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Lexie sat at a table in the banquet hall, trying not to think of herself as having been parked there. She could turn on her powerchair and go wherever she wanted. The plan had been for her to use her manual chair, which fit in Meredith's rental car—"I don't care where you're living; I'm trying to stay a step ahead of the universe"—but one incident of AD and a day of sedatives later, she and Zola were both having their seats fastened into the back of an accessible cab.

"Darren told me to look out for you," the driver had said to Meredith.

"Why's that?"

The tall young man sucked his teeth. "We know the world is such that many women carry blades in our cabs. Not so many of them have he finesse of a surgeon with a scalpel."

Meredith had laughed.

When she'd come in to help Lexie change out of her hospital gown and into the green maxi-dress she'd ordered online, her eyes had been brighter than Lexie had seen them in months. They'd dulled a little after Adele Webber's aneurysm had torn into her duodenum, in spite of the level of observation was under. Meredith had scrubbed into a successful surgery, leaving Lexie for just long enough for her dress to feel crumpled and sweaty.

As the D.J. had invited Drs. Bailey and Warren onto the dance floor, Meredith had gone over to investigate Dr. Webber's unexpected arrival. Lexie had caught the gist on their lips, and her sister's eyes going from sparkling to shining under a sheen of tears.

"Re It was a heart attack."

Now, Lexie wished she could get Zola and take her over to her sister. Nothing would make the life return to her face more quickly than the toddler in her midnight blue dress covered in embroidered snowflakes, but Bailey had thoughtfully had a kid's reception set up in another room, where they could dance off the sugar of the cake. It would take the ticket in Meredith's clutch to retrieve her niece—"Like she's a coat" Meredith had complained—and she wouldn't be fast enough to affect the conversation she was watching.

Lexie had always conceptualized paralysis as all-or-nothing. She'd known better; mentally able to consult hundreds of case studies and articles about incomplete injuries, and to extend the possibility of phantom pain to nerves that hadn't been cut, but were lost to the brain. That didn't mean she'd considered how strange it would be to have no sensation of most of her abdomen, while able to sense the tensing of her gut. Her back seized, and she did some quick mental arithmetic. Four hours since they'd taken out her IV? At least.

The pull attached to the zipper on her pouch had come in a set Derek had bought to get by between surgeries. They'd come to her, now; or maybe stay on the diaper-bag so she stood a chance of being able to get into it.

By the time Lexie had adapted well enough to be doing diaper changes, Zola wouldn't be the one who needed them. There'd be another baby; one who'd never known her as someone fully able. Whose Uncle Mark would only be a concept.

The only liquid in reach was champagne. She swallowed two pills with it, feeling just as sneaky as she had as a teenager hiding a novel behind her history textbook. Rumor had it Alex had gone upstairs with the intern who tended to stare at Lexie, but wasn't the one who'd gotten overly attached to him, so the scrutiny didn't make sense.

"Murphy gets sad eyes when he talks to me sometimes," Meredith had said when Lexie noticed it back in her first stint at the hospital. "And I've also heard her comment on how 'solid' Derek and I seem, so I don't know what that's about."

Lexie sort of got it. She and Alex hadn't been much more than sex, and she'd felt envy watching his banter with her sister. Their friendship looked superficial, like they were bros, until you focused in it turned out that they were far past each other's walls.

"If I tell you that you look gorgeous, will you believe me?"

Lexie looked up at Dr. Robbins, who was standing to the side of the nearest chair, her hand open to hide how heavily she was learning on it. "Maybe. Dr. Yang did my hair and make-up while Mer got dressed again. She said I'd do."

"High praise."

Lexie gestured to the chair. "I don't bite, Dr. Robbins."

"Not what I heard." Robbins stiffened as she lowered herself into the chair. "Ugh, can you tell I'm a lightweight, these days?"

Lexie swirled the few drops leftover in her glass. "I did break his dick."

Robbin's eyes went wide as she took that in. "It does make sense. I didn't really know Calliope's…pack yet."

Lexie nodded. Meredith had actually adjusted to her relationship with Mark quickly; she suspected that Sadie having actually screwed him would've been weirder for her.

What Lexie thought should've been weirder was the night Meredith had both come out to her and asked if she'd been into, not just intrigued by, her ex…"whatever we were." She'd waved off Lexie's assertion that she was straight—"You wouldn't have been the first Sadie-sexual"—Had Meredith been hoping to find something else they shared; separate from their father and job? They had plenty of shared memories, now. Did that make up for commonalities?

As though pulled over by her thoughts, Meredith came over to the table. She picked up her clutch and pointed her shoulder toward the restroom wearing the drawn expression came every time Meredith risked discovering spotting she hadn't felt. Lexie shook her head.

