To Keep Her Safe is All I Know

Epilogue

A few months later.

Melanie lays on the couch in the living room, watching TV. She'd gotten a promotion at work, and it actually led her to being able to be home more often. She worked a regular schedule at work rather than being the on-call doctor. She had literally just gotten home and was waiting for Sadie to get home.    

Chris walks out of another room and smiles at Melanie. He goes over to the couch and crawls on top of her before kissing her.

"Hi."

"Hi." Melanie repeats.

They kiss a bit more, as happy as can be. Now that Melanie's schedule was a bit more flexible, Sadie was able to ride the bus home at the start of her third grade year. Melanie and Sadie and Fred were now fully moved in and situated in Chris' house and were completely happy. 

Sadie still called Chris 'Dad', especially now that the adoption process was complete. It didn't take long for that to happen. Under normal circumstances for a step-parent adoption, consent from the blood parent is required, but since John was dead, that wasn't the case. Chris had made it clear to Sadie that he was in no way shape or form trying to replace John or take away from the memories that Sadie had of him, but Sadie was actually pretty excited about the idea of Chris adopting her and seemed pretty okay with it all. (A/N: This is the only time I will ever include adoption in a story, I am not ever going to write one of THOSE stories, haha! We all know what I'm talking about...)

Telling everyone else about Chris and Melanie's sudden marriage was interesting.

They'd had all the guys over at Melanie's house and Melanie had ordered chicken wings. When everyone came over, they were all suspicious of Chris and Melanie, but no one said anything until they walked into the house. Melanie opened the door and smiled.

"Hey, you guys."

Ricky gasped, "You two totally did it."

Melanie's cheeks turned pink, "Okay, is my poker face really that readable?"

"Yes!" The guys exclaim in unison.

Melanie rolls her eyes, "Well, Sadie is here, so appropriate language, please. We'll discuss it later. Come on in."

The guys walked in and all immediately rushed over to Chris.

"Dude, are you serious right now?"

"Are you and Melanie together?"

"What's going on?"

Sadie then walked downstairs and smiled, knowing what Melanie and Chris had planned, "Hey, the guys are here!"

"Who wants chicken wings?" Melanie asked.

"Why will no one tell us what's going on?!" Vinny asked.

"What do you mean? There's nothing going on." Sadie said.

Balz pointed to Sadie, "The kid knows something."

Ghost ran up to Sadie, picked her up and shook her, "Come on, Sadie, tell us what you know!"

Sadie laughed, "I don't know anything!"

"Okay, but those chicken wings do smell really good." Ryan said. 

"Dig in." Melanie said with a smile, shoving her left hand into her pocket.

"This doesn't mean we're not still suspicious of you two." Balz said.

They all served themselves and began to eat, all of them exchanging suspicious glances at each other. Chris, Melanie and Sadie all acted oblivious.