected a blow-up over her doing it at all, but in the argument that ensued, he'd listened to her side. Whatever opinion he'd come to, he'd stood with her through the storm. In the decade since the Alzheimer's study, he'd seen more of the cracks in the system or maybe he'd come to accept the woman he'd married. Whatever the reason, she wanted to acknowledge the strength of what they'd become, and the latter half of the year made it difficult.
On the thirteenth anniversary of the night they met, Derek would be forced to attend a mixer that Meredith wasn't invited to. She would brave the whispers to meet him at Joe's afterward, but he wouldn't be the only attendee to continue across the street, and The burn of top shelf añejo tequila would be nothing compared to the glares of staff who didn't believe she should be seen so close to the hospital.
They only noted the day they'd been legally married because it also marked the day their oldest had come into their lives.
Four-year-old Ellis looked exactly like Meredith had at that age, and was even more stubborn and determined, by the nature of being an adored youngest child. She had not, it seemed, understood that her parents had not had a wedding, and wanted them to remedy that rout de suite.
"You just wanna be a flower girl," Zola accused, ever pragmatic. "But that means you'd have to wear pink."
"You don't wear pink at Alex and Jo's wedding," Ellis objected. "I saw the pictures of that, and it's mean!" Meredith waited for her to complain that she and Bailey hadn't been there. Not wanting them to spread the flu wasn't a sufficient excuse. "Mommy and Daddy shoulda been the ones to have a ferryboat wedding!"
Okay, wow. She hadn't expected that one. "That was a last-minute thing, Ella-Belle. Daddy and I didn't think of it at all when we were considering a ceremony."
Derek caught her eye while putting a basket of bread on the table. "I did consider proposing on the ferry, but Mark pointed out that your mom might push me into the sound."
"Psh, he would've let me do it," she countered. She'd come to terms with the fact that Mark was the easiest to keep alive of the people they'd lost before their children could really know them. George came up a few times a year, and she'd gotten more stories of Lexie from Molly over the years. She simply hadn't had time with her sibling that Derek had with his.
Zola and Bailey laughed, but Ellis screwed up her face. "Mommy would not do that! She saves people!"
"He didn't say she'd let him drown," Zola said.
"Momma'd probably jump in to save him," Bailey added. "Even if it was before she adjusted the water. She's all kinds of brave."
"Adjusted to." Zola sighed.
She didn't love that the older two remembered her skittishness the first times they'd gone from Lake Pond, the small body of water on their property, to real open water, but it hadn't affected them negatively. What stories they'd heard, and what they'd made of them, she wasn't sure. He can't have gotten them from his namesake, though; he'd have said "foolhardy."
"So's your dad," Meredith put in, holding Derek's gaze. Pulling her out of the waves was only one of the times he'd saved her from herself.
Ellis dragged the conversation back to her original topic. "Mommy and Daddy wouldn't make me wear pink if I didn't want." She ripped a bite from her roll as a so there.
"So you do want to be a flower girl?" Zola asked, a little too slyly.
Across the table, Meredith saw Derek brace for impact at the same time she did, but Bailey was the one to intercede. "She said that's not it!"
"Then what is it? They don't need a wedding to be married, or to be our parents!"
"That's Not IT!"
"Okay!" Meredith cut in. "Ellis, getting married is where you make the promises that you keep to stay together. Daddy and I did that. A wedding just doing that in front of people. There was a time when other people were as responsible for holding you to your promises. Priests, and your family, and friends. When you do it at the courthouse like we did, it's so they can help with all the promises about money and kids that are part of all marriages. That doesn't matter to us as much as our promises."
"It's not just," Ellis objected, but she couldn't put what she meant into words that night.
They'd had the Post-it reframed before Ellis was born, but Meredith could still picture the cracked glass. These days, it symbolized what they'd gotten through. How they'd healed.
After having the symbolism of their night at Joe's, Meredith had been more sure that the stolen moments in the residents' locker room mattered more than any other.
She took the Post-it down and took it to Ellis's room on the night of the only chick and duckling day she'd missed since she'd been one of them, totally unprepared for a year of imprinting on a surrogate mama duck who was now as disappointed in her as her own had been.
"These are the first promises we made to each other. There are more that we've discover as time goes on, and sometimes what they mean can change—but that's the foundation. The beginning. Keeping them is what being married means for us. It can mean other things to people, but for us it's simple. Not easy.
"I didn't need to walk down an aisle in a dress to see how much Daddy loved me. I see it all the time."
"But other people." Ellis said.
"What about them?"
"They don't get to clap and dance and have a party to celebrate you"
Right now, no one wants to celebrate me. Derek, maybe. They probably think he's a saint. "Sweetie, we've had lots of parties."
"Not for you."
"Maybe not," Meredith conceded.
The hospital had been so invested in them, then. They'd conceded to the big, churchy wedding, in front God, whom they'd both been iffy about at best, and everyone. She'd been sure there had been some guests anticipating a gender-flipped repeat of Cristina's wedding. But that hadn't been them, and that wedding hadn't been theirs. It'd been Izzie's Walk to Remember thing, and however that'd ended up, Meredith didn't regret letting her have it.
At the time, she'd pictured any gathering they'd have requiring a marker-line through the house, with one side labeled GREY+SLOAN and the other PAC-NORTH. But she needed banal things to think of through the hours of her community service; the kind her mother liked to say she'd end up doing when she finally got sent to Juvie. (Yet, the one time it'd gotten close, there'd been someone whose relative she'd operated on, and nothing ever said again.) She wasn't sure when her idle considerations of what a ceremony for her and Derek would look like now became a plan. It'd been in the back of her mind for a long time, through months without much to celebrate, other than the simple and incredible blessing of her family.
Whatever happened to her career, and her license, her future was her kids. She got more time with them over the summer.. There'd been walks to the ponds on the property where Ellis was working on "for real" swimming, not just self-saving. They went on nature walks that she got to see through three totally different lenses in their notebooks. They were curious, active individuals, but also a unit. Bailey would put his colored pencils down to catch frogs with Ellis. Zola scouted climbing trees and raced her brother up. Ellis made up songs they all sang on the walk home.
