𝐑𝐈𝐒𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐏𝐇𝐎𝐄𝐍𝐈𝐗 ━━ 𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐤 𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐩𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐝

thirty five | freedom

"Okay, listen up."

An exhausted Bailey stumbles to the front desk, a plastic clipboard in hand.

"O'Malley, you're with Shepherd. Phoenix, you're with Sloan. Stevens, you're with Burke. Karev, with Addison. Go."

Meredith stays behind to be assigned a task while Cristina tries to convince Bailey to let her scrub in on a case.

"Aren't you glad I'm working with you today?" My hip bumps against Derek's.

"Technically, you're under Sloan, not me." He greets me with a swift peck to the cheek. "I have surgery, though. Right before the wedding."

His face beams brightly, but the cautious look in his eyes says otherwise.

"Why are you staring at me like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like. . .you know something that I don't."

He shrugs his shoulders. "I'm the best man, if you want to know. Preston picked me to be his best man."

"That's sweet. I'm one of the maids of honor, so. . .it's rather fitting." I fail to look away from the glint in his eyes. "Okay, what is the matter with you?"

"I met up with your dad yesterday. At Joe's. Shared a couple of drinks."

"Better than me. I had a whiff of Meredith's tequila sunrise while drinking my fourth cup of coffee for the night."

"He doesn't want me to be with you."

The fronts of my brows furrow. "What?"

"Lennox knows I'm damaged goods, Mark knows I'm damaged goods. . ." A shaky sigh leaves his lips.

"We can talk later." I clear my throat. "You have surgery, I have to get back to Mark. . .it'll be fine, okay? Everything's going to be fine."

With uncertainty lingering in my thoughts, I walk away from him. Meredith and I meet up by the front desk by the main entrance of the hallway.

"Meredith. . ."

"The chief's wife is pregnant. And it can't be his if they were divorced. Unless they — no, I don't want to think about it."

"Leven. . ."

"Why does my father not want me to be with Derek? Does he not want me to be happy or something? Thought he learned his lesson after twenty years of torment."

"You know how something it's about you, sometimes it's about Meredith, and sometimes it's about me? This is really, really about me."

The two of us swivel around in our chairs, staring up in shock at the sight of Cristina without her eyebrows.

"What happened to your face?"

"Oh — Leven."

"Don't lie to me. You were thinking the same thing."

"Mama took my eyebrows." She trembles on the spot. "She took my eyebrows, and now I am a Burke."

Bailey lets Meredith and I leave early with Cristina to make sure she gets ready for the wedding instead of making a run for it.

But with less than thirty minutes for the wedding, we stick to prepping in the locker room with the other interns.

"Moment of truth, people."

Patricia walks in with six individual envelopes, each one addressed to one of us. She passes around each of them, and we hurry to open them up.

"Yes, thank God."