If Dr. Robbins noticed the exchange, she'd decided it wasn't her business, and looked over to watch Bailey dancing with her father. "I must seem like an ungrateful bitch to you."

"In the 1994 Annals of Emergency Medicine', Gerhart et al., published a study of three Level I trauma centers. they compared the attitudes of two-hundred thirty-three physicians, nurses, and EMTs toward people with SCI, compared to responses of patients with SCI from a previous study. Twenty-two percent of clinicians reported that they wouldn't want life-sustaining treatment if they had an SCI. Eighteen percent imagined being glad to be alive; and forty-one percent felt that staff in their emergency departments tried 'too hard to resuscitate or save persons with new SCIs. On the other hand, ninety-two percent of respondents with SCI said they were glad to be alive. I don't know if there are similar statistics for amputees, but the subtext is that physicians take the cure model to heart. You're still a surgeon, Dr. Robbins. It makes sense that it's been a rough transition."

"Lexie, you're a surgeon."

"Only technically," Lexie said. "My medical license will have to be renewed next year, and I don't know what I'll do."

"Psh. The State of Washington just wants the fee. They won't cross-check the papers."

"Because no one's ever been reported for having mental illness, or—"

"An entire hospital would have your back, kid."

Lexie shrugged. "If I can't do it, they shouldn't."

She flashed to sitting in the courtyard the other night, and knowing that the stuffiness she was feeling wasn't a cold she needed to worry about passing onto Zola. She was going to have to recalibrate everything about her connection with her body, and even then she'd face moments like that.

This afternoon Meredith had presented her with a list of ways to avoid AD triggers. "I've told you for ages to skip placebo week on the Pill," she'd said. "We'll find a really good nail salon for pedicures. You haven't gained so much as a bruise this month, which is more than I can say." She'd put a hand on the side of her leg, presumably indicating a mark hidden by her jeans. "I see the internet's 'stepping on a Lego' and raise it 'rolling over on a Duplo.'"

"She's good with those."

"Did you see her castle from this weekend? We barely got the picture before she decided to play dinosaur and send it flying." Meredith gestured with the story, grinning broadly. Lexie almost said she hoped Zola would be as excited by her sibling destroying her towers, but she didn't. The thought had made her remember a time exactly like that, where she and Molly had been stacking up a wooden castle, only to destroy it; together, which was what Mom had pointed out when Dad came out of the study, a book in one hand, his hair stuck out in all directions, ready to remind them that Daddy's work was reading, and he needed them to be quiet.

She knew Meredith considered her default volume to be retaliation against all the times Ellis told her to be quiet. Had it always been that way? Kids yelling could get on any empathetic parents' nerves, but wouldn't Ellis Grey have encouraged a girl to have a voice?

"Hey," Meredith had taken her hand. "It might take time for you to figure this stuff out. You might not know what path you want to pursue until that's done. But whatever it is? Internal medicine, or becoming a pioneer in adaptive and robotic neurosurgery, or, heck, modeling for Chelle; I'll be with you. But I think it's better if you wait until you know what you want. To do that…to do that, first you need to know what you have. You have me."

Robbins couldn't have assumed losing her leg would put her career at stake, but that didn't mean she couldn't claim loss. "I don't blame you for not wanting to let them take your leg off in Idaho. They were following the most conservative guidelines, and Search and Rescue not giving them full background almost cost Derek his hand—and he picked up that rock. You weren't supposed to be on the plane in the first place. I get it.

"I don't think you're ungrateful. I'm no scion of accepting my new limitations. I do think you were a bitch to give Alex a survivor's guilt-trip over a choice you made to punish him."

"He…He was going to take off. After everything…. After Nick—"

"Alex wasn't going to die! He was going to do a fellowship—a year long fellowship—at your alma mater. I'm glad he didn't go; he's good to have around, but if he had? I doubt I'd be the one he called to update."

Sorry, if that was blunt.

Sorry, if it's not my place.

Sorry to put a damper on your evening.

Lexie thought those things as she left the table, but the niceties didn't seem nearly as important when you weren't worried about letters of recommendation.

When she was almost run into by Callie while the latter turned away from the bar, she wondered if she should have been nicer. Callie was Meredith's friend; her primary mom-friend, and if Mark had been around—But he wasn't.

"Hey, hey, li— Lexie Grey," Callie said, once she'd kept the glasses she was carrying from tipping out onto Lexie's lap. "Discharged honorably?"

"Ha. Yeah, I guess. Mer's taking me back to Roseridge tonight."

"Mmm." Her eyes flicked to the front table where Richard sat in low conversation with Bailey's dad.

"It wasn't the facility's fault," Lexie said, snapping Callie's gaze back to her and earning a dubiously raised chin. "No one on staff knew what was going on. If I was anyone else, they probably would've had me sent somewhere else."

"You as a Grey? The Webber whistleblower?"

