Finally getting answers. When Jo (Camilla Luddington) arrives at her mother’s house on the Thursday, March 28, Grey’s Anatomy episode, she’s surprised to find the exact opposite of what she expected. But will it change everything? Not quite in the way that she hoped.
As it turns out, Jo’s mom lives in a nice house in a beautiful neighborhood, and she’s a successful, married woman who has a dog and children of her own. At first, she tried to send Jo away, but she wasn’t having it.
“There’s a diner a few miles up, weird green roof. One conversation and you will never hear from me again,” Jo told her before leaving.
She waited hours in the diner, but finally, her mom came — just as Jo was about to leave. Jo told her that she didn’t want any money, just the truth about why she left her at a fire station just two weeks after she was born… but the truth wasn’t anything like what Jo expected to hear. Not only did her birth father die in a motorcycle accident years ago, but he also raped Jo’s mom on a date, and that was the night she was conceived.
According to Jo’s mom, her father was a TA when she was in college who hounded her for a date until she’d said yes, and when they started making out, he didn’t take no for an answer. Nine months later, Jo was born.
Since then, Jo’s mom said she was able to move on with a lot of therapy, although she did say she suffered from PTSD. But she said the scars were so deep that she was petrified to go looking for Jo — and the decision to leave her at that fire station wasn’t one she made lightly.
“Movies and books and magazines, they just kept talking about this love that you feel the minute your baby is born, how instantaneous it is and how your heart just cracks wide open,” she said. “I remember I kept telling myself that as soon as I had you in my arms, I could do that and that I would do that.”
But as hard as she tried — and as much as she did have that instantaneous love for Jo — she couldn’t stop thinking about the man who raped her every time she looked at her baby. But that wasn’t good enough for Jo, because as she told her mom, she has been in a similar situation herself, and she has made a different decision: She got an abortion.
“I was seven weeks pregnant when my ex husband cracked my ribs and threw me across the living room floor,” she said. “He didn’t know that I was pregnant, and in that moment I decided that he could never know. I couldn’t see a way out. Not then, at least. I knew that if I tried to leave he would kill me, and I also knew that I couldn’t raise a kid in that fear and in that danger.”
“I did the best I could,” Jo’s mom said when she left. “I’m sorry. I’m still doing the best I can.”
Meanwhile, back at the hospital, Jo still refuses to tell Alex (Justin Chambers) how the visit with her mother went, but when she meets a patient named Abby, her focus goes completely to her. When Abby arrived at the hospital, she was bleeding from her face, insisting that she hurt herself while putting away dishes, but then Jo realized she also had serious internal injuries and that there was more to the story than a simple accident.
After Teddy (Kim Raver) did an ultrasound, she discovered that Abby needed surgery. But before that could happen, they had to make sure not to sterilize her, because it appeared that Abby had been raped, and they needed to give her the opportunity to provide evidence if she wanted to report it.
Abby didn’t want to tell Teddy and Jo what happened at first, but finally, she decided to talk. It wasn’t her husband — it happened at a bar after she and her husband had a fight about laundry.
“We all know if I do that kit, it ends up in the back of some police station ignored for years while I sit there wondering when the bomb will go off, waiting to see if a jury of my peers will believe a woman who wore a skirt a few inches too short, who had a few cocktails too many at a bar last night after having a fight about laundry with her husband,” she said. “You know the tequila I drank will make it my fault and whoever did this to me, whatever he drank, that’ll be his excuse.”
But after hearing Jo’s story about her own abuse, Abby decided to go through with the rape kit. When it was time to go up to surgery, she was too afraid to leave the room, so Jo, Teddy, and Qadri called all the female doctors and nurses to line the halls of the hospital so that Abby would be surrounded and feel safe on her way to the OR.
After surgery, Abby decided to call her husband, and Jo stayed by her side to hold her hand until her husband arrived to keep her company while she reported her rape to the police. But when Jo finally left Abby and saw Alex, as much as he wanted her to talk about her visit with her mom, she didn’t want to.
“I don’t want to talk about it. I can’t talk about it. I just want to go home,” she said. “I want to go home alone. I want to go home and sleep. Please.”
Grey’s Anatomy airs on ABC Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET.
