Ellen was snapped out of her memories by the flashes of the paparazzi. It was bizarre to have them following her every step again. She wondered if it was just a one day thing. "How long are you back in LA for?" a man yelled. Ellen left a twenty dollar bill on the table and fought her way through the flashing photographers.
She jumped into the Lexus' that the movie production company had rented for her until filming wrapped. It was the newest model and she had fallen in love with it the second she had sat down in the driver's. Ellen pulled out into the heavy Hollywood traffic. She was anxious to get back to her new house. It was odd but strangely freeing to be living alone. Her first night, she felt remarkably like she was having a mid life crisis.
The traffic was lighter than she had expected. She was pulling into her garage just over ten minutes later. Ellen quickly padded inside and then up the stairs to her bedroom. She pulled a small box from under the bed. Running her thumb along the edge she tried to recall what she had placed inside. She took it with her everywhere she went but very rarely opened it.
Hesitantly, she opened the box. There was a necklace her mother had given her. The very first page of the pilot script of Grey's Anatomy, she sighed as she read over it. She pulled out several pictures of Stella. Ellen anxiously sifted through the rest of her memorabilia quickly trying to find it. Impatiently she dumped the entire box out onto the hardwood floor. Taped to the bottom of the box was a small letter envelope. A trembling sigh escaped her lips. The yellowing envelop crinkled in her hands as she started to open it. A strange feeling swept over her, continuing to open it would be knowingly torturing herself. But she couldn't stop. She wanted to see it just as bad as she wanted to return it to its hiding place in the darkness.
Her fingers brush the edge of a picture. Ellen recalled that she had placed it inside after she had decided not to send the letter. The snapshot was of Ellen and Patrick, taken near the end of the series. They were cheek to cheek and they both had the happiest smiles spread across their faces. Ellen remembered that she was laughing hard just after the picture was taken because he had been tickling her. Her eyes instantly started to fill with tears as she placed the picture carefully on her leg and reached for the letter still inside. She unfolded it carefully, the words rushed back to her as if she had written them yesterday. The blue ink was smeared in spots. Ellen ran her finger across the name at the top of the letter. That was all she could bring herself to write, his name. How do you tell a man that you haven't spoken to in nine months that you just gave his daughter away?
A familiar ache filled her chest again, she had been so sure that it was the right decision that day. It would have destroyed Patrick's family, and her own. That beautiful baby girl was much better growing up in a family that was together. A family that had prayed for someone just like her to come along. If she had kept her, the innocent baby would have been considered the scandal of the century. No one should have to grow up in that light. It wasn't fair for them to put her through that.
It was the right thing to do, but it was the very thing that she regretted every day. Not a day passed when Ellen didn't think of that beautiful baby wrapped in a pink blanket, her perfect little nose and strikingly green eyes.