Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Tim rolls onto his back, bone-deep satisfaction humming through every part of him, feeling as though there are still stars exploding somewhere behind his eyes.

Beside him, Pai is still catching his breath. And in between, their hands remain loosely intertwined, Pai's left cradled with Tim's right.

Tim turns his head to watch as the rise and fall of Pai’s chest gradually slows. He lifts their joined hands and presses a lingering kiss to the ring on Pai’s finger.

Pai looks over.

Their eyes meet, and Tim feels his entire face scrunch helplessly into a smile he doesn’t even attempt to hold back.

“Pardon my French,” Pai says after another beat, voice gravelly with exhaustion and delight, “but holy fuck. Married sex is amazing.”

Married.

The word crashes through Tim all over again.

“Say that again,” he whispers, almost pleading.

Pai’s eyes soften.

“I married you.”

He lets go of Tim’s hand only to drape himself half over Tim’s body, pressing their matching grins together as he steals a kiss. Then another. And another, intent loud and clear with not a word spoken.

“Pai,” Tim whines weakly against his lips. “I can’t get hard again that fast.”

“No?” Pai pulls back just enough to arch one (sculpted, delicate, absolutely perfect) eyebrow at him. “I seem to remember not even a week ago —”

“Teerak!”

“What?” Pai giggles.

And the sound of it rings through the room: bright, warm, completely uninhibited.

Tim freezes for a moment just listening to him.

He has heard Pai laugh before, countless times. Smug laughs, teasing laughs, sharp little victorious laughs.

But never like this. This open, or this happy.

Not even the first time they were wed.

Back then, as much as they had both wanted it, the ceremony had still been a performance in so many ways. Months of planning, endless traditions, over a hundred guests watching them with scrutiny.

Joy had existed, of course.

But it had been restrained. Polished. Contained.

Today was none of those things.

A spur-of-the-moment decision, made together with just one look. The two of them saying “I do”, against the backdrop of the setting sun, witnessed only by the handful of people who mattered most amidst the noise of the world.

This was more like the wedding day Tim had dreamed about.

He catches Pai’s wandering hand before it can drift any lower.

“You know what?” Tim murmurs, gaze fond as it lingers on Pai. “You’re absolutely right.”

Pai hums smugly. “As I always am.”

Tim leans in to kiss the smile right off his husband’s face.

Husband.

“I’m going to wear both of us out tonight,” he mumbles against Pai’s mouth. “Hope you’re ready for it, teerak.”

Pai’s response is a wicked smirk and Tim’s pulse stumbles.

“In case it wasn't obvious, that’s exactly what I want right now.”

=========

Pai wakes to a room still completely dark and immediately registers the empty space beside him.

Tim is gone.

Pai stares blearily at the ceiling for a moment, already knowing he won’t fall back asleep without Tim there. With a sigh, he pushes himself upright and leaves the bedroom.

The fully lit living room stings his sleep-heavy eyes. When they adjust, it’s to the sight of Tim hunched over the low table in the middle of the room, residential sketches and floor plans spread around him in chaotic layers.

Pai walks over without a word and reaches for his shoulders, gently tugging him backward. Tim goes willingly, head falling back so he can look up at the interruption.

“Teerak,” he murmurs. “Why are you awake?”

“You weren’t there,” Pai says, simple as that. He throws a pointed glance at the blueprints. “Can’t that wait?”

Tim tiredly shakes his head. “Not this one.”

Pai circles around and eases onto the couch, curling into Tim’s side and closing his eyes again. Tim’s arms wrap around him automatically, instinctive as breathing.

“We’re getting you a drafting table and bench tomorrow,” Pai grumbles. “If you’re going to insist on bringing work home with you, we’re at least giving you a proper desk. Even if I can’t give you your own room for it here.”

Tim presses a kiss to the top of his head. “Thank you, teerak.”

Pai cracks one eye open and squints suspiciously at the mess spread across the table.

“Who is that for, anyway? Even when you bring those home, you don’t usually stay up this late.”

“A VIP.”

“Must be one heck of an important person if you’re sacrificing sleep for them.”

“He is.” Tim sits up straighter, bringing Pai with him. “Take a look.”

Pai leans forward reluctantly, squinting at the title block of the nearest page.

Chaiyanuwat-Jeeramongkolthanun Residence

“Teerak…?”

“I wasn’t planning to show you until morning, but…” A sheepish little smile tugs at Tim’s mouth. “Happy first monthsary?”

Pai blinks, then snorts in amusement. “You’re such a dweeb. Aren’t we too old to still celebrate that?”

His tone is pure condescension wrapped around unmistakable affection, so thoroughly Pai that Tim can’t help the soft laugh that escapes him.

Then it fades.

Silence settles between them.

Pai is confused. “…Tim?”

Tim exhales heavily, something akin to remorse taking over his handsome face.

“I already lost you once, Pai.” The words leave him slowly, carefully. “I’ll celebrate every single day you still choose me.”

Pai’s throat tightens. “Tim —”

“I don’t want to spend even one moment without showing how much I love you.”

The words come out too earnest, too unguarded; the kind that appears only when Tim’s fear slips through the cracks. 

Pai kisses him before he can spiral any further. “Tim,” he murmurs against his mouth. “Teerak. This is it for me.”

Tim's breath catches beneath Pai’s touch.

“The Tim I married isn’t the same Tim who hurt me before.” Pai can already feel tears threatening, but he keeps going anyway. “The Tim in front of me now… Who you are now, I’ll choose you every day for the rest of my life.”

“Pai…”

Pai kisses him again, gentler this time.

“Come back to bed,” he coaxes. “This can wait.”

You don’t have to earn your place goes unsaid. You already have me.

Later, when Tim finally slips into his side of the bed, his gaze traces every curve and line of Pai’s face like he still can’t quite believe he’s allowed to have this.

Pai rolls his eyes sleepily and pushes at Tim’s shoulder until he turns around.

Then he presses himself firmly against Tim’s back, arms wrapping possessively around his waist.

Only once Tim relaxes fully does Pai finally fall asleep.

=========

Fifteen paperwork-filled weeks later, Pai and Tim are signing their names on the foundation slab, newly laid in the soil where Tim’s family home once stood.

“You know… I never did ask. Why here?”

“Hm?”

“We could have bought a new plot of land for ourselves, and you could still have kept your old house.”

Tim takes Pai's hand as he turns them both to face the empty lot. Wind moves noiselessly through the open space, carrying with it the ghost of a life he spent years trying to preserve.

“I used to think that if I protected this place long enough, my family would come back to me,” is the admission he opens with. “Trying to save it was what made me… make the wrong decisions. Every lie. Every compromise. I kept telling myself everything would all be worth it if I could just keep the house standing.”

His fingers tighten around Pai’s.

“But a house built around waiting for people to return…” A slow, heavy sigh. “That isn’t a home.”

His gaze stays for another moment before dropping to the ground beneath their feet.

“I can’t erase what I’ve done. It’s part of me. This is my history.” His voice lowers, gentler now. “But where that life once stood, I want to build something new.”

He turns to Pai, completely open and exposed in a way that makes Pai’s heart clench.

“I spent years trying to hold on to a home they could return to,” Tim says quietly. “Then I met you.”

His thumb brushes slowly across Pai’s knuckles.

“And soon I learned to stop waiting for the people who had already gone.” A faint smile touches his mouth. “I started thinking about the person who was already standing beside me.”

He looks down for a moment where their hands are connected, like the confession itself still surprises him.

“Somewhere along the way, you became the place I always want to come back home to.”

His gaze lifts to meet Pai’s. “And even after everything I did, you still kept a space for me next to you.”

Tim glances toward the foundation in front of them before looking back at Pai, something fragile and unbearably sincere in his features.

“This time, I don’t want to keep a home standing for the people who chose to leave.” His gaze softens. “I want to build one with the person who chose to stay.”

Pai stares at him for a long moment, chest aching so hard it almost feels unfair.

God. Damn him.

Tim will always know exactly how to say the things that make Pai fall in love with him all over again.

“Take me home,” Pai says abruptly.

Tim blinks. “Hm?”

“Right now.”

“Pai, I can’t just leave —”

“Architect Tim has a good foreman and can take the rest of the day off.” Pai crosses his arms, tone making it absolutely clear that he is making neither request nor suggestion. “Husband Tim, however, is needed elsewhere. Immediately.”

=========

Between being pulled into projects at the firm, overseeing the construction of Pai’s dream, and staying as hands-on as possible with building the home that would one day belong to both of them, the next two years become the busiest of Tim’s life so far.

Pai spends his own days preparing North — and, by extension, Yu — to eventually take over the CEO position Pai has held at Empire for years, all while steadily growing his side of the family business through his gated community projects. Convincing the board, Aunt Kia, and Grandpa Soephon to support both the separate expansion and the eventual transition of responsibilities to North had taken months of negotiations, presentations, and stubborn persistence on Pai’s part.

Despite everything, their marriage never falters.

Every exhausting day still ends the same way: the two of them collapsed in bed, worn thin by work but secure in the certainty that every long hour and difficult decision is heading toward a future they share.

Some nights, they barely have enough energy left to eat dinner, clean up, and collapse into bed before sleep drags them under.

Other nights, they cling to each other with all the intensity of newlyweds still drunk on the fact that they belong to one another at all — sometimes desperate and overwhelming enough to leave them flushed, breathless, and laughing into the low light afterward, other times slow and tender and no less intimate for it.

Whether the night is all frantic kisses and burning need or unhurried caresses and sleepy murmurs, it always ends the same way: tangled together beneath the sheets, grounded by the unshakable sense of home they found in each other.

—

By the time the house is finally complete, the condo has become impossibly full.

Late-night takeout containers left on the counter, Tim’s sketches spread across the table, Pai’s blazers draped on the sofa.

Arguments big and small, gentle reconciliation kisses, mornings wrapped around each other in bed long after alarms had gone off.

The weight of everything they had become there, memories accumulated one by one, day by day, year by year.

Tim and Pai are packing up the last vestiges of the space, once owned by one then shared by two, preparing to trade familiar walls for a new chapter of their life together.

