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Some love it they baked bread. I don’t like bread.
Addison leaned back in the desk chair, her eyes tilted towards the ceiling. She had just gotten off the phone with Charlotte, who told her despite their best efforts, after four months of isolation, she was going to have to come into the hospital. Her patients needed her to operate. She knew it was only a matter of time before she would have to leave the safety of her house on the beach, where Henry and Jake were safe and well.
She stood up and closed the laptop on the desk with a sigh. Addison felt torn; on the one hand, she was excited to cut again and get away from Jake for a hot minute. On the other hand, she knew she would have to leave Henry for at least three weeks, and it would be the longest they had been apart since she got him. The laptop and its charging cord made their way to the bag that it hadn’t been in for months and she looked around the home office that she knew she wouldn’t see for a while.
It had taken her a while to decorate the room once the shutdown happened, but slowly she realized if she was going to take hours of telehealth visits in the room it needed to feel like a happy place. She ordered a blanket that most of the time just sat on the back of her chair in the same ocean blue as the swirls on her scrub cap. Her desk slowly filled with plants and picture frames. Sheer blue curtains hung over the windows, softening the sun on bright days, but still letting her bathe in its warmness. Despite the initial resistance, she was going to miss sitting in the office for hours at a time. But it was only temporary, she reminded herself, as she grabbed the framed picture of Henry that sat on her desk.
He was hanging over the side of a skating rink, a couple of months before the shutdown, while Addison was behind him, mid-laugh. She had just gotten him to make it all the way around the rink on his own without holding on to her and hit the wall where Jake was sitting on the bench like it was the most dramatic thing in the world. Jake had turned and snapped the picture without a second thought, and it became her favorite thing to look at when she got off a call with someone who was particularly panicky.
She dropped the picture into the laptop bag and nodded to herself in the empty room. It would be fine. She wouldn’t get sick. She would be in and out and back home to Henry and his video game obsessive self before they even realized it.
She turned to leave the office and found Jake leaning in the doorway. He had splotches of paint on his arms from the damned model train hobby he picked up that was driving her up a wall. She could only take so many more conversations about trains, and if she tripped over one more she might actually throw a fit.
“Char texted, to let me know you would probably be on your way out,” Jake said, and Addison didn’t have the mental capacity to take care of whatever his feelings were about the situation. It was easier for him to distance himself from the need to go into the hospital, and while he enjoyed general surgery, other people could do that. Addison was one of the precious few who could do what she could. They had already had this fight, that when push came to shove, she would go in. She wasn’t going to let some woman’s child die because she wouldn’t show up. Jake didn’t understand how she could leave him and Henry, and Addison was tired of trying to make him understand.
“It’ll be three weeks tops, just to be safe. I’ll have the laptop, and we can video chat.” Addison responds instead of walking into the trap he laid to reignite the fight.
“Are you even going to tell Henry?” Jake asked, and it takes everything in Addison to not scream at him.
“Of course.” She hissed back at him. “I was packing up what I needed here, then I just needed to grab the suitcase out of the walk-in. Which means I have at least thirty minutes to spend with my son before I leave.”
“Our son.”
“My son.” Addison snapped back and went to move past Jake.
“Addison.” He sounds broken like maybe he is just as tired of these fights, but he starts most of them at this point and she has no pity for him. He reached out and grabbed her wrist to stop her, which it does, but only because it ignited a fire in her.
“Jake Reilly, you know better than to grab me.” Addison kept her voice low and measured, but her face is anything but controlled.
The effect was instant, and he dropped his hold on her wrist as if the touch burned. “I’m sorry Addie. Truly, but…”
Addison cuts him off. “Even Henry is old enough to know a sorry with a but attached is not an apology. Maybe us being apart for a little while will help.” She ended the sentence softer than she started it. She was tired of the fights, but she knew she was not the easiest person to live with. Outside of the pointless two-hour drive that she hadn’t intended to take, they had been stuck with each other for four months.
“Yeah. Maybe.” Jake still sounded like he was going to break into two, but Addison couldn’t handle and fix that all now. Instead, she leaned forward and kissed his cheek before she continued her preparations to leave.
The suitcase had been packed since the moment they all realized this wasn’t ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’, and sat like a looming threat in the back of the walk-in closet. She had painstakingly packed it, with clothes she wasn’t overly attached to in the event that they needed to be left behind. She looped the laptop bag around the extended handle, once it was settled by the front door.
