The Home and The Heart

Mean

Another week had passed since Meredith's dinner party, making it almost five weeks since the last contact from Paul. If you could call that meeting contact anyway, Jo thought it was too much of a hostile situation to simply call it contact. If Jo thought she had been on edge before, boy was she wrong. Ever since Jo had found out she was pregnant, life had somehow become even more stressful. Jo was a doctor, she knew the chances of a child in utero surviving what Paul had in store for her this early in a pregnancy.

Jo's day had been relatively simple, nothing out of the ordinary for the doctors at Grey Sloan Memorial. Rounding on patients in the morning, standard splenectomy with Grey, MVC injury bought in on the rig, which turned out to be a non-surgical case. After Jo had shared lunch with Alex in the cafeteria around midday, she wandered into the pit, finding it oddly quiet. Of course, it was an unspoken rule that you never complain about a slow day in the emergency room, but apparently, that rule was unknown to an intern who strolled into the pit and immediately announced the state of the pit. It wasn't even thirty seconds before the ER telephone rang.

Turned out there was a multiple MVC with multiple adult and paediatric casualties eight minutes out. After that, the pit was a flurry of activity with attendings being paged down and equipment and supplies being gathered in preparation for injuries they would need to treat in the next few minutes.

...

The accident was just as bad as they had anticipated, and Jo had immediately been pulled into surgery with Grey and Webber on a patient with severe internal bleeding and a perforated liver. Just as Jo was scrubbing out, the OR door swung open and Alex stepped inside.

"Hey. How was the surgery?" He asked.

"It was good. It was a bit touch and go there for a while, but I think he will be okay. A few interns took him up to the ICU and he will be there for a few days at least, I think. How about you? Were you pulled into surgery too?" Jo asked, reaching for a dry towel to wipe her hands.

"Yeah, I just got out a few minutes ago. I scrubbed in with Kepner and Avery on a kid, ten years old with an internal bleed and an in-field arm amputation at the elbow. Avery managed to re-attach it though so the kid has that going for him, at least. Are you ready to go home soon?" Alex stepped closer to Jo, leaning against the sinks as he spoke.

"Soon, yeah. Give me half an hour or so."

"Ok, babe. I will round on a few patients in peds and then I will meet you in the attending's lounge." With a smile and a quick kiss, Alex was gone, leaving Jo in the scrub room. Jo stood still, absentmindedly watching Meredith and Richard talk on the other side of the glass.

Jo didn't have a lot to do after surgery, and once she had checked on her patient from that morning and collected her things from the resident's lounge, she could head straight to the attending's lounge to meet Alex.

...

In general, Jo thought her day had been great, and she was looking forward to getting home and spending the evening watching a movie and eating whatever takeout she and Alex decided to order. Her bliss came to an abrupt end and was replaced by spine-tingling fear as soon as the pair stepped up to Alex's car to find a note under one of the windshield wipers.

Monday, 6 pm, GSM

It was plainly obvious who had left the note for them to find. Neither of them had returned to Alex's car since they had left it in the hospital parking lot earlier that morning, so the note could have been left for them at any point of the day. The car ride back to their loft was made in total silence. Alex, despite the fury that was bubbling inside of him, knew that if Jo wanted to speak about it, she would in her own time. So, he just stayed with her, holding her hand at any opportunity he had to remove one of his hands from the steering wheel. Just when Jo had thought her stress levels couldn't possibly worsen, they also found an identical note taped to the front door at the loft with a measly piece of scotch tape.