While they were at day-camps and lessons, Meredith was worse than them at sitting still. For the first time in her life, not counting the weeks of deafness after being attacked in the E.R., music failed her. Once, it'd drowned out the refrain insisting she'd never be good enough. Her certainty that she was good enough, and it might not matter was so much louder. The last time she'd been unable to do her job, she'd taken the opportunity to catch up on the world. Three years and one disastrous election later, every link illuminated another flaw in the system. Planning for how she could change it without her license felt like admitting defeat; planning for getting it back brought too many "what ifs." So, she didn't. After that article, she hardly wrote things down—at least, things that had to do with medicine.
After Know My Name brought her close to throwing her phone at the living room window, .she considered trying one of the sports biographies Derek liked; maybe she could bore herself calm, she came across one of the books Zola had recently been raving about. Figuring she'd at least be able to talk to her about it, Meredith had downloaded it. Reading certain kinds of books hit differently now that she could see herself in someone who was next thing she knew, the sun was edging toward the trees, and Derek was texting to ask if she wanted Indian take-out. From that point on, she'd given into fiction. The unraveling threads and snags in the fabric of society were there, but they also provided what the non-fiction couldn't guarantee: hope that one person could make a change, in this world or the one on the other side of the portal.
With three children and four—sometimes three—doctors in the house, life was hectic, whatever the season. They tried to cultivate regular moments of peace in the hubbub, and she, Derek, and the kids came to spend Sunday afternoons in the living room, reading. They didn't drag them out of their rooms, or force them to put down a toy. It was just their routine, and most weeks, everyone drifted in. Even Ellis was reading early readers, by fall, not just flipping pages and studying pictures.
They'd become the type of family that played audiobooks on the morning ferry on dreary days; alternating between novels and non-fiction, and no one complained that it was "like school." Meredith felt incredibly lucky that not one of the kids was objecting to being read to at night, even though when she was working it sometimes meant only getting through a chapter a week. Often, B and Z would come in to listen to Ellie's stack of picture-books, and then move together into Bailey's room. Once the book was closed, Zola would slip out, giving her brother alone time with the parent putting them to bed.
When Meredith took them to the library, Zola would sometimes bring her one of the picture books that they both wished had been published four or five years ago. They'd read them, cuddled together on a beanbag, and if she liked it, Meredith would say, "We'll get this for our library," so that she didn't have to ask for a "baby book."
In August, she'd specifically asked for a new YA book about a Black girl growing up in a white family to be a read-aloud.
"You should've maybe taken point on this one," Meredith told Maggie a couple of chapters in.
"She knows where to find me. I'll always be there to talk to her about being adopted, and being Black, but my experience growing up didn't feel like an interracial adoption. I knew I was mixed, but it didn't matter much. I didn't have white siblings, or day-camp counselors trying to send me off with the wrong person."
Meredith cringed. Zola had not been the only Black kid in her group, but the other two had been picked up before her. When a dark-skinned woman had come over to them, the counselor had said, "Zola, ready to go?" at the same time another child leapt up, happily greeting the friend's mom taking her on a play-date.
There wasn't a chance Zola would've gone off with a stranger. The camp required ID, and the kids had a passphrase for the slim chance someone unfamiliar said they'd been sent to get them in a situation where that wasn't the case. She hadn't been in danger. It'd just been obnoxious racism.
Like the time someone saw Z and B holding hands and asked him if she was his girlfriend. (Bailey had said, "better, she's my sister,"and kissed Zola's cheek.) Like the time she'd been carrying her reluctant baby sister to the car, and some playground Karen had yelled, "Let that little girl go!" (Zola had replied, "I don't think our mom would like that.")
Her kids knew what they were to each other, but in the seconds right after the words were said, Zola's face always made her look four years old, in Meredith's eyes. The Christmas she'd first been old enough to understand that people didn't expect her to belong to her family, she'd lost an innocence that had nothing to do with believing in Santa.
Meredith had privilege. She could escalate. She could roar. They talked a lot about why a "Mom, let's just go!" had been ignored, and when getting out of a situation took precedent.
She never wantedto deescalate. She wanted to defenestrate people who sexualized her elementary schoolers, and who spoke to her younger children and not her eldest.
She didn't always like the ones who acknowledged their family much, either.
"You're all blessings," she'd say once they'd escaped an encounter with someone whose prayers they'd be receiving.
It did concern her that she was teaching them bitterness. She made sure that they knew that some of the condescending people meant well—"the Thatchers," they called them—and established many family jokes. "She's an actual African?" got thrown around with no context the most. Some how they'd also adapted, "If you're Black, why aren't you from America?" even though she was sure none of them had seen Mean Girls.
The last time, Meredith had followed up. "In some families like ours, adopted kids are told that their skin color doesn't matter. We know that racism exists, and microagressions. But where you were born only matters as much as it matters to you. We would've loved you if you'd been from Tacoma. Those people mean two things when they say 'saved,' and we didn't actually do either."
"The bad babies," Zola offered. "They think that not being baptized means going to Hell, even if there was no contact between a person and anything about God, and especially if they had their own beliefs already. Slavers took advantage of that, but it was a lie. They didn't see Black people as human. If they had, anyone who became a Christian would've had to have been let go—the Bible said."
"That did happen," Meredith said, impressed. "But it didn't last. They gave enslaved people edited versions of the Bible that cut out everything about freedom. Then, they made it illegal for them to read, so they could control what they were told about actual Christianity."
"It's like in the book I read where the girl's Jewish family acts Christian, but they still get taken to a camp during the Holocaust, like their religion is a race, not a belief. They didn't really care what people believe."
"No," Meredith agreed. "Judaism isn't a race—"
"'Cause race is made up!"
"Right. It is a religion, but it's also an ethnicity—a culture. Usually, if someone stops believing in the Christian God, they don't say they're Christian, but being Jewish is about more than that."