(The house is already mostly furnished. While Pai had insisted on purchasing everything new, Tim had been stubbornly sentimental about the sofa set moving with them.

Pai eventually lost the argument in spectacularly humiliating fashion — not that he hadn't enjoyed it, because he absolutely had — and now refuses to acknowledge exactly how Tim had persuaded him, reacting with visible suspicion anytime Tim looks a little too fondly at the couch.)

Workers carry another batch of their belongings out of the bedroom as Tim and Pai walk around, sorting the knickknacks scattered around their room.

Pai is halfway through taping another box shut when something compels him to look at Tim.

Tim is standing next to the discard pile, about to drop a very familiar ball of fluff onto it.

Pai straightens immediately. “What are you doing?”

Tim looks down at the duck plushie, face unreadable for a fraction of a second before carefully smoothing over into something neutral.

“Throwing this out.”

“Why?”

“Pai,” Tim says on a slow exhale. “We don’t need to bring everything with us.”

Pai studies him for another moment before understanding dawns on him. Ah.

Of course.

He sets the tape down and walks over, plucking the doll out of Tim’s hand. “We’re keeping it.”

“Teerak —”

“No.” Pai protectively hides the plushie behind himself. “You bought this because you said I look like a sad duckling when I cry.”

Tim cringes. “That was… from back then.”

“And?”

“And I don’t want to bring reminders of that into our new home.”

Something painfully tender pulls at Pai’s insides. “Tim. My love. I need you to listen.

“I thought, after that night fell apart, that everything that came before it was a lie. Every second you touched me, every time you kissed me, every single thing you told me.”

Silence falls as Pai’s words settle like a physical presence between them.

“But this?” He brings the plush doll to his chest. “Looking back… I know now.” A whisper: “This wasn’t.”

Tim’s brows furrow in confusion.

“A year into our relationship…” Pai pauses, turning the thought over carefully before continuing. “You were still lying to me, but…” He brushes his fingers over the exaggerated tears on the duck’s face. “Nobody forced you to notice things like this.”

Tim goes still.

“Nobody forced you to remember exactly what I look like when I cry.”

Something twists sharply in Tim’s stomach.

Because — he realizes — Pai is right.

The doll had not been part of the plan.

Neither had the teasing joke about Pai looking like a sad duckling.

Or the way Pai’s tears had immediately made him ache to fix things.

Somewhere between all the lies and stolen honesty, what began as carefully constructed affection had become real.

“You already loved me then,” Pai concludes softly.

“... Pai.”

Pai steps closer, the doll now caught between both of them. “She’s coming with us.”

Tim hums questioningly as his arms go around Pai’s waist. “...‘She’?”

Pai nods once. “It… just feels right. Thinking of her that way.” 

Tim huffs a small laugh as the last of the tension finally leaves his shoulders, impossibly endeared with the beautiful man in his embrace.

The duck, apparently, is staying.

=========

In the end, Pai still doesn’t entirely know what to do with the plushie.

It feels wrong to let go of it, but equally strange to place it anywhere permanent.

So it ends up tucked into one of the spare rooms among half-unpacked boxes, the contents of which are waiting to find their places in the house.

Occasionally Pai thinks of it when he passes by the closed door of that room, currently designated as temporary storage, and feels something odd twist warmly in his chest.

He never quite examines it too closely.

—

A few weeks later, the house finally begins to feel lived in rather than merely occupied. Slowly, steadily, the brochure-immaculate perfection of the house yields around them and takes on the interlocking shapes of life.

The sharp scent of fresh paint fades beneath traces of brewed coffee and Pai’s cologne lingering in the hallways on rushed weekday mornings. Shoes begin collecting near the entrance despite Pai’s repeated insistence that they use the rack properly. One of Tim’s jackets somehow ends up permanently draped over the back of a dining chair.

Tim works late in his office often enough that Pai eventually stops asking whether he wants dinner brought in on such nights.

More often than not, Pai arrives still in slacks and done-up dress shirt with only his blazer discarded in the living room, balancing takeout containers or reheated leftovers as he steps around scattered sketches and drafting instruments.

He usually ends up sitting on Tim’s lap before either of them can pretend this is a civilized interruption, settling easily like he belongs there.

Which, as far as Tim is concerned, he does.

Work rarely survives much longer after that.

Especially after the unfortunate discovery that Pai attempting to distract him while he works apparently triggers something deeply unreasonable and insatiable in Tim’s brain.

On that particularly memorable night, Tim had looked up from his designs and stared at Pai – who had already been getting ready for bed, hair still slightly damp and towel draped over the shoulders of his favourite dark blue pajamas, eyes sleepy-warm in the way only post-shower contentment can bring – long enough to make him squirm.

Then, in a voice low enough to send heat rushing throughout Pai's suddenly awake body:

“You, teerak, are a work of art.”

Pai had mistaken this for victory and started to move closer in encouragement, immensely pleased with himself.

Tim’s response had been to pin him against the nearest wall hard enough to rattle the items on the mounted shelves.

Little by little, moments like these become woven so thoroughly into the fabric of their days. Beneath all the laughter, wandering hands, and steadily accumulating traces of ordinary life, there thrums a love so immense it still catches Pai off guard sometimes.

Most days it appears in easy touches and domestic routines.

Other times it manifests as Tim systematically wandering barefoot through the house checking doors, windows, lights — restless in the way he still becomes whenever something feels too precious to lose.

The first few times it happens, Pai pretends not to notice.

The fourth time, he catches Tim halfway through checking the lock on the front door for the second time that night and simply takes his hand.

“Teerak —”

“If somebody manages to get through the gate, the security system, the front door, another security system, and you,” Pai mutters sleepily, already dragging him back toward the bedroom, “then honestly they deserve whatever they came for.”

Tim lets out a startled laugh despite himself.

Pai glances back just in time to catch something flit across his face, unguarded and so full of affection that it almost hurts to look at directly.

There it is again. That quiet realization that still sneaks up on Pai at odd moments, even now:

Tim loves him with everything he has.

=========

One day, Pai catches Tim carefully placing the plushie on one of the shelves in their room instead of letting it stay sealed away in storage.

“I thought you wanted to throw that out,” Pai says from the doorway.

Tim glances over briefly. “You wanted to keep it.” Like that explains everything.

And maybe it does.

Something stirs in Pai’s stomach as he watches his husband shift the doll around, finding the perfect spot before stepping back to make sure it won’t fall.

… Huh.

That feels awfully close to something Pai isn’t ready to name yet.

—

After that, Pai begins to notice things he had somehow never paid attention to before.

The way Tim automatically reaches for the small of his back whenever they move through crowded spaces together.

How he replaces things around the house without comment whenever Pai inconveniences himself on them even once.

Pai bumps his hip rather roughly against a corner of one of the side tables exactly one time; the very next day, Tim is browsing round-edged replacements with the same concentration he usually reserves for project proposals.

“Teerak,” Pai laughs helplessly, catching him midway through comparing wood finishes on his tablet. “I survived.”

Tim barely even glances up. “You could survive more comfortably.”

(And really, what is Pai supposed to do with that?)

Tim remembers exactly how Pai takes his coffee depending on how stressful his workday has been. He sees tension in Pai’s shoulders before Pai himself feels it. He keeps spare chargers in nearly every room because Pai has a habit of leaving his wherever he last used them.

None of these are grand gestures — and that is precisely what makes them so impossible to ignore.

And once Pai notices, he realizes Tim’s care does not begin and end with him.

The way Tim slows his pace whenever children are nearby, shifting himself aside to make room for them without seeming aware that he's doing it. The first time Pai clocks it is at one of their community sites, when a little boy darts recklessly across a pathway chasing after a stray ball. Tim stops short immediately, one arm lifting across Pai’s chest on pure reflex while his eyes track the child until he safely reunites with his mother.

He doesn't scold. Doesn’t sigh impatiently. Doesn’t even look particularly inconvenienced. He simply waits.

Later, at a café, Pai watches Tim subtly angle a chair farther out of the way so a toddler wobbling past will not bump into it. Another time, he spots Tim crouching to eye level with a crying little girl in a supermarket aisle, calmly asking where her parents are while already scanning the crowd around them.

There is never any performance to it. No exaggerated fondness. No dramatic declarations about liking children.

Just pure and immediate attentiveness. The same steady care Tim threads through every part of his life without ever seeming to realize how deeply it affects the people around him.

At construction sites, that instinct somehow extends to every junior architect and intern rotating through the projects. Pai witnesses Tim with one of the younger workers one afternoon, calmly bandaging a scraped palm while simultaneously lecturing him for climbing scaffolding without proper gloves.

The poor kid looks moments away from apologizing for existing. Tim buys him lunch afterward.

Individually, none of it should mean anything.

Together, however, they layer and compound.

And suddenly Pai can picture it all too clearly.

Tim standing in the kitchen with flour dusted across one cheek while the little voice of a similarly messy child chatters endlessly beside him.

Tim carrying a toddler against his shoulder down the corridor to the bedroom, having fallen asleep halfway through movie night.

Tim cradling someone small and fragile with the same overwhelming devotion he already loves Pai with.

For the first time, Pai truly understands why people decide to start families.

—

The topic slips into Pai’s mind more and more often after that.

Not enough to become bothersome. But enough to hover, shining spotlights on the mundane.

A family laughing together across the restaurant. Tiny shoes abandoned near the entrance of a shopping mall play area. Tim playing peekaboo with the infant in the stroller next to them while waiting to cross the street.

Little things.

Except they stop feeling little very quickly.

Pai tells himself he is reading too much into all of it.

The thought persists anyway.

—

One evening, he finds himself hovering at the doorway of Tim’s office while his husband works through a set of revisions at the drafting table.

Tim glances up the moment he feels Pai's presence. “What?”

Pai opens his mouth.

Nothing comes out.

Tim’s expression shifts almost imperceptibly. Concern. Attention. “Teerak?”

Pai hates it a little.

Because now the thought feels terrifyingly real in a way it never had before.

Not abstract, not hypothetical. But completely, utterly, entirely possible.