Climbing the stairs to say goodbye to Henry gave her an overwhelming feeling of drowning in slow motion. His door was closed, as it typically was anymore, and she stood in front of it and took a few deep breaths. She couldn’t cry. Not in front of Henry, later in her car, or in the hotel room, she would let herself feel her feelings, but for that moment, she needed to be strong.
Addison brought her hand up to the door and knocked and heard Henry’s muffled voice, “BRB guys.” A few seconds later the door opened and Henry stood in front of her with his dorky smile. He needed a haircut desperately, and Addison couldn’t help but reach out and run her fingers through his shaggy brown hair.
“Mama? What’s going on?” Henry asked.
Addison bit her lip to keep her emotions contained and had to look up at the ceiling to keep the tears from falling as they brimmed at the back of her eyes. “You know, how I told you, at some point, I would probably have to go into the hospital?”
Henry nodded and reached out for Addison’s hand. Addison took it without hesitation and found her eight-year-old pulling her into the bedroom and to sit on his bed.
“I put it off as long as I could, honey. I have to go in.” Addison continued.
“But… It’s gotten worse. What if… What if you get sick?” Henry asked, and Addison felt her heart crack in two.
“Dad is staying home, he won’t have to go in. We can video chat every night. I have one surgery, so it will be a little bit of time away from you to make sure I don’t bring anything back home, but I’ll be in and out. I promise.” Addison pulled him into her, holding him tight, trying to imprint the feeling of holding him into her memory in the most visceral way possible.
“What if you get sick tho?”
“Then Aunt Charlotte will be right there with me, and she will take care of me. You know Aunt Charlotte is too stubborn to let anything happen to me.” Addison was trying her best to be reassuring, but she worried too. Rubbing Henry’s back while she held him, she knew that she was trying to convince both herself and her son at the same time.
“When do you leave?” Henry asked, pulling away just enough to look up at Addison.
“In a little while, but I wanted to spend as much time with you before I left as I could.”
“Can we just hang out? Watch tv? Something normal.”
“Whatever you want, my sweet boy.”
It took fourteen hours after leaving Henry for her to get checked into the hotel room.
Charlotte handed her a room key after she got out of the second freezing decontamination shower and told her they were next to each other, so she wouldn’t be as alone as it would seem. They separated in the hallway with a wave as they entered their rooms and Addison felt like the promise of she wouldn’t be so alone was an empty one.
It takes more effort for her than she wants to admit to not just fall back against the door and sob. The cold, impersonal hotel room is not where she wanted to be after the day she had. A simple surgery turned into a more complex one, and then she had no choice but to deliver the baby early. It was supposed to be a simple surgery by her standards, in and out, fix the baby, and send mom on her way to have the baby at home, where the risk of catching COVID was lower. But nothing had gone right. All she wanted was to open the door to Henry’s room and check on him sleeping.
It’s what she needed. So despite it being three in the morning, she pulled the phone out of her back pocket and Facetimed Jake. When he answered the room was dark and she can just barely make out the lines of his face from the light her video is casting on him.
“Addison? What’s wrong?” The camera moved haphazardly when he sat up in their bed and reached for the light.
“Can you…” She started but, choked on the words in the middle.
“Addison, it is three in the morning. What’s wrong?” With the light turned on, she could see he looked concerned and irritated.
“It was a hard day, I just need to see him, please.” Addison croaked out, the tears she had held back all day had breached the gates and just poured down her face without her permission.
“Addison, he’s asleep. I’m not going to wake him up in the middle of the night.” Jake looked like he thought she was insane for even asking such a thing.
“Don’t wake him, just, let me see him. I always checked on him at night when I came home late. Please. I need this, Jake.” She begged him, and she could probably count on one hand how many times her husband had seen her cry, and he was still on the other end of the phone call, refusing her this one thing.
“Look, Addison, it’s three in the morning. I’ll have Henry call you when he wakes up in the morning. You don’t have to go back into the hospital right?”
