Epilogue
Jaxon
Five Years Later
The sound of giggles drifts into the kitchen. Followed by loud shushing. Then more laughter. I can’t help but smile. Whatever conspiracy is taking place in the living room has involved Ollie and at least one of our own children. Which means the chances of it ending quietly are nonexistent.
I glance around the kitchen as I chop vegetables for lunch. Sunlight pours through the windows. The refrigerator hums quietly behind me. A loaf of fresh bread cools on the counter. It’s ordinary. Wonderfully ordinary. I still can’t quite believe this is my life.
Five years. Five years since a warehouse. Five years since a woman looked me in the eye and told me I belonged. Five years since I stood in a cemetery believing I had spent my entire life unwanted. They have been the happiest of my life.
Childhood me would never have believed a life like this existed.
Adult me was certain it wasn’t meant for someone like me.
Yet here I am. In a home filled with laughter.
With family dropping by unannounced. With nephews who raid my pantry and brothers who somehow still think adding me to ridiculous group chats is hilarious.
With a mother who still kisses the top of my head every chance she gets.
And with Conor.
Always Conor.
The man who promised he would spend the rest of his life proving I mattered.
The remarkable thing is, he kept that promise.
Not with grand gestures, but with thousands of ordinary moments.
A hand at the small of my back. Coffee already made when I wake.
A blanket draped over me when I fall asleep on the couch.
The certainty that wherever I go, someone is waiting for me to come home.
“Daddy!”
The shout is followed by pounding little feet. I turn just in time to catch a flying toddler against my hip. I reach down and pick up our son. Tiny arms wrap around my neck.
I look toward the living room to find Conor already walking in, wearing the resigned expression of a man who has lost control of his own children. Behind him stand half the Murphy family. Apparently, no one bothered to knock. Again.
I laugh. Real laughter. The kind that once felt impossible. As Conor reaches us, his hand finds the small of my back out of habit.
And I finally understand what took me so long to believe. Home was never a place. It was always the people who refused to let me face the world alone.
Thomas Duncan Murphy squirms in my arms, trying to get down. I let him. Mostly because holding onto a three-and-a-half-year-old determined to escape is an exercise in futility. The little menace has enough energy to power half of Philadelphia. He keeps all of us running.
Three years ago, I asked Conor if he would be willing to foster a child with me. He didn’t hesitate. Not even for a second.
“Yes.”
That had been his entire answer. The fostering part of our plan, however, didn’t work out quite the way we’d intended. What I failed to consider was what happens when Conor Murphy becomes fixated on something. Or someone.
One week. That’s how long it took. Seven days after Thomas moved into our home, Conor called his attorney and started the adoption process. When I reminded him that fostering was supposed to be temporary, he looked at me as though I’d lost my mind.
“He’s already ours, A Chroí.” As if there had never been another possibility. As if loving someone and letting them leave were mutually exclusive concepts.
Mom simply laughed. Then informed me she’d had the adoption papers mentally prepared by day three. Apparently, none of them were surprised.
We named him Thomas after the father I never had the chance to know.
His middle name came from Uncle Duncan. It seemed fitting.
The man who refused to let me remain trapped.
The man who walked into that warehouse beside me and was willing to risk everything to make sure I walked back out.
The man who agreed to a favor so enormous that I still don’t know if I’ll ever truly understand its cost. That favor was collected only a few months later.
I glance across the backyard. My eyes settle on Finn.
He’s chasing Thomas through the grass while Ollie follows behind, determined not to be left out.
His laughter carries across the yard. The corner of my mouth lifts.
Some favors cost money. Some cost influence.
The one Duncan traded with Vincenzo Moretti changed lives.
Not just one. Many. Including the man laughing in my backyard.
I spent so much of my life believing families were something you were born into. Turns out, sometimes they’re built one stubborn Murphy decision at a time. And I have never been happier that my husband is incapable of doing anything halfway.
Husband.
The word still makes me smile. I glance across the yard to where Conor is pretending not to let Thomas climb him like a tree. He’s failing spectacularly.
We didn’t have a traditional courtship. Considering the way our relationship started, that was probably never in the cards. So it makes sense that we didn’t have a traditional engagement either.
