Epilogue #2
"Only when convenient." I laughed and kissed her temple. A few minutes later, Toxic came through the back door carrying Orla under one arm because she had apparently escaped the garden and decided his boots required investigation. Eamon followed, pointing accusingly toward the child.
"She gets that from Niamh." Niamh stared at him from the table.
"You're blaming me?"
"Survival instinct." Orla spotted me and immediately reached out. I considered refusing. Then she smiled. That ruined everything. I took her. She grabbed my beard.
"Still doing that?" Niamh laughed.
"She likes you."
"She likes violence."
"Same family." I freed my beard carefully while Orla protested and shifted her against my hip. Charlie appeared beside me a second later holding something she had clearly found outside.
"Bug." I looked down. She opened her hand. I stepped back.
"No." Charlie frowned.
"It's dead."
"Still no."
Remedy called from across the room, "Charlie." She looked toward him.
"Show Storm." Storm's head snapped around.
"Absolutely not."
Charlie ran toward Raze. He screamed before the child reached him.
The room erupted. I laughed hard enough that Orla laughed too without understanding why.
For one strange moment, the sound of it all blurred together into children, friends, brothers, women arguing in the kitchen, people calling across rooms, doors opening and closing, and footsteps overhead.
The farmhouse was loud again. It wasn't the same kind of loud and never would be, but recreating the past had stopped being the goal.
Skye looked toward me from beside the table.
Our eyes met across the room. I knew she saw exactly what I did.
Life where silence had lived too long. I gave Orla back to Niamh and crossed toward Skye.
She had been studying a framed photograph on the wall beside the kitchen doorway.
The one with Finn, Maeve, Eamon, and me as teenagers near the coast. Eamon had finally identified himself as the mysterious fourth person and spent ten minutes complaining that none of us had recognized his hair.
"You fixed it," I said. Skye glanced toward the frame. A small brass label now sat beneath it. Rory, Finn, Maeve it was simply a response.
Skye smiled without making the moment dramatic or triumphant and continued upstairs.
I remained in the hallway for several seconds after she disappeared.
Rory. The name had once belonged to a boy who left his family after an argument and spent fifteen years believing he had no right to return.
Now it belonged to the man standing inside that family's house while people he loved slept beneath the same roof.
Irish would still answer tomorrow when Toxic called.
Callum would still exist in passports, memories, and the long road between one life and another.
None of them needed burying anymore. I checked the fire, turned off the kitchen light, and stood for a moment beside the photographs lining the stairs.
Mam. Da. Maeve. Finn. I touched the frame nearest me.
"Night."
Then I went upstairs. Skye had left the bedroom door open.
I smiled as I crossed the threshold. For fifteen years, I had believed home was something I survived losing.
I knew better now. Home wasn't one house, one country, one family, or one name.
It was the place where love didn't require disappearing.
The place where doors opened from the inside.
The place you chose to return to. Skye looked up as I entered.
"Coming to bed?" I closed the door behind me.
"Aye." And this time, when I crossed the room toward her, there wasn't a single part of me still thinking about leaving.