"Neither. The rehab center wants a partnership with Seattle Grace. Most patients across the yard go to Pros. They have a geriatric medicine program. Mer and Dr. Webber requested Grace—Whatever, this was me."

"'Across the yard' like it's a prison."

"Not for us," Lexie said, although there was always someone complaining about the basic safety regulations.

Callie nodded, looking around for a moment. Had she gotten to be an orthopedic surgeon and remained one of those people who couldn't make conversation with people in wheelchairs?

Then she put the glasses down, and settled on the closest chair. "Lexie, you started the program as a fetus, right?"

That was my sister. Meredith would've been a fetus, at the time Ellis was accepted, but Lexie didn't make the joke. "I was almost twenty-four," she said. She didn't think Callie knew when her birthday was, or why she suddenly didn't want her to know it wasn't until February.

"So, you're twenty-seven."

"I'm young; I have my whole life in front of me."

"Clichés exist for a reason. Did you know I was in the Peace Corps?"

"Mark told me. Said it made sense you didn't want to go with Dr. Robbins. You'd done your time."

"That's…. Well. Okay. So, I did that after college, kind of…kind of because I wanted to give after a life of being given. if been a bio major; i wanted to do something with the environment. Dad was still sure I'd eventually take over for him.

"I came out wanting to go straight to Doctors Without Borders. Four years later, I knew with every fiber of my being, I knew I had to go into sports medicine."

"Oh. That's…different. But…there are designated residency programs for that."

"I was in one. I did my PGY-1 and 2 in the southwest. I thought it was going to be perfect. I could use my Spanish; we got skiers, hikers, whole football teams, and I'd never been 'one of the girls….' But, uh…I was one. A girl. Woman. In a program that slanted very…macho."

Once, at a point where the declaration would've been almost unintelligible to Lexie, Meredith had told her, "George was her McDreamy. That's more than just the latest hot dude. He's the guy who makes you believe in ferryboats."

"Fairy tales?"

"I know when I'm stuttering. That as awful as the world is, something every day can be magical."

The way Callie said "macho" made it clear why she, like Meredith, had needed someone to do that.

"When I reported and was asked to leave…. I transferred to Seattle Grace, because they had an opening, and I liked orthopedic trauma. Ironically, I'd wanted to work with girls sports teams. I played several, and any time I was injured I got good care, but…you hear things.

"Now, I grow cartilage. I've been getting emails from TED. I know that doesn't sound much like being derailed, but it did feel like it at the time. I didn't plan on being here. You've seen the changes in my personal life. If any of those offer plans had worked, I'm sure I would've found my way to being happy. A lot of doctors made the decision before kindergarten. I figured you might be one of them."

"Some of us before preschool," Meredith put in. She was carrying Zola, who drooped against her, but was still valiantly moving her foot to the music. "Okay if we call Jean-Philippe, Lex? I want to check on Derek before we head for the ferry."

"He's good. Sleeping, probably. Good BP," Callie said, shooting to her feet. "Tell him…uh, tell him, we're, y'know, gonna take it slow this time. With the hand."

"I'll be sure to do that," Meredith said. The smirk in her voice spread once Callie had turned around. "She called him from upstairs," she explained, sotto voce. "That's why they were late. She, uh, needed him to be Mark."

"What…? Ohhh. That…does not seem like his thing."

"If he could, he'd be like Miranda. Never wanting to hear about anyone else's sex life. Unfortunately, he married me." She grinned, and then nodded over to Bailey who was talking to a nurse. "Let's go tell her we're leaving."

"One sec. If Derek's…like that, why'd he get so mad about Mark and me?"

"That was my fault. I told him not to let Little Sloan in Little Grey…? I didn't know how to sister."

"No, I know, but…Mer, he was pissed."

"Well, Mark was sort of an exception. They talked about stuff. And it wasn't all actually you. He'd just gotten Mark back. He didn't want to lose him again. We'd have to ask Liz, but I'd bet that's why he didn't know about most of the sister-hookups until after Addison. They knew, family first is a strong creed for him. It gets a little complicated, and maybe misogynist, protect the greeters when you factor in how he considers Mark to be a brother. He wanted him to be happy, but he didn't want you hurt. And…part of him was still punishing Mark for being the catalyst that got him here. Once he has a creed, it's not easy to He'd been taking chances; taking loses, and that'd lead to some killer saves, but just then he felt like a killer. Then there's Mark telling him he's done the one thing Derek asked him not to do. He exploded, because he knew Mark would take it. And Mark sticking around after that proved that Derek really could trust him. They might not…. Oh, she's free; we're going in!"

