"Meredith's sister?"

Alex scratches the back of his neck, clearly uncomfortable with the subject. "Yeah, she died in the crash."

Maggie swallows, but the painful lump in her throat still won't go away. "And that's how Arizona lost her leg. I never wanted to ask…"

April is focused intensly on Maggie's shoes, "Callie had to amputate," she says softly.

Maggie hugs her knees. It doesn't help. "I need to go find Meredith."

Before Maggie can do anything however, her pager finds Meredith for her in OR 3, working on the pilot of today's crash. For a good hour or so, Maggie lets herself forget about the harrowing story her friends told her about her sister. Fighting to keep a heart beating, she is in her element. She is powerful, she is elated, she is working on a human heart.

Then she is scrubbing, and the surgery is over, and that harrowing story is 100% at the forefront of her thoughts again because Derek is missing and Meredith is freaking out.

"You're gonna panic, no matter what," Maggie says to her sister because that's exactly what she'd be doing if she were Meredith. "You should go home, Mer."

With that, Maggie leaves the OR before she can see or hear Meredith ignoring her advice because of course she wasn't going to go home; there were lives to save.

"She's not going home, you know."

There's a resident leaning against the wall next to the door, as if she'd been waiting for Maggie to leave.

Maggie sighs, leaning against the wall opposite her, "You a friend of Dr. Grey?"

The resident flashes a set of brilliantly white teeth at her, "You could say that."

"Then you know she isn't going home."

"You know, one time, there was a mass shooting here," the resident says sadly, Maggie notes that this resident likes to talk with her hands, "And Meredith had a miscarriage while Christina fixed Derek's gunshot wound."

"Wow," says Maggie, "A shooting and a plane crash? That is just too much heartache for one person to handle, ya know?"

The woman's kind, brown eyes glint sadly from behind a curtain of dark, brown bangs. "That's why she isn't gonna go home," the resident insists, "She needs to be with her friends."

"Oh yeah?" says Maggie, "How do you know so much about my sister, anyway?"

A distant look clouds the resident's face. "I-uh…I don't remember," she says, clearly confused.

Before Maggie can answer, her pager goes off again.

"Look, I gotta…go"

Maggie looks up from her phone and the resident is gone. "Ugh, rude," she scoffs. She didn't mean it, though; hospitals were busy places.

"Edwards," Maggie greets her favorite resident, "What have we got."

Stephanie Edwards groans, "Oh, I'm sorry, Dr. Pierce. I meant to page Dr. Shepherd. I needed help making sense of these scans."

Maggie takes a deep breath to calm down. "It's ok, Edwards, maybe I can help anyway."

"It's a glioblastoma."

Maggie glances over her shoulder. Her mystery resident is back again, lounging comfortably in a chair by the door.

"How do you know that?"

"I was going to be a neurosurgeon."

Her use of the past tense sends chills down Maggie's spine.

"Um, Dr. Pierce?" Edwards says timidly, "Who are you talking to?"

"What?" says Maggie, bewildered, "Edwards, are your eyes working alright…"

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see the resident slowly shaking her head.

"It's nothing, Edwards," says Maggie, taking the scan from Edwards, "I think it's a glioblastoma, but you need to page Dr. Shepherd to make sure. And Edwards?"

Edwards whips around, and Maggie has to fight really hard not to gape, because Stephanie's lab coat just passed straight through the mystery resident's head.

"Don't tell Amelia that I'm the one who suggested it's a glioblastoma," says Maggie, still staring at the mystery resident. Maggie's mystery resident is watching Edwards with a wistful look on her pale face.

"Why?" says Edwards.

"Because if she asked me why I know that, I'm not sure I'd be able to answer," Maggie answers faintly, "Now go; I need to be alone for a moment."

"Dr. Pierce, are you sure you're ok-"

"Go, Edwards!"

Edwards scurries away before Maggie can yell at her again. Maggie collapses onto the soft, leather couch. "You never told me your name."

"You never asked," says the resident.

"Fair enough," says Maggie, "A little childish (the resident rolls her eyes at her), but fair enough. My name is Maggie Pierce, and you are?"

The woman opens her mouth to answer, but all that comes out is a horribly loud banging noise.

But of course, the noise must be coming from somewhere else; no human could possibly make that noise. Maggie took an autoshop class in undergrand; to her, the noise sounded almost like a hammer striking metal.

"I can't hear you!" Maggie tries to call over the din, "Maybe we can go somewhere else?"

Maggie feels her phone vibrate. She looks down at the soft blue screen.

