"Do you think we are neglecting Olive?" asked Addison, snuggled into Derek's bare shoulder.
"Why do you say that?" he asked, gently stroking her back.
"Amelia told me something that worried me... something about Olive feeling unloved. Will Olive feel that we don't love her anymore?"
"I don't think so. She knows we love her."
"Yes, she knows. But maybe she doesn't feel it. Maybe she feels that Arleth has replaced her, taken her place in the family..."
"She shouldn't feel that way. She loves her."
"She can love her and be jealous at the same time. One does not exclude the other."
"You said that jealousy is a stage she will have to overcome. At some point, she will stop feeling it."
"I was reading in one of the parenting books your sister gave me, that to neutralize jealousy we have to do more activities with the baby that include Olive. Let her give her a bottle, help with bath time, dress her, brush her hair..."
"She has already done all that."
"Yes, but maybe we need to give her more importance. This will make her feel responsible and an important part of the new dynamic."
"Are you suggesting we leave the baby in her care?"
"Don't be silly, Derek. I mean incorporate her more maybe. In simple things. I also read that we should have alone time with her, separately. She needs to have alone time with her mom and alone time with her dad. Fun times, without the sister in the middle. When was the last time you took her fishing?"
"Those books are garbage, Addie. We already do all that without even reading them. Olive likes to bathe her and likes to be there when you change her or feed her. But that doesn't prevent the jealousy."
"Maybe because we don't have alone time with her. You should take her to the movies, or the park, or for a walk, without the baby. So she feels that all your attention is on her and that she hasn't lost it. The same with me, just that it's difficult for me leaving the baby alone..."
"I'll take her to the hospital in the next few days. She enjoys being in my office."
"That's not an interesting outing, it's taking her to your work, and you wouldn't be doing it for her but for yourself. Killing two birds with one stone."
"Of course not, Olive has fun there. She is the most spoiled by the nurses and the interns. And more now that they are decorating everything for Christmas, she will have fun."
"Derek, we still haven't bought the tickets, you know that flights get booked up this time of the year. There's less than a week left until Christmas."
"Addie, I don't know how to tell you this..."
"Oh no. No. No. You can't be serious, Derek. Again?" she said, quickly moving away from his body.
"I can't leave now, it's when they need me the most at the hospital."
"Derek, it's Christmas! We are supposed to spend Christmas with the people we love."
"I know, and I will be at the Christmas lunch here at home, but we can't travel this time. Come back here..." he gestured for her to come back and lay down beside him, but she ignored him.
"How can you do this to Olive? You know she's counting the days to go see her cousins."
"She will understand..."
"Just like she understood about Halloween? She still hasn't forgiven you for that. Do you think she will forgive you for not going during her favorite season?"
"It will be difficult, but I'll make it up to her. I'll buy her something nice to entertain her."
"Olive is not a baby, she realizes everything. You can't buy her off with a toy. She'll be furious. Once again, we are failing our daughter."
"We are not failing her, we just can't travel right now. She has to understand that sometimes it's possible and sometimes it's not, and that doesn't mean she will have a bad Christmas here."
Addison sighed irritably and began to get dressed without looking at him. Olive wouldn't be the only one disappointed this Christmas.
~•~
"All right, so in the third quarter, the collection rate of Medicaid was what percent again?" Derek asked at a meeting with his business partners. "Hey. Would you excuse me for one second?" he said, getting up and approaching his sister, somewhat nervous, "you have 30 seconds."
"Okay. So this woman comes to the ER this morning with abdominal pain. She's had it on and off for about six months."
"Mm-hmm."
"And a lot of doctors have told her it's either an ulcer or gastritis."
"All right, get to the point. You have 15 seconds."
"Okay. So it occurs to me that the nausea is probably caused by a positional shift-."
"Cerebrospinal fluid, okay. Brain tumor. Got it."
"Right. But not just any brain tumor! I mean, she's got this huge and beautiful ependymoma. So Shadow Shepherd... "
"Dr. Nelson."
"Okay. Shadow Shepherd was going to do an intraventricular resection."
"Mm-hmm."
"And he passed the surgery on to me. I'm going to remove that giant tumor!"
"That's it?" he said, turning away disinterestedly, "okay, sorry for the interruption. So where were we? The Medicaid percentage, what is the profitability rate?" he asked his partners, sitting back down at the table.
