None of the Grey-Sloan Memorial doctors are having the morning they had planned. Simone Griffith and her father and sister, Ebony, are helping her grandmother move into an assisted living facility, though Granny Joyce doesn’t remember picking out the place. Joyce also still thinks Simone is her mother, Denise. Simone can’t quite bring herself to leave, even if it means she’ll be late for work.
Lucas Adams, on the other hand, won’t be late. He might get his Aunt Amelia Shepherd into a car accident, though, as he’s so focused on the questions she’s asking him in preparation for the upcoming intern exam that he flies through a stop sign. When he asks Amelia why she can’t just ask him the questions without backseat driving, she asks him why he can’t study with the other interns. And that is a can of worms Lucas can’t quite bring himself to open on the drive to work.
Speaking of the other interns, Mika Yasuda and Benson Kwan, who are now roommates, are arriving at Grey-Sloan Memorial in Mika’s van, which seems to be on its last leg. When “Leona” finally comes to a thumping halt in the middle of the parking lot, Benson hops out, leaving Mika to handle getting the van started again on her own.
Teddy Altman and Owen Hunt are walking into the hospital, going through the motions of their life — Allison’s playdate and what kind of socks she needs for the indoor gym, etc. — when they run into Amelia, who has made it to the hospital in one piece. Owen immediately bails on the conversation, heading to the cafeteria, which Teddy finds odd. She mentions his weird behavior to Amelia, but she can’t get a straight answer out of her either, not even when Amelia’s terrible lying skills make it clear that whatever Owen is going through, he’s been talking to Amelia about it.
In the ICU, Miranda Bailey is walking the interns to a patient’s room and reminding them that their exam is in one week — and they better not screw it up. They also need to complete their procedure logs. Adams and Yasuda are done, but Kwan and Jules Millin still have to finish. And Griffith? She arrives late, just as they reach their patient’s room. Their first stop of the day is with Dorian Cardenas, who was shot in Season 20, Episode 2, “Keep the Family Close.” This time, they have good news — Dorian is finally being downgraded from the ICU and being taken to a new room upstairs. As Bailey leaves for surgery, Levi Schmitt sends Griffith, Millin, and Kwan down to the pit and has Adams and Yasuda take Dorian to his new room.
Downstairs, Millin and Kwan join Hunt and Atticus “Link” Lincoln to meet two ambulances arriving at the entrance, but not before they make a bet — the last of the two of them to finish their procedure log buys drinks at Joe’s. When they unload the ambulances, they meet Gillian and Cassandra, a couple who were in a car accident though pretty quickly, the doctors find out that it was because they were fooling around in the backseat of Gillian’s car; one of them accidentally hit the parking brake, and the car went flying down the hill and into Cassandra’s parked car. Cassandra, whose knee is incredibly swollen, is super high on pain meds, and Gillian has a massive headache, but otherwise, they’re fine. Embarrassed but fine. Just as the doctors are getting ready to examine both women, Gillian’s husband, Aaron, shows up, changing the whole dynamic. Cassandra is hidden behind the curtain dividing their beds, and Millin has to stick Cassandra’s bright pink bra, found among Gillian’s clothes, down the back of her pants to keep Aaron from seeing. Things are about to get messy.
Griffith was assigned to a different case and is meeting with Miles Ferguson, who is in the ER for a broken wrist and has brought along his daughter and his very pregnant wife, Lauren, who is experiencing Braxton Hicks contractions and heartburn. Griffith is at her finest dealing with the Fergusons — she examines Miles and sets him up with an X-ray, whisks Lauren off to OB, and even promises four-year-old Jayden that she might know where the OB nurses hide the cookies. Upstairs, Griffith keeps Jayden entertained while Jo Wilson examines Lauren, who is not experiencing Braxton Hicks after all. She is absolutely in labor and is already four and a half centimeters dilated. Lauren was scheduled to go back to the OB the following day, and the last time she was in, they ran blood work, but they hadn’t called her back about any of her tests. Wilson tasks Griffith with getting prenatal records, running a new set of labs, getting Jayden to the hospital daycare, and ensuring Miles gets up to OB as soon as possible. The baby will be there much sooner than they expected!