Addison shook her head, and pressed her fingers to her mouth, as she tried to keep the sobs from breaking through completely. She just wanted to see Henry, even if it was for a second, and Jake didn’t get it. It was one of the things that had caused a strain in their relationship before the pandemic ever hit, but they had just kept smoothing over it. Despite Jake having raised his daughter, he never seemed to understand Addison’s attachment to Henry. In the heat of a fight he had called her overbearing a few times, but she wasn’t. It was just sometimes, her mind liked to find a dark and twisty corner and pretend she never got her son. That it was all some elaborate hallucination or fantasy and she just needed reassurance that he was hers, and safe.
“He’ll call in the morning. Go to bed, Addison.” Jake hung up the call before she could try to beg again.
With the call disconnected she let herself wail in the empty hotel room. She wanted to throw her phone so badly but knew with her luck it would break and she wouldn’t be able to talk to Henry at all. She knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep until she talked to Henry. Even if she fell asleep, she would be plagued with the nightmares that lived in that dark and twisty corner of her mind.
She had no interest in waking up in a cold sweat after having a nightmare again. She had done it too often to willingly let it happen again. The nightmares liked to take turns between all the darkest timelines for her; the one where she never got Henry, that being asked to adopt him was a mistake and his birth mother changed her mind in the allowed 72 hours; the one where his birth mother decided after seeing him, that she wanted him back and fought Addison for him and Addison lost; the one where the adoption was prevented because of Jake’s history. With how angry she was with Jake at that moment, she knew the third one would make an appearance if she dared to sleep then.
Instead, she unpacked. She was slow and methodical, bras and blouses were hung up in the closet. Pants and skirts are carefully folded and put in the dresser. Underwear is carefully sorted and put away, laid out in the same organization as her dresser at home so that she knows exactly which pile to grab from based on which skirt or pants she plans to wear that day. Then she set up the laptop to charge on the nightstand beside her, with the picture of Henry and her perched behind it. But even though she took as much time as humanly possible to unpack, when she checked her watch it is still only five in the morning and she had time to kill.
She finally peeled off the clean scrubs they had given her after the shower and changed into one of the cheap t-shirts she had packed to sleep in. She had wanted to bring the Yale shirt that made her feel safest, but she couldn’t bear the thought of it maybe getting left behind. The oversized grey shirt was plain and didn’t feel nearly as comforting, but it would do. She found the laundry bag that Charlotte had promised would be in the room so she could send stuff out, and the service was used to cleaning their potentially infected clothing at this point.
Addison had no intention of falling asleep when she laid down on the bed and turned on the tv. She didn’t care what she was watching, she just needed the noise to fill the empty, cold, hotel room. For it to feel less oppressively bleak. But she woke up five hours later, in the middle of the nightmare she knew was coming, when her phone rang.
She swiped to answer the call from Henry’s phone, and the screen showed her how bad she looked. The dark circles that hadn’t lived on her face for so long had found their way home. She was just shy of panting, the nightmare always made her feel like she had run a race in her sleep.
“Mama, dad said you called late last night?” Henry was holding the phone up while he ate breakfast at the kitchen table. He was casually picking at the eggs on his plate, and Addison felt her lip quiver. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours and it was already tearing her apart to be away from him.
“I just had a really rough day. I wanted to see you.” Addison explained.
“Do you just want me to talk? And when you go back to sleep I can hang up?” Henry asked, and pushed his plate aside and stood up. Addison watched as he carried her through the house and back upstairs to his bedroom where he could prop the phone up under his computer monitor.
“Yea, bud, that would be great.” Addison agreed.
Addison doesn’t remember how long Henry talked to her, or even what about. With the exception of telling her he got his first penta-kill in some game, and he was so excited. When she woke back up it was late in the afternoon, her phone was still propped up on the pillow next to her, but the call had been long since disconnected.
She woke up with the boulder of despair that had attached itself to her the night before eased. It wasn’t gone, but she was sure she could do this. Three weeks. She could do this, as long as she talked to Henry, she could do this.
And she did. She managed for two weeks and four days, with daily calls with Henry, where he would tell her about something from school but mostly talk about video games. She was counting down the days till she got to go home again. Until she could wrap her arms around her son again. Until she could sit in her sunny office to do the telehealth visits.
But the universe was cruel to Addison Forbes-Montgomery.
Charlotte knocked at her door the afternoon when she had three days left of the isolation. “Addie, I hate to ask…”
Addison closed her eyes and nodded. She knew whatever Charlotte was going to ask her she would say yes. The woman did not ask her for things unless she really needed them.