Amelia looked at him bewildered. Could he be so arrogant? Stupid.
~•~
Olive was walking down the hallway when Addison's phone started ringing in her room. She approached, picked it up, and saw on the caller ID that it was Bizzy, and didn't hesitate to answer. It had been a long time since they talked and she really missed her.
"Grandma?" asked the little girl, bringing the phone to her ear.
"You can call me Bizzy, Olive."
"Hi, Bizzy."
"Hello, dear. How are you?"
"Fine."
"That's good, I'm glad."
"I'm eating a cinnamon cupcake that Mom bought when she picked me up from the kinder. I also had a vanilla and chocolate one on the way. They're Christmas ones. They have little green and red colored balls. And white ones too."
"Is your mother around?"
"When are you coming to my house? I want to show you my room. My dad gave me a new Rapunzel painting. And now I have purple curtains! Milo doesn't like them, he scratched them yesterday and Dad got mad. But he didn't tear them too much, they just have little nail marks. You can hardly see it because they have white stars. Dad also put starry curtains in Arley's room. But she sleeps with Mom and Dad, she doesn't use her room yet."
"Sounds very nice. Can you pass me to your mother?"
"Are you coming to see me?" she asked, ignoring what she was being told.
"I don't know, does your mother want to?"
"Yes, you can come and sleep in my room with me. Or in the guest room, because it has a bigger bed. It has a soft pink duvet! Mom bought it when Grandma Carolyn came the other time... when my sister was born. When are you going to see my sister? She's already very big and Grandma says that..."
"Can I talk to her, Olive?" She interrupted, impatiently.
"With Grandma?"
"With your mother."
"She can't right now, she's pooping."
"Oh... thank you for the... detailed information."
"You're welcome."
"I'll call her at another time then."
"Okay."
"Goodbye, dear. Take care."
"Bye," she said and hung up the call.
She left the phone again on Addison's nightstand and went back to playing with her dolls as if nothing had happened.
~•~
"You stole my surgery right out from under me! You son of a bitch!" Amelia shouted as she approached Derek, who was erasing her name from the surgery board and putting his own.
"It wasn't your surgery, it was Nelson's."
"I told you he had given it to me!"
"Nelson wasn't capable of performing it, and neither are you. You don't have enough experience to handle something so complex. You would have killed her."
"What are you talking about? My mortality rate is even lower than yours, you arrogant bastard!"
"Dr. Shepherd was the best option for..." said April, interrupting.
"Shut up! Why don't you go suck up to someone else and see if you can get anywhere in life?"
"Amelia, don't speak to her like that."
"Shut up. It was my diagnosis, my tumor, and my surgery! Can I at least scrub in?"
"No. You have to take care of Nelson's aneurysm now," said Derek, looking at his board.
"Aneurysm, operating room 3. With Nelson," added April.
"Shut up! Stop talking, you sound like a parrot repeating everything this clown says!"
"Can you calm down, Amelia? People are watching."
"You stole my surgery! You're a piece of shit," she said, storming away. "HE STOLE MY SURGERY!" she shouted for everyone to hear.
Richard turned around and looked at Derek, who was nervous.
"Is everything okay?"
"Yeah, it's fine. Everything's it's fine."
"Have you had lunch yet today? I'm headed down..."
"Oh, I can't eat at the cafeteria anymore. The vultures won't leave me alone."
"The vultures?" Richard asked, puzzled.
"People... they need things from me. Seems like everybody has a pressing problem that can't wait."
"Shepherd, you have a minute?" Owen asked as he approached.
"See?" he said as he followed Owen.
~•~
"I'll wear this dress for Christmas," Olive said, entering her mother's room in a pink tutu dress.
"Are you sure, honey? I think that dress is for dance class."
"But also for Christmas!"
"Hmm, do you think so?"
"Yes, because it's magical and Christmas is magical."
"You're right. Anyway, I wanted to go shopping with you, to choose gifts for your cousins and our outfits."
"I already chose mine. But I can go with you to choose something for Arley. It has to be pink too."
"Why pink? It's not a Christmas color..."
"Because Julie and Steph will wear pink. And we all have to match. We're going to put on a show at Grandma's house."
Addison occasionally let Olive use her phone to video call her cousins in New York, so they could organize these things for when they got together.
"Oh... listen, Olive..."
"I'm going to dance! I've been practicing. Do you want to see?"
"Oh... alright. Show me."