“Teerak.” Pai gathers himself for a moment, folding his arms across his chest. “Do you ever think about… later?”

Tim tilts his head as he studies Pai. “Later like how?”

For one fear-filled second, Pai regrets bringing it up.

“I don’t know,” he mutters. “Like… Years from now.”

Comprehension unfolds across Tim’s face with absurd clarity.

And now Pai wants to bolt from this conversation even more.

“Pai,” Tim gently prompts, “what are you trying to ask me?”

“I’m not trying to ask anything.”

Tim says nothing. Which is unfair, honestly, because Pai knows that silence. Knows all too well how patiently Tim can wait him out when he wants the truth.

Pai exhales shakily through his nose.

“Back then,” Pai finally admits. “I believed it. Every word you said.

“After everything went sideways, I convinced myself that that dream had never really belonged to us.”

And suddenly he can’t breathe properly because he knows, can see it in the way Tim's entire aura goes soft, that Tim understands exactly what he means.

“I'm…” His voice catches slightly. “Things are different now.” 

Tim looks at him like something inside him has cracked open.

“Yes,” he agrees. “They are.”

Another silence.

Fragile. 

(Tim adjusting his hold on the plastic doll in his arms as he played with the synthetic curls peeking out of the fabric.)

Hopeful.

(Wondering what their family might look like one day, and Tim responding so easily it had felt natural to believe him.)

… Terrifying.

“I’m not asking because I expect anything right now,” Pai says quickly. “I just —”

The words snag in his throat. Damn it.

“I think,” and Pai needs to look away, not knowing if he can meet Tim’s gaze when he asks, “I want to know if we still think about the future the same way.”

For a few, drawn-out seconds, Tim simply looks at him and Pai almost wants to take it back.

“Pai. I never stopped.”

Pai feels his pulse stop and violently restart.

Tim notices, because of course he does.

“You know,” he says after another moment and a half, “before you asked me the first time… I never really thought about it.”

That makes Pai look back at Tim, who now shifts and turns his eyes elsewhere, self-consciously rubbing the back of his neck.

“But now, every future I imagine with you… They’re part of it.”

And Pai’s chest feels too full and his eyes sting in the horribly embarrassing way they always do whenever Tim says something so heartwrenchingly sincere that self-preservation takes over.

“Well?” he demands after a beat, falling back on his tried-and-true tactic. “What are you waiting for, Tim? Let’s go make a baby.”

Tim blinks, caught unaware by the abrupt change in mood. “Teerak,” he says carefully, “you are aware that neither of us can actually get pregnant, right?”

“Oh come on, teerak,” Pai groans, mortified but fully committed to the bit now. “You’re focusing on the wrong part of this fantasy.”

=========

Nana is instantly suspicious the second Tim apologizes to her.

Not for anything serious, either.

Just before one of Pai’s afternoon meetings, Tim arrives carrying two iced coffees and wearing the intensely focused expression of a man preparing for an important negotiation.

“Nana,” he says, his voice calm in the way that hides the hint of urgency underneath, “I need to apologize.”

She pauses mid-email. “… For what exactly, Khun Tim?”

Tim carefully sets down one drink (clearly a bribe of some sort, Nana thinks) onto her desk and lowers his voice, despite Pai not even being there.

“If Pai becomes unusually emotional over the next few months,” he supplies. “Or irritable. Or develops sudden cravings at random moments.”

Nana blinks once. Twice. “… Khun Tim.”

“He’s been sleeping less lately because of the research,” Tim continues, entirely oblivious to her confusion. “And stress affects people differently, right? So if he starts getting irrational or suddenly decides he wants strawberries and peanut butter at 2:17 in the afternoon, I just wanted to say sorry in advance.”

Now she is worried too, albeit for entirely different reasons.

“What kind of research?”

Tim opens his mouth. Closes it again.

Then, apparently deciding honesty is the best approach,

“We’re trying for a baby.”

Silence descends upon the office.

Utterly catastrophic silence.

Nana stares at him, simultaneously squinting and raising an eyebrow at the man inconveniently disrupting her workday.

Tim, to his credit, withstands it admirably.

“…You know,” she warily says, “that this is not biologically possible between the two of you.”

“Yes,” Tim replies immediately. “That is where most of the complications are coming from.”

And somehow that answer only makes the situation worse. Because now Nana has to deal with the knowledge that not only are her boss and his husband completely serious about this, but also that said husband has clearly already progressed beyond the hypothetical stage and into active logistical planning.

Sure enough —

“The primary concerns at the moment,” Tim continues, “are legal protections, confidentiality, and making sure nothing creates complications regarding inheritance or the family business later.”

Nana slowly closes her laptop screen. 

“You already made spreadsheets, didn’t you?”

A brief pause.

“... Several.”

Of course he did.

Nana can already feel the migraine coming on.

—

At first, Nana assumes the matter will remain private discussions and late-night research between the two of them.

Then Pai begins forwarding documents.

Medical agencies.

Legal precedents.

Clinic recommendations.

Eventually, entire folders.

Please look into these when you have time.

I need someone I trust to help with cross-referencing.

Absolutely no leaks.

The messages arrive at increasingly inopportune hours. Sometimes inconveniently in the middle of the day, sometimes even more inconveniently at three in the morning (though Nana doesn't see those until she's actually awake anyway. Still, she is wildly unimpressed).

So do the questions.

“Nana,” Pai says one evening from the doorway of the office, still showing no signs of leaving for the night despite the hour being half past nine, “how extensive are the screening processes, usually?”

Nana sets aside the contract she had been reviewing. “For surrogates, Khun Pai?”

He nods distractedly, already walking toward her desk.

“Medical evaluations are standard. Psychological assessments too, depending on the agency.” She studies him briefly. “Is there something specific you're concerned about?”

Pai falls silent for a moment before lowering himself into the chair across from her desk.

“She would be carrying our child,” he says quietly, as though still trying to grasp the reality of the words himself. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to place something that important in the hands of someone I haven't known for long.”

Not uncertainty about becoming parents, then.

Apprehension.

Nana observes him.

In all the years she has worked for Pai, she has seen him furious, heartbroken, sleep-deprived, grieving, relentlessly determined.

This, however, feels wholly different.

Small. Scared in a way shaped less by doubt and more by the panic of figuring out how much this already matters to him.

Carefully, Nana closes the file in front of her.

“Khun Pai,” she says after a moment, “if trust is the concern… There may be another option.”

Pai looks up immediately. “What option?”

“Me.”

Pai stares at her blankly.

Nana continues before he can completely short-circuit.

“I’m healthy,” she says calmly. “I have no plans for marriage or children of my own. And if your concern is entrusting your child to someone unfamiliar,” a faint gentleness touches her voice, “then I am likely already one of the people you trust most.”

“Nana…”

“I've thought about this over and over, and I don't make this offer lightly. You don't need to answer now,” she hurries to add before he can go into full-on meltdown. “I’m only asking you to thoroughly consider it first.”

Pai keeps staring at her for several long seconds.

“… Tim is going to cry.”

—

Tim does, in fact, cry.

Nana gives him precisely one minute (not without making fun of him) before presenting her meticulously compiled consent forms and contracts waiting for his signature.

=========

Tim never actually says he’s turning one of the guest rooms into a nursery.

The problem is that he also doesn't bother being subtle about it at all.

Pai comes home one afternoon, having been frustrated enough to walk out of a meeting and leave it to Aunt Kia and North, to find the bed (the entire bed) from the second floor guest room haphazardly occupying the living room while Tim oversees the delivery of rather enormous boxes into the very same guest room.

He blinks.

“... What in the world, Tim. Why is the bed not inside the bedroom?”

“I had it removed.”

Pai waits for the continuation.

“It’s not appropriate for the room.”

That… wasn’t really a complete answer. “Teerak, did you or did you not personally approve the interior design for the whole house?”

“That’s beside the point —” “It is exactly the point.”

Tim ignores him with all the pride of a man refusing to accept that he’s actively losing this conversation.

Pai’s attention shifts to the next box being brought in — specifically, at the diagram printed across the broad side. “... Is that a crib?”

“No.”

“Tim. You ordered a crib. For a baby.”

“For the room.”

“A baby’s room.”

“The multipurpose room.”

“A crib literally has no other purpose.”

“Technically it’s not a crib until it’s assembled.”

Pai stares at him for another long moment before laughter finally escapes him. “Oh my god,” he manages to choke out through giggles. “You’re nesting.”

“I’m proactively planning.”

“Okay, love.”

“It’ll be more inconvenient to renovate when the baby is almost here.”

Pai’s breath gets stuck in his throat. Tim notices. “What?”

“You said ‘when’. Not ‘if’.”

And there it is. The smallest fracture in Tim’s composure. Small enough that most people would have missed it entirely. But Pai has been with his ridiculous husband for years and has learned all too well how to read him; he sees the exact moment it catches up with him, the realization that this is no longer just a hypothetical in his mind.

That there is already a place carved out for this child in his future.

In their home.

In him.

Pai is so overwhelmingly filled with love for this man he married.

Tim clears his throat abruptly and stalks closer to Pai, completely unmindful of the delivery men within proximity. “Don’t start,” he warns.

Pai is still smiling when Tim cups the back of his neck and kisses him into silence anyway.

=========

The next few months slip into a new rhythm.

Threaded between jobsite visits and merger negotiations are appointments for consultations, bloodwork, and physical exams. Medical terminology starts infiltrating everyday conversation until phrases like “hormone levels” and “implantation windows” begin sounding incredibly ordinary inside their home.

There are legal consultations too. Extensive ones.

Confidentiality agreements. Parental rights. Inheritance protections. The possibility of future disputes involving biological donors and public family records.

At some point, Pai realizes with faint horror that he and Tim are now spending entire evenings discussing egg donor screening criteria over dinner like this is perfectly normal married couple activity.

“It says here she enjoys extreme sports,” Pai says from behind his tablet one night, suspicion deeply evident in his tone.

Tim does not look up from the folder in front of him. “That is not genetically relevant.”

“I refuse to raise a child with an inherited penchant for skydiving.”

