Derek stopped to watch Meredith zooming his daughter and her cousin in broad curves around the lobby.

"Hands up, guys! That's it! Wooooo!"

The toddlers echoed her, their hands held at four different levels. Their thrilled shrieks had been what stopped him initially, but it was Meredith who held his attention. Upstairs, she'd been inciting awe bordering in terror in the interns—He felt like an upperclassman at a K-12 thinking of how young they seemed; how impossible that she'd been one when they met. Hadn't that been yesterday?

Back then, the end of a day wouldn't cause a magical transition between Dr. Grey and Meredith—especially not a Meredith who didn't care what anyone seeing her in the lobby thought. She hadn't separated them yet, and she was, rightfully, he knew, afraid of what someone saw down here affecting how they treated her up there.

She'd only been on the O.R. board once all day. He'd considered paging her to come sit in neuro galleries with him, narrating for the residents; she'd make it fun, not chaffing. But he'd known where she would be spending anything close to spare time, and knew the feeling of desperately wanting to be there when she couldn't.

As she maneuvered the stroller, her hair swirled around her head, shining in the evening light; her smile as joyous as the girls'. These moments where nothing else existed were precious.

The side-by-side stroller was a result of Bailey taking his AmEx to Target the third time she'd caught him struggling with one toddler "helping him push" the toddler-in-theory, who wanted—and absolutely could not have—down. His niece was a miracle, and was meeting her adjusted milestones nicely, but she'd only been walking a week. Shet expressed the unfairness of this sanction with a piercing "ow, ow, ow!" When they clocked two non-white babies, and probably his cast, bystanders stopped eying him like he might be a kidnapper. He couldn't blame them for still looking concerned.

When he'd told Bailey the stroller handled so well, he might retire the one he'd stressed over so intensely last year, she'd snorted. "You and Grey keep doing what you're doing, and you'll be switching to the two-seater anyway."

(He and Meredith had been overlapping at the hospital more than home in the past few weeks, and she'd misinterpreted a few locked doors—Granted, not all of them.)

Arcing the stroller in the other direction, Meredith caught sight of him and froze. Zola immediately twisted around in her seat. "Mama, mo' rollaco!"

"Tomorrow afternoon, Princess." Derek kissed the toddler's cheek, and then the pout that would hopefully be the only objection. He gave Sofia extra kisses from her daddy, as he had for six weeks.

"Mer?" She didn't move. He stopped next to her, turning the girls with his leg to let them watch people pass. "Hey. We're home. We're safe."

She blinked, and with no explanation he could point to, smacked the back of her hand against his chest. Immediately, her expression went from flat to horrified. "I…. I…. Sorry, I…. Crap'"

He couldn't grab both of her hands, but he could take one and wrap his arm around her. "It's okay. C'mon, let me see your eyes." She cheated a glance, her gaze holding all the self-consciousness that'd been gone while she played ride operator. "What's in your head?"

"Not here."

The girls were getting restive, and he could understand not wanting to deal with rumors that would have them splitting up on the basis of one serious conversation. He took the stroller, which really did glide incredibly easily pushed with one hand. She knocked her shoulder gently against his every few steps.

"You shouldn't be doing that," she complained, when he swung Sofia up into her car-seat. "And what she tells her mommas can hurt you." Her eyes flicked away almost immediately. Her mommas.

His chest tightened, but he preferred her scolding him over her worrying. Bracing one side of Sofia's harness with his forearm, he made a goofy face at her. "You gonna tattle on Uncle Derek?"

"Un Durp," she replied, a recent addition to her vocabulary. Relatively recent. Mark thought it was hilarious. Derek had stopped trying to correct that "p" last month.

"Durp is right. Zola, what happens when we get used to babies not talk-talk-talking?"

"Talk, talk. Talky talk. Yakky yak talk back."

"So right, funny girl."

"Yak," Sofia repeated, and then lobbed the stuffed bird he'd handed her at her cousin. It took a minute to get the ensuing feelings under control without venturing into the tumult of two toddler tantrums, a hell that Uncle Derek been able to sidestep in his previous life. This summer had taught him what a blessing it'd been that Amelia could use her words when Dad died, however insufficient they'd been.

Thinking about his baby sister came with a brand new jolt of guilt now that he was spending more than half his days at Mark or Lexie's bedside.

He stood by his choice not to book a red-eye out to L.A, last year. Not when leaving the state to visit his sister in rehab could've become another barrier to bringing Zola home.

