Epilogue #5
“You guys,” she murmurs. Her hand finds the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair. “You guys.”
She kisses Michalis’s cheek. She kisses Allie’s temple. She presses her lips to my forehead and holds them there for one heartbeat, two.
“Thank you,” she whispers. “For this. For everything.”
“We didn’t do anything,” Allie mumbles into her shoulder.
Mom laughs, that surprised, genuine sound. “You absolutely did. This room looks incredible. The food smells amazing. You—” She pulls back, holding Allie’s face in both hands. “—are wearing a crop top in the cold, and I have questions.”
“It’s not that cold, Mom.”
“It’s forty-five degrees.”
“It’s fashion.”
“It’s pneumonia.”
Allie grins, unrepentant. “Worth it.”
“My babies,” Mom says, her voice thick. “God, I’m so happy to finally have more time with you guys.”
“You’re going to get sick of us,” Allie says.
“Impossible.”
“Give it a week,” I add.
“Two days,” Michalis says.
Mom laughs and pulls us in tighter. “I’ve missed you. All of you. So much.”
She lets us go and I watch her move through the room.
It’s not something I plan to do. It’s not a conscious decision.
But my gaze keeps finding her, following her from conversation to conversation, and I don’t try to stop it.
She’s hugging people, laughing at their jokes, asking questions and actually listening to the answers.
She makes everyone feel like they’re the most important person in the room, like she has all the time in the world for them even though there are forty people here.
It’s a skill she honed over twenty years of interviewing people, I guess. But it’s also just who she is. She cares. Genuinely, deeply cares about people.
Dad appears beside me, two glasses of wine in his hands. He offers me one and I kindly decline.
“She’s amazing, isn’t she?” he says quietly, watching Mom across the room.
I nod. “The best.”
And I mean it. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t look up to her.
Mom started as my nanny when I was five years old. Dad hired her after my sixth nanny quit, and I was a nightmare child back then—angry and confused and acting out because I didn’t understand why my biological mother had left.
And then Mom showed up.
She didn’t try to replace my biological mom. She didn’t try to force me to like her. She just…showed up. Every day. She married Dad soon after, and by then I was already calling her Mom. It just felt natural.
She never treated me differently than she treated Allie and Michalis.
She never made me feel like I was borrowed, or temporary, or somehow less hers because I came from someone else’s body.
If anything, I felt closer to her in some ways.
Not because I was special, but because I was first. I got to know her before anyone else did.
I got to see her figure out how to be a parent in real time, learning alongside her, growing up with her.
I got to watch her become my mother.
Rebecca is…I don’t know what Rebecca is.
She’s my biological mother. That’s a fact, immutable and meaningless.
She lives in Boston now with her husband and their two kids—my half-siblings, technically, though I’ve met them exactly twice.
She calls on my birthday, usually, and sends Christmas gifts that arrive in mid-January with the tags still on.
We exchange emails every few months, polite and careful, like distant colleagues who once worked on the same project.
That’s the extent of it.
I used to wonder if that was my fault. If I’d done something wrong, or not enough, or too much. If there was a version of me that could have made her stay.
But I don’t wonder anymore. The truth of it is, Rebecca left. That was her choice. And it had nothing to do with me.
And in her absence, Annie showed up. Every day.
For eighteen years. Not necessarily because she had to, not because she was obligated, but because she wanted to.
That’s not a consolation prize. That’s not a replacement or a substitute or a second-best. That’s something else entirely, something Rebecca could never give me, even if she tried.
And through all of it—through every birthday Mom remembered when Rebecca forgot, every school play Mom attended when Rebecca was in Boston, every heartbreak and triumph and ordinary Tuesday—I never once heard my dad or Mom say a bad word about Rebecca.
They never had to. They just showed up. Day after day, year after year.
And eventually, I stopped measuring Rebecca’s absence and started measuring Mom’s presence.
I don’t feel like I was missing anything, because I wasn’t. I had everything I needed. I had her and my dad.
Dad’s phone starts buzzing on the mantel, right between the white hydrangeas and a half-empty glass of wine. He glances at the screen and his whole face changes—that particular smile, the one that says I’ve pulled something off and I’m very pleased with myself.
“Annie,” he calls across the room. “Come here! You’re going to want to get this.”