“I know you were close to being able to go back home, but this woman came in last night and it looks like her baby has the fetal bands but I need a second opinion at a minimum and probably need you to operate.” Charlotte looked like she hated even having to ask Addison, but she was out of options.
“Of course. That means I’m back to day one of isolating though, right.”
Charlotte nodded sadly. “Another three weeks.”
Addison exhaled hard and nodded. “Okay, another three weeks without seeing my son in person. I can do this. I am The Ruler of All that is Evil. I can do this.”
Charlotte moved like she wanted nothing more than to pull Addison into a hug, but it would have been too risky. “I’ll meet you at the hospital in a couple of hours?”
Addison agreed and found the pair of scrubs she had sent out to be laundered a couple of weeks ago and started the process of getting ready. She stood in the bathroom and braided her hair, then pined it up. Found one of the cheap long sleeve undershirts to put on under the scrub top and pulled it on over a sports bra that was functional. Then shot a text to Jake, “We need to have a family conversation tonight. I should be able to call around 9. Don’t let him go to bed until we talk.”
She doesn’t get a text back but she couldn’t bug him about it anymore. She leaves the hotel with the hope that he was just wrapped up in the dumb model trains, and he would see the message later.
Charlotte’s initial brief on the case ended up being correct and Addison scheduled surgery for a couple of hours after meeting the young mother. Luckily, that surgery went off without a hitch. Mom and baby did well, and she had all the paperwork filled out to discharge them the following morning if they held steady overnight.
Even with the icy shower and trading out scrubs, she still made it back to the hotel a little before nine. She wanted to change and take a hot shower, but the conversation was too important, she could do it after.
She sat on the small couch in and set the laptop up on the coffee table. She didn’t want to tell them it would be another three weeks. But there wasn’t another option. She was the best at what she did, and they knew that.
It was only another three weeks.
Jake called her before she could make the call and the image of Jake and Henry huddled on their couch with the laptop between them made her heartache. She missed sitting in the living room with them and watching tv. She missed the easy way they all existed together. And she had just messed it up.
“My boys!” Addison greeted them with a smile.
“Mama! Why are you in scrubs?” Henry asked, and Addison saw Jake’s face shuttered.
“That was why we had to have a family call tonight. I had to go back into the hospital today…” Addison trailed off.
“You had to,” Jake repeated it, and Addison could feel the fight coming.
“So you can’t come home for another three weeks? You lied.” Henry looked so angry.
Addison bit her lip and looked over the laptop, desperate to find anything else for her to focus on than her son telling her she lied. She knew that Jake’s anger about the situation would only compound the issue too.
“It was an emergency, honey. A baby would have been seriously hurt if I didn’t operate, and we’ve talked about there being some things only I can do.” Addison tried to explain it, but she knew the raw emotions would be too much.
Jake rolled his eyes at her explanation. She wasn’t sure if it was weird professional jealousy that always made him prickly when they talked about her being double board-certified, or if he just genuinely didn’t think her skills in neonatal surgery were that good. Another thing in the house of cards that was their relationship.
“But you promised. In and out, you’d be back home in three weeks. You were almost home.” Henry is almost yelling at the end, but when he grabbed a throw pillow and threw it over the laptop, Addison flinched.
“I know.” Addison acknowledges his pain, and she understands it. “If I could have not gone in today, and that baby would have been fine, I would have. You have to know how much I miss you.”
“But you’re Addison Montgomery, and you put your patients before your family.” Jake rolled his eyes as he said it. “I think we should end this call here, Addison. You and I need to have a discussion and Henry needs to get to bed. We’ll talk.”
“I love you guys. To the moon and back, Henry.” Addison pressed a kiss to her hand and then to the screen.
“Yeah,” Henry responded, dejectedly.
The screen goes black when Jake closes the screen to the laptop on their end and Addison has to sit on the couch with her eyes closed for nearly an hour while she tried not to feel like she was going to break apart at the seams.
When she finally managed to make herself get up from the couch, she looked at the room service menu and flipped to the alcohol. She had glanced over it the week prior, and ultimately decided against it, but that night when she put in her order for dinner, she also asked them to bring a bottle of red wine.