"Isn't the system based on eugenicism?" Meredith had said. "Alzheimer's. should be glad we're asking for a kid who's already here."

"There are environmental triggers involved," he'd pointed out. "And I'd hate to draw their attention to the closest member of my family relapsing. I can say she and I had totally different childhoods. Her addiction is no one's fault, but I'll be avoiding some parenting techniques Mom saved for her."

"You could—"

"She has support," he'd said, when the day before Liz had referred to the situation as Amelia Bedilia Again. "Addison has done this before, and I'm not going to make you wait for a decision here alone. Besides, I don't want to miss Zola's homecoming. Not again."

She hadn't exactly smiled, but she hadn't looked like she was afraid she'd misread his tone, either. That had been progress; another reason he'd known he was making the right choice.

He got Sofia focused on clicking together a set of plastic links, and Meredith distracted Zola with her stuffie. That she did that so well was something he cited whenever she fell into a spiral over her similarity to her mother. Ellis Grey definitely didn't have different voices for Rawr the Lion and Pascal "Pasky" the Floppy Frog.

"Daddy hurt, Mama drive," Zola announced as he got in, as she'd done twice a day, minimum, for weeks.

"Daddy will be cleared to drive soon," he told her. "You know who's going to do that? Sofi's mama!"

"Mommy, Mama," Sofia said, pointing to the hospital.

"On caw," Zola responded. It took Derek a moment to realize she'd said on call, not uncle. Both were true. Both were true, for today.

"Is it gonna be speeding again?"

"Huh?"

Meredith shook her head, wiping her hand over her mouth like she was trying to retroactively catch the words. He grabbed it.

"Hey, nope."

"It's...it's nothing. You've been sitting with Mark all day."

"And you've been with Lexie."

He wouldn't let her see it as a competition, but he didn't know which was harder. They both had to be moved to avoid bedsores, but Mark was otherwise still. Lexie was showing signs that she could wake up, or she could get a PVS diagnosis—Well. No. She'd be diagnosed with Unconscious Wakefulness Syndrome. The change had been suggested just last winter, after thirty-five years of trying to change things "vegetative" remained a stigmatized term. He should've ordered the switch in the terminology used in the department, instead of waiting to see if it caught on, but he'd do it now. He'd never be able to consider Lexie a vegetable, and he wouldn't force some other family to apply the term to their loved one.

"Mer." Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel. "Head to the overlook."

"We have to feed the-"

"There are Puffs in the diaper bag," he said, accurately betting on the echoes of "PUFFS!" from the backseat. "If I was driving, I'd be making the turn."

"Yeah, well, you're not," she groused, but followed his directions, as she'd have humored him doing so. As though she wasn't the one who'd first taken him there.

He wished there'd been a reason to direct her to the ferry. The house was nearly furnished; they were constantly having to lift Zola off of packing boxes. If Mark or Lexie had a change in status; they wanted to be closer than they'd need to be ordinarily.

With only a couple of words, they settled the girls back into the stroller. Meredith kept her free hand firmly locked in his, and he felt the slight tug as they approached the fourth bench from the parking lot.

"Is that it?" be asked, hanging back while she arranged the stroller beside it.

Meredith sighed and pointed to a spot just over her shoulder with the snack bag, raising a surge of protest from the Puffs gallery. "Carvings don't disappear. That's kinda the point."

He leaned over her, more intent on kissing her than confirming the longevity of the MD-2006 she'd scratched into the wood with his pocket knife.

"I became an M.D. this year." she'd claimed. "Nothing to do with you!"

It'd been the kind of gesture he'd performed by rote with Addison, and had become wholly new with Meredith. He'd still do anything to see the gleam in her eyes whenever she protested Derek, no one actually does that, and meant they didn't do it for her.

The night she'd been the one to make the gesture. She'd pickpocketed his multitool, and blushed deeper with every gouge it took to make the M. He could still make out the waver her giggling had caused. She'd gotten more focused as she went, giving him the time to adjust to the feeling that he'd discovered a color that only he could see.

"So," he said, once the girls were happily chomping on puffed corn.

Her shoulders rose a millimeter, preparing to deem her concern nothing/stupid/ridiculous. Then, she exhaled, and they lowered.

He'd had her convinced that none of her concerns were too minor before the shooting. Her regression then should've clued him into something, but it'd been so like her to weigh everything against taking a bullet. He taken too long to realize how imbalanced her scales had become.