"Yeah, I remember from the Rachel books," Zola said. "Remember? And at shabbos with Hannah's family. Her mom says they're culture Jewish.
"I'd go crazy," she added. "I'd have to learn to read and write. Or else, how would I hold onto everything I think?"
They'd work you until you were too exhausted for it. They'd beat the curiosity out of you, Meredith thought, though another part of her was sure Zola would preserver. It was in her spirit; what Derek had seen in her from the start.
"How honest missionaries were depended on the time and place. Still does. A lot of the stuff I read while we were preparing to adopt you came from families who believed that without them swooping in, their adopted child wouldn't have been baptized—saved."
"There are Christians in Africa," Zola said. "Isn't that the point of them?"
"Well, I think that's where the other 'saved' part comes in. "Well, I think that's where the other 'saved' part comes in. "They think that Africa is Africa. That all fifty-four countries are the same. That they're all full of war and poverty. But all over the world, some adopted kids have been rescued from somewhere they were unsafe, hungry, and sick. Where no child should be.
"You needed a family, yes, and your life here is different than it'd be if you'd been adopted in Malawi, but you'd have been safe there."
"I have a shunt, though." She'd touched the new scar. The revision had made it real to her. She'd had symptoms memorized, and had done school presentations on the different types of spina bifida. They'd put her up to explain it to a new intern class once, before Derek went in on a baby whose opening had similar positioning. But because she had meningocele, meaning the sac that had protruded from the opening in her back contained only fluid, not nerves it would with myelomeningocele, it'd all been abstract. Something that happened to a baby, to Zola Lombani.
"You do, and it's why the orphanage was taking you to the clinic. They were making sure you got care, but I don't think you would've gone untreated. What Uncle Alex did…it started a little savior-y. But it's evolved. He's helping people get the chance to learn, and to build the infrastructure in a way that works for them. It's hard for people to remember that the way we screwed up in the first place was assuming our way was the best way.
"He made sure the other children he brought here got the follow-up procedures they needed. They're facing other challenges; they have different opportunities and dreams. Most of their lives must look very different from yours, but how they compare depends on the scale you're using."
If she'd been adopted there, by a family who could give her medical care, she wouldn't have had to have her aunt tell her to be vocal if she was in pain, because studies on inherent bias showed that Black patients' pain tolerance was chronically underestimated. Overhearing that, Meredith had realized that every time she'd downplayed how much something hurt, knowing that she'd be treated based on her report, had been a privilege.
"Dad and I knew that. We made a big choice for you, because we'd already started to love you. Taking responsibility for that is part of being a parent. We wanted to give you opportunity and love, just like we wanted for B and E on the days they were born. We don't expect more or less from you than we do from them, and while we know you're a smart, observant, responsible kid, you're gonna screw up sometimes. You're going to have bad times, and a voice in your head might say, 'I don't have a right to be hurt, because I was saved.' That voice is Bad News Bears. You don't have to be the plucky orphan. You don't owe anyone anything, either; not even your story. You can make them work for it. Get to know you."
"But they wonder."
"Let them. There's time. You're only at the beginning."
"That's the thing. I love my story, but I'm only nine and eleven-twelfths, and I don't remember any of it, so I've only ever been Zola Shepherd. It's like the…the…what's it called? Before the chapters?"
"Dedication…. Author's Note…. Oh, prologue?"
"Yeah! It's a prologue! My story's still at chapter…five," she said, decisively. "One: 'Boom! Bailey!' Two:…'Princess of Pre-K…' Three: 'Ellie Bell.' Four: um…'See You, Sofia.' Five: 'Brain Drain.' Yeah, five," she confirmed, holding her hand up the way she had when that was her age.
"Those are clever titles. I'd love to get your perspective on all those things," Meredith had said. She'd made a mental note to add a journal to Zola's Christmas gifts. "That's the thing, love-bug. Your story is so much more than the things that have happened. It's what you think about them. No one else gets to decide that."
As inadequate as she felt during these conversations, there would be more of them in the future, with more abhorrent details that she wished her child didn't have to know. Marion Simms. Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells. Tuskegee. She knew from Arizona that the maternal mortality rates were high all over the country, but the race disparity was massive. She didn't want to be one of those white-savior adoptive moms; everywhere had its problems, and part of being Zola's mom was helping her navigate them. She had other people to turn to, people whose experience Meredith could never match, but she always wanted to be one of them.
"Yeah, see?" Maggie said, in response to the stream-of-conscious monologue Meredith had delivered. "Zola's experience wasn't Wilson's. She has the mom who picks her up on the playground, and makes sure the bully knows she was hurt. Or yours, because you not only let her talk about her feelings, you encourage it. That's a message you can't reinforce enough. And it's not mine. It's not the girl in the book's, either, but the more perspectives she has, the easier it'll be for her to figure her own out. She'll have the language, and she'll know you have it, too.
"She's always been able to talk about the good side of her adoption. The respect you give her birthmother always impresses me. But it's good for her to be reminded that you see where it's not perfect. That she doesn't have to be afraid of telling you how she feels about all of it.
"My parents are my parents, but I had so many traits that were very nature not nurture. I wanted to know more of my own story. But I don't have an emptiness, didn't feel abandoned—"
Meredith had taken a sip of her hot coffee. She'd known about Maggie for six years, and she could still feel being not-quite six and terrified that she was been signed away.
"—it's nice to see my niece growing up the same way."
Meredith was heartened by that. Maggie had definitely had a better mom in Diane; the mom she'd needed to flourish. She didn't think she'd needed Ellis to push her, but she'd been defiant enough to hold up under the pressure. Maggie was driven, but she'd never limited her interests. Meredith had read under the covers by flashlight, keeping certain books under a floorboard, not because they were too advanced, but because they were "too whimsical." She'd read her roommate's copies of Harry Potter in college, and felt like she was getting away with something. That was part of what made sharing stories with her kids so important to her.