Back in the pit, Kwan and Millin up the ante on their bet — the loser buys drinks and fries — just in time to hear Gillian and Aaron fighting. He’s figured out Cassandra, who he thinks is just his wife’s friend, was also in the accident and is blaming her. Hunt finally manages to quell the fighting when he announces that CT is ready, and he and Millin rush Gillian out of the pit, leaving Aaron behind. Gillian hopes the CT will take a while, but Hunt assures her that it’s quick. When she asks if they want to know what happened, Hunt tells her she doesn’t need to tell them anything, but Millin is always down for some good gossip. Shepherd shows up to check the CT while Gillian is telling them about how her marriage got complacent, and then she meets Cassandra at the PTA, and Hunt looks worried. Is that where he and Teddy are headed?
Griffith arrives to tell Miles that Lauren is in labor, and he panics, trying to get up and leave without his bone having been set. Griffith manages to get him to sit back down by talking him through what will happen. “We’ll take you to the cast room so someone from Ortho can set the bone, they’ll make you a splint, and then you can go have a baby.” Griffith rushes back upstairs to let Lauren know what is happening with Miles and then leaves to meet up with him, and just after she leaves, things begin to go haywire. Lauren’s nose starts bleeding, her blood pressure skyrockets, and then suddenly, she’s having an eclamptic seizure. This is no longer going to be a simple vaginal birth. Lauren needs an emergency c-section. Someone page Carina DeLuca!
In a procedure room, Link is letting Kwan drain Cassandra’s knee as she tells them about falling in love with Gillian and how great the sex is. Girlfriend is still a little high, which is even more evident when she loopily asks Kwan for her bra back. Millin still has that, so Kwan asks her to meet him in the cafeteria, where he is having lunch with Griffith and Yasuda — roomies! — as Adams sits at the next table over, alone. After Millin arrives, giving him the bra before grabbing her own lunch, Kwan gets paged to radiology and has to leave, but not before upping the ante with Millin again. The loser buys dinner at Joe’s. Millin wants wine pairings.
Richard Webber, who spotted Winston Ndugu getting flirty with a nurse on the cardio floor earlier in the episode, is excited to scrub in with Ndugu on a hiatal hernia and is surprised to find Altman scrubbing in with him instead. When he talks to Ndugu about it, he tells him that they don’t need to avoid each other just because Winston and Maggie are getting divorced. Winston tells him that his bypass graft ran long; that’s the only reason he sent Altman. “So…I just made it weird,” Richard says. Yes, sir. You sure did.
In the OR, Carina DeLuca has arrived to perform Lauren’s emergency c-section. The baby looks great, but Lauren is immediately bleeding heavily. At first, Wilson thinks they get it under control, but then Lauren starts hemorrhaging. DeLuca asks if she complained of upper abdominal pain, and Wilson tells her that she thought it was just the labor. They will need to do an ex-lap and bring in Bailey, who is finishing up a lap chole. She arrives just before Griffith, who has just dropped Miles off in OB, and is shocked to see Lauren on the table in the OR. DeLuca has to take out Lauren’s uterus, and Bailey tells Griffith, who freezes momentarily, to call the blood bank.
When Lauren codes, Bailey has to begin performing CPR and tells Griffith to gown and glove. Griffith reminds her that her procedure log isn’t done, but Bailey doesn’t care; she just needs her hands. Bailey instructs Griffith to clamp with her fingers, just like she did when she and Adams were stuck in an ambulance and performing a pringle maneuver with Bailey and Meredith Grey walking them through it from outside the rig in Season 20, Episode 1, “We’ve Only Just Begun.” She manages to do it, but once Lauren has a heartbeat again and Bailey starts on the procedure, Griffith finally looks down at Lauren. All she can see is her own mother, who died giving birth to Simone, lying on the table and wearing the dress she had on in the picture Simone looked at with her Granny that very morning.
Now that he’s no longer in the ICU, Dorian’s friends from graduate school have shown up to see how he’s doing. They brought him a huge manila envelope of cards and lots of stories. Adams, feeling left out of his own friend group, thinks he sees the same thing happening to Dorian, especially when Dorian asks his friends to give him a minute. Instead, Dorian reveals that he thinks his ostomy bag is leaking. They page Schmitt, and together, the doctors discover that it’s actually his incision that is leaking. They find an enterocutaneous fistula, which means Dorian’s small bowel and skin got connected during the healing process, which means Dorian has to stop even his liquid diet and might have to go back to the ICU.
