Epilogue Family Beginnings #2
Finally, I say, “Andie’s been weird lately.”
He hums, noncommittal. “Define weird.”
I kick a pebble off the sidewalk. “Cagey. She keeps dodging my calls, and she hasn’t posted a selfie in, like, a week. Last time we talked, she sounded… I don’t know. Giddy? But nervous, too. I think it’s that older guy she’s seeing.”
He glances over, blue eyes narrowing. “She’s entitled to date older men. I’m an older man.”
I nod, but I’m not finished. “I think it’s serious. Like, seriously serious. And I have a theory.”
He arches an eyebrow, teacher mode engaged. “Let’s hear it.”
I check that the street is empty, as if this is the kind of intel that needs to be whispered.
“She’s seeing Stella Moreland’s dad. Stella’s a girl who used to live down the hall from us.
I think this new guy is really dominant and he’s got Andie wrapped around his little finger. I mean, I don’t really know, but …”
For a moment, nothing changes. Liam keeps walking, keeps breathing. But then he stops so suddenly the diaper bag nearly swings out of his grasp. He stares at me, all pretense of casual dropped like a mask.
“So she’s dating Thomas Moreland.” His voice is lower now, nearly inaudible. “Are you certain?”
I hesitate, caught off guard by the gravity in his face.
“Not one hundred percent, but Stella mentioned something about her dad helping Andie move out at the end of spring semester. Then Andie started showing up with, like, suspiciously expensive handbags. And she’s been to Chicago twice in two months, which just happens to be where he lives. ”
Liam’s jaw works, the muscle pulsing like a separate animal.
“Andie needs to be careful. Moreland is a huge donor to the school, and on the Board of Trustees.” He trails off, then finds the thread again.
“He’s ruthless. In business, sure, but in every other way, too.
You don’t get to where he is without some scorched earth behind you. ”
We stand there on the sidewalk, Emmy snoring gently, my own heart rate spiking for reasons I can’t name.
“What do you know about him?” I ask. “Besides what everyone can find on Google?”
Liam looks away, scanning the horizon as if expecting Moreland to materialize from the hydrangeas.
“Nothing I can prove. But when I was on faculty council, I watched him destroy someone in a meeting. No warning, no compromise. One week the guy was a rising star; next week, blackballed from every campus in the state. There are rumors about non-disclosure settlements, but nobody will talk.”
He starts walking again, more slowly now, his hand resting at my lower back, a steady pressure.
I process this, trying to picture Andie in a world that sharp and unforgiving. “She’s not an idiot,” I say, half to myself.
“No,” he agrees. “But she’s young. And men like Moreland—” he pauses, searching for words “—they know how to find your weak spots.”
We walk a few paces more. Emmy shudders in her sleep, a tiny fist clenching and unclenching at my sternum.
I say, “She’s happy, though. I can hear it in her voice. And she says the sex is fantastic.”
Liam makes a noncommittal noise, but doesn’t contradict me.
We reach the corner where the bakery always smells like caramelized sugar, and I look up at the cloud-patched sky, searching for something light to say. Instead, all I find is the ache of wanting to protect the people I love, even from themselves.
“Should I talk to her?” I ask, unsure whether I want him to say yes.
He shakes his head. “Let her tell you. She’ll need someone in her corner if things go bad.”
He takes Emmy from my chest, transferring her to his own with the practiced efficiency of a dad who’s done this a hundred times. She shifts, resettles, then immediately drools a new stain onto his shirt.
“Classic,” I say, and he grins, his tension ebbing a little.
We keep walking, the late afternoon turning gold around the edges. The world is small for a few minutes—just us, the baby, and the mystery of what happens when girls grow up and start making choices nobody can fix for them.
But I tuck the story of Andie and Thomas Moreland away, a secret for a future day. For now, I just want to walk the long road home with the people who need me most.
Our new house doesn’t have a white picket fence, but it might as well.
The front walk is lined with tulip bulbs that I planted when I was newly pregnant and convinced that “nesting” was a real thing, not just the collective hallucination of the baby-industrial complex.
There’s a little swing on the porch, and a mat that says WELCOME in bold sans-serif, which makes me smile every time I see it, even though I bought it ironically.
Inside, the evening glows with the soft conspiracy of dimmed lamps and the scent of coconut shampoo rising from Emmy’s head as she fusses through her last feeding.
I’m always amazed at how much space a baby can occupy—her playpen blocks the TV, her bottles claim real estate on every countertop, her toys land wherever the laws of entropy demand.
Still, this is the life I wanted, even on days when it feels like a beautiful siege.
Liam cleans up the kitchen with the methodical grace of a man who believes in small rituals. He catches me watching from the hallway, and winks, then gestures up the stairs. “Go. I’ll finish here.”