The first celebration they'd shared with other people after she became a criminal was Zola's tenth birthday. She'd been concerned that Susie Wilson, the nosy room mom who'd passed her picking up trash on the road, had sent a group text to all the other parents, and no one would show—she'd taken the days of lunches at The American Girl Store with Sofia for granted—but they'd had a decent turn out for the roller-rink. It'd been worth every flashback to long Saturdays loitering everywhere she could to stay off of her mother's radar.
She and Derek had taken Zola out for a grown-up dinner, and given her the earrings that symbolized that she could—finally!—have her ears pierced. Meredith thought she deserved more.
She always thought that.
Her community service hours finished as the holidays approached, and while the possibility of losing her license had loomed over her, Meredith had collected presents for the family who'd never complained about her latest situation, up to and including the dog—Dante had been with them since Meredith had pulled an Obama, and said they could get a dog if she won the Harper Avery—That win was also how they'd ended up going to Disney World with Molly's family while Eric was on leave—The dog's name was an overlapping reference, both to Coco, Ellis's first big-screen movie, still a favorite, and the book Derek had been reading to the older two at the time.
Even though planning parts of the day was helping her keep from going crazy, she'd needed someone else to take hosting the holiday out of her hands.
It'd been done before, during the remodel that finished the basement. They hadn't planned to have all of their bedrooms be permanently allocated. It'd been nice to ro pack a couple new toys into backpacks and become guests—at Alex's, although a medley of people were actually in charge. It'd been novel, particularly in a house that'd once been hers. Derek had laughed at her for constantly jumping up to refill things, and collect plates while she'd been a million years pregnant.
Since then, Richard's Kwanzaa gatherings had shifted fully to the hospital. Some evenings they lit the kinara and discussed the day's principle at home, but for most of the seven nights they went over to join the community Richard had built around a choice they'd made for their daughter. It was exactly what they'd wanted her to have.
This year, when someone had volunteered to take on the m arrangements for what their Christmas had come to be, it wasn't a shock that that person had been her husband.
Even in ordinary years, they didn't have an open house, but it had become known that if you needed somewhere to go for Christmas, you were welcome out on Bainbridge. Their close family came for brunch and present exchanges; no invite necessary, if you knew, you knew. The evening didn't end as intimately as it once had—but how could it? Their circle had morphed, connections broken and formed. It got busier than Thanksgivings at The Pen, which they'd finally made it to the year before last.
Sometimes, she wondered if she was ready to start again, somewhere anyone who mattered would have to seek them out.
"How horrible is it that I want to say 'sorry, not this year,' to anyone who waits for the results of your hearing to ask about Christmas?" Derek asked one November night, flicking through email on his phone.
He'd started on at PacNorth before Alex, with his reputation for turning around sinking hospitals. He'd done it with Dillard Medical—She was bitter about that one; if they'd caved, Callie's girlfriend Penny might've been rematched somewhere where she wouldn't have taken off with one of Meredith's best friends, and one of Zola's—Although he had also kept his lab at Grey+Sloan, protected by the Foundation, and, Alex joked, the government.
As if. Not this government.
"Not horrible," she replied. "Only married to me for too long."
"Never. I'll be older than Methuselah and it won't have been long enough."
"What if they take my license?"
"That won't be you choosing not to use your gift," he said, not pointing out that that'd been her condition. "Will you be able to stand it that I can?"
"It's gonna suck—If they do it, it will suck," she corrected at his exaggeratedly raised eyebrows. "But we have other things. Our life is so much more than that."
"You're always going to find a way to help the world, Mer. I'll be with you, whatever that is. Maybe we actually do start traveling more. Maybe you write an actual tell-all. The kind you run by Lawyer Nancy first."
She'd checked their open bedroom door for children, and then flipped him off. "I just want to do move than throw money at things."
Derek laughed and lay down on the bed beside her, looking over her shoulder at the toy store site she had open. "You want to find the right gifts for the entire world."
"Is that too much to ask?"
"If anyone can do it, I think it's you. Probably not on the Melissa and Doug website. Might not be long before they don't have a perfect present for anyone in this house."
"Depends on where your sister chooses to live. Besides, we're lacking kids in our circle. There's Harriet, so there's Ruby, because it's not fair otherwise—April does good work, maybe I should talk to her—There's Leo, and if there's Leo, there's Allie. But, I think we've still got a long time before Ellis's is done with Let's Pretend."
"Mmhmm," he said, causing one of those moments where he was the pragmatic one, acknowledging that kids were fickle, and Ellis could wake up the next day and decide never to open the costume wardrobe again. Meredith didn't want another one, she just wasn't quite ready for the year her baby would be in kindergarten.
At least when she was, she'd be able to say, "My mommy is a doctor."
They had an onslaught of RSVPs in mid-December, but the few coming in because it was safe to be associated with Meredith Grey were unimportant compared the variations on "Congratulations! I can't wait to be back at work on your service. I was not planning to be here for the upcoming holiday. However, I A. was/am covering shifts for those who were injured in the crash at Joe's. As a result my parents are here/I am on my own. Would I/they be welcome?"
She couldn't turn these kids away; she'd been the one alone on Christmas. She'd also been the one saying, "Mom, look at my life. Tell me I'm doing all right. Tell me I'm not falling." She'd needed someone when her mom said no.
Casey, she heard from directly. He'd heard she was attacked at the hospital and wanted to know how she'd gone back—She didn't know how to tell him that a big part of it was that it hadn't been the first time.
For now, the door stayed open. It was nice not to have to deal with what they found inside. She could host; she'd fine-tuned that skill, but what was served, where they ate wasn't her triviality to deal with.
She focused on giving her kids everything they deserved. She'd kept up the advent books, ordering them at about the same time as Zola's birthday presents. Wrapping them wasn't a treat; she wasn't that pathetic, but it was repetitive and always turned out neat. Not the worst way to spend a night leading up to the hearing.
It was a logic game, filling in all twenty-four days. The books Mom would have to think to talk about would come after, either as a welcome distraction, or a return to the real world. She'd put significant thought into those acquisitions, particularly the read-alouds, knowing they'd take them through a quarter or more of the next year, reading We Need Diverse Books! blog posts, and flipping through sample pages.