Across the table, Nana calmly flips another page in her binder. “Khun Pai, respectfully, you rejected the previous donor because her college thesis topic annoyed you.”

“She sounded judgmental.”

“It was a thesis on urban zoning laws.”

“Perfect,” Tim offers absently as he moves to the next candidate in his pile. “I’d have a little assistant.”

Pai immediately lowers the tablet to fix him with a look. “You want a tiny version of you following you around?”

Tim finally glances up. “You say that like it'd be a bad thing.”

And unfortunately, no, Pai absolutely cannot say that with any real conviction.

Nana, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, becomes alarmingly competent at navigating the whole process. Before long, she acquires an entire color-coded binder system. At some point, she starts correcting doctors mid-sentence.

Tim watches all this happen with visible relief.

For Pai, it's with the growing awareness that between the three of them, this child is already going to have an absurd amount of people loving them before they even exist.

There are, unfortunately, also logistics.

Very strange logistics.

“I refuse,” Pai declares one evening with steadfast conviction, “to refer to it as a sperm cocktail.”

Tim chokes on his sip of wine. North’s eyes immediately widen with mischievous interest.

“Oh,” he says slowly.

Pai recognizes that tone instantly and points at him in warning. “Don’t.”

“But wait,” North prods, already grinning. “Does that mean the two of you have to, like —”

“North.”

“— do it together?”

Yu immediately folds forward into helpless laughter beside him. Pai glares daggers at his shaking shoulders.

North waggles his eyebrows so aggressively it nearly qualifies as a medical emergency.

“Oh my god,” Pai groans, covering his face. “I did not raise you like this.”

“You made him worse,” Nana unhelpfully supplies.

Meanwhile, Tim looks like he is questioning everything that brought him to this dining table. “It’s a medical procedure,” he says with strained patience in an attempt to save face.

North gasps theatrically. “So romantic.”

“Please stop talking.”

“I’m just saying,” North continues brightly, “if you’re making a baby together, shouldn’t the process at least be a little fun?”

Pai reaches for his drink with all the dignity (or lack thereof) of a man profoundly betrayed by his own family.

Across the table, Nana closes one of her binders with quiet finality.

“For the record,” she says calmly, “the proper term for it is ‘mixed-source fertilization’.”

“Nana, please,” Pai begs.

The nursery continues evolving alongside the process.

Slowly at first. Shelves. Lighting. A rug Pai swears is unnecessarily expensive until he catches Tim researching whether the fabric dyes are certified non-toxic.

The crib remains unassembled for weeks, still sealed inside its boxes like Tim thinks refusing to fully put it together might somehow protect them from becoming too hopeful too quickly.

It does not work.

Hope arrives anyway, in fleeting moments.

Tim absentmindedly pausing outside children’s clothing stores.

Pai bookmarking baby names at two in the morning and pretending he absolutely did not do that when Tim catches him.

North loudly offering to teach their future child swear words while Pai threatens to withhold visitation rights.

Nana developing the exhausted countenance of someone already parenting two emotionally unstable grown men before a baby has even entered the equation.

And through all of it, Tim changes in ways so gradual Pai almost misses them.

Until he doesn’t.

Because this man who once guarded every vulnerable part of himself like state secrets now instinctively reaches for Pai’s hand during appointments.

Because he talks about the future without hesitation now.

Not cautiously.

Not conditionally.

But concretely. In terms of when.

“When the baby gets older.”

“When we move the playroom downstairs.”

“When they start school.”

Like he has already allowed himself to step fully into the reality of it.

The first failed implantation devastates them.

Not dramatically, though. There was no screaming. No tearful breakdowns.

Just hollowness sitting between them in the car on the drive home from the clinic.

Tim keeps one hand on Pai’s knee the entire ride back.

Pai pretends to not notice how tightly he’s gripping the steering wheel with the other.

“It’s normal,” Nana tells them later with neutral practicality over takeout containers spread across their dining table. “The success rates for first transfers are not high enough for this result to be unexpected.”

Pai nods.

Tim nods.

And somehow that almost makes it worse.

Because unexpected would have implied unfairness. This, instead, is simply statistics. A risk they knowingly agreed to.

So they try again.

The second failure hits differently.

Heavier.

The optimism remains, but no longer untouched.

Tim speaks less during appointments.

Pai checks Nana’s expression before he looks at the doctors.

Nobody says it aloud yet, but the possibility of disappointment has stopped feeling theoretical now, too.

Still, they try again.

Third time’s the charm, North declares with complete confidence, as though saying it firmly enough might force the universe to cooperate.

And for a while, it almost seems like it finally has.

=========

The positive test doesn’t feel real at first, even after the doctor confirms it. (Thrice.)

Even after Nana starts hiccuping through her tears while trying to continue asking practical questions.

Even after Pai registers that Tim has gone completely motionless beside him.

Pregnant.

The word seems to alter the very atmosphere around them as the doctor explains numbers and timelines and next steps.

North bursts into tears immediately when they tell him. Yu has to physically remove his phone before he ends up informing the whole world.

Grandpa Soephon cries in a more dignified manner, one hand dabbing at his eyes while the other squeezes Pai’s shoulder.

And Tim?

The stark reality of it all truly hits.

The next night, Pai comes home after leaving before Tim even woke up and spending the intervening hours buried in meetings without enough breathing room to type, let alone send, more than half a dozen unfinished messages.

The door to the nursery is open. Not excessively so. Just enough to invite curiosity.

Pai finds Tim inside.

The crib is finally assembled. Suspended mobile and assorted accoutrements and all.

He must have spent the whole day putting it together.

His hand rests lightly against the railing, eyes lowered to the empty mattress like he’s trying to reconcile the space in front of him with the gravity of what it now represents.

Pai does not interrupt him. Instead, he crosses the room until they are standing next to each other, shoulders brushing lightly as they look down at the crib together in silence.

Tim’s hand finds his without looking.

And somehow that feels larger than conversation would.

The room feels different now.

Less like preparation.

More like a space waiting for someone to come home to it.

---

For a while after, life settles into something that feels almost ordinary — but in the best possible way.

Not uncomplicated, certainly. There are still appointments and precautions and moments where hope jolts unexpectedly into fear in the corners of otherwise ordinary conversations. But little by little, the tension that has held itself taut inside the house for months begins easing at the edges, enough that they allow themselves to lean into it as it evolves into anticipation.

Nana starts showing in ways only the three of them really notice at first: A hand absently resting against her stomach during meetings. Tim moving heavier binders out of her reach before she can touch them. Pai catching him reading pregnancy milestone articles at two in the morning with the same intensity reserved for reviewing structural safety reports.

At eleven weeks, they hear the heartbeat. It's strong. Stable. Steadying.

The sound touches something vulnerable inside Tim the moment it fills the room. The moment where the truth finally lands that this is no longer abstract. This is so, so real.

Later that evening, Pai finds him in the recliner in the nursery with a hand over his eyes.

The room is finished now. Shelves have been filled, tiny clothes have been folded neatly into drawers. A set of curtains, sheer yellow under heavy blue, pulled to the side and letting the moon peek through the window.

Pai walks over and crouches in front of him, both hands resting on Tim's knees, light but grounding.

“You okay?”

Tim lowers his hand. Emotion glimmers visibly behind his composure, too large to fully contain.

“I heard it,” he breathes quietly, wonder and disbelief tangled together in his voice.

The simple honesty nearly undoes Pai on the spot.

He gets up and folds himself carefully into Tim’s lap, arms winding around his shoulders as Tim pulls him close.

For a long moment they just sit like that, wrapped around each other in the middle of the nursery that had gradually been assembled around a future that had only recently seemed impossible to reach.

Then, within a kiss pressed so softly to Pai’s temple:

“I think this might actually be real now.”

Pai laughs helplessly through the sting suddenly burning behind his own eyes.

“Teerak,” he murmurs, pressing a kiss against the corner of Tim’s mouth. “There is literally a heartbeat.”

“I know.”

But he says it carefully, like speaking too confidently might somehow tempt fate into listening.

And despite himself, Pai understands exactly what he means.

After everything they have survived together, joy still feels fragile in their hands.

The days continue passing anyway.

North starts referring to the baby exclusively as “my niece” despite repeated reminders that they don't actually know the sex yet.

Yu begins dropping by more often with baby-related items that he claims are impulse purchases while also insisting that he is “just helping”.

Grandpa Soephon commissions an entire set of handcrafted nursery furniture despite the room already being fully furnished. “For the main estate,” he simply states when Pai calls him out on it, a spot in a place so central to Pai's childhood already reserved by his family for his own child.

They hit twelve weeks. Thirteen weeks.

Tim stops pretending he doesn't already have three separate folders dedicated entirely to school research.

“You can't possibly be comparing preschools already,” Pai says one night in disbelief.

Tim does not even glance up from his laptop. “Planning ahead is responsible parenting.”

“The baby is the size of a peach.”

“And will eventually require an education.”

Pai stares at him for a long moment before dissolving into fondly exasperated giggles.

It feels good.

It makes it a little too easy to stop waiting for something to go wrong.

Which is perhaps why none of them are prepared when Nana calls Pai just before midnight, sounding very calm and very frightened all at once.

“Khun Pai,” she starts, voice hiding the barest tremble. “I think something is wrong.”

—

Pai barely remembers ending the call.

Tim is already sitting upright beside him before the screen even goes dark.

“What happened?”

“Nana thinks something’s wrong.”

The remaining traces of sleep vanish from the room instantly.

Within minutes they are both dressed and moving through the darkened house in sharp, disjointed motions, Pai trying to locate his keys despite already holding them in his hand, Tim halfway through searching symptoms on his phone before they even make it to the front door.

“There are still viable pregnancies after bleeding,” Tim says abruptly as they step out into the night. “It says here the percentage is still —”

“I know.”

Except Pai does not actually know.

Neither of them do.

The drive to the hospital passes in fragments. Streetlights streaking across the windshield. The low hum of the engine beneath a silence that never quite settles.

Tim beside him scrolling too quickly through medical forums and statistical probabilities and phrases they don't want to give voice to.

Possible miscarriage.

