Chapter Text
Seattle greeted them with a drizzle that refused to stop — the kind that didn’t fall so much as hang in the air, clinging to coats, hair, and nerves. Monica Beltran pressed her hand against the car window and watched the droplets slide down like they were racing to nowhere.
“Home sweet home,” Adriana said from the driver’s seat, her voice too bright to be real.
Monica didn’t answer. Home was a generous word. The city was new, the hospital was new, but the ache between them had made the trip. They were supposed to be starting over. It already felt like they’d arrived at the end of something.
The building manager handed them keys to a temporary apartment — modern, beige, and echoing with silence once the door shut behind them. Adriana immediately began opening boxes. She liked to organize chaos, to make things livable. It was her nature. Monica just stood there, her hands still, her brain already at work — on anything but this.
“It’s smaller than the pictures,” Monica said finally.
Adriana didn’t look up. “It’s temporary. Like everything else.”
Monica turned, catching the sharpness that flickered across her wife’s face. Wife — a word that felt heavier now, like a title she’d been stripped of but still had to wear.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
Adriana sighed, the sound of someone who’d run out of good answers. “It’s supposed to make you feel realistic.” They didn’t talk much after that.
Grey Sloan Memorial was already awake the next morning, humming with movement and caffeine and chaos. Monica felt at home in that rhythm — clipped voices, alarms, surgical pages firing off like background music. It was a place where she could disappear into her work until her mind went blissfully blank.
Adriana, meanwhile, was being led through the patient advocacy offices by a well-meaning administrator who kept using words like resourceful and compassionate. Monica could practically hear it from across the hallway. The irony was almost too much.
They’d agreed not to mention their relationship to anyone at the hospital. They had different last names. They could give each other space. Passing Adriana in the corridor that afternoon, Monica felt a tiny twist of guilt when her wife smiled and she didn’t return it.
At lunch, Adriana found her in the cafeteria, seated alone with her phone and a salad she wasn’t eating. She sat down across from her, trying for casual.
“We should probably talk about… what this is going to look like,” Adriana said quietly.
Monica didn’t glance up. “What what’s going to look like?”
“Us,” she said, keeping her tone soft. “I know you don’t want to do therapy again, but we can’t keep pretending we’re fine.”
“We’re not pretending,” Monica said flatly. “We’re surviving.”
Adriana’s expression faltered. “That’s not enough.”
“It’s what we’ve got.”
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on. Adriana stared at her hands for a long moment, then said, “Maybe we just… stop forcing it. You do your thing, I do mine. No expectations, no guilt.”
Monica frowned. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying maybe we need to give each other space. Be honest about what we want. An open marriage doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”
Monica let out a sharp laugh. “You think sleeping with other people is going to fix this?”
“I think pretending we’re still the same people we were before I messed up isn’t working,” Adriana said quietly. “Maybe if we stop suffocating each other, we can start… forgiving each other.”
Monica stood, tossing her tray into the bin. “You want to fix your guilt by screwing strangers, go ahead. I can’t believe you’re talking to me about this at work.”
“Well, you don’t want to talk about it at home.”
Monica turned, but Adriana’s voice followed — quieter now, breaking just a little.
“Maybe it’s the only way we stop hating each other.”
Monica didn’t answer. She walked out into the hallway, her pulse pounding harder than she wanted to admit.
She told herself she wouldn’t think about it again. She would.
By the end of the week, she’d be the one saying yes.
The next day, Monica drove to work without Adriana. It was bad for the environment but good for their cover story. As Monica waited for a parking spot to become available, she looked down at her phone. Her screensaver was blank. It used to be her wedding photo. She scrolled through her photos and found it again. They were so happy. They thought nothing would ever take it away.
That was before Adriana cheated. Monica looked away in disgust, just in time to see the parking spot that she was waiting for get stolen.
She pulled her car forward. “Hey. I was waiting for that spot.”
“You were on the phone,” a beautiful brunette with piercing blue eyes said. Monica hated her on sight.
“I was responding to an important text,” Monica said, because it was easier than saying she was just wondering why she stayed married.
“On your phone,” the woman responded.
That’s it. Monica was going to hate whoever this was, forever.