This time, he'd put effort into preempting this, even while they were in the woods. She couldn't claim she wasn't affected by it, and he didn't think she'd been holding back. She clearly thought that she was upset about was different.

He squeezed her hand to express that he noticed that she didn't try to dismiss whatever it was, while stretching his other arm out on the back of the bench.

"Playing rollercoaster made me remember that night…. Well, you were there."

"I was there. Doesn't mean I don't want to hear your side."

"So you say." She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, and he flattened his right hand against her back. They'd sat this all the time when she'd worked herself up studying for the boards. She'd been far more confident than he'd been before his.

"I thought about that place you and Mark were going on about. With the water slide that got 9-Gs."

"What, Action Park?" He laughed, dryly, which was more than he'd been able to do around the fire as darkness fell, even though Mark saying, "Hey, remember the Cannonball Loop?" had taken him back to bragging about their amusement park exploits on the first day of school.

Mark had tried to give off the same air of bravado he'd had then, in spite of having to pause to pull more air from the oxygen canister. They were rationing them, but no one could bare to tell him to stop talking. He improved morale for all of them, especially while Lexie was awake and aware.

"Manhattan was a great playground for adults in the pre=Disnification days. Kids, we made our fun, but by July anyone who could vacated."

Including, Derek had not commented, Mark's parents. They'd put him on the camp bus in June and return from the Cape in time to buy him an MTA pass for the school year. (Derek had convinced himself that talking Addison into vacationing in the Hamptons was taking a stand of some kind. Mer would've laughed in his face, and rightly so.)

"So," Mark had rasped. "We'd pile as many people as we could into someone's jalopy, and head for this amusement park in Jersey. Hardest part was escaping Amy. She tried to hide in the trunk, once."

Lexie's voice was thready, and Meredith interpreted. "Why ditch a kid to go to an amusement park?"

"Lemme put it this way," Mark said, displaying the charm he'd used to talk girls into letting their bikinis come off on the Tarzan swing.

Lexie said something else, and Meredith could barely speak through her laughter. "Presented for the approval of the Crashed Plane Society, he calls this story, 'Dude, Check That Out.'"

Cristina and Robbins had snorted, leaving Mark and Derek in the dark—an ironic way to think of it, he discovered, when Meredith explained the Nickelodeon horror anthology show framed by kids in the "Midnight Society" telling each other creepy stories. Another instance of the Grey sisters' references often fell in the place where Amelia had been too old for something and the flock too young. It was jarring, sometimes, to be faced with how much pop culture he'd missed as a resident but it would've been much stranger if they'd crossed over with his sisters' kids.

"You want a story? Place must have ghosts, especially the kind made with dead adolescent energy. I call this 'Paean for Poltergeist Park.'"

Meredith's jaw had dropped, presumably at Mark's off-hand understanding of something occult. He'd made a note to get them talking horror some time.

(He needed more time.)

"It begins with a Wall Street mogul who got kicked out for selling penny stocks, and bought a couple-a ski lodges in Jersey—"

"Like you do," Robbins said, covering his pause for breath. It was the first time she'd spoken in hours.

"Mm. Wasn't enough. Off-season. So, he put this massive Alpine Slide over a slope, followed by Go-Karts, couple dozen more water slides—"

"White water rafting meant to mimic the Colorado River," Derek put in. "Might've been bumpier."

"Yeah." Mark's expression went nostalgic. Derek was pretty sure he'd once gotten stuck under an overturned raft. "Pure eighties, 'whatever doesn't kill them, we don't have to know about.' Nothing I'd let Sof anywhere near.

"Might notta been so bad if the staff hadn't been locals who were the same age as we were, on average. No one listened to them. Big guys jumped off the Tarzan Swing without checking to see if anyone was below them; the path to Motor World went through the beer tent. Events staff must'a had a real thing for Polish Festivals."

"Polish?" Cristina repeated.

"And German. Anything to get people to trade their hard earned cash for beer. We didn't bother with that. We made friends with the girls filling the tankards."

"I'll bet," Robbins muttered.