I take Emmy to her room. The walls are painted the color of butter, each corner filled with stuffed animals—lions, rabbits, a flock of iridescent songbirds suspended from the mobile that Andie made by hand one fevered winter break.
I settle into the rocker, the fabric faded from years of sun, and feed Emmy her bottle as she stares at me with clear blue eyes that are nobody’s but her own.
She’s asleep in minutes. I lay her gently in the crib, tuck the knit blanket around her legs, and tiptoe to the door.
I linger, just a second, and watch her chest rise and fall, the simple miracle of breath and safety.
For a long time, I didn’t believe I’d ever have this—a room, a baby, a night unbroken by panic.
The hush is complete. Even the old floorboards seem to agree to keep their secrets.
Back downstairs, Liam is waiting in the foyer. He’s swapped his cardigan for a threadbare Henley, arms crossed over his chest, looking less like a poet and more like a man ready to weather any storm. He beckons me into his study.
The study smells of leather and paper and a hint of the cologne he only wears for me. The walls are lined floor-to-ceiling with books; some are arranged by color, most by obsession. On the desk is a manila envelope, unassuming except for the weight it seems to radiate.
He closes the door behind me, the latch clicking softly.
“I have something for you,” he says, voice stripped of all pretense.
I cross the room, my heart spiking with the old animal sense of news—good or bad, I can never tell until the story is over.
He slides the envelope to me. “You remember when you asked me to stop looking?”
I do. Months ago, back when the pregnancy was new and all I could think about was not dying, not disappointing anyone, not falling apart. Back when I asked him—begged him—to stop searching for my brother, to let the past rest where it lay.
“I know you said you didn’t want to know,” he says, “but I couldn’t let it go.”
I stand there, the envelope between my hands, the edge digging into my thumb.
Liam steps forward, crowding my space, as if to catch me if I tip. “You can open it. Or not. It’s your call.”
For a long time, I just hold the thing. It’s heavier than it looks.
Then I break the seal, slow, like I’m afraid of cutting what’s inside.
The first page is a letter from a private investigator in Milwaukee. I skim, picking out words: James Andrew McCall, a bartender at a place called Molly O’Martin. My vision tunnels, everything else washed out except the black-and-white photo clipped to the next sheet.
It’s Jimmy.
Not a boy anymore, but a man—older, tan, a beard where there never was one.
He’s behind the bar at some place with a neon sign, smiling at the camera, arm slung around a girl with green hair and a tattoo sleeve.
The photo isn’t staged. It’s candid, a moment ripped from the blur of someone’s real, ongoing life.
My little brother looks happy.
I press a palm to my mouth and sit down hard in the nearest chair. I don’t realize I’m crying until the paper blurs.
Liam kneels in front of me, rests his hands on my knees, and waits.
After a minute, I manage: “He’s alive. He’s really okay.”
Liam nods, his own eyes wet.
“Did you—did you contact him?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “That’s up to you. I just wanted you to know he made it.”
I pull him into a hug, my face buried in his neck, and he holds me tight, tight enough to anchor me to the room, to the house, to the life we’ve built from nothing.
“I love you,” I say, a hundred times over.
“I love you more,” Liam whispers, and for once, I believe it.
We sit there until my hands stop shaking.
Later, I vow to write a letter to the return address in Milwaukee. I don’t know what I’ll say—maybe everything, maybe nothing. But I have the option now. That’s enough.
When Emmy wakes at ten, we bring her into our bed, the three of us piled together in a jumble of limbs and hair and old university sweatshirts.
She smells like milk and skin and sleep.
Liam reads her Yeats, because of course he does, his voice low and sonorous, and I wonder if she’ll grow up loving poetry or hating it.
Eventually, we fall into our evening routine.
I type out the last paragraphs of my paper—on Walt Whitman and the democratization of longing—while Liam brings me a mug of chamomile and strokes my hair.
The monitor hums with Emmy’s breathing, and the only other sound is the scratch of my pen in the margin, correcting my own overconfident prose.
We don’t talk much, but we don’t need to.
I think about the idea of control—how it can run your life, or shape it, or turn it into something beautiful if you’re lucky.
Liam was a control freak when it came to getting women pregnant.
I was trying to control my body, even when it betrayed me.
But we did the thing anyway, and now there’s a girl in the next room who might grow up to be braver than either of us.
Before I go to sleep, I check the locks. I peek into Emmy’s room, just to see her one more time. And I make a promise to myself that I’ll never run away from the things that scare me, not again.
I crawl back into bed, pull Liam close, and whisper: “I love you, Professor Thomas. Thank you for making this life possible for me.”
He squeezes my hand and says, “Always, my darling. I’d do anything for you.”
And with a smile on my face, I fall asleep, cradled against my fiancé’s broad chest, our hearts beating in unison.
THE END