She always used the advent books to keep their favorite series up-to-date—The Princess in Black, Horrible History, Girls Who Code, Trapped in a Video Game, Origami Yoda. Ellis'sfavoriteswere the How to Catch A… series, which, hilariously, contained How to Catch the Tooth Fairy, and that year had produced "Dragon" "Unicorn" and "Dinosaur."
"It's like they met you," Bailey had said to Zola once all three had been unwrapped.
"You were the dinosaur nut," she'd countered.
"Still think there coulda been a fire-breathing one," Bailey said. "And unicorns are real."
"Yeah, true. I met one for my sixth birthday."
That had been one of the better birthday party decisions Meredith had ever made, in her opinion.
"I was there too!" Ellis objected. "You met a horsey with a horn. The lion's the better story."
The next day, Ellis unwrapped Never Let a Unicorn Meet a Reindeer, and was more solicitous to her sister. "Zo-Zo, it's our favorite! Read it to me?"
Later in the week, she'd repeat the phrase with B.B., holding up Llama Llama, Mess, Mess, Mess.
Meredith might have picked the books she knew would get those little pre-Christmas moments of magic in the two weeks before her trial.
Generally, more personal reading choices went under the tree wrapped, and bigger DK guides were brought by Santa to be shared. This year, all their shelves had needed the influx. While recovering from her shunt replacement, Zola had spent the first couple of days wanting mostly to be read to while she was awake, but bounced back almost exactly as she had as a baby. She'd finished the work her teachers sent her done at a clip, and then ended up ahead of the lesson plan. Through the rest of her time at home, she'd powered through her unread books, including the volumes that had arrived in that month's subscription boxes—Those were a failsafe when library trips and bookstore browsing couldn't be arranged. Activity boxes were the opposite; guaranteed parent-time. They were great gift suggestions for aunts across the country, and after she'd started the Google spreadsheet they didn't get duplicate—She'd also revisited all her favorites.
"It's like when you hang out with someone you've known forever, but you notice something totally new about them," she said, when the topic of rereading came up at dinner. "Or sometimes I know more, so I'm the new one."
Meredith had been an adult before she got that insight; as a kid, returning to stories had been about the consistency. Experiencing old favorites with them gave her different views of the books, and of her own childhood. Like the newer books, they sparked conversations, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not.
Maggie would be the first to grapple with Death of the Author; starting the illustrated Harry Potter with Aunt Maggie had become a seven years old rite of passage.
"I wish I could just give them the first time, but we all read it with an idea of the whole rags-to-riches story," she lamented, sitting in the living room on a night another article about Rowling's transphobia had been released.
"You know what you know," Derek offered, filling her wine glass. "My mom read us The Giving Tree dozens of times, and then the first time she read it to Carly she couldn't believe it was the same book."
"Says the man whose favorite book is by Hemingway." Meredith had patted his knee sympathetically. "And that's about interpretation. Shel Silverstein wasn't saying, 'yes, I think women should be used down to the stump.' Not consciously. Probably.
"Maggie, tell them the truth. They know what transphobia is, unfortunately, If they want to keep reading, point out the 'mannish hands,' and the other examples I'm sure are in there. You've already started pointing out where the reader can fill in things she doesn't say."
"To make Black Hermione canon, I have to accept Cursed Child. I'm not sure I'm willing to do that," Maggie groaned.
"I didn't go past the seventh book. But if all the Disney Princesses can exist in one place in Wreck-it Ralph 2, you can have Black Hermione. I like the idea of South Asian Potters, but the thing with Petunia and his hair…" Meredith trailed off and took a long pull from her glass, narrowing her eyes. "You! You made me like this, Maggie Pierce. I knew nothing about fan theories—"
"Uh, Mer."
"You shut up," she told Derek. "Lupin's bisexuality isn't a theory. She used werewolfism a bad metaphor for AIDS, and then backtracked—"
"Lycanthropy," Maggie interrupted.
"Huh?"
"Werewolfism is lycanthropy."
"Werewolfism is ergot causing mass hallucination. Might be what happened in Salem. Might be that scientists really have no idea how far a bunch of bored teenage girls will go.
"She made Lupin and Sirius obviously gay, and then got squeamish about that, so Lupin needed a nice…badass, queer punk who could transform their body at will? It felt like representation. I wasn't even mad that she had a baby, because you can be a mom and an Auror— then she killed them all off! All the should-be queers, killed off. It killed me, and I was just a bi, gawky resident who missed having bright pink hair. What about all the actually genderqueer people who are finding out that the creator of Nymphadora Tonks thinks they're wrong?
"She has to have met hundreds, thousands, of trans kids who saw themselves in those books. He literally lives in a closet. She didn't catch that?"
"It's a cupboard," Maggie pointed out. "Just enough deniability."
"That's all they need," Meredith grumbled. "Maybe Mom had a point about fiction. It sucks to find out something you love came from a bigoted mind. I mean, I was one of those kids who didn't catch the allegory in Narnia. It actually helped to find out, because you get what he had against Susan. I rejected lipsticks and nylons, but what happened to 'once a king or queen of Grey+Sloan, always a king or queen of Grey+Sloan.'"
Derek choked on a sip of wine.
"I think you're still on the throne," Maggie replied, not missing a beat. "I don't think everyone got the multiple-monarchs memo."
"I can handle Catherine Fox." Meredith heard her mother coming out of her mouth, and she didn't flinch. She wasn't sure if Ellis Grey had truly respected Catherine. Meredith did. She appreciated her teaching, her love for Jackson, her ability to balance work and marriage. Using the one weakness every man had, flipping the narrative as a female urologist—all of it was masterful.
"You think I meant her? No, she's, like…there's not a Narnia metaphor. She's not Aslan, but she rules us all from afar."
"She's your co-reigning monarch," Derek countered. "But she has a regent."