"That's where I got all my Class Action Park insider information, Robbins. This guy had the kind of money where he could draw a squiggle on a napkin and get it turned into a slide. That's how they got The Cannonball Loop. Up until I got initiate d into—what was it, the Crashed Plane Society?—that was the scariest shit I'd ever experienced. It was this enclosed slide that went down sixty feet with a complete vertical loop at the end." Mark drew the acute angle of the slide in the air with a shaky finger. "Rumor had it there'd been test dummies that'd come flying out beheaded. He paid some of the teenage schmuks he employed a hundred bucks to test it. First go 'round, you get some contusions, maybe a concussion. Next group pops out with a bunch of lacerations, and no idea how they happened. Workers take the top of the top off and what do they find embedded in there?" Ever the storyteller, Mark had forced his way to the end of that sentence before inhaling—gasping really. "Teeth the first crew left behind."

A half-dozen people who'd survived a plane crash shuddered in unison. Robbins broke the silence. "To think I wanted to take Sofia to Disneyland."

"Aw, we're still gonna do that," Mark asserted. "Your her mom, don't you want to take her to your home planet?"

Derek definitely heard the huffs amusement from Cristina and Meredith, but he might've imagined tracing a similar sound to Lexie. It was as likely to be the wind or the fire. He'd hoped not.

"Disney would never pull shit like that," Mark continued. "These idiots worked on it for two years, and after a month some advisory board on ride safety shut it down. In 1985. But don't worry, our story isn't over. During that month, one Derek Shepherd hears all that, along with the claim that the guy's teenage son wouldn't go down it without wearing a full hockey uniform, and says, 'bring it on.'"

"I, uh, don't think it went quite like that," Derek objected,, aware that all the others were eyeing him doubtfully.

"Right, I left out that Lizzie told you all that while daring you to try it."

That…might've been true. "You tried it too," he muttered, and Meredith snorted at him. "I figured people were exaggerating, and it'd really just give you friction burns, like the others."

"Just," Cristina repeated.

"The burns were nothing. It was what came next that traumatized you. Talk about half-assed first-aid," Mark said. "We're Mt. Sinai out here in comparison. I don't know what they put in the stuff they'd spray on you. That crapmade grown men cry, and it turned your skin orange, so it wasn't just Bedadine.

"That's the kind of thing most of us experienced, but over the years there were deaths. An employee whose Alpine Slide sled jumped the tracks. Others were in Tidal Wave Pool. One guy got electrocuted. Some big injuries happened on the Motor World side. The owner ran a bunch of lawsuits into the ground. Changed the place's nickname from 'Traction Park' to 'Class Action Park.' He couldn't even get freaking Donald Trump to invest in it."

Meredith stiffened under his arm, and murmured, "Maybe you do know what drowning feels like."

He'd managed not to repeat the argument he'd used whenever Mom had noticed the marks and gone off about how they knew better—God had they known.—"I can swim." He'd cut Meredith deeply with words in the past, and that one would've gone to the bone.

He didn't remember what he'd said, or if he'd just smoothed her hair away from her face. He did that now to get sight of her eyes when she rested her forehead on her clasped hands. Her thumbs touched the tiny pink scar.

"I don't think it closed until the nineties," he offered. "You and Sadie…." He trailed off before the glare was leveled at him.

"We might've gone, if we hadn't been total snobs. But…."

To get past the gorgon, Perseus had to look in the mirror. "But the stuff you guys did wasn't about the thrill?"

She shrugged, lifting her head and pressing her hands to her lips. "Maybe it was. There were thrills, absolutely. Some of our antics were tame compared to what we see in the E.R., and some absolutely weren't. Just, it wasn't…. My car accident was an accident—"

"I kn—"

"But I was careless with my life…or…I wasn't careful." A line appeared at the side of her mouth.

Her stories were closer to Amelia's than to his, but Mom had never said that she was going to wake up in a bathtub of ice missing a kidney. Not to her face, anyway.

"Mostly, I took my cues from everyone else, and they weren't worrying about my safety or their own. Even Sadie…like I've said, ceviche, except she might've called a few times, and shown up once I'd recovered.

"We acted like she was in charge, but part of me…part of me knew—could've never said, but knew—it was the other way around. Like those two." She nodded at the babies. "They're not even playing together properly, yet. Zola's older, a little more social, but I've seen times where Sofia is absolutely in charge. Sadie could be a whirlwind, and if I'd let myself be totally caught up in it…. Twenty-five alive was always a catchphrase for her and a promise for me, even if I didn't…if I sometimes came close to breaking it."

"We were out here when you first told me about her, remember? That she was your Mark, except you didn't think she'd show up this time. Then, she did. Is that your point? That I drew him here?"