Subchorionic hematoma.

A whole host of other likely complications.

By the time they arrive, Nana is already there. She’s lying in one of the examination rooms with a blanket over her lap and her hands folded carefully together, composed enough at first glance that Pai almost believes this will all turn out to be nothing.

Then he sees how pale she looks.

“Why did you drive yourself?” he demands immediately.

Nana gives him a tired look. “Because panicking before I knew anything for certain wouldn't have helped anyone. Or anything.”

Pai has another reprimand ready to go before the full picture stops him cold.

Because there is blood seeping from beneath the hospital blankets and fluorescent lighting and careful voices, and suddenly none of this feels manageable anymore.

Tim is already asking questions. How long ago did it start? How much bleeding? What did the emergency department say? Have they run bloodwork yet? Did anyone check —

“Khun Tim.”

Nana reaches out to pause the momentum of his questions, fingers curling briefly around his elbow.

Her expression softens despite the obvious strain around her eyes.

“I’m okay right now.”

Right now.

The wording lands heavily enough that Pai nearly stops breathing.

The ultrasound room is dimmer than the rest of the floor.

Too quiet.

(Pai will later think that maybe he understood something was wrong the moment nobody in the room seemed willing to meet their eyes directly.

For now, though, he is still holding onto the desperate certainty that this can still be fixed somehow.)

People go through complications all the time. Pregnancies survive worse than this.

There are treatments. Interventions. Tim keeps talking beside him in quick, restless bursts, grasping frantically at every possibility the doctor mentions before they can fully explain it.

“What about hormone support?”

“What are the viability rates at this stage?”

“If the bleeding stops —”

And then the technician goes quiet. Not abruptly.

Just subtly enough for dread to begin spreading through the room before anyone says a word.

The silence stretches.

Pai stares at the monitor without understanding what he’s supposed to be seeing.

Beside him, Tim suddenly stops talking.

The doctor’s voice is gentle when it finally comes.

“I’m very sorry.”

And this time, there is no heartbeat.

—

Nobody speaks for several seconds after.

The monitor still glows softly in front of them.

Cruelly unchanged.

Pai keeps staring at it anyway, like comprehension might arrive if he looks long enough.

Beside him, Tim speaks first.

“You have to do another scan.”

His voice is steady in the way people sound right before panic fully takes hold.

“We can repeat the ultrasound if you would like,” the doctor replies. Gently. Placatingly. “But I’m afraid the result is very clear.”

“No,” Tim says immediately. “Machines make mistakes.”

“Khun Tim —”

“There are false negatives. Delayed detections. If the positioning is wrong or the equipment —”

“Tim.”

Pai reaches for him, fingers closing around his wrist hard enough that Tim finally stops speaking.

Not because he believes it.

Just because there is nothing left to say.

The silence afterward feels too heavy.

Eventually the doctor begins explaining next steps.

Standard words: Procedure. Recovery. Monitoring.

Pai hears almost none of it.

Across the room, Nana sits too eerily still beneath the fluorescent lights, one hand curled unconsciously against her stomach like some part of her still expects to protect what is no longer there.

“I’m sorry,” she suddenly says, only barely loud enough.

The words hit Pai hard enough that for a second he genuinely cannot process them.

Nana’s eyes shine with exhaustion and apology as she looks between both of them.

“I tried to be careful.”

“Oh my god,” Pai says immediately, horrified. “Nana, no.”

“This is not your fault,” Tim says at almost the exact same moment, too quickly, too sharply.

And for the first time since they arrived at the hospital, his composure finally fractures around the edges.

Because there is nothing strategic left to hold onto now. No solutions or interventions. No possible way to negotiate with this outcome.

Just loss.

Nana presses trembling fingers against her eyes.

“I know,” she whispers, although she doesn’t sound too sure.

The rest of the night dissolves into paperwork and signatures and instructions neither Pai nor Tim will fully remember later.

At some point, Nana falls asleep for nearly twenty minutes in the recovery room after the medication finally begins taking effect.

Pai watches Tim pace the hallway outside the room in restless circuits while pretending to read the discharge documents for the fifth time.

Every few minutes he stops moving entirely. Then starts again.

Like he hasn’t figured out what to do with the frenzy now that there is nowhere left to direct it.

By the time the sun begins rising outside the hospital windows, all three of them look emotionally hollowed out.

The drive home feels longer than the drive there.

Nobody turns on the radio.

Nobody tries for conversation.

The early morning traffic moves around them with quiet indifference while the city wakes up exactly the same way it always does.

And when they finally step back inside the house, the silence waiting for them there feels wrong somehow.

Too intact.

Like the future they had spent months assembling still exists upstairs, unaware that it no longer has anyone to belong to.

=========

The first few weeks afterward pass in a haze that Pai will later struggle to recall clearly.

Not because nothing happens, but because too much of it does.

Doctor appointments.

Follow-up monitoring.

Medication schedules.

Nana recovering physically while all three of them pretend emotional recovery is something equally measurable.

For a while, Pai thinks maybe they are coping better than expected.

Then it becomes glaringly obvious that functioning does not necessarily mean healing.

Tim goes back to work almost immediately.

At first, Pai tells himself that this is normal. Reasonable. Tim has always survived by keeping himself moving. Adapting. Finding the next solution before the current problem can swallow him whole.

But slowly, almost too imperceptibly to notice at first, their lives begin changing around the absence left behind.

Tim starts coming home later.

Meals go untouched in the refrigerator until Pai throws them out after two days.

The folders about schools disappear from the dining table.

And perhaps worst of all, Tim stops talking about the future entirely.

Not just the baby.

Everything.

No more:

when we travel there

when we renovate this

when things calm down

The concept itself seems to vanish from his vocabulary altogether.

The nursery door remains closed. Neither of them addresses it.

It eventually dawns on Pai that weeks have passed since either of them stepped inside, and it leaves him strangely untethered.

The room still remains the way they left it.

Tiny clothes folded neatly into drawers.

The assembled crib waiting in silence.

Curtains still tied back, moonlight still streaming through the windows.

Like the house itself never knew anything changed.

Nana had returned to work only three days later despite Pai and Tim both insisting she should rest longer.

“I am not dying,” she informs them flatly during this debate.

“You had a medical emergency,” Pai shoots back.

“And now I am recovering from it.”

Tim barely participated in that conversation. Or heck, any conversation at all.

At first Pai attributes it to exhaustion.

Then to mourning.

Then finally, reluctantly, to something more.

Distance.

Not intentional cruelty.

Not rejection.

Just absence. Avoidance.

Like some essential part of Tim has withdrawn somewhere Pai cannot follow.

So instead, he compensates.

He picks up conversations Tim no longer starts. Fills silences before they can last.

Pretends not to notice the growing chasm between them because acknowledging it would make it real.

Until one night, just over two months after, he finds Tim standing alone in the kitchen in the dead of night, staring blankly at a mug of coffee gone cold in his hands.

“You’re doing it again,” Pai says softly.

Tim blinks almost owlishly, like he has only just realized someone else is in the room.

“Doing what?”

“This.” Pai gestures vaguely between them. “Whatever this is.”

For a moment, Tim simply looks tired. Then guarded.

“I’m fine.”

The lie lands so automatically between them that Pai almost recoils from it.

“Teerak —”

“I said I’m fine.” Too quick. Too sharp. Even the air flinches from it.

Pai exhales slowly, weariness and frustration tangling together somewhere behind his ribs.

“You don’t have to keep pretending with me.”

“I'm not.”

“You barely sleep anymore.”

“I’m working.”

“You barely talk.”

Tim’s jaw tightens. “What else is there to say, Pai?"

Pai regrets bringing it up.

Not because he thinks he’s wrong, but because it's so evident that Tim has closed off even more. Exactly not what he wants to happen.

The tension around them is stifling.

The coffee in Tim’s hands has long since gone cold. He still hasn’t taken a single sip from it.

Pai forces himself to press on. “I’m not asking you to magically feel okay,” he says carefully. “I'm only…” he pauses, trying to think of the best way to convey what's on his mind.

“What?” Tim’s voice is not loud.

If anything, that makes it worse.

Pai looks at him. Really looks.

Because underneath the exhaustion and distance, there it is at last:

immense grief.

Raw enough, strong enough that it’s now finally beginning to bleed through the cracks.

“I want you to stop acting like you’re alone in this.”

Something flashes across Tim’s face too quickly for Pai to fully name.

Pain. Guilt. Something more intense.

“I’m not.”

“Really? Because sometimes it feels like I’m the only one still trying to hold us together.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No?” Pai scoffs derisively. “Tell me what’s been fair about the past two months, Tim.”

No answer. Until:

“I know I’ve been difficult to live with.”

The words strike into Pai, hard and ugly.

“Teerak,” he counters, dragging a hand through his hair. “That’s not what I meant.”

“No,” Tim replies, voice trembling with defeat. “But it’s true, isn’t it?”

The kitchen suddenly feels too small.

Too tight around both of them.

Tim sets the mug down abruptly, coffee splashing over the rim before pacing a few steps away like he's incapable of staying still anymore.

“I tried to do everything right,” he says, as much a concession as it is an apology.

Not just to Pai.

To the room.

To himself.

To the oppressive silence that has been co-inhabiting the house for weeks.

“I read everything. I went to every appointment. I made sure Nana had the best doctors, the best care, the safest environment."

“Tim.”

“I planned for everything.”

His voice breaks on the last word. Barely audible. But catastrophic anyway.

And with that, Pai understands. Not all of it — maybe not even most of it. But enough.

Enough to finally see the full depth of what Tim has been suffering through since the hospital.

Because he had never just been mourning.

This was a man who had internally reorganized his entire future around a child who no longer exists.

Every instinct. Every routine. Every imagined version of tomorrow.

Gone.

And now all of that love and anticipation has nowhere to go.

The realization hits Pai so strongly that for a second he feels like he actually can't breathe.

“Teerak,” he tries to offer by way of comfort.

Tim chokes back a sob.

The sound of it is awful.

“You know what the worst part is?” he asks, looking somewhere over Pai’s shoulder instead of at him. “I'm still thinking of how to adjust.”

