BONUS EPILOGUE
Eighteen months later
“Thanks for the update, Liam,” Noah says into his phone. He’s talking to my second cousin, who happens to be a builder and contractor in County Cork. Liam is overseeing the build of our Irish house, which is almost finished. We designed it ourselves, with the help of another one of my second cousins, Rory, an architect who lives in Galway. My mother didn’t have any siblings, since her mother died young, but my grandmother had twelve, and they all reproduced like crazy. And then their kids reproduced even more crazily. When I counted how many second cousins I have, I lost track somewhere around 72. “The pictures you sent look great...yes, we’re absolutely thrilled. We’re planning on coming over next month…” Noah laughs. Liam moonlights as an aspiring stand-up comedian and it’s impossible not to laugh at his (mostly bad) jokes.