Between us, our son makes a small sound—not a cry this time, something softer. Dane’s hand moves in slow circles over his back, and it lands with a kind of clarity I can’t ignore.
This is it.
This is what we were always moving toward.
Epilogue
Dane Gallagher
There’s no mistaking it.I feel it before I fully see it.
Something tightens in my chest, sharp and certain. I’ve been scanning horizons for months—getting it wrong enough times that I stopped trusting that feeling. Stopped letting it mean anything.
This time is different. I know that shape. I never forgot it.
Charlotte’s hand closes around my arm. “Dane?—”
That’s when I know she feels it too.
It’s taken almost a year to find this place. That’s once we were actually able to start looking.
We had to leave our cottage not long after Cameron was born and go back to Australia. There wasn’t a way around it.
What followed wasn’t quick. There was no path waiting for us—we had to build one ourselves.
The DNA results confirmed what my mother and Marcus had always known. Even then, separating one identity from another wasn’t simple. Everything had to be proven and formalized.
Cameron turned one before the courts recognized me as Dane Shepherd.
It had to be done. There was no other way to make Charlotte my wife in a way the world couldn’t question.
I’m not a Gallagher anymore.
Neither is Charlotte. Neither is our son.
We’re Shepherds.
That revelation set the media off all over again. New headlines. New theories. New people deciding they understood our lives.
In the end, it made the next step easy.
We left it all behind.
We anchor offshore and drop the tender.
The water is exactly as I remember it—a blue-green that only exists here. I know the depth at this distance without checking.
I lift Cam into my arms. He grabs my shirt straight away, both fists, the way he does when something’s new and he’s not quite sure about it yet.
Charlotte takes my hand as she steps into the tender. I steady her in, then bring us across.
She steps onto the sand first.
We stop there for a moment, just looking.
The first time I stood on this beach, I was twelve years old, and something inside me was broken.
I had no idea what this place would become. Or what Charlotte would become to me. I couldn't have imagined that the girl I resented would one day be the most important person in my life. That she'd be standing here now.