Meredith sighed. "Yeah, well. I've been Dr. Bailey's little rule-breaker for over a decade. You didn't like it when you were my supervisor, either. I was this rich white girl from Boston who probably got the job thanks to my famous mommy, and then immediately started sleeping with an attending. I had Richard on my side for no reason she could see. The one time she tried to step out-of-line at all, by taking on a peds fellowship, of all things, Richard got butthurt over it. Meanwhile, I've been in the middle of every disaster.
"And that's not considering the Alex of it all. She's got a soft-spot for him. She should; she did a lot for his reformation. I was just there." She swiped the back of her hand against Derek's chest to make him stop shaking his head. He took it. "I made him lie about the L-VAD. He was shot—"
"Mer—"
"Not my fault, but I'm all mixed up in it, and…, regardless, he was shot. He kept quiet about me sneaking into the pharmacy for over a month, while fighting to get Zola home. We were together in that ambulance. I'm why he turned down Hopkins. I did not have anything to do with his felony assault charge, and made him turn himself in, so, there's that. She got one up by stealing Jo and her internship, but it kept them here, so, whatever. Alex proved he could handle taking over for her at the start of all this, and now she's back in charge without him or her mentor.
"Meanwhile, I'm on the board. I'm using my supplies that happen to be at the hospital, sending patients to his E.R.—and she wouldn't want the flood, but something in her thinks it's disloyal. She has to work with his wife, my husband, my sisters, Richard's wife. That stupid article—It makes Alex's overhaul of Pac-North seem bigger than it is. It's big," she added, squeezing Derek's hand. "It's not changing the system. She's beholden to the Foundation. It takes unity on the rest of the board to work against them, and nothing can be settled until they know if one of their doctors has lost her license for insurance fraud. No one's gonna care that it was to save a child our government…." Meredith huffed. Derek and Maggie had heard it all many, many times. "I understand her position. I understand that I can't understand her perspective, and in her eyes I'm never going to face sufficient consequences for the choices I've made, because I broke the rules. She can't do that. It's not safe. That's nothing to do with her OCD—well, medically, maybe, but…have you met her parents?"
Maggie nodded. "And she's told me some about how protective they were."
"Okay. Good. I'm very privileged, I break rules all the time, and she would do the same thing, if she could believe it was an option.
"She cares about me. She's seen me at my worst she's saved my life, she's my kid's namesake. She doesn't want me to lose my license, but if I don't, the carousel goes around again. Not that I want it to.
"Also…. I know the looks she was giving me while Zola was in the hospital. They were the ones Alex gave me when…. Why is it always Zo-Zo?" She pressed her hands against her face, and Derek circled his on her back. "I was so close to skipping that damn hearing. We've known it was coming for ten years. Every flu, every headache…. Zola got her first stomach flu the weekend of my board exams. She was fine, Derek was with her, and Lexie, and I still feel guilty about it."
"Tell her the other part."
"What, that I puked through my boards? It's not a fun, isn't-she-great story, Derek, it's gross! Definitely not worth giving up—They were doctors, hadn't they seen a little vomit? It wasn't excessive…. Anyway, point is, I hate that I missed that. This…I've heard so many kids waking up in recovery and asking for their mom, and for nine years, I told myself…I knew that I'd be there. She wouldn't have to wait a second…." Meredith's voice broke. Derek kissed her temple, and nudged the inside of her ear with his nose.
"You made it. You did."
She nodded, sipping her wine until she felt the catch in her throat go away.
It flashed through her head like a word problem: Meredith Grey has an important hearing today, and she wore heels! The hospital is a mile from the courthouse (according to GoogleMaps, which approximated a five minute drive, or a fifteen minute walk.) An uncomplicated shunt replacement procedure can take from one to two hours. ("One if you're good," Koracick said. "And I'm very good.") If she decides to take an Uber to the Courthouse and run back to the hospital, how much time will she have to risk being put in contempt of court?
"Still expect Klein to call and fire me as her client," she said, gruffly.
Her lawyer had been sympathetic. Generally, they liked each other, or she wouldn't be on retainer for them. But she didn't have a dependent—Meredith wouldn't say wasn't a mom, or didn't have a kid; it was the responsibility that mattered—and she didn't understand how, in this case, "Derek is with her," wasn't enough.
Meredith had thought the other woman was going to rip her jacket pulling her down toward the bench, but she'd gotten there. She'd appeared, and she wasn't going to get pigeonholed into sounding like a bad mother for doing it.
"Your Honor, if I seem agitated right now, please know that I would sit here all day if it was asked of me at any other time. I left my work-site to deal with something that seemed emergent at the time, and I shouldn't have done so. But today, all that matters is that my daughter is having surgery to replace the shunt that keeps fluid from compressing her brain. I am here, because all I can do to help her now is try to guarantee that I will be with her for her recovery.
"A few months ago, I met a little girl whose parents wanted to give her more than they could in Honduras. Her father came here, got a job, and sent for his family. His wife was separated from their daughter at the border. By the time the child was reunited with her father, she was in severe abdominal pain that the detention center treated with an antacid. He brought her to us, and although we were fully capable of treating the Stage II Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma we diagnosed, we were told to wait. Because he earns more than a pittance, she didn't qualify for Medicaid. My husband is a neurosurgeon. I am…was Chief of General Surgery at that hospital, and it's a ridiculous truth that even we couldn't have paid for this level of treatment out of pocket. Not without making sacrifices that this family had already made. Any alternative involved allowing the cancer to spread unchecked for a month, which would have forced her to endure further painful treatments and affected her prognosis. Her father couldn't have missed work to accompany her to appointments without putting his job at risk. She'd have likely been separated from her parents, endured pain that she couldn't give words to while surrounded by strangers.
"Nine years ago, a different little girl was left with strangers who could take care of her medical needs. She'd travelled to a country where she didn't speak the language to have multiple surgeries. When my husband and I adopted her, we promised to give her many things. Love, knowledge, safety. But when they file the insurance claim for her surgery today, all that will matter is her name.