Pai doesn't know how to respond. 

Tim’s not done talking anyway, and Pai wants to listen to every last thing he's been keeping inside.

“The hallway lighting upstairs,” Tim says quietly. “Whether we should always keep them on in case she’d eventually start running through the house at night, looking for us when she's supposed to be in bed. If I should add some sort of carpet to the stairs so she's less likely to slip on them. Stuff like that.”

The pronoun catches Pai by surprise. She.

Without ever saying it out loud before, the form of Tim's imagination had already taken character.

“I still think about it all before I fall asleep,” Tim whispers. “And then I'll remember there’s no reason to anymore, and it feels like —” He cuts himself off abruptly, jaw tightening hard enough to be visible. “Fuck.”

Pai walks to him, needing to physically reach out and ground both of them.

Tim tenses the moment Pai's fingers touch his.

Not refusal.

Something more helpless.

The instinctive flinch of someone no longer sure how to be consoled.

Pai also recoils at that.

For one terrible second, neither of them moves.

Then Tim steps backward.

Not far.

But enough that Pai feels the distance like a punch to the gut. “Teerak —”

“I don’t know how to do this properly,” Tim interrupts.

The words spill out of him unevenly, as if they've been fighting to claw their way out of him for so long. His tone is laced with desperation, like a cry for help that he doesn't expect to be answered.

Pai, frozen, can only watch him unravel even more.

“I don’t know how to wake up every day and just continue normally after this.”

“You don’t have to do it alone.”

The moment the sentence leaves his mouth, Pai knows something about it landed wrong.

Tim’s expression changes instantly. Not anger. Something more wounded than that.

“You keep saying that.”

Pai frowns. “Because it’s true.”

“But it doesn’t change anything.”

“Of course it does.”

“How?” The question comes too fast. Too fragile.

“How does it change any of this?”

Tim gestures vaguely at the house around them, toward the emptiness upstairs neither of them has been able to touch for weeks.

“There’s still an unoccupied nursery upstairs. There's still clothes folded into drawers. There’s still —” His voice catches hard enough that he has to stop.

Pai steps toward him again. Tim retreats just as quickly.

And this time it hurts differently.

“You think I don’t know that you’re hurting too?” Tim asks quietly.

I know you do. Of course Tim knows.

Hearing it said out loud only makes the distance between them feel worse. Pai snaps.

“I lost her, too,” he grits out, the words scraping harshly out of him. “You're acting like I didn’t.”

Tim winces. The low volume Pai used was infinitely worse than if he'd raised his voice instead.

“I'm not — That’s not what I’m trying to do.”

“Then stop shutting me out.”

“I’m trying to keep you from drowning with me, Pai.”

“And what do you think that's been doing to me?”

For one painfully suspended moment, neither of them knows what to do with that.

Tim looks away first.

That hurts too.

Everything hurts now.

“I feel like I can’t even breathe in this house anymore,” Tim admits.

The confession has Pai reeling.

This house was supposed to be proof of everything they had overcome.

Tim had laid the first foundations on the remnants of the place where he was left behind.

They built the rest together afterward.

And now every corner of it is haunted by absence all over again.

Pai’s voice comes out rougher than intended. “So now what? You just disappear into yourself and leave me here pretending none of this is happening?”

“I never asked you to.”

“No,” Pai is beginning to fray at the edges. “You just stopped letting me stand next to you through it all.”

Tim visibly deflates. And with barely even a whisper,

“You don’t understand what this feels like.”

The words hit Pai hard enough that he genuinely cannot process them.

“What, exactly, is that supposed to mean?”

“You have people, Pai. Family. You always have. You’ve never had to struggle alone.”

Tim looks wrecked as soon as he says it. Pai can see the self-disgust arrive in real time. But the damage is already done.

The temperature in the room drops several degrees.

Tim feels it immediately.

But it is already far too late for him to take anything back.

And now Pai is there again:

standing in the wreckage of the reception,

humiliated in front of everyone,

abandoned by his family,

cut off from the only life he'd known,

and the person standing in front of him now is the same person who once held onto him so tightly through that collapse.

“You don’t get to say that to me.”

Pai’s voice is dangerous.

Tim inhales sharply. “Pai —”

“No.”

Pointed. Wounding them both.

“You do not get to stand there and say that I have no idea what it feels like to lose everything.”

“I didn’t mean —”

“I know exactly what you meant.” Pai laughs bitterly, broken. “God, Tim.”

And somehow that sounds far crueler than fury ever could.

The exhaustion at the late hour, the grief, the anger — all of it crashing together into something severe. In that moment, Tim looks so small.

Pai hates that even now, after everything Tim just said, he still instinctively wants to reach for him instead of protecting himself.

He drags a hand over his face. “I can’t do this right now.”

“Pai, no, I —”

"I can’t.” Pai shakes his head hard once, already turning away. “I need — I need to go.”

Wallet. Keys. Phone. Jerky movements fueled by agony too big for the kitchen to hold.

“Where are you going?” Tim follows, and now there’s real panic underneath the question.

Pai shrugs. “I don’t know. Out. Away from you. I can’t be here right now.”

Tim stops in his tracks. “Pai, please,” he begs. “Don't leave like this.”

Pai squeezes his eyes shut.

Part of him wants to stay.

Some deeply conditioned part of him wants to turn back around, pull Tim into his arms, and apologize just to make it all stop.

But another, louder part — bruised raw and bleeding from everything Tim just tore open — cannot handle one more second of this tonight.

“We’re not done talking about this,” Pai sighs. “But right now we are so far from okay and I can’t even look at you.”

He doesn't see Tim breaking as he walks out the door.

=========

Pai doesn’t think much at all while driving.

Only that he needs distance. Air. Control of himself.

When he parks in the familiar garage, his hands are still shaking around the steering wheel.

He makes it all the way from the private elevator to his destination before reaching automatically for his wallet. Then pauses.

Right.

His keycard isn't there anymore. Hasn’t been for years.

Pai stares at his old door for a second more before huffing hard through his nose.

North’s condo is only a few steps away. He knocks.

There’s movement almost immediately from inside, the clicking of locks being undone, then the door swings open. North blinks at him once. Then twice. “... Hia?”

Pai only blinks back.

North’s expression changes instantly. “Okay,” he says slowly, already stepping aside. “That bad?”

Pai nods his thanks, walking in on autopilot.

And immediately stops short when he sees Yu sitting cross-legged on the couch with a blanket draped over his shoulders, a half-empty mug in one hand and the television remote in the other.

Pai stares between them. “Why are you both awake?”

North shuts the door behind him. “Why are you here looking like you’re about to commit arson?”

Yu gives Pai a very quick once-over. “And in pajamas.”

Pai looks down at himself for the first time since leaving the house.

Dark blue pajama pants. Matching button-up top. House slippers.

Oh.

North watches the awareness land and visibly presses his lips together, clearly biting back another comment on Pai's appearance.

Which honestly feels a little offensive considering Pai’s life is in an ongoing crisis.

“I deeply dislike both of you,” Pai grumbles.

“Uh-huh," North hums indulgently. “You say that every time you’re emotionally compromised.” He points. “Sit down before you fall down.”

Pai drops heavily into the proffered armchair.

North disappears into the kitchen and returns with a glass of water, which he practically pushes into Pai’s hands. “So, you wanna talk about why you look like you lost a fistfight with your own marriage?”

Pai laughs humorlessly. “That’s actually not far off.”

North settles back onto the couch beside U, one leg tucked underneath himself. “Care to elaborate?”

Pai looks down at the glass in his hands. “He said I have people.”

North blinks once. “... Okay?”

Pai laughs again, sharper this time. “Yeah, that was my first reaction too.”

“Hia Pai,” Yu carefully interjects, “I feel like there’s context missing.”

“There’s a lot of context missing,” Pai mutters.

Tim shutting down.

His physical avoidance.

The way his grief has been pervading the house for weeks.

The emotional distance.

Pai trying and trying and trying to reach him anyway.

The things they said tonight.

The things they shouldn’t have said tonight.

By the time Pai gets to the part that touched old wounds neither of them have thought about in years, North is staring at him in open disbelief.

“... Hia.”

Pai sighs. "I don’t think Tim even knew what he was saying,” he admits after a moment. “But after he said it, all I could think about was standing there while everything exploded around me and then everyone just...” He swallows hard. “I was alone.”

Pai leans forward, elbows on knees, hand over eyes.

“I know he didn’t mean it the way it came out,” he mutters. “But hearing that from him after everything...” His jaw tightens hard. “I think something in me just snapped.”

Neither North nor Yu interrupts, they just patiently let him keep talking.

And apparently Pai needs that more than he knows.

“I know he’s in pain,” he says quietly. “I know. But it’s taking over him and he’s drifting away from me, and every time I try to pull him back, he shuts down harder.”

North’s expression softens in empathy.

“Hia...”

“No, seriously.” The frustration bleeds back in before Pai can stop it. “I'm trying to get us through this together while he thinks shutting me out is somehow protecting me.”

Yu lowers his mug carefully onto the coffee table. “He lost a child, too,” he reminds Pai.

Pai’s shoulders tense in defense. “I know that.”

“Do you, really?”

“I —" Pai looks away, hit by sudden shame.

“Because from the way you’re talking right now,” Yu continues, “it sounds like both of you have been trying so hard to protect each other from your own pain that neither of you knows what to do with the other person’s grief anymore.”

Silence.

North glances between them once and — very wisely — says nothing.

Pai leans back into the armchair, exhaustion finally beginning to outweigh anger.

“He looked at me like I was hurting him just by asking him to let me in.”

And beneath all the bitterness still clawing through Pai’s chest, something uglier starts to surface.

Hopelessness.

“I didn’t know what else to do anymore,” Pai whispers, defeated. “I kept trying to reach him and nothing was getting through.”

Yu is quiet for a moment.

“It sounds like you're both terrified that you're losing each other.”

And that's really the core of the problem, isn't it?

Fear. Big enough to twist grief into distance and distance into damage.

Something pricks sharply at Pai's conscience, and the fight finally starts draining out of him.

