The Release

Chapter 3

"I don't think I've been this tired in my life," Meredith sighed as she sat down next to Cristina on the bench in front of the hospital.

"You get use to it," Cristina said with a yawn. They were thirty hours into their  forty-eight hour shift. She wanted to nap so badly but she had to stay alert in case anything else happened with Katie.

"Do you have any idea what could be wrong with my girl?" Meredith asked. She had briefly talked about the case with Cristina in the little she had seen her.

"Check for an aneurysm?" Cristina asked.

"Yeah, clear scans and labs. It's a complete mystery. What if this girl is stuck like this forever?" Meredith sighed as she sipped on the coffee in her hands.

"Go over it again," Cristina said.

"16 year old female, grand mal seizures onset after a fall in some kind of jazzy gymnastics. Labs clear, scans clear," Meredith said.

"A fall? Any other symptoms?" She asked.

"No. Nothing,"

"You sure it isn't an aneurysm?" Cristina furrowed her brows.

"Like I said, the scans were clear. The chances of a CT and MRI missing an aneurysm is so small," Meredith shook her head.

"But there's a chance," Cristina raised her brows.

"Like one in a million," Meredith scoffed.

"Get Shepherd to run an angiogram. That is the only way to tell if an aneurysm was missing," Cristina said.

"I will. Only for my patient," Meredith said with an eye roll.

"You ever going to tell me what's the deal?" Cristina said.

"It was in the past and I've moved on," Meredith said as she shook her head. Cristina just looked at her with a curious look on her face. Meredith heard a little girl squeal and giggle, she looked up just in time to see the beautiful little girl jump into a familiar face's arms.

"Daddy," she said happily, her hair hung in dark curls, she looked like him. A lot like him.

"He has a kid?" Meredith said with a gulp. A lump formed in her throat just thinking about it.

"Yeah, she's like eight. She lives with him, don't know what happened to the mom," Cristina said. Meredith kept watching him with her, the way his face completely lit up while he was talking to her made her stomach turn. She suddenly felt this deafening urge to vomit. She couldn't tell if she was upset or just overwhelmed knowing he had a child. He had a child that wasn't hers. It brought her back to a wicked memory that she had managed to bury deep inside her to forget.

Waking up with a hangover had become an everyday thing. She looked at the man beside her, his darker complexion was bright as the sun peaked through the windows. Her stomach did flips as she felt the burning in her throat. She quickly jumped up and ran to the bathroom, just in time to spew the leftover alcohol in her stomach empty. She felt awful, worse than she had ever felt. She doesn't even remember drinking that much last night.

She had been in Europe for three months, already made her way around Spain and landed herself in France. She didn't have a plan, but she knew it was almost time to move on to the next country. She woke the man, he didn't speak much English so the conversation was just small. She told him to leave and that was that. She felt a pain rumble through her stomach again, she didn't know what was wrong. The pain was unbearable, something she hadn't felt before.

"Are you ok?" The man said to her just before leaving the room. She just nodded and he finally left. She had lied, her whole body was shaking from the intense pain she felt in her stomach. She was scared, in a foreign country and she felt like she couldn't walk.