The space to where she was aiming to overtake Bailey en route to the cake table was clear, but she still paused to look back and ensure Lexie was behind her. When their eyes met, Lexie heard what she really said. After everything had gone down with Sadie Meredith had wanted to protect her from Mark, but once it'd come out that they were together, she'd been totally supportive. There'd never been an 'I told you so." She'd been there for Lexie after the breakups, and when things fell apart with Alex, when she saw him as a brother; she'd figured out the balance. She'd started telling Lexie things directly, not just putting other people in place to affect her decisions without her knowing.

Maybe she hadn't had a lot of sistering experience at that point, but she'd learned on the job, and Lexie would take all of Meredith's mistakes over a punch in the face.

Likely because of what she'd seen at the wedding, Zola mashed birthday cake frosting into Sofia's mouth, leaving them just as giggly as Ben and Bailey had been a week earlier. Lexie watched Robbins cleaning her baby up. Would that have been something she'd do as second nature by this point, if the crash hadn't happened?q

"Mind if I join you?" Derek asked, taking a steel box down from the cabinet nearest to where Lexie had set down the pouch holding her meds. It was the third day in a row she'd spent almost entirely in a wheelchair, and the second of propelling manually.

"Oh. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't know you were…." She trailed off. On her side of Roseridge, they'd be comparing prescriptions; a level of openness that seemed life-saving considering how things were in the other building. You'd think doctors would have a similar attitude, but in her experience, they were more awkward about their own medications.

"Popping antibiotics and anti-rejection meds?" he offered. A second later, he grimaced, and she realized he'd held the bottle up with his left hand. "Can you….?"

She took the bottle with three fingers and pressed the childproof lid down with the heel of her hand. With an incredibly petulant sigh, he traded it for another bottle holding the same pills hers did. "Good call, Dr. Shepherd. Just because pain is a good sign doesn't mean—"

"—that I have to suffer through it. We've known that you don't have to feel the pain to heal for over a century. You're absolutely the first person to tell me that."

"Yikes, no wonder Mer wanted to grind those into your food last weekend."

"Liz was just as—"

"It was my idea to call your mom."

"Did you tell her to broadcast it over the PA?"

Lexie couldn't hide her snicker. Meredith had put her on speaker to hear Carolyn's voice saying All Doctors Shepherd are to quit being children and allow Dr. Torres to treat their pain. "That was all her."

"I'd have assumed, except I thought she wanted me to have authority at the hospital."

"Eh, most of the Sunday nurses are night-shift during the week."

Derek tilted his head, and even with his lips occupied with finishing the water in his glass, she knew from one line by his eye that he was thinking of Mark. "Meredith won. Although, she's one to talk."

"Yeah, did you consider that?"

"I didn't. Liz and I…we make everything into a competition. Maybe…I kept thinking of Amy. She's had kidney stones and wouldn't game anything. Some addicts don't consider emergency prescriptions to be breaking sobriety—it's needless suffering—but she says she knows herself better than that. To be a doctor surrounded by pills, when that was her drug of choice…. It went too far, and the next time I try to convince Meredith to take so much as an allergy pill it'll be an issue." His lips thinned. "Once she admits she's in pain, though, she's usually willing."

"Ever get her to acknowledge anything else?"

"Occasionally. Insomnia, on her nights off." He returned the box to the cabinet. "Having it all down here makes it just about impossible, but potty training. She didn't want there to be anything in our bathroom that could endanger Zo more than the temptation to make a toilet paper wedding dress."

"Has she?"

"She won't let us leave her that unsupervised."

"Still doesn't stay where you put her?"

"Not since she could roll over."

They let the settle; Zola starting to roll in the hospital once the weight in her head evened out. She'd been rocking, desperate to crawl to an adult, usually him or Meredith before she was taken. Then, walking after mere weeks of scurrying behind them on hands and knees.

"How was Thanksgiving with your dad?"

"Not…awful,"

Lexie had imagined that having minimal to no control of the majority of her muscles would give her move control of the others. Unfortunately, as she'd learned to shift without thinking every few minutes, she had not figured out how to keep her face blank. The divot between his eyebrows made her remember he'd spent a week with his sister around.

"He had one of those stair-lift things put in. Mom's mom had one. Molly and I used to play on it. So I could have my old room."

"Huh " Derek said. "Meaning he never rearranged the sewing room."

Lexie looked at him. Has she not been horrible to think of that?

"Bee-Beep!" Zola called, propelling herself into the kitchen on the foot-powered toddler trike she'd been gliding around on all day, her location easy to pinpoint thanks to the mylar balloon tied to the handlebars. "Daddy, tell Itcher 'bye."

Her proclamation was explained by Meredith and Richard following her into the kitchen.

"Richard, can we send anything with you? Cake? Fish?"

"Oh, uh, no. Arlene filled the deep freeze yesterday." The pause that followed that flowed from the kitchen through the sitting areas on either side; the adults in the house had almost all overlapped at the wedding, and then' the funeral Wednesday.