That first bottle lasted a couple of days. But the next doesn’t quite stretch as long. And then the bottle she orders the second time she has to tell Jake and Henry she can’t come home for another three weeks disappears that night.
By the time November rolled around, Addison wasn’t sure if she just kept getting pulled into something at the hospital or if she was avoiding going home. Henry had stopped talking to her every day sometime during August, and she knew it was mostly her fault. Three weeks had turned into months on end. There was a week in October that she could have gone home, she made it through the whole three weeks without going back to the hospital but, neither Jake nor Henry picked up her calls that week. She wanted to blame it on them not answering her calls, but she felt like she deserved not being able to make up with Henry. What kind of mother was she, that she had started resenting his hobby and didn’t find a way to end up back home.
She needed someone to talk to. Cooper brought the kids to see Charlotte, even if they couldn’t get close, they saw each other in person at least twice a month, with a thick sheet of plastic between them in the hotel hallway and her room. But Addison was lucky to talk to Henry twice a month at that point.
Meredith. She could call and talk to Meredith. If anyone was on the front lines, sacrificing time with their children, Addison knew it would be Meredith. If she drunk dialed her ex-husband's mistress/wife, well, that was between her and whatever higher being she chose to believe in that week.
The line rang and rang and rang.
Addison scrunched her face up and looked at the phone. She knew she called the right number. She may not have talked to Meredith a ton over the years, but occasionally something would come up and she would ask for her professional opinion. Or she would call to plan something for Amelia’s birthday.
So Addison hit call again. She was almost sure Meredith wasn’t going to pick up when the line finally clicked.
“Addison?” Only it was not Meredith on the line. Richard’s gruff voice, muffled behind plastic and what sounded like a mask sobered her up rather quickly, despite the half bottle of wine she had drunk already that day.
“Richard. Nope, I’m a little drunk, but I am pretty sure I called Meredith.” Addison responded.
“You did Addie. Meredith, she’s…” The deep breath Richard took rattled across the phone line. “She got COVID Addie.”
Addison didn’t know if she managed to say anything to Richard. The phone fell from her hand and bounced on the bed. She felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice over her, and she was never going to get warm again. Meredith had three kids, she couldn’t…
Eventually, Richard must have hung up the phone when he realize Addison wasn’t going to answer him. When she reached for it, she was half tempted to call Meredith again to get mad at her. This was a dumb joke, she didn’t appreciate it.
But deep down she knew, Meredith and Richard would never joke about that. Instead, she called Jake.
“Nice of you to call Addison.” Jake picked the phone up.
“Not today, Jake, please. I just, I need you to be my husband right now.” Addison begged him.
“Well, I’ve needed you to be my wife since June, but you keep forgetting how to be that, so why do I owe you anything right now?” Jake threw back at her, and it hit home. Was this really what it all boiled down to? She was a crap wife to both men she married. That in the end, it was all her fault.
“I know you’re mad at the situation…”
Jake cut her off before she could finish the sentence. “The situation you keep creating Addison. Your son, since you made that so clear on the way out the door, has not seen you in half a year. You keep doing this. So whatever you want to cry about, find someone else to cry to, because I need you to fix our marriage before I am that person for you again.”
The line disconnected before Addison had a chance to respond.
Addison ordered another bottle of wine and didn’t even have the good sense to feel guilty about it being the second of the day when she opened it.
Addison added calling Meredith into her rotation of calls that would probably not get answered.
Addison started daydreaming about not waking up the next morning when she went to bed, in early December.
The thing about having worked with such a small group of people at the practice is that they know things. So Charlotte knows how much Addison loved Christmas. Charlotte knew that not being able to spend it with Henry was probably destroying her and that if there was a night for them to break restrictions and just be in each other's space it was Christmas Eve.
The door that connected her and Charlotte’s rooms was never locked. They never used it, but if one of them got sick, it was a precaution to make sure one could get to the other. It was a fact that Addison knew in the back of her mind, but when she was sitting on the counter in the bathroom, a bottle of red wine between her knees, in the cheap grey t-shirt and her underwear, it was not one that she was acutely aware of.