“Hia.”

Pai doesn’t look up at him. “Hmm.”

“Go home.”

For a second, North thinks Pai is going to argue. Instead, he just seems to sink deeper into the armchair. “I don’t want to do this again tonight.”

North puts a comforting hand on his arm. “I know.”

“I was so upset at him,” Pai laments, pressing the heel of one hand between his eyes. “Then he looked at me like I was personally destroying him and suddenly I didn’t know what the hell we were even doing anymore.

“He said he was trying to protect me. And I know he believes that, I do.” He sighs heavily. “But from what? Me loving him too much?”

“You won’t know if you don’t clear things up with him, Hia.”

“You don’t have to forgive him tonight,” Yu gently advises in response. Pai looks at him questioningly. “But I don’t think you or P’Tim should wake up tomorrow believing either of you gave up.”

Pai shifts his focus to his barely-touched water. “... I hate it when both of you make sense.”

North grins. “There he is. Okay. Good. Now get in your car and go home to your husband before I physically escort you there myself.”

—

By the time he pulls into the driveway, the house is completely dark save for the one light over the front door. Pai sits in the parked car for a long time, gathering himself.

North was right. No matter how messy the night had turned out, it won’t get better if they left it as-is. Separation would only worsen it.

Pai forces himself out of the car.

The front door is unlocked. Pai fully expected Tim to still be on the first floor, maybe on the couch in the living room, but there’s no sign of him. His mug is in the drying rack, as is the emptied percolator. He’s not in his office either.

Pai climbs to the second floor, thinking Tim must have gone to bed. At the top of the stairs, he sees it.

The door to the nursery. The last place Pai would have expected Tim to be in.

It’s no longer tightly shut. Pai slowly pushes it open, afraid of what he’ll find.

Tim is in the middle of the unlit room, his back to the entrance. He’s sitting on the floor, facing the crib – or he would be, had his head not been buried in his hands. The sight of him is almost peaceful, but Pai knows that inside, Tim is anything but.

He takes a step forward.

=========

Tim stands frozen in the entryway. He listens to the sound of Pai's car starting, backing out, fading down the driveway.

He tries to look through the windows, but the curtains are drawn and he can't see the tail lights anymore.

Gone. The word sits in his stomach like something undigested.

He tries to think what comes next. His mug next to the sink. If the gardener is coming today or tomorrow. The sketches on his desk for the community center project, due Thursday according to his chart. Normal things. Ordinary things.

The house is too still. No text. No call. Just the absence where Pai should be, expanding outward like a physical force.

He replays the fight in his head, thinks about words coming out of his mouth — short and clipped as they were, but loaded enough — with terrible velocity, watches himself damaging things and unable to stop. His heart hammers against his ribs, stupid and useless, flooding his bloodstream with chemicals that feel like poison. Pai left. The damage is done.

He takes a few steps forward. His hand finds the knob. Turns it.

Outside, the night air hits his face, cool and indifferent. The driveway is missing one vehicle. He could get in his car. Could follow. Could —

He stops. Pai's voice, echoing from the kitchen: I can't even look at you.

He stands there for a long time. Eventually he steps inside and slowly closes the door. The sound is too final, a mechanical period at the end of a sentence he didn't mean to write.

He walks.

Through the living room that witnessed countless discussions about Nana's wellbeing that would now no longer mean the same thing. Into his office where the drafting table holds projects he can't focus on, sketches of community centers with playgrounds for other families' children —

He halts that thought. Can't finish it.

His feet keep moving.

Past the dining table from where he cleared away every binder, every folder, every colorblocked system of hope, hiding them in drawers where he wouldn't have to see. He finds himself back in the kitchen again. Circles it. Opens the refrigerator, closes it. Doesn't really know why he did it. His hands open and close at his sides, like he's itching for something to hold on to but finds nothing.

He should call someone. North. Yu. But the thought of explaining — of putting words to any of this — feels impossible. Language has left him. All he has left is the weight in his chest and the terrible certainty that he has permanently broken something he doesn't know how to fix.

He takes a seat by the kitchen island.

Stands up immediately. The countertop is just a countertop, but somehow looking at it makes Tim's throat close.

He walks again.

His feet carry him to the stairs without conscious decision. He climbs. Step after step. The wood creaks under his feet. At the top, he turns automatically toward their bedroom door.

He stops in front of it. Wants to enter it. Can't. Something else is tugging at him, something heavier. He looks down the hallway toward the closed door only a handful of meters away.

He shouldn't. He knows he shouldn't. That room is a trap, a wound, a space that contains everything he has been carefully not touching. He has made it through seventy-three days without opening that door. He can make it through tonight. He should go into their bedroom. Sleep alone in the bed they share. Wait for morning. Wait for Pai to come home or not come home or —

He goes.

He doesn't remember deciding to walk. His body is moving without him, autopilot, some deeper system taking over while his conscious mind floats above, watching with detachment. Step after step. The hallway stretches long and then short, perspective warping.

He stands in front of the nursery door.

His hand reaches for the knob. He tries to pull back. The avoidance has become its own weight, unbearable, and now opening the door feels not like choice but like gravity. Like falling.

The knob turns. The door opens.

The room is exactly as they last left it. Curtains still tied back. The assembled crib with the mobile hanging motionless above it. The shelves with their small folded clothes, the recliner in the corner where he sat one night thinking about the heartbeat — the one that now no longer exists.

Tim just stands in the doorway.

He doesn't enter. He can't. The threshold feels like a physical barrier, the air in the room somehow denser, pressing against his chest.

His knees hurt.

He looks down. He's standing wrong, locked, joints protesting. He shifts his weight and the movement carries him forward, one step, two, into the room. The door closes behind him; not fully, but enough to change the acoustics, enough to make the space feel sealed.

He stands beside the crib.

He reaches out, touches the railing. It's cold — or maybe that's just him. He shouldn't have come here. Every object in this room is evidence of hope, and that hope is what's killing him. The careful research into non-toxic paints. The rug Pai laughed at the price of. The folders of school information packets he hid under the dresser because looking at them felt like tempting fate.

Fate didn't need tempting. Fate found them anyway.

His legs give out. Slowly, like a building accepting its own destruction. He descends to the floor in front of the crib. The carpet around here is soft, he notes with stupid clarity. Pai chose it because he read that babies learning to walk needed cushioning. Tim had teased him about overthinking. Now the carpet is just carpet, and Pai is gone, and the baby is gone, and Tim is sitting on the floor of a room that has no purpose.

He puts his head in his hands.

The tears come silently. They always do with him, even alone, even now. No sound, just the wet tracking down his face. He doesn't wipe them away. He doesn't have the energy for performance, not even for himself.

"I'm sorry," he whispers.

The words emerge cracked. He doesn't know who he's speaking to. Pai, probably. Pai who left, who couldn't look at him, who was right to leave. Tim had said terrible things. Had weaponized his own grief to wound the one person he promised to never hurt ever again. He'd wanted Pai to understand the way he was hurting, and now Pai is hurting, and Tim is alone in a nursery that will never be used, and he doesn't know how to stop crying.

"I'm sorry, Pai," he says again, louder. "I'm so sorry."

There's a sound just outside the window. He looks up, and his eyes land on the starless sky. He thinks of Pai's face in the kitchen, the exact moment he registered what Tim said. The way his expression shuttered. The look behind his eyes as Tim ripped open the scars they'd both already thought closed.

Tim curls forward, forehead against his knees.

"I'm sorry," he breathes again into the fabric of his pants.

But the words are shifting now, changing shape in his mouth without permission. The image behind his eyes is no longer Pai in the kitchen. It's the examination room. The ultrasound monitor. The silence where there should have been sound.

He thinks of his parents. The years he spent waiting for them to come back. He'd promised himself — promised — that his own child would never go through what he did. Never feel that abandonment. Never wonder why they weren't enough to make someone stay.

He'd done everything right this time. Everything. And he still couldn't hold on to her.

"I'm sorry," and this time it is not for Pai.

This time it is for her.

The grief hits differently here, in this room, surrounded by evidence of what they were building. He had allowed himself to imagine. Had let the future take shape in his mind: her running through the house, her small hand in his, her questions, her growth, her life unfolding across years he had already begun planning for. He had done everything right. Every appointment, every precaution, every book and article and forum post, every reminder to Nana, every modification to this room to make it safer, softer, better.

He had tried so hard.

"I did my best," he whispers, and his voice breaks on the last word, finally, audibly. "I did my best."

Not an excuse. Not a claim to deserve better. Just the simple, devastating truth: he had tried everything he knew how to do, done everything he was allowed and able to do, and it had not been enough. The failure is absolute. There is no appeal, no correction, no next time. Just this room, this floor, this weight. The same weight he carried when they left him.

He stays there, crying quietly, the faint shadows of the mobile in the dim moonlight mocking him.

The door opens almost noiselessly.

Tim doesn't stir. He knows who it is — who else would it be? — but he can't lift his head, can't wipe his face, can't pretend that the last few hours didn't happen. He just sits there with every last bit of anguish exposed and waits to see what Pai will do with it.

A step forward. Another.

Tim breathes. In. Out. "I'm sorry," he says one more time, not knowing anymore who he's talking to, Pai or the baby or himself or all three. "I'm so sorry." Not that the constant repetition changes anything, but it's all that he has left.

The last step closer. The presence above him. Then the warmth of another body sinking to the floor beside him, shoulder pressing against shoulder, and Pai's voice, rough and tired and still here:

"I know."

Tim turns his head. Pai is looking at him with red-rimmed eyes, his own face tracked with tears, and he is here, he came back, he is sitting next to Tim on the floor of the nursery in his pajamas, and he didn't have to be, but he is.

"I know," Pai says again, softer, and his hand reaches for Tim's, fingers threading together the way they're always meant to be. "I know you are."

Tim makes a sound that isn't quite words, desolation and relief and terror all mashed together, and leans his head against Pai's shoulder, and they sit on the floor of the room that was supposed to hold their future, holding each other instead, and for the first time in weeks, he doesn't feel like he's drowning.