"My cake?" Zola craned to see the pink and purple zebra stripes on what was left of the beautiful cake that had ridden on Lexie's lap after Cristina picked it up from the bakery.

She'd felt sort of privileged to hear the satisfaction in the other woman's voice when she'd declared it "perfect for Zola. " The little girl hqd had been so enchanted that it had taken two renditions of "Happy Birthday" to get her to blow out her candles.

"You got plenty of cake, icing eyebrows," Meredith said, running a knuckle over the spot where Zola's eyebrow had been purple once she'd destroyed her piece'. "And you can have another piece for breakfast in the morning."

"We'll remind Momma that that was her idea while she's chasing you up and down trees," Derek said.

"It's tradition!" Meredith and Lexie said at the same time, and their gazes locked. Lexie thought that was from her mom's side. Maybe Meredith had come up with it herself; she probably eaten cake for dinner, too, if Ellis wasn't around.

Her sister's eyes went to Richard. There were conversations going on in the other rooms, but quiet crept into the kitchen again.

Richard turned to Derek. "Your sister went down to L.A., that right?"

"Uh, yeah. Couldn't be made to see reason."

"She wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving," Meredith said, putting her hand on Derek's arm. He quickly covered it with his. "We don't."

Sure they did. Their tradition just didn't look like anyone else's. '

"You don't go to Amelia Shepherd if you want Thanksgiving. Or Addison Montgomery, for that matter," Derek added. Richard nodded, his lip twitched, and Lexie recognized the tension marking him purposefully pulling it back. Was it grief? Laughing had felt wrong for weeks after Mom died. Or did he just not want to rile Derek?'

"She called. You, uh, you heard about Vivian?"

"Yeah," Derek said. "Shame."

Feeling like a kid who'd been shut out of the conversation, Lexie batted at Zola's balloon. Her niece giggled, and a shriek prepended Sofia coming into the room. She had a noisemaker clutched in one hand, but in spite of all the bite marks on the end, neither little one had managed to get more than a flap out of the paper that unspooled at the end.

Lexie had taken hers while clearing the table, figuring it might be a fun incentive for someone's respiratory therapy. Now, she took it out of her cupholder, made sure the toddlers were watching, and blew.

Exclamations came from every corner of the open great rooms while the paper recoiled, and for the first time in a while, Lexie didn't mind knowing all eyes were on her. She blew the noisemaker again, and then held it down for Zola, who emitted a series of raspberries into the mouthpiece. Her: face started to get stormy, but Sofia was delighted, clapping for her friend at the slightest twitch of the paper. A moment later, they were a parade of two, Zola struggling to keep her front wheel aligned while blowing the horn.

"That's why you can't drive yet, bub," Meredith told Derek. In the second before he turned to stick his tongue out at his wife, Lexie caught the way he'd been looking at her. He'd absolutely been imagining Mark leaning against the other side of the wall, grinning at Dr. Robbins trying to catch the noisemaker in her lips while Sofia held it anything-but-steady. He'd have a joke about blowing horns.

She wanted to get away, but Alex had gone upstairs to put together Zola's toddler bed, and Cristina had followed to make sure he didn't screw it up. Jackson had brought an intern as his date, and April was still looking at the old books Meredith had shown her to stop the longing glances.

As the girls approached Dr. Hunt, he came to life, like a motion-activated Disney animatronic.

"Dr. Grey? …Lexie?"

Lexie managed to smile up at Dr. Webber. It didn't make sense that he should have to say her name twice, really. He almost always never used her sister's title. "Sorry, sir."

"Quite all right. I'm sure it's been a long few days for you."

How was she supposed to respond to that? Did he mean physically, or was he thinking of Mark? Was it messed up of her to wonder that, when it meant comparing her Schroediger's Relationship to his marriage of twenty-five years?

She shrugged.

"I'll carry this stuff out for you, Richard," Meredith said. "If you go now, you should be able to drive straight onto the ferry."

"Very kind."

In her sister's face, Lexie saw herself yesterday, when her father praised her for taking her plate to the dishwasher. It was something she'd been expected to do at Roseridge for weeks, and she'd immediately felt pathetic, but before that, for a second, she'd preened.

"How old were you?" Derek asked. "The last time you changed anything in your room at Thatcher's?"

"The Matrix poster came from my freshman dorm. More than that? Fifteen. Really, it's better than a bed in the sewing room." That was all it'd be, though. There are patterns laid out that'd fit Laura's dolls. It'd been easy to imagine herself stalling. unnoticed and untouched for five, ten, fifteen years. But what role would she have here, where it felt like she had t been banished to the kids table solely because there wasn't one?

"I want to show you something."

Derek led her out of the kitchen, past the gated stairs that definitely wouldn't support a lift, and the downstairs bathroom, which had been adapted in the summer. She'd been careful with her liquid consumption yesterday, and neither Dad nor Dani had noticed.