She looked at the phone where it sat next to her thigh and took another long drink from the bottle. She had called Henry five times and he didn’t pick up once. Jake would have known she would want to talk to him that day, and yet no call from either of them. Suddenly her passive desire to just not wake up felt more like a need pressed up against her. She had her emergency kit stashed under the sink. She knew the scalpels in there would be clean and sharp, since she replaced them any time she had to use the kit.
She held the bottle of wine in one hand and stared at the bathtub. She knew what she was doing. She knew how to cut to make it quick and mostly painless.
She had burned the bridges with her son and husband. Before, it had been easy to blame it all on Derek, and even in her haze of depression, she knew most of the blame was at his feet. But some of that blame belonged to her. Something in her was broken. It had to be. Who couldn’t handle being in the home she made with her husband and child during a global pandemic. Who kept making false promises that it would just be three more weeks. Then just two more weeks when protocol changed. But it was never just two more weeks. She found herself pulled back into the hospital over small things, or just not going home. This one was on her. She was broken. She had spun herself into a tailspin, convinced that all the people around her would be better off if she just stopped being there. Henry and Jake could move on, and find happiness. Amelia would be okay as long as Meredith was okay. But she had no control over that.
She wedged the bottle back between her knees and picked up the phone. She found the text chain to Henry and hesitated for a second before she let her fingers dance over the keyboard. I love you, always. To the moon and back. Never forget that. She put the phone back down by the sink and looked at it for a couple more minutes, with the faintest amount of hope that Henry or Jake would call. But it wasn’t meant to be.
She had just hopped down from the counter, intent on pulling that little kit out from under the sink when she heard Charlotte. “Montgomery, I swear to god, if you are passed out in the bathroom because you got COVID and didn’t tell anyone, I am saving your life just to kick your ass.”
Addison is crouched down on the bathroom floor, her hand over her emergency kit when Charlotte opens the door. The bottle of wine sat on the edge of the counter now, obviously mostly empty. Charlotte takes a step back out of the bathroom doorway and looks around the rest of the hotel room. She could count seven bottles with a quick sweep of the room and then moved her attention back to Addison.
“Addison, hands away from the scalpels. Right now.” Charlotte’s voice was stern and Addison bit her lip, the tears were too close to the surface.
The only thought that raced around her head at that moment was she couldn’t even do this right.
Charlotte closed the distance between them and pulled Addison up off the floor. “I don’t know what is going on in that pretty head of yours, but that, that is not the answer. Do you hear me?”
Addison wrapped her arms around Charlotte, and let the tears flow out. “I’ve messed it all up. Jake and Henry…”
“Will forgive you. They are mad, the world is on fire, and you haven’t made it home. They will forgive you.” Charlotte tried to comfort her, but she knew a spiral when she saw one. “Come on, let's get you mostly dressed, and then you’re coming to a meeting with me.”
“What?”
“You obviously developed a nasty little drinking problem when I wasn’t paying attention, so we are going to get rid of all the bottles, and I’m going to put a stop on you being able to order any more wine, and then we are going to a virtual meeting,” Charlotte explained, taking her time to make sure Addison was processing what she was hearing.
“Charlotte.”
“Nope, go put pants on, so we don’t accidentally show a bunch of strangers your bits,” Charlotte instructed before she started the clean-up process that needed to happen. Addison sat on the bed while Charlotte moved around the hotel room, and is slightly horrified at herself when Charlotte is finished and had a bag of thirteen wine bottles.
Addison had cleaned out the hotel room the week before, so that meant all of those were from that week. Maybe an AA meeting wasn’t such a bad idea. Or maybe rehab at that point. Addison tried to keep up with Charlotte, but she was in and out of the room in a flurry, getting rid of the bottles and then talking to the front desk about not letting her order anymore. Before she knew it, Charlotte was back in the room, and settled on the bed beside her, with the laptop open and with a zoom link for the meeting.
“You don’t have to talk, but we are doing a meeting a day for the next three weeks, and then, you are going home. And I better see your ass in meetings from home.” Charlotte brokered no argument and Addison nodded in agreement. “No more surgery for a while.” Again Addison nodded. She knew it was inevitable. She had messed up. Just as badly as Amelia had when she had to drag her to rehab.
It was mid-January when she opened her front door for the first time in closer to a year than she had ever intended. She had expected the house to be quiet with Jake focused on his trains and Henry playing some video game, but instead, Henry was yelling almost at the top of his lungs in his bedroom.