"My youngest shares her name with her late grandmother, and she's very focused on fairness. In my eyes, she and her siblings are the most deserving children in the world. In reality, the only reason my daughter is treated without question, and this scared little girl had to wait, is that there was a crack in the system. She was going to fall through it. I reached out to catch her. I went about it the wrong way. I broke a law, and that's not something I want to model for my kids. I should've found a more creative solution, one that would've drawn more attention to the systemic issue. At the time, I just wanted to take care of one little girl who'd already suffered because of choices made by adults; some who will never meet her, and her parents, who wanted to give her the happiest, healthiest life possible. Leaving my oldest daughter today was one of the most difficult things I've ever done, but I did, because I will do whatever I can to keep her from suffering from my choices."
The judge had extended her community service, and she'd run out into a break between downpours, feeling like the clouds were chasing her down Seneca, onto Spring and past the library where, for a second, everything was so familiar that nothing looked right. It'd been nine years since she and Derek had walked this route in the opposite direction, taking the first steps toward becoming Zola's parents, not knowing that that building would become one of their daughter's favorite places. Once she could see the hospital, the world clicked back into place. She'd shaken the feeling that if she ran into traffic, the gurney squad would get her there faster.
And then she'd been on the surgical floor, standing at the entrance to the waiting room. Amelia curled up in a chair too small for it, her head on Derek's shoulder. He hunched forward in a chair, jerking upward at her appearance. On her other side, Tom pushed both OR floor doors open at the same time.
"Almost exactly an hour. Told you I was good. I had great material. She didn't give us any trouble at all. She—"
"Is she in recovery?"
"Transport was going in while I scrubbed out—Whoa there!" He'd caught her by her shoulders, and she'd wanted to headbutt him. "This is just a suggestion, far be it from me, but, Dr. Grey? You wanna grab a different pair of shoes from your office first, or maybe put those back on?"
Meredith had looked at him blankly until Derek put a hand on her arm and she'd realized that at some point she'd taken her heels off to run. Zola had flown through brain surgery, but the miracle of the day might've been Meredith not picking up tetanus, or getting glass embedded in her heel once her hose began to shred.
She'd gone into the recovery area wearing grippy socks, and the first time those brown eyes flickered open, they'd settled on her. "Momma?"
"I'm here, baby girl. Daddy and I are right here."
Meredith also recalled catching Miranda's eye on her way to Zola's room with a Jell-O cup.
"I recognized the look," she told Derek and Maggie. "Later, Zola told me she came in, saying she rounded on all the surgical patients. Like she has time in the day for that."
"Zola will be a princess at that hospital long after you and I have royally retired," Derek predicted.
"Only if she wants to be," Meredith said. "They oughta watch out for Ellie. She's got the potential for benign tyrant."
"And B.B.?" Maggie asked, using the nickname now said to stand for "brother Bailey," "boy Bailey," or "blond Bailey," but in Meredith's head was always "baby Bailey."
"He's good with people," Derek said.
"And he'd hate it the way you did," Meredith countered. "Ever heard him really get going about worksheets? He's seven, and he deduced the purpose of busy-work."
"When I asked him if he'd want to go to whatever the American Wizarding school would be, if it was a boarding school, he said no, because if he was magic, you guys would be amazing wizards, so you could teach him everything important, I quote 'like they already do,'" Maggie said.
"Hm, yeah. Think we'll keep him," Meredith said, shifting to swing her legs up onto Derek's lap. "Might have to figure out a new nickname. Think he'd answer to 'Rek?"
Maggie and Derek laughed. "Wrong kid," she admitted. Bailey had been adorable playing Wreck-It Ralph with Ellis as Vanillope, because it'd been so against type. Ellis had been the one to run the ride-on car into the wall of the shed.
Bailey was careful. Not exactly like his namesake, necessarily; he managed to have Meredith's daring at the same time. She'd never have predicted that their primary shared activity would be rock climbing, but although they'd only gone out twice so far, they'd become regulars at the gym, and made one wall of his room a climbing wall. He never neglected a safety precaution by rushing, and was particularly careful about looking out for others. She'd watch him plan his climb, and see Derek at the scope.
"Sometimes, it's like my hand just knows where to go next," he'd told her. "It's like magic, but not, because it's me, right? My muscles remember?"
"It's a little bit muscle memory, and you learning how to make your next move without thinking loud about it. Your brain working out your path in the background like an app. I think that's a little magical."
"Yeah! It is!" He looked before he rappelled, and then whooped and giggled all the way down. Rek or any variant of it would be a purposeful misnomer. Could be fun, but he'd collected enough nicknames through the years; it hadn't been a true problem.
She was met back at work by a literal crunch; they went down three residents, and Alex had poached Owen thanks to Koracick. Meredith got it. Tom was a dick; Owen could be a dick measurer.
In spite of all that, she walked up to doors and overheard the drama being re-enacted. It wouldn't matter that she didn't have to think about the timing of the caterers, or the tent being set up in the yard, or that week's record-breaking rains. He'd saved her from that, likely in case her brain got fixated on all the other parts of the day she could freak out over. Regardless, all eyes inside and outside the house were going to be on her, not because of the results of her hearing, but the event itself.
It wasn't her fault that her husband had been involved in Paul Castello's firing, or that when he'd come to Grey+Sloan looking for a job, he'd been interviewing with their newly-appointed Chief of General Surgery. Her reasons for not giving him another chance hadn't even been what she'd seen as one of the "external observers" Derek had brought through Dillard; an idea modeled after Callie and Richard's attempt at espionage back when Pegasus wanted to take over Seattle Grace. Castello hadn't remembered her from that, which implied that he hadn't read any of the evaluations. She'd given him the interview, and shaped her questions around insight she'd gotten out of Callie's Pretty Penny. Getting that girl to tell tales out of school was a huge reminder of how gossipy Grey+Sloan could be, but without the talk, you might accidentally hire a guy whose enthusiasm for "the next generation" was a front. He'd ignored suggestions from residents, particularly female, to a dangerous degree, and that wasn't what she wanted in her department. Last she'd heard, he was working wound care at a Virginia Mason clinic out in Issaquah, and his reaction to her suggested that he didn't like it. She'd wanted to object to his presence, but Derek overheard Nancy arguing with her and murmured, "Do you want to do this after Christmas?"
