Izzie's home: Meredith busted into Alex's room to tell him Izzie was on her way home, only to find him in bed with Lexie. She swore them both to secrecy. Izzie, it turned out, was under consideration for a job in nearby Tacoma that would allow her to mend fences with Alex — although it wasn't clear whether Alex was looking for a reconciliation.
Hard choices: Derek wanted to turn in the Chief for drinking, but Meredith insisted that her Post-It Note husband not use the information she told him in confidence. Derek agreed, but when he confronted the Chief directly, he got nowhere. The Chief then set up a complicated surgery he could perform with new protégé Meredith, but Derek and Bailey both thought the Chief was in over his head. Derek convinced him to duck that particular surgery, but the larger problem persisted.
Derek then offered Meredith an agonizing (and totally unprofessional) deal: Let him turn in the Chief, and he'd be made the chief himself — and, he promised her, he'd hire Izzie back. When Izzie came to Meredith bubbling with good news about her latest scans and her hoped-for marital reconciliation, Meredith gave Derek the all-clear to go to the hospital board so Izzie could be hired. Sadly, it was too late, as Alex dumped Izzie anyway, so she didn't want to work at Seattle Grace. The board, however, had already come for the Chief.
You can have my boyfriend: Teddy and Cristina worked together on the case of an arrogant, cancer-stricken opera singer who believed that the possible loss of his lung would deprive him of his career and his entire reason to live. Teddy managed to save the lung, but the singer's partner told Alex how wounded he was by the implication that a simple life together would not be worth living, and about how difficult it was to live with someone who didn't respect you. In 'Grey's' tradition, this resonated with Alex, given the way he was feeling about Izzie.
Cristina, impressed with Teddy's solution to the surgical problem, reiterated her previous offer that Teddy could have Owen if she would stay and train Cristina. Teddy got drunk and shared the terms of Cristina's offer with a wounded Owen, who, rather than dumping Cristina as she deserved, went to her and insisted he would not let her throw away their relationship in the belief that career was more important.
Itchy and scratchy: Callie came down with chicken pox, and Arizona put her in the hospital to keep her from spreading it around. While she was there, Lexie was assigned to watch her, and blurted out the fact that she slept with Alex while Mark was in L.A. for the operation on his unborn grandson. When Mark later visited Callie, he confessed that he slept with Addison. Later, Lexie and Mark confessed to each other. She figured that they were now even, but he decided she had left him first, while he had been in pain over his daughter, so he considered her sin more egregious and walked away from her.
Linda Holmes is a writer in Washington.