One of the few walled-off rooms on the first floor had been designed as Derek's study—Meredith used to mention it whenever he said something about the lack of space in the townhouse, saying"Go add another few square feet to your study!"—with built-in shelves for their books and other media. She didn't realize that wasn't where the doors would lead until a second before he opened them.

It wasn't all that big, compared to an attic that'd technically been the third story, but this time, you'd never know it wasn't meant to be a bedroom. The queen-sized bed had a white frame and a pile of pillows that matched the purple-plaid duvet. Prints of Seattle landmarks were hung on the wall, above the accessible desk. Even the window-seat was at her level, with a hinged transfer board attached.

"We can redo it however you want. If you want. There's still a spare room upstairs."

"Your study, now."

"No. I've been working in our room, mostly, but there are two full bedrooms that aren't attached to Zola's, or the nursery. One of those could be yours. I'm sure a stair lift makes sense at Thatcher's, and you'll get to transferring at that height on your own. What's the hall like? Wide enough for a transport chair?"

"Barely." Roseridge used one of those to move people with larger motorized wheelchairs around the PT gym. Hank and Lionel didn't agree on much, but they agreed those made them feel like luggage.

"We have options if you'd prefer to be upstairs. Our contractor will work with us on an elevator, if you want."

"If we get the money—"

"If you want, we'll figure it out. Adds to resale value. Even if you prefer it down here, it'd be good for you to be able to help with… any kids upstairs." He sat on the bed, propping his arm on his lap. "Zo's getting a toddler bed. and Mer tried to convince me we should donate the crib and get a new one for the baby."

Lexie couldn't help a splutter of laughter. "Yeah, I know. But…for her it would mean not having an empty crib."

Derek sighed. "I'm sorry, that wasn't relevant."

"It's okay. You don't…I'm….You can talk to me, you know."

"I know," he said, more readily than she expected. "But I do want…. We could've put Zola in a bed in September. She's been climbing out of her crib about that long. But having her crib gave her a smoother transition, after so many changes and….We weren't ready. Thinking of her as a toddler, a two-year-old, a little girl—If it's big for us; how do you think it is for her?" His lip curled, the half-smile signaling a rhetorical question. "Making the transition a big deal helps her understand that's natural. New situations are an adjustment.

"I bought this land with zero thought. I joked I was used to Manhattan real restate; you never know what will be snatched out from under you. Really, I just…well, I knew Addison would hate it. And I wanted to start over. To rebuild myself.

"It's why my sisters and I pitched in for the Pen. We wanted somewhere without the history. The Queen Anne house…It put Meredith's entire life in one place for the first time. She wasn't…I don't think she'd be the same person if she'd gone through with selling it, even if she'd moved into an apartment with the same roommates.

"Your dad's place is familiar. That may be what you need. We're going to have a place for you even if it's just to crash when you don't want to get the ferry. I'm sure Amelia didn't have Thanksgiving plans, but being an adult sometimes means making room for your siblings."

"Or rooms," Lexie murmured.

"You'll have to pick eventually. But it won't be between us and Thatcher. Not on our side."

"Derek Shepherd!" Meredith appeared in the doorway, and Derek's features opened in a flash of guilt. "We weren't going to pressure her."

"He's not," Lexie said. If anything, hadn't he been doing the opposite? Showing her this room that was perfect for the woman she'd been six months ago, and saying it was okay if she didn't want it? "Just showing me my options."

"It's yours either way. And we can point Thatcher toward any of the adaptive equipment in here," Meredith gestured around the room, and returned her arms to the crossed position they'd been in, even while Derek pulled her toward him.

"Dani," Lexie corrected. "They don't pretend otherwise. She did put in a shower chair, upstairs but—Did you actually add a bathroom?"

"Under the stairs is only a half, what were we going to do, let you smell?"

Lexie shrugged. What would they have done in the old house? It was more like her dad's in layout. Would she have woken to find it transformed?

They had money, but none of it had to have been earmarked for her.

She'd be able to help with Zola and any future siblings, at least a little, they'd have that—but so would she. She'd still be Aunt Lexie, almost the only other identity she'd had.

Derek's text tone startled all three of them, as Meredith read "Richard got the ferry" over his shoulder, her sleeve fell, Lexie noticed a fading red mark on her forearm.

"He seemed to be doing well," Derek said.

"He seemed okay after Mom died, too." Meredith pointed out. "Then the hospital ranking tanked. He's not chief now, but…."

"But he's not chief, now." Derek kissed her cheek. Lexie had a memory of having her friends over and listening to them freak out over her parents' physicality. She and Molly had been lucky to see their love as normal; Zola and her sibling would be too.