Drinks at my place? –Meredith

"Because, you know, I have a lot of questions-" but when Maggie looks up again, the woman is gone along with the banging noise. The cardiothoracic surgeon slaps her cheeks experimentally. She's clearly been awake and working for too long; drinks at Meredith's sounded great. Besides, maybe she could keep Meredith from freaking out too much about Derek…

Meredith whips the door open the moment Maggie arrives. "Derek-?"

Maggie gives her a small smile. "Nope, sorry."

Meredith bits her lip and retreats back to the kitchen. "Thanks for coming. What are you drinking?"
Maggie scoffs. "Knowing you, we're drinking tequila, right?"

That, at least, earns Maggie a short, humorless laugh from Meredith as she retrieves the bottle from the cabinet above her fridge.

"So you know what's freaking me out," she starts as she pours the smooth, brown liquid into two glasses, "And now I could really use a distraction."

"Ok," says Maggie while swirling her glass experimentally, "But what's freaking me out might just freak you out more…?"

That catches Meredith's attention. She sinks into a stool at her kitchen island, never taking her eyes off her sister. "Ok," she says decisively, "spill."

"I-uh," Maggie hesitates, because if she is wrong, she knows she will cause Meredith even more pain, "I think I've been seeing a ghost all day."

Meredith raises a dark blonde eyebrow. "Oh? What did it look like?"

Maggie joins her sister at the kitchen island and gingerly sets her glass down on a tan coaster. "She was a resident, I think. She was wearing the right scrubs, anyway. The weird thing is, she seemed to know quite a bit about you."

Meredith blanches. "Oh," she says quietly.

"But I'm probably just imagining things," Maggie says hastily, "It's been a long couple of days.'

But Meredith isn't listening to her; instead, she's gazing sadly at a point just over Maggie's shoulder.

"Meredith?" asks Maggie, putting a hand on her sister's shaking wrist.

Meredith gulps, "It's- never mind, it's nothing."

Maggie glances over her shoulder and utters a small scream. For there, sitting on the couch is the mystery resident from before.

Meredith clutches Maggie's hand in a death grip. "Maggie," she says urgently, "you can see her too?"

Too freaked out to open her mouth, Maggie nods. Meredith lets go of her hand and begins pacing up and down her kitchen.

"That doesn't make any sense," Meredith says, clearly very agitated by now, "How are you sharing my psychosis?"

"Psychosis?" Maggie squeaks.

Meredith stops and slams her glass on the table hard enough to crack it. "How are you seeing my dead sister?" she demands.

Maggie feels goosebumps coat every inch of her arms. "You mean…?"

The woman, still dressed in her scrubs, fiddles nervously with the drawstrings on her scrub pants. "I never did get to introduce myself," she says softly, never taking her eyes off Zola's stuffed lion on the floor, "I'm Lexie Grey."

"You're dead…" Maggie wants to cry, because she just heard this story today-just learned about this woman's existence…

and yet there she was, sitting on the couch as if nothing were wrong.

Though now that they were in Meredith's house, Maggie could see that Lexie's scrubs were still drenched in blood. Earlier, she'd thought the woman had just come from surgery and hadn't yet had the chance to change…

Lexie stands from the couch to join her sisters at the kitchen island. "It's nice to meet you Maggie; I hear we're sisters."

Maggie glances back at Meredith, who's crying silently at her stool, her eyes fixed on her dead sister.

"Um," Maggie hesitates. What does one ask a ghost, anyway? Oh! "Why are you here? I mean, if you died a few years ago, why are you here now?"

At this, Lexie's sad face gets even sadder. "To be with my family when Meredith gets the news."

Meredith grasps Maggie's hand. "You can hear her?" she demands, "What's she saying?"

"You can't…?"

"No," Meredith says, frustrated, "She's been following me around ever since I met you. She keeps trying to talk but it's like no sound's coming out. Just-what is she saying?"

Maggie takes Meredith's hand. "She says she wants to be with you when you get the news."

Meredith gasps. "What news?" she fixes Lexie with a wildly desperate glare, "Lexie, what news?"

Lexie's also crying now. "Maggie, Derek sent me. He can't come yet, so he sent me."

Maggie's heart clenches. "Derek sent you…?"

Before Lexie can answer, there's a knock at the door. Meredith races to it, and yanks it open, flooding the room with the bright red and blue flashing lights of the cop car parked outside.

Lexie takes Maggie's hand. Maggie knows the cliché that dead bodies are supposed to be cold, but Lexie's hand is hot and slimy with what smelled like a sickening mixture of blood, dirt and motor oil.

Maggie gags.

"He sent me to say goodbye," whispers the ghost of Lexie Grey.

Meredith faints into the police officer's arms.