Evelyn's Tale

-Epilogue-

A/N: Well, this is it. We have come to the end of Evelyn's Tale. Four years and it's done. For everyone who has continued to read this over the years (and especially when I've been a moron who kept deleting her accounts when she was having a mental episode). This has been a real labour of love for me and I've really given it my all and I feel so sad to be saying goodbye to this.

However, there will be Ev and Joe imagines coming (one of which is already written and posted in my 'Band of Brothers Imagines'. So thank you again and now I'm off to cry, haha. Chloe.

24th November, 1948- San Francisco

Evelyn pushed open the door and smiled when she heard the sound of giggling coming from the kitchen, along with the aroma of food cooking. The knowledge that Joe would try and pass off whatever culinary deliciousness was almost ready to eat as something he had made himself rather than something his mother had come round and made for them made her smile even wider.

Monday was one of Evelyn's two days working at the veteran's home; a job role she hadn't foreseen when she first moved to San Francisco with Joe when Georgina was three weeks old. But it was a role that she had fallen into accidentally when visiting Chuck who was recovering there for a short while until he was ready to live back at home with his family.

After swearing to never work in the medical field again, working as a sort of nursing assistant there had just felt right. After all, she had been where many of them; had been through so much of what they had and she knew she could help them. She could talk with them when she was feeding them, and she could take them for fresh air outside, and in helping them she was helping herself. They didn't need to try and explain to her how it felt to witness the things they had, and they didn't need to explain to her how deep the trauma of their injuries affected them mentally because she had seen so much of it for herself; she had seen how their life could have changed in a split second.

The other nurses always tried to talk her into finishing her training and becoming one of them, but she had no wish to treat wounds. No, what she did was enough for her. She felt like she was accomplishing something and really helping those in the home, whether they were there for a long time or a short time.

Besides, she had her hands full with a husband and a three year old and a whole family in law who, much like her own family would be if they lived closer, loved to pop by uninvited and who always wanted to host family gatherings and dinners at short notice. Georgina was lucky enough to live within walking distance of her three other cousins, and Evelyn's friendship with Joe's sister was something she had really come to cherish over the past few years. Especially when the pangs of missing her own sisters hit her hard in the chest. Not to mention Bill.

It didn't matter that she spoke to Bill at least four times a week, or that they each made a visit to one another every few months for the weekend, she still missed him like crazy. Now a father of two boys, he was as wrapped up in his own family life as she was but that didn't make it hurt any less. It only distracted her from the anguish of missing them until something would suddenly remind her that they were so far away and that pain would wash over her again.

Joe had suggested multiple times that they move back to Philly, that he would do it in an instant to make her happy, but their life was in San Francisco. They had good jobs– jobs that they loved– and they had a beautiful home; or at least it would be once they had finished repairing and decorating it. For now, it was a promise of perfection which somehow only made it all the better because it was imperfectly theirs.

No, this was her home now but that didn't mean that half of her wouldn't always be in the place she had grown up.

Hanging up her coat on the hook and toeing off her pinching shoes, she sighed with relief when her stockinged swollen feet felt the plush new carpet beneath them; the carpet that had been laid only two weeks ago yet already had a small stain next to the living room door where Georgina had gotten hold of a pen and thought to do some decorating of her own.