"He loved her," Meredith said, and at first she wondered if her sister had read her mind. No she was talking about Richard. "My mom…she loved him enough that…that teaching me I didn't need that was protecting me. She never had it again. But…But he did. And Adele deserved it."

The glance Meredith gave her was unconscious, Lexie was sure, but she knew what it must mean. Lexie's mom had to.

"Do you remember her from when you were a kid?"

Meredith's shrug was stiff. "Some. She used to be the one who took me back to daycare. Not always, but a lot. Some of the nurses, they'd grab me at the elevator and go straight for the stairs. I didn't make that easy. They probably thought Adele was a lion-tamer, but all she did was take me to the gallery, or the locker room, or wherever Mom was. She knew, so no interaction with my mom can have been easy for her. The time she thought I was her…. She loved him."

"We'll all watch out for him. Just like you did for her." He turned, addressing the statement to Lexie, too. "You both gave them more time."

"I gave them twenty-five years, by existing," Meredith quipped. "Hey, Lex, did I tell you what I realized this year? Remember me telling you my mom played suicide roulette?"

"You, uh, don't forget that." It hadn't been long after animosity began to transform into sisterhood; a time when it was still nebulous. Before she'd moved into the attic. About this time of year, actually. Not wanting to be alone in the Crapartment with George on call, she'd taken a bottle of tequila to Meredith's, a surefire way to be let in. They'd been in the living room, and Meredith had asked, "Does he ever say anything about my mom? About…I dunno, her mental health, or whatever?"

It'd led to the confession that she'd sat in the next room over and watched her mother slit her wrists. She'd been wrong about what it meant, but there'd been social workers taking her to a strange house, so, she wondered if they hadn't reached Thatcher, or… "He an' your mom couldn'a been married, yet, so it wasn' the last time," she'd said, and then frowned like she was listening back to her own slurring words. "I liked her."

Lexie had assured her that she knew that, and left it. She'd been incurably curious about her sister, but she hadn't been far out from her mother's death, and once she got answers, she couldn't return them.

Meredith's body was beginning to overlap her husband's, and there were any number of things she couldn't un-know in her eyes. "It was June 19th, 1983."

.Most of the questions the confession had given Lexie had been inappropriate. Naive. Others had answered themselves over time. This one was stoked several times a year, but she'd managed to control the burn. On her birthday intern year, she'd seen a form of the same curiosity in Meredith's eyes. Eventually, it would burn her lips open, and if she didn't aim right, it would turn something to ashes, she was sure.

Forty weeks before February fifteenth was May twenty-fifth. Lexie wasn't sure when she'd discovered that her father and Ellis had split up in June—it had woven its way into the story too tightly. If she'd gone late, the way many first babies did, it would complicate something that already resembled Zola's Skwish. First babies also had a tendency to be early. Thirty-seven weeks would put her conception at June fifteenth. What were the chances that if those social workers had reached Thatcher, Lexie wouldn't exist? What if they had reached him, and he'd been with her mother?

"Adele's family does big Juneteenth parties," Meredith continued, unaware of Lexie's calculations. She must've done them, right? "Always has. Always on the nineteenth of June, not the nearest weekend. Don't you think Mom should've known it wasn't an ordinary Thursday?"

"She wasn't exactly in a rational state," Derek said, definitely not for the first or tenth time.

"He invited us to bring Zo this year. it matters to him, and I bet Mom knew nothing about it. It's not like Kwanzaa. That was new back then. It doesn't change anything," she added, standing. "Just makes me wonder which one was really the love of his life."

"Maybe Ellis loved him the best she could. Maybe he didn't mention Adele's family celebrations when hers was gone, or about to be torn apart."

"Look at you being all empathetic with my mom," Meredith said, before kissing him. "Go back out to our guests please? I need to use Lexie's unnecessary necessary."

"He's with me."

"You're not a guest!" Meredith said, like it was obvious. I meant, like, Edwards. Derek, did I tell you April brought Ross to the wedding? It's like she and Avery are acting out a weird mating ritual. I'm against interns knowing where I live, much less going through my stuff."

"Since when?" Lexie snorted. Meredith flipped her off and slammed the bathroom door.

Her bathroom door?

When she used it before leaving with Cristina, she found bars that made it almost possible to transfer herself; she needed help with her clothes more than anything.

She was then arranged in the front seat of Cristina's car. She'd forgotten that Derek wasn't going to be the one helping her transfer for a few weeks; the splint and sling didn't register as all that different from the brace she'd gotten accustomed to.

She'd tell Cristina what she'd seen. She was Mer's best friend, more her sister in many—most—ways than Lexie.

They dropped Owen off at the trailer first. Lexie had always been the one made to do things like that; to sit in middle seats, to open doors. Now, she swallowed envy along with the painkiller that would ensure she could reverse the transfer into the Corolla. She capped her water bottle and waited while they lingered on the grass, Owen finally clapping Cristina on the shoulder before she returned to her seat. Maybe it was just the residual scent of his after-shave, but it didn't feel like he'd left the car.