Conor proposed at the cemetery. We’d gone to visit my parents. Something we’d done several times a year since the day Neil gave me their names. When we arrived, I thought we’d come to leave flowers. Instead, I found the old headstone gone. In its place stood a new one.
Polished granite. Beautiful without being extravagant. Their names engraved in deep black lettering.
Thomas Kane
Catherine Kane
Beneath them were words that hadn’t been there before.
Beloved Husband and Wife.
Forever Loved.
And below that…
Cherished Parents.
Two words. Two words I’d spent years believing could never belong to me. I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe. Conor stood beside me, his hand resting quietly against my back.
“I thought they deserved more than names and dates.” His voice had been soft. “They deserved to have the world know they loved each other. And they deserved to have everyone know they were your parents.”
I cried harder that day than I had at their graves the first time. Because for the first time, someone had honored not only the people who gave me life, but the little boy who’d spent decades believing they never wanted him.
When I finally turned to Conor, he was already on one knee. No speech or elaborate plan. Just the man I loved, holding out a ring. And just like a year ago, his family stands behind him.
“I’ve spent a year proving you belong with my family.” His eyes never left mine. “I think it’s about time I made it official.”
I laughed through my tears. The easiest answer of my life.
“Yes.”
Standing between the people who gave me life and the man who taught me how to live it, I finally understood. I had never been abandoned. I had simply spent years waiting for the family that was always meant to find me.
I force myself to shake away the memory before I embarrass myself all over again.
Five years later, and Conor can still bring me to tears without even trying.
Honestly, I think I’ve cried more in the last five years than I did in the thirty before them.
For most of my life, tears were dangerous.
A weakness to swallow down and lock away.
Somewhere along the way, that changed. Now they come without shame.
The tears still surprise me, but they’re different now.
They don’t come from loneliness. Or grief.
Or the certainty that no one would notice if I disappeared.
They come because, after a lifetime of believing I wasn’t worth loving, I found a life so full of it that some days my heart doesn’t know what else to do. So it cries.
“Dad, Cathy needs to be changed, and I’m not doing it.”
Our oldest son, Cillian Kieran Murphy, deposits his baby sister into my arms before taking three quick steps backward. Smart kid.
“I did the last one.”
“You watched me do the last one,” I remind him.
“Same thing.”
His expression never changes. The little brat has perfected Murphy sarcasm in record time. I look down at Catherine—Cathy to everyone except Mom, who insists on using her full name. Catherine Alessia Murphy.
She blinks up at me with complete innocence. The innocence of a three-month-old who has absolutely destroyed her diaper. Wonderful. Cillian snickers.
I point toward the changing table. “You’re still helping.”
He groans dramatically. “At least I’m not changing her.”
“No,” I agree. “You’re just learning.”
His eyes roll so hard I’m surprised they don’t stick.
Two years ago, Cillian walked into our home carrying everything he owned in a single duffel bag.
He was twelve. Old enough to know that foster placements end.
Old enough not to unpack all his clothes.
Old enough to sleep with his shoes beside the bed in case he had to leave again.
Memories of my own came flooding back to me that night.
Conor held me as I cried myself to sleep.
I cried for myself, but mostly for the boy sleeping in our guest room.
We took things slowly. There were no promises we couldn’t keep. No demands that he call us “Dad” and “Papa”. No expectation that trust would appear overnight.
Instead, we showed up. Every day. Every meal. Every school event. Every nightmare. Every victory.
The first time he left a toothbrush in the bathroom instead of putting it back in his bag, Conor noticed. He didn’t say a word. Just smiled to himself for the rest of the day.
The duffel bag stayed packed for almost three months, then one morning it disappeared.
Neither of us asked where it went. It had finally stopped being an exit strategy.
It had become an empty bag in the back of a closet.
Exactly where it belonged. When the adoption came up, he asked to change his name to sound more “Murphy-ish”, his words.
Now Cillian stands in my kitchen arguing about diapers with all the confidence of a kid who knows he’s not going anywhere. And I can’t think of a more beautiful ending than that.