She’s mid-conversation with Maria, something about gardening, something about tomatoes that wouldn’t ripen last summer. But she catches something in his voice, some undercurrent, and she excuses herself with a hand on Maria’s arm.
“What is it?” She’s already reaching for the phone. “Who—”
Then she sees the screen. Her hand flies to her chest again. The same gesture as when she walked through the door, but different now—softer, younger somehow. Her mouth opens and nothing comes out.
“It’s Eileen,” Dad says, unnecessarily. “She wanted to call before the party got too crazy.”
“Eileen!” Mom’s voice breaks on the syllable. “Oh my god.”
She answers the FaceTime call and there she is.
Eileen. Silver hair braided back from her face, the same silver it’s been since I was a kid, the same neat, practical braid she’s probably worn every day for the last forty years.
Her face fills the screen, creased and kind and so familiar it makes my chest ache.
“Hello, mo stór,” she says, and her Irish accent wraps around the words like wool.
“It’s—Eileen, it must be, what, one in the morning there?”
“Half one. And it’s never too late for you.” Her eyes crinkle. “Now let me look at you. Let me see if all this fuss is worth it.”
Mom laughs, wet and wobbly, and holds the phone closer to her face. “There’s not even that much fuss.”
“The balloons on the mantelpiece would disagree with you, love.”
“How do you know about the balloons?”
“Your husband called me three days ago. Very thorough man, your Leo. Told me everything.” Eileen’s gaze shifts. “Hello, Leo. You’re looking well.”
Dad waves, caught. “Hi, Eileen. Sorry about the timing.”
“Don’t be daft. I’d have stayed up till four if that’s what it took.” Her eyes find me next. “And is that wee Emma beside you? Come here, let me see you properly.”
I lean into frame. “Hi, Eileen.”
“Oh, look at you! All grown up and beautiful. You have your mother’s eyes.”
She means Annie. She always means Annie.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Are they feeding you over there? You look thin.”
“Everyone keeps saying that.”
“Because everyone with eyes can see it.” But she’s smiling. “I’m only teasing. You look wonderful, pet. They both do.”
Mom takes the phone and stalks off toward the kitchen, already talking a mile a minute, her free hand gesturing.
But I catch her face as she turns away. Tears are streaming down her cheeks and she has a particular smile, one that makes her look like the girl she must have been before any of us knew her.
Mom calls her once a month, without fail.
We used to time our summer trips to Ireland around her birthday, and then just because.
I have memories of Eileen’s small house in Galway, the kettle always on, the garden overgrown.
There was always too much rain, not enough time.
I remember helping her dig potatoes when I was eight, my hands black with soil, her patient voice guiding me.
I remember her teaching me to knit and never once getting frustrated when I dropped stitches.
She raised Mom. Not in the legal sense, not on paper. But in every way that matters, she raised her. And because she did, Mom became who she is. Patient. Kind. Steady. The kind of mother who shows up, every day, without being asked.
Eileen paved the road and Annie walked it. And now I’m standing at the beginning of that same road, trying to figure out how to walk it myself.
I have Eileen to thank for that. For all of it.
A hand slides around my waist, warm and familiar. Lips press to my forehead.
I look up and Brandon is there. His hair still damp from the shower he must have taken after his last appointment, glasses slightly fogged from the warmth of the room. He smells like soap and coffee.
“Sorry I’m late,” he murmurs against my skin. “My three o’clock ran long and then the four o’clock showed up early and I couldn’t—”
“It’s okay.” I rise on my toes and kiss him, quick and soft. “You’re here now.”
“You look beautiful.”
“You look tired.”
“Same thing, right?”
“Absolutely not. You look handsome and tired. There’s a difference.”
He huffs a laugh, his breath warm against my cheek. “Noted.”
I pull back to look at him properly. He’s wearing the navy sweater I like, the one that brings out his eyes, and he’s clearly made an effort to tame his hair, which is already starting to escape in the direction of his forehead. His hands are warm where they rest on my hips.
He’s the best person I’ve ever met. Not because he’s perfect—he’s not, he leaves his socks everywhere and he’s never once managed to load a dishwasher correctly and he still can’t remember the difference between spanakopita and tiropita, which after six years is frankly inexcusable.
But he shows up, every day, without being asked.