"I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"Just…if you're divorcing for the suit—"

Cristina took the turn onto the ferry dock road hard enough to cause Lexie's shoulder to bump against the door. "Did Meredith tell you that?"

"No, I just figured…you didn't do it while you were in Minnesota, and you had a sex friend…. She, uh, did tell me that."

Cristina shrugged. "It wasn't a secret. It wasn't anything."

"Palette cleanser?" Lexie offered.

"Sloan wasn't all bad ideas. Just should've made sure Torres had stayed on the Pill after she started going out with Robbins."

Cristina tapped her fingers against the wheel as they waited for an empty spot to appear. A moment after cutting the motor she sighed. "He said marriage was like putting what we had into a box. But, I don't know, maybe it's the HEART IN A BOX case last year or being called Snow White—way more you—I keep thinking…. Mer compared him to the housekeeping forest animals, but the Huntsman is meant to put Snow White's heart in a box. It's like….he had it, but he never looked at it. Once it was in the box, it didn't really matter.

"The suit was Owen giving us both an out. It's business. It's not that he cheated on me, or that I don't want kids, and he lied to himself about the chances of me changing my mind.

"I admired you digging your heels in with Sloan. You didn't want to be Lexie Tremaine before you were Dr. Grey-Sloan, or Mom. Nothing wrong with that."

"That's, uh, sort of a deep cut." She'd gotten good at reading Cristina's micro expressions as an intern; the word didn't garner a reaction.

"You read our personal files."

"Did George tell you that?"

"I know things."

Lexie did, too. That was the problem.

"You're aware that I have dyslexia. And I'm crappy at names. Presumably related. There are ways I overcompensate. When I was a kid, I'd memorize movie credits; so no one on the playground would doubt that I was just as Disney brainwashed as anyone. Thought I was in on it."

"Smart." Lexie remembered someone telling her that Cristina had come up with the name "McDreamy," and it made more sense, now. She almost ignored the shadow crossing over the woman's face to change the subject. Who knew when she'd next have the opportunity?

"Marriage is like…one night you want Italian and he wants Japanese, so you compromise and get Indian. Doesn't matter. Someone's disappointed. It adds up. You realize, he's been ordering Indian before you get home. You're going to Indian places for every holiday. And you don't mind. You almost forget you wanted Italian. Then, one day, you get home first and order dinner. He gets pissed off because it's not Japanese. You should know he always wants Japanese. He's only been getting Indian for your sake. He thought you'd come around to Japanese eventually!"

There was something in that in any relationship. Meredith had apparently once told George and Izzie she hated Chinese food to get them to leave her alone—"and because I knew they'd have ordered grease with a side of cardboard"—She'd never told the truth, even once she and Lexie started going for dumplings once a month or so.

"Now, we can make our own choices. We can have Indian, but I can have Italian, and when he meets someone who wants Japanese, he's free to do that. Better than making me believe Japanese was my idea like Burke did."

Lexie didn't know what to say to that. Cristina almost never mentioned her ex around her, maybe at all. She couldn't imagine having wanted to be married at the end of her intern year, even to Mark. It was harder to picture Cristina doing it; and it really hasn't been all that long.

It took a second to figure out the workings of Cristina's fancy car stereo; an auxiliary cord would've been easier, in her opinion, but she managed."Like a Virgin" came blasting through the speakers.

Then, they were pulling into the underpass at the front of Roseridge. Garrett was waiting at the door.

"Shit. Sorry," Lexie groaned, realizing she'd fallen asleep.

"No worries, Three. You missed out on the snoring genes. You do drool

Lexie dragged her hand over her cheek. "Um. About Mer. There… In my…well, it's not my bathroom, yet, just…I glanced at the trash and—" The car door opened, and Garrett caught her shoulder as she arced toward him. "Whoa Doc. Good party?"

"It was for a two-year-old," Cristina said. "Is there such a thing? Manual chair's in the trunk."

"Aw, fun! Just a sec."

Cristina wrinkled her nose after him. "He's…cheerful."

"Not in the 'life is sunshine' way," Lexie assured her. "He's—Not the point—"

"I know, the stick turned blue. Aren't you supposed to be the investigative one?"

From one of the nearby streets, Lexie heard sirens wailing. She already knew Cristina was on call. "Do you know…. Where did Derek's sister stay? After the surgery, I mean?"

"I'm sure they'll change the sheets for you."

Lexie let Garrett help her into her wheelchair.

A bandage wrapper wasn't such a strange thing to discover in a house where two residents had recently had surgery, and it wasn't as though she'd investigated the trash the first time she went into the room. There was nothing to say for sure that Meredith had left it there.