"That's what's in your head. What I mean…. Sadie and I did risky things—some dangerous, some just risking a ticket for trespassing. We were together, but in a way we were just…bouncing off each other, but we started in different places and continued in different directions.

"Maybe Mark took your lead a lot, but I'm sure he did dangerous shit to impress the girls at the bottom of the slide, too. I don't think that was your motive."

He didn't either.

One time Mark got them into a party after the gates had been locked, but the girl he'd followed into the shed hadn't worked at Waterworld, and wouldn't have been impressed by his riding the Loop. Sure, he'd noticed all the female bodies on display, but that hadn't been the thrill he was seeking.

"What he said about the guy's kid and the hockey gear," she said. "It's a challenge I might've taken, and I wouldn't have been trying to prove I was a tougher forward."

Derek's heartbeat became audible to him as the word "hockey" passed her lips. He wished that he could remember playing on the line with Mark; every pass a predicator for how well they'd work together at an operating table in ten years. In twenty. In two years it would be thirty.

Had Michael Boetcher gone on those trips to Jersey? He didn't think so. There would've been so many boat jokes. So many recitations of Oh Captain! My Captain! Mike had been a strategic thinkers; less likely to be into that lack of structure, but he'd also been a teenager. They'd had plenty of tagalongs looking for one day of adventure.

Derek's whole life would've been different if Mike's accident had happened because someone misjudged their descent into a pool called "the death pool," or if he'd fallen off his sled on the Aquaskoot. It wouldn't have been Derek's fault. Probably. Except…. Mark hadn't been Liz's coconspirator when it came to doling out dares.

Derek had.

He hadn't seen himself as a leader. Mark was the social one, the one who made friends. Derek had been—What, Shepherd? The brains? What's wrong with you?

"But you were a kid," Meredith continued. "You'd been holding it together for years by then, right? Trying to be the peacemaker and the security guard?"

He shrugged. He would've classed Mark as the peacemaker. Derek going out for hockey was a direct result of the robbery. Not because of his deeply buried rage—not just that, anyway—Because he almost hadn't been able to hold his little sister down.

"When was your motorcycle accident, Derek?"

"Friend of Mark's needed it driven down to the city from Vermont. We swapped off driving on a gorgeous night. Moon so clear you could see the craters."

"I didn't ask where."

"Med school. My second year."

"What else happened that year?"

He glanced over at the stroller, where the girls were entertaining each other by alternating pointing and saying, "Boat!" He caught his daughter's eye, mentally wishing her luck if she ever tried to avoid her mother's questions.

"Amy got caught with pills," he admitted. "None of us had known anything was going on. " He sighed, carding his hand through his hair, and then put it over hers. "We didn't want to know."

Suddenly, he realized that the insane cannonball slide had been open in the summer after Mike's injury. He started to tell her the story, finally, so she'd know how right she was, but she wasn't looking at him.

"Was that it, when Idied? Was flirting with some cute girl enough of a rush?" She flinched and shook her head. "Don't— That's not really…."

"It was risking my life. Stop trying to undermine your own insight." Was he so volatile that she couldn't point out his flaws without immediately deflecting?

"I don't want to fight. We might be facing a lawsuit; we're going to have to help Lexie recover. The interns think I'm mean. If it hadn't become as gauche as it always should've been, I'd be the Neo-Nazi. Hilarious, because I have faced down more than a few skinheads."

"You're not mean."

"Haven't you heard? I'm Maleficent. No one can decide who's Snow White and who's Sleeping Beauty—Lexie hates apples, she's still asleep, should be obvious, except Snow probably wakes up despising them, and she is—Point being, either way, I'm probably also the Evil Queen, or maybe Dopey."

"You know, Maleficent's getting a movie. They're saying Angelina Jolie's signed on."

"Why do you know that?"

"You read them books, I go leafing through magazines at the nurses' station." He sighed. "In thirty-six years, I've always had something to say to him, whether I could or not. Now that it matters…."

"He knows. Not in a woo-woo way. In a maybe he can hear you, depends on the study, but mostly he's known you for decades. He's not missing out on the past. If you really can only think of Sofia's newest word, or Zola's latest dance moves, then you're will always be that stuff. That's what sucks."

He kissed the top of her head. "Thank you."

She shrugged. "Not like I listen to myself. I can't start reading sequel, in case…for stupid reasons, so I just started the book over with Lexie. I have so much I should say, but she…."