Adams, who promised Dorian he would tell his friends what happened, unleashes on the two graduate students, giving them a hard time for the stories they were telling. “He’s been hanging on by a thread for weeks! And he’s already feeling disconnected enough, not knowing how long he’ll be here. He doesn’t need to listen to stories about people he doesn’t know or graduations he won’t attend. He just needs to know that you’re actually here for him.” Yasuda catches him yelling at them and tells him to take a walk, then follows him after apologizing to Dorian’s friends. Adams is upset that Dorian’s friends are just now visiting, and Yasuda reminds him that maybe Dorian didn’t want them there and then asks him what his problem is, but Adams doesn’t answer. He just storms off.
Though her CT was clear, Gillian still has a massive headache, and Aaron isn’t making it any better. When she finally can’t take his interrupting anymore, she finally tells him the truth, yelling at him that she and Cassandra are having an affair. Every head in the ER turns, and Aaron leaves, but Gillian tells Millin and Hunt that she felt better while yelling. Millin says that sometimes things just need to be let out, but that’s not what Gillian means. Her headache disappeared when she was yelling, so she proceeds to yell everything she says from then on.
When they take her back to CT, Shepherd has her yell while they take one more scan, and that’s when they spot what is wrong. Gillian has an Arnold-Chiari malformation, which can develop from whiplash. The screaming shifts her cerebellar tonsils, relieving the intracranial pressure. Gillian, still yelling, asks if there is anything that can be done, and Shepherd tells her they’ll perform the surgery that evening. Shepherd also tells Hunt he needs to talk to his wife. After getting Gillian settled in a room and returning Cassandra’s bra, Millin and Kwan up the ante on their bet one final time. If Kwan loses, he’ll buy Millin a steak and lobster dinner at Nicoletti’s. Millin says that if she loses, they’ll have sex in a car. It’s anyone’s game at this point.
Up in the nursery, Wilson and Griffith approach Miles, who is holding his newborn baby. DeLuca already told Miles that Lauren had to have an emergency c-section and was losing blood, so he’s bracing for the worst, but Lauren survived. She lost a lot of blood and will need several weeks of recovery, but she is stable and headed to the ICU. Griffith tells him that the heartburn Lauren thought she was having was actually preeclampsia, and Miles starts to break down. “Shouldn’t someone have seen this?” he asks. “I mean, we were just at her OB. We were here for two hours before she went into labor. All we’ve done is plan. You know, since the day we found out we were having another baby. I mean, we read all the books and the online discussions. We just settled on a doula and a lactation consultant, just in case. You know, Lauren was not gonna be another statistic. This was not in our plan.”
When Wilson leaves to find out how long it will be until Miles can see Lauren, he starts to tell Griffith that he doesn’t know if he could have handled Jayden and the baby if Lauren had died. She tells him he could have, and then she asks him if they’ve picked out a name. When Miles answers, though, he isn’t Miles. Griffith sees her own father telling her that the baby’s name is Simone. In a panic, Griffith backs away, and her father disappears. She hears Miles telling her that the name means “faith,” but she doesn’t catch the name, so he says it again. “Imani. It means ‘faith’.”
When Wilson is checking on Lauren in the ICU, she finally gets the test results she ordered when Lauren first checked in at OB. They tell her that Lauren has HELLP Syndrome, a complication of severe preeclampsia that affects the blood and liver. Wilson tells Link, who came by to go home with her, that if she had just rushed the labs, it all could have been avoided. She knows the statistics, especially for Black women like Lauren. Link thinks she’s being a little hard on herself, but Wilson doesn’t. “My patient was sick, and I didn’t know it!” She doesn’t know if she didn’t ask the right questions or if she wasn’t listening, but she doesn’t want to miss something with another patient, so she decides to quit general surgery and focus solely on OB. Link, who always supports Wilson, tells her okay. He doesn’t try to push her to stay in general surgery; he just shows her that he trusts her judgment and supports her decision, which is all Wilson has ever needed.
