Chapter Text
Sometimes, TK Strand can’t believe how lucky he is.
He never saw a life glowing with possibilities.
A life full of sobriety.
A life that didn’t end in his New York flat on a rainy day five years ago.
A life full of his husband’s whispers of love and a tiny bedroom with glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling and a three-year-old who looks at him like he hung the moon.
Adopting Jonah wasn’t easy.
TK was used to feeling like the world was conspiring against him, where one step forward meant three steps back.
But a life without Jonah coming home - a life without spaghetti nights and matching pyjamas, a life without cheering on the sidelines at tee-ball games and cheesy Disney movies playing in the background while Jonah falls asleep in his husbands arms, was not a life he was ready to give up on.
And so he fought.
He fought to bring his brother, his child, their child, home.
TK still remembers the day Jonah walked through their door and became a part of their future forever.
The three-year-old wasn’t aware of the lives he had changed, and the gaping hole he had filled. He just wondered through the door in his dinosaur light up sneakers and a sweet smile that reminded TK so much of their mothers.
I hope to raise him to be everything you’d ever want him to be, mom - now a persistent thought at the back of his mind that grows with every passing day of raising Jonah as his own.
And yet, in this moment, where he is simply just existing with his husband and their son on their couch that has now acquired a mixture of stuffed plushies and dinosaur figurines, where Jonah now has his own space that TK couldn’t imagine being empty ever again, he knows.
He knows she’s still here.
His mom is still here, watching her boys, loving her boys, guiding her boys.
She never left.