No, she did not. If he'd become an issue, she'd had documentation of every interest that conflicted.
The Medical Commission did not yield to spousal privilege. They called Derek after Miranda disowned her more resolutely than Ellis Grey ever had. After Luis, whose testimony should've been all that mattered. After Owen became her favorite double-ex-brother-in-law. After Glasses—sorry, Schmitt, I won't say it to your face—of all people, admitted to turning her in. After Richard and Patricia revealed that Meredith had not originally matched with Seattle Grace—a suspicion she'd told herself was her self-worth issues speaking; a truth Richard had been right to keep from her; a reason for dozens of new questions to appear in her head—Derek left her side to take the witness chair.
Richard's testimony—Richard's lies—ran through her head.
"And I discovered that she was selected for the placebo instead of the experimental drug. I changed the envelopes. I got her the drug."
Meredith didn't lie. She evaded, she talked around, she deflected. Richard lied.
Derek was honest. He loved her. He didn't want her to lose her license. He'd forgiven her long ago. He'd say things he didn't mean—not nearly as much any more—but overall? Apart from that one initial omission thirteen years ago, he was honest.
"Dr. Grey showed an early aptitude for neurosurgery, is that right?"
"Yes, although I know several service heads would've said the same."
"But in fact, she worked on two clinical trials with you as a resident, one of which was shut down by the FDA. Why was that?"
"Because I shouldn't have taken it on in the first place."
Castello had leaned back in his chair, and given Derek a smarmy smirk. "I don't believe that's what the FDA has documented. It's not what Dr. Webber testified to."
"It was my trial. I went into it thinking about our future, and not about the patients I would be treating. I couldn't have predicted that someone as close to us would receive a diagnosis during the process, but that only highlighted the problem. Meredith was treating patients; she was considering their caretakers. She knew how much they needed hope. And, more than any doctor I know, Meredith is a healer. Double-blind studies have their place, but as her teacher, I should've seen that this one in particular would be difficult for her."
"Difficult enough for her to tamper with it?"
"We weren't doing everything possible for our patients, and we had a significant change in our personal situation."
"You adopted your daughter at about that time."
"We did."
"She has spina bifida?"
"Uh, yes. Zola has meningocele spina bifida with related hydrocephalus."
"Neurological conditions."
"Yes."
"Your biological children and her sister are at risk for developing Alzheimer's? As well as Dr. Grey, herself?"
"We're all at risk of developing Alzheimer's. We haven't had the kids tested, that's up to them. Maggie's genes aren't my business, but, yes, Meredith has the markers."
"She quit pursuing neurosurgery at that point, though. Your research has continued to have implications for Alzheimer's treatment, but notably, she dropped neurosurgery when you adopted a child with a neurological defect. You say Dr. Grey is a fixer—"
"Healer."
"—and your daughter just had her fourth operation. It seems like a good mother would be more interested in fixing her kids than showy procedures that win Harp—"
"My children don't need fixing!" Meredith exclaimed. Next to her, Nancy groaned, and Derek made a throat-slitting motion at her, with a resigned smile. "Zola had three of those procedures between six and eight months. Eighty percent of shunts need replacing within the first ten years, and there's a decent chance she'll never need another revision. A shunt that doesn't clog would be great, but historically it's gonna be an engineer or a children's book author who takes that on, not a neurosurgeon."
"A children's book author?" one of the other board members asked.
"Roald Dahl's five-month-old developed hydrocephalus after being hit by a taxi, and it led to the invention of the Wade-Dahl-Till valve.
"My seven-year-old reminded me of that. He found out after Zola's procedure. That he and his sister might have the Alzheimer's gene, that terrifies me for them. It terrifies me for Zola, who could end up caring for four loved ones with dementia. But I'm more focused on the development of their brains than their deterioration. Do we encourage puzzles, and music, and every other skill the research suggests might improve their chances? Yes, but they are who they are. We're not letting them grow up feeling like they're guinea pigs being chased by the big bad Alzheimer's wolf!"
"They are who they are, and yet two of them are named after general surgeons. You aren't interested in protecting them from Alzheimer's, but you will use them to commit insurance fraud?"
"What relevance does that have?" Nancy demanded.
"Her older daughter's adoption was held up at the time Dr. Shepherd's Alzheimer's trial ended. Dr. Grey was fired for a brief time. This is, I believe, the third time Dr. Grey has been suspended or let go. At that point, Dr. Shepherd, you also spent time away from her, did you not?"
"This has absolutely no relevance—"
"She cost you the trial, and the timing suggests that you'd only legally married her to satisfy the adoption requirements—"
"That's not true!" Meredith said. Derek's voice chorused with hers, and she broke her stare with Costello to meet his eyes.
If "marriage certificate" hadn't been on that "Documents to Submit" list, would they have gotten it together? She'd determined that, yeah, once they'd had a kid, she'd have wanted the certainty. She'd never asked if he'd come to the same conclusion. She'd been the one who originally said they didn't need to bother; she'd been scared that marriage meant becoming an obligation. It wasn't until she'd come close to losing him that she'd understood; marriage was as much of a job as anything else. Derek had said he couldn't work with her and be married to her. She'd chosen marriage. They'd chosen marriage, and they'd keep choosing it.
Costello had started to seize at about that moment. So, the narrative that she'd caused him to stroke out absolutely wasn't true. He was the one who'd scheduled the thing on Friday the thirteenth. She'd vocally not seen it as an omen, but if it'd been pushed back a day, she wouldn't have minded. But maybe he'd considered it his hearing, maybe the luck had fallen randomly, maybe the date hadn't mattered at all.
What had happened was that Derek had saved the life of a man who held a grudge against both of them, and Alex had saved her career—"Don't be a dumbass," he'd said, when she thanked him, "You did that. I just provided the receipts."—She'd kept her license for Christmas, and gotten her job back on top of it.
A definite reason to celebrate, and not a bad time to wed the husband who'd been with her through all of it.