Alice ✧ [a. karev]

epilogue

This story could've started in so many places. It could've began at Jade's birth and you could know her whole life story. It could've began at her mothers death, or her acceptance to medical school, or at Addison and Derek's wedding.

Looking back at her life, she sometimes feels like it started after the plane crash. Like her life is split into two parts. There is pre-plane crash and there is post-plane crash. And sometimes she doesn't know where to begin.

Both are interesting. Both are jam-packed with memories, both joyously elating ones and miserably sad ones. But you know most of the pre-plane crash story already, and Jade finds that post-plane crash has a much happier ending.

✧

Alex was not happy to see an intern cradling his fussy baby. He was even less happy to learn that his wife was the one who left the baby with her before rushing out of the hospital.

Confusion clouded worry and annoyance when he arrived at the apartment, door unlocked and Jade's carefully packed final suitcase spilled open in the front entrance.

He called and called and called and went through every possible rational explanation. She was too distraught to come back to an empty apartment and went to stay at Mark's apartment. She wanted to be close to his things and close to Callie. That would be fair. She could very well be back at the hospital, wanting to be buried in work to cover her grief.

Alex knew his wife better than anyone in the world and he knew none of these explanations made sense. Jade would do none of these things and would not leave the apartment like this, on the night they were supposed to leave it forever, if she were in her right mind. But Alex told them to himself as possibilities anyway.

When it was nearing 3 a.m. and not even Alex's worry was keeping him awake anymore, the last call he made only rang once before going straight to her voicemail. If she's using her phone enough for it to die she has to be safe enough, he rationed as his eyes closed against his own volition.

✧

Jade had barely even realized the sun was setting. She hadn't meant to stay there that long, fully clothed laying on the sand. She hadn't even really meant to be in L.A. in the first place. It's just where she ended up.

The persistent honking of a trucks horn had broken her out of her daze. Opening her eyes she was met with the navy blue of the sky above her and she sat up, catching the last few minutes of a marigold sunset before the only light on the beach came from the moon and the lingering artificial light from the houses behind her.

She tapped her phone to check the time before realizing it was dead. She didn't move for a while longer, too long probably, and by the time she got up all the lights in Addison's house had gone out, but she didn't notice.

She knocked lightly on the door, waiting a few moments before knocking again.

Addison answered after that second, slightly louder knock in a silk robe and a baby monitor in her hand. A man Jade figured was Jake stood behind her, his arms loosely crossed in front of his t-shirt clad chest.

Addison's expression remained confused and concerned as Jade babbled through some sort of explanation. Her expression changed to one of shock that slowly morphed into what Jade felt was horror when she revealed that Mark was dead.

Perhaps baby Henry somehow sensed the abrupt interruption to his household's routine and that's why he woke up crying when he did. The sound crackled through the monitor as any baby's would have, as Gabe's would have.