Olive excitedly ran and started twirling and jumping, a choreography she had invented, and she wanted to dance it with a song from Tangled, which was practically the soundtrack of her life.
How was she supposed to tell her daughter that they wouldn't be traveling to New York for Christmas this year? It would shatter her excitement, it would break her heart in the most beautiful time of the year.
No, she definitely didn't want to be the one to tell her that. She would give Derek the task, after all, it was his fault that they wouldn't be traveling.
~•~
At the end of the day, Derek was on his way to his office to drop off some paperwork when he ran into Richard.
"Ugh. It..."
"The place looks different... there's something different," Richard said.
"Something I can help you with?"
"You were jealous of her today."
"I'm sorry?"
"Amelia. That's why you stole her surgery. You miss the pace of back-to-back surgeries, the adrenaline."
"Yeah, I do," he nodded.
Richard took a few steps closer to him.
"Schedule yourself one surgery a day. In the morning, very early. An hour before anyone else. So at the very least you start your day good. You start your day cutting. And you don't have to actually sign all the paperwork, Patricia's an excellent forger. And if you eat alone in the cafeteria, you are a sitting duck. So you need to eat with someone else. That way people are more likely to leave you alone."
Derek smiled. He couldn't believe Richard was confiding his best chief advice in him.
"You can eat with me," he offered.
"Thank you, Richard."
~•~
"Are we not going to New York for Christmas?" Olive asked with tears in her eyes as her father tucked her in before bedtime.
"No, my love. I'm sorry, we can't go this year."
"But why? I wanted to see my cousins!"
"I know, but now Dad is the chief of the hospital, and I can't take a vacation right now. They need me more than ever."
"But what about Christmas?"
"We'll celebrate here, we can make those gingerbread cookies that Grandma taught you, and buy a huge tree for the living room."
"Is there Christmas in Seattle?"
"Of course, there is, Ols. Christmas is celebrated all over the world, not just in New York."
"But in New York, there's family!" she exclaimed, crying inconsolably.
"Ols... don't do this to me, it breaks my heart to see you like this."
"I wanted to see Grandma!"
"I know, but you can talk to her on a video call and..."
"And our show? How am I going to dance with Julie and Stephanie?"
"You can dance here."
"It's not the same! I wanted to go there!"
"We'll try to go for your birthday..."
"You always say the same and we never go!"
"It's not easy to travel to the other end of the country, my love," he said as he wiped his daughter's tears with his thumb.
"But there are airplanes!"
"Yes, but it doesn't make sense for us to go for just one day. I need to be back at the hospital on the morning of the 26th."
"And Mom?"
"Mom is not working yet, but..."
"Mom and I can go to New York!"
"You'll leave me alone here?"
"No, you'll be with Arley and Aunt Amy."
"I think Arley will want to be with Mom, she feeds her."
"Can we go just the three of us then?"
Derek sighed, finding it increasingly difficult to have this conversation with those tear-filled, pleading eyes.
"No, Ols. Mom won't want to travel with just the two of you."
"But I'll behave!"
"I know, it's not about that, it's because..."
"Please!"
"We can't this time, my love. We'll plan it with more time next year."
"But there are still 4 days left until Christmas!"
"It's too little time to plan a trip, we don't even have the tickets, and at this time of the year, all flights are fully booked. There are no more available planes."
"Nooo!" she kept crying, devastated.
"I'm sorry, Ols... I'll make it up to you."
"I hate you!"
"Hey, don't say that Ols..."
"I hate you a lot! And your job!"
"I'm sorry, I didn't want this to affect you like this. I promise we'll have a wonderful Christmas here... Sofía, Tucker will come..."
"AHHHHH!" she screamed through tears.
Derek sighed and tried to hug her, but she pushed him away and continued to scream. Addison was in the doorway, looking anguished. It hurt her a lot to see Olive suffer at Christmas.
They had always tried their best to make it the most important celebration of the year. Since she was born, Christmases became even more magical than they were. They made sure to spend Olive's last five Christmases in New York, and she had already gotten used to that. How could they now tell her that they wouldn't go when she was already prepared to see her entire family, whom she hadn't seen in a year?
"Ollie, come with Mom..." she said softly, seeing that Derek couldn't control her.
Olive got out of bed quickly and ran to hug her mother's legs tightly. Addison surrounded her with her arms and caressed her hair while giving Derek a disapproving look.