“I’m tired of not talking to mama! She is my mama, and I am tired of punishing her because that’s what you want me to do!” Henry’s voice was cracked and it sounded like Addison had caught the end of the argument.
“Henry!” She yelled and the pitter-patter of his feet as he ran down the hallway to the top of the stairs was like a balm on her battered heart.
“Mama!” He flew down the stairs and slammed into her.
“Hey, my sweet boy. I missed you so much,” Addison pulled him tight into her. “I’m so sorry.”
Jake stood at the top of the stairs and she knew that homecoming was going to be harder but she had not expected the low level of hatred that lived in his gaze.
“I was mad for a little while, but I understand. You are superwoman, I don’t get to hog superwoman all to myself,” Henry told her with a smile. “Dad is really mad though. He told me not to call you…” He trailed off.
“It's okay. I heard the end of that argument.” She paused for a moment. “I didn’t scare you did I?”
“The text at Christmas?” He asked.
“Yeah.” Addison nodded.
“A little bit, but dad said you were probably just being weird about the holiday, but you did it to yourself.”
Addison nodded again. “Love you to the moon and back. Dad and I are probably going to have a few really bad fights. And I need you to know, that they are not about you. No matter what you hear, you are always my baby.”
Henry looked up at her and nodded. “You’re going to break up aren’t you?”
“Probably,” Addison admitted.
“I think that’s for the best,” Henry said and punctuated the sentence with a tight squeeze in the hug.
Jake had finally made his way down the stairs by the time Henry let go and Addison looked at him with hard eyes. “Are we fighting in the house or out by the ocean so maybe no one else hears it?”
“Ocean,” He said, and walked through the house and out onto the beach.
“Not about you, remember,” Addison reminds Henry as she followed Jake outside.
She turned around to look and saw Henry perched on one of the chairs on the deck right before she finished closing the distance between Jake and herself. She didn’t need Henry to see this, but if he had been fighting with Jake almost the whole time she had been gone, she understood his need to be around. Her wild little protector.
“So much for time away, healing us.” Jake started.
“We were broken long before any of this, and you know it. At best, we would have been okay as friends, but I wanted something more from you, and I backed you into this marriage. I did. But you weren’t interested in being a parent again. You weren’t interested in being my partner. And all this did was make it clear to me.” Addison fired back without hesitation. After a month of AA meetings, she was really at a place of understanding of how she got to the place she was when Charlotte found her in the bathroom.
“You don’t get to lay the blame all on me.”
“I’m not, you… I’m not. I am telling you, I made choices, that backed you into a corner. We were never right for each other. I was your patient for Christ's sake, Jake. We tried to make it work, but you are not Henry’s father, and you are not my forever. And as mad as I was about all that, you didn’t let Henry call me?”
“I didn’t think it was good for him.” Jake tried to defend.
“What about what was good for me? You iced me out and made me feel like my child was icing me out. You don’t do that to the person you love!” Addison screamed at him at the end, but most of the sound was swallowed up by the waves.
“So that’s it, you’re calling it quits?”
“I refuse to let this be some messy drawn-out bull shit like my first divorce was. I’ll have the paperwork drawn up, we keep anything we entered the marriage with, which means you need to move the fuck out, and I have primary custody of Henry.” Addison doesn’t leave any room for Jake to keep the argument alive. She has decided, and even if he wants to fight it, California will let her file without his agreement.
In October, when she agrees to go back to Seattle to help save the program, she brought Henry with her. The wedding band stays on her finger for now, since she is stuck in the six-month waiting period before they will officially hear their case, but she knows the marriage is dead. They did the counseling to appease the court and after a few sessions the therapist signed off on irrevocable differences.
Dinner with Meredith after the surgery is exactly what she needs to realize what she wants to do. She’ll have to go back to LA, for the time being, to finish up the divorce and ensure that when she moves everything is legal. But she needs to come back to Seattle.
She desperately wants to tell Amelia, that she agrees, that virtual meetings, while better than no meetings, are shit. She wants to tell her that she understands, that feeling of being in a relationship that doesn’t fit. But it's not her moment to tell her story. She gives just enough to let Amelia know she is not alone. That she does understand, better than she ever did before.
But that is something that they can talk about over playdates after Addison moves her life back to where it belongs. To the people she belongs to.