"She's going to wake up, and you want to tell her then."

She nodded at their clasped hands, like she was ashamed about something. He'd just said…. Oh. "Mer?"

"Hm?"

"Did you get the script?"

"What?"

"You know, the script. The 'My Husband's Best Friend is Dying' script. With the 'And My Sister's Recovering' insert."

"That's not a thing." She said it like she was sure, but with an undercurrent of, but what do I know?

"Correct, it's not." He wrapped his good arm around her waist as she reflexively relaxed. "That's why this has no universal rules. Only ours. Which so far boil down to not shutting each other out; not comparing tragedies. Speaking up about pain. Being honest. Asking for beating yourself down or up. Got it?"

"Mmm. Think that'll get us thirty-six years?"

"Psh, that's nothing. All of my grandparents lived to be shriveled old bats." That made her laugh, really laugh, the sound that made his chest feel impossibly light.

"Maleficent kinda looks like a bat."

"She—"

Meredith put a hand over his mouth, and used the other to take out her phone. In a couple of taps she had an image of the bad fairy pulled up. "Oh. She does. There's another reason why the interns are wrong. You're going to live to be a hundred, and be as sharp and lovely as ever. I'll be a hundred and twelve, Lexie will be a remarkably spry ninety-five, and these few months…. They're going to be a memory."

"Memories can be painful," she pointed out. "At first when I finished Wicked and was gonna bring in the second one, I started reading articles t-to Lexie. Advances on Per—UWS long term, and her injury. Would that be better? More stimulating, or something?"

"Nah," he said, and she let out a long breath. "Stories are the first things we learn to process. If she can hear, a story, especially one as evocative as that. Especially since it's one of Mark's favorites. Lexie'd at least be interested in those journals. Bet if I read him neuro research, he'd wake up just to make me stop."

"I'll bring one of the spinal injury journals I borrowed from your office tomorrow if you want to try."

"Thanks."

It was good that her focus was on the possible paralysis. There wasn't anything they could do to wake Lexie. If she did get a UWS diagnosis down the line that would become Meredith's focus, especially if he couldn't operate. If he hadn't kicked her off his service—He shrugged himself out of that eventuality. Lexie would wake up.

"Even without Mark's campfire tales, you'd have reason to be worried," he said. "I scared you after the shooting, and here you are, doing just as much to hold everything together, and ot's more complicated. Cristina was even further out of your reach, and now she's actually gone. Arizona lost her leg. Mark's not waking up, and Lexie hasn't. You need to know if you can rely on me through the next part, or if you should be telling Callie not to clear me to drive."

"You make me sound so calculating."

"No." He drew her closer and tried to find an angle where he could see her face: hold, and comfort her. "There's nothing wrong with wanting to know what's coming."

She shrugged, out of accusations for now. Not wanting an argument didn't mean she wouldn't push far enough to provoke one; sometimes to get it over with, sometimes because that was where any real conversation went with her mother.

"We're together in this. We're home."

"Zola has both parents," she murmured.

The babies turned to her. "Zo," Sofia repeated and pressed her palm against Zola's cheek. When that got her licked, she giggled.

"I'm sorry she won't know him."

"Me too."

"I'll understand. If up in lock-up again. I won't like it, but if it was…. If Cristina died, I would've—"

"Meredith."

"I'm just saying. I've known Lexie for less time, and I'm still..."

"Scared?"

She looked up at him, and he could see the list of everyone else's damage in her eyes. For maybe the first time, she didn't recite it, just nodded, and turned her face into his chest, staying there until Zola announced, "Uh-oh, wet!" and lobbed her sippy cup out of the stroller—He was proud of her for making the connection—Sofia copied her.

"No, no, So-So!" Zola chastised.

Predictably, Sofia started to cry, but not loudly enough to drown out Meredith's snicker. "Our baby is a bad influence," she lamented with a smile, getting up to collect the cups.

s"I don't know," he said, as Sofia's tears became giggles again in response to Zola imitating the faces Meredith made to cheer them up. "I think she's being as supportive she can be. I'm sire Sofia appreciates it."

Meredith rolled her eyes at him, but she smiled throiugh the drive home.

A/N: Action Park is a wild story. I recommend the documentary "Class Action Park" if you're interested. The son, Andy Mulvlhill has written a book, too, but I haven't read it yet.

Review, please!