In the lobby, Aaron is waiting to find out how Gillian is when Hunt spots him. Hunt tells him that Gillian is okay and that Shepherd repaired the malformation. Then Aaron starts to talk about his marriage. “There was never any big fight or anything. We just stopped talking. And I told myself that maybe that’s what happens when you’ve been married for 20 years. You know what the other person is thinking. You don’t have to talk. But I think… I was just scared of losing her. So I didn’t ask. But now I’ve lost her anyway.” While Aaron talks, revelation breaks over Hunt’s face. He doesn’t want to lose Teddy either, so he finds her in her office and tells her as much. He tells her that it feels like they’re on autopilot, which made sense when she was recovering, but it still feels like they’re far apart, even though she’s better. “We don’t talk anymore. I am struggling in my work right now, and I’m talking to Amelia about it when I should be talking to you,” he admits.
Teddy says that she wants him to talk to her, and he tells her that he can’t because he doesn’t want to put more stress on her. She starts to tell him that she’s fine, but he cuts her off. “You flatlined in front of me,” he says, still obviously scared that he’ll really lose her if it happens again. Teddy wants him to know that he’s not going to break her. “If there is anything that I have been able to count on in the last 20 years, it’s you. It’s us,” she says, and Owen tells her that he misses her. Teddy walks away, but only to lock the door. They can turn down the lights in her office and spend a little time together, maybe even get naked. After all, the kids are at home, already asleep.
Before heading out for the day, Mika finds Lucas in the intern locker room. She tells him that he’s lucky she is the one who saw him yelling at Dorian’s friends and not Schmitt or Bailey, and Lucas asks if she would have done the same thing for Kwan. Mika reminds him that he’s the one who moved out and then tells him that she didn’t ask Kwan to move in; Griffith did. She starts to tell him that she’s sorry things didn’t work out for him and Griffith, and he interrupts her, telling her that it’s not about Simone. “You said you were done,” he says, referring to her comments to him after he stole a procedure from her in Season 20, Episode 3, “Walk on the Ocean.” “I was mad that you stole the procedure,” she says, “I didn’t think that you would just, like, disappear into the middle of the night like my camp girlfriend after I wrote her a poem!”
Suddenly, Lucas is laughing, but not at Mika. “I’m remembering what it was like to fight with you, and it’s — I mean, this is the most normal I’ve felt in a while.” Mika tells him he’s pathetic and then calls him “Skywalker,” which she hasn’t done in a long time. A smile breaks over Lucas’s face. He has his friend back.
At Joe’s, Millin and Kwan are making good on their bet — which Millin lost. Kwan offers to cover their milkshakes, which could be considered either dessert or drinks, but Millin tells him that she settles her bets. All that’s left is sex in a car. Mika shows up, annoyed that Kwan ate without her, and tells him he has to sit and wait until she’s done. Will Millin and Kwan end up getting together? Only time will tell.
Also at Joe’s, Simone has lost count of the number of tequila shots she has had. She can’t remember the bartender’s name and tries to hide in her tequila shot when Bailey comes in to pick up her dinner. “Let’s go,” Bailey says, ready to take Griffith home, and Griffith tries to tell Bailey that she doesn’t have to listen to her outside of work hours. “If you like your job, you will not finish that sentence,” Bailey says, and Griffith goes with her. Bailey takes her home and sets her up in front of the fire, bringing her a cup of something warm, which Simone immediately sets on the table next to her. Simone says she should have been thinking about atypical abdominal pain, and even though Bailey reminds her that she’s not an OB-GYN, she still feels like she should have said something to Wilson. Then she tells Bailey the thing she’s been holding in all day, that her mother died at Grey-Sloan while giving birth to her. Bailey didn’t know, and it’s written all over her face that she suddenly understands why the day was so tough for Griffith — and why she’s so drunk.
“I don’t know all the details, but I know someone missed something,” Simone continues. “And I always wondered who those doctors were. Now I know they’re me.” Bailey tells her that she did everything she was taught and that the events of the day are the perfect example of why patients like Lauren need surgeons like them. “It is our job to make sure that no one falls through the cracks,” Bailey tells her. “To make sure that no one overlooks their pain.” Bailey acknowledges that it isn’t fair that Lauren should be awake and holding her baby, but it’s not Simone’s fault that she’s not. She hands the warm mug back to Simone and tells her to get some rest. It’s clear from the tears in Simone’s eyes that this is not the last time her mother’s death will impact her work.