—

No words pass between them for a long while. Tim's cheek is pressed against Pai's shoulder, Pai's hand is warm around his, and neither of them moves. 

Tim doesn't know how much time has passed. He knows there's a clock somewhere above their heads, he'd watched Pai fail multiple times to mount it onto the wall while he held back his laughter, but he can't muster up the energy to check. His face is starting to get sticky from his tears, and his thighs and side are aching from his position, but he can't bring himself to care about any of it.

"I didn't mean it," he says finally. His voice sounds like gravel, like something broken then rearranged wrong. "What I said."

Pai's hand tightens around his. "I know."

"I was trying to —" Tim stops. Swallows. The words are there but they don't want to come out in the right order. "I thought if I made it seem like I was the only one who needed you, you'd —" He shakes his head, frustrated. "I don't know what I was trying to do. I just wanted you to understand."

"Understand what?"

"That I'm struggling." The admission comes out flat, almost matter-of-fact. "That I've been drowning for weeks and I didn't know how to tell you without pulling you under too."

Pai is quiet for a moment. When he speaks, his voice is careful. "You said you were trying to protect me."

"I thought —" Tim pulls back enough to look at him, to somehow see Pai's face in the dark. "I thought if you didn't see how bad it was, you wouldn't have to feel it too. I thought I could just... hold it. Until it got better."

"But it didn't."

"No."

"And instead you just pulled away from me."

Tim looks away. "Yeah."

Pai reaches up with his free hand, turns Tim's face back toward him. His thumb traces the line of Tim's jaw, a familiar gesture, grounding. "You don't get to decide what I can and can't handle, Tim. Not after everything."

"I know."

"You promised me. After we talked to your parents, after you told me everything you'd carried alone for years, the day we got married. You vowed you would always be honest with me."

The words land like a physical blow. Tim closes his eyes. "I did."

"So what happens next time?" Pai asks, and his voice isn't angry anymore, just tired. "When something else goes wrong? Do I spend weeks trying to reach you while you pretend everything's fine?"

Tim shakes his head. He doesn't know how to make this promise, how to make it stick, but he knows he has to try. "I don't..." He pauses. Tries again. "I don't know how to do this. To let you see me like that. But I know I can't keep doing what I was doing. I know I broke something."

"You did."

"Can I —" Tim's voice cracks. He forces himself to keep going. "Can I try to fix it?"

Pai studies him for a long moment. Tim can feel the scrutiny in that gaze, the assessment, the question of how to move on in the aftermath. He sits still for it. Lets Pai look.

"Here's what happens," Pai says finally. "You promise me — actually promise, not just say the words — that when you start to feel like you're slipping, you tell me. Before you start hiding in your office and avoiding me and turning our house into a graveyard."

Tim nods. "I promise."

"You promise that you'll let me in. Even when it's ugly. Even when you think you're protecting me."

"I promise."

Pai's hand moves from his jaw to his hair, fingers threading through it, tugging slightly. "And I promise to pay better attention. To notice when you're starting to fade before I lose you completely. I should have... I knew something was wrong, I just didn't know how to get through."

"You tried."

"Not hard enough." Pai's voice is rough with self-recrimination. "I kept waiting for you to just... Get better. Like it was a phase. I should have pushed for the conversation earlier."

"You're not responsible for my —"

"I'm your husband." Pai cuts him off, firm. "That means I'm responsible for showing up. Even when you're being difficult. Even when you try to make it seem impossible."

They sit with that for a moment more.

"Tim." Pai's voice is softer now. "We need to talk about what comes next. With us. With —" He gestures vaguely at the room around them.

Tim tenses. "I can't —" He stops. Forces himself to be honest. "I can't think about trying again. Not yet. Maybe not ever. I can't even —"

"I know." Pai squeezes his hand. "I'm not asking for that. I'm not asking for a decision tonight. I'm just asking if we're going to be okay. Eventually."

Tim looks at him. Really looks at him: at the exhaustion etched into his face, at the love that's still there despite everything, at the stubborn refusal to give up that has always been the core of who Pai is.

"Eventually," Tim echoes. "Of course. Yes. Definitely. We will be."

"Good." Pai leans his forehead against Tim's. "That's enough for now."

They stay there for a while longer, shoulders pressed together, breathing in sync.

"We should go to bed," he says. "Our bed. Not —" He glances at the crib, then away. "Not here. I mean, obviously. But not here."

Tim nods. He doesn't know if he'll sleep, doesn't know if he can close his eyes without seeing the ultrasound room or the kitchen or the look on Pai's face before he walked out the door. But he knows he doesn't want to be in this room anymore. The gravity that pulled him here has released him, slightly, just enough to move.

They get up slowly, joints protesting, and Pai keeps hold of Tim's hand as they walk to the door. Tim looks back once at the mobile, the crib, the recliner. The room is still a wound, still a space full of everything they lost. But it's no longer dragging him down. Not right now.

He exits first. Pai closes the door behind them.

Back in their bedroom, they climb into bed, into sheets that smell like both of them. Pai curls against Tim's back, arm wrapping around his waist, and Tim covers Pai's hand with his own.

"I love you," Tim whispers into the dark.

"I know," Pai murmurs against his shoulder. "I love you too. Even when you're an idiot."

Tim huffs out something that isn't quite a laugh, but is close. "I'm sorry."

"I know that too. Go to sleep, teerak."

Tim closes his eyes. He doesn't expect to sleep, expects to lie awake cataloging failures until morning. But Pai's breathing evens out against his back, warm and familiar, and the weight of his arm is grounding, and soon, Tim follows him down.

=========

Weeks pass quietly after that, not all of them easy, but every single one manageable. Where it no longer feels like a struggle to survive minute to minute. Where grief stops swallowing every room whole and instead settles into the spaces between things: lingering in silences, surfacing unexpectedly, still surrounding them but without consuming them alive.

Tim still has difficult days.

Sometimes Pai finds him staring too long at children in public places before catching himself and looking away. Sometimes he still wakes up in the middle of the night with tears silently slipping down into his hairline. Sometimes he disappears into his work for hours at a time until Pai gently appears beside his desk with food and a pointed, “You’ve been drawing projections for six straight hours. Blink twice if you still remember you’re human.”

Tim blinks once. Then twice. Pai snorts. “Good enough.”

Little by little, they learn each other again.

Or maybe not learn.

Remember.

Remember that love does not become smaller just because grief moved in beside it for a while. That silence is not always abandonment.

Remember how to reach out. 

Some nights, Pai wakes up to find the other side of the bed empty.

The first time it happens, worry claws through him enough for his pulse to stutter. He steps out of the bedroom and immediately spots Tim at the far side of the hallway, a dim silhouette against the wall directly opposite the nursery door.

His knees are slightly drawn up. One arm rests loosely over them while his head is leaned back against the wall, eyes closed.

Not asleep.

Just… there.

The nursery door remains shut.

Tim cannot bring himself to enter that room again — and yet some part of him gravitates toward it anyway.

He opens his eyes at the muffled sound of Pai's footsteps. “Sorry,” he immediately apologizes, voice rough with sleep.“I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Pai chooses not to answer and sinks down next to him instead, pressed side to side.

The hallway stays dark around them, only a sliver of moonlight spilling faintly through the window at the end of the hall.

They lean toward each other at the same time, heads softly bumping. Pai intertwines their fingers.

And together, they sit facing the closed door neither of them is ready to open yet.

—

Around two months after the fight, Pai asks Nana to have lunch with him.

Nana agrees immediately, mostly because she assumes this is about work. That assumption lasts exactly eleven minutes.

They’re halfway through their food when Pai abruptly sets his chopsticks down and asks, “Would you be willing to try again?”

Nana slowly lowers her glass of water. “… Excuse me?”

Pai looks mildly startled at himself too, like the question bypassed several layers of internal filtering before making it out into the open.

“I mean — not now,” he says quickly. “Obviously not now, I just —”

“Khun Pai." Nana studies him carefully across the table. Then, very gently, asks, “Does Khun Tim know you’re asking me this?”

“...”

“Ah,” is all she says.

Pai looks down immediately. “I haven’t brought it up again,” he admits quietly. “Not properly.”

“And yet you’re asking me.”

The words aren’t accusatory. Which somehow makes it worse.

“I want to try again,” Pai says after a moment, fingers tightening slightly around his coffee cup. “I know maybe that sounds insane after everything, but I do.”

“And Khun Tim?” she prompts.

Pai tiredly sighs. “I think part of him still wants it too,” he says quietly. “But wanting it terrifies him.” He stares down at the table. “I hate this,” he admits softly. “Watching him hurt and not knowing how to fix it.”

“Loving someone isn’t the same thing as fixing them, Khun Pai.”

“I know that.”

“No,” Nana says gently. “I think you only know the words. I don’t think you actually believe them.”

And Pai realizes she’s right.

He has spent almost his entire life solving problems. Holding things together. Managing crises before they become disasters.

Pai never learned how to simply stand by and watch — especially when it comes to Tim.

“I keep thinking,” Pai admits after a long silence, “that if I can just give him something to hope for again, maybe it’ll stop hurting this much.”

Nana squints at him. “And would another baby actually fix that?”

No, it wouldn’t. A child is not a replacement for grief. Not a solution to it either. And Pai already knows that.

“You do genuinely want to be a father,” Nana echoes his thoughts. “That part’s real. It still is. But wanting to be a father and wanting to save your husband from himself are not the same thing.”

Pai’s fingers tighten around his own glass.

“If you ask him to try again before he’s ready,” Nana continues quietly, “he’ll say yes for you.”

Pai knows how true this is. Tim loves him enough to walk into fear with trembling hands if Pai asks him to.

And the thought simultaneously comforts and distresses him.

“I don’t want to pressure him,” Pai says softly.

“I know.”

“It's just that...” He exhales shakily. “I miss seeing him excited about the future.”

Nana nods in empathy. “I think he misses it too.” Then she asks, “If Khun Tim woke up tomorrow and told you he never wanted to try again, would you still want the life you have with him?”

Pai doesn't even need to think about it. “Yes.” Zero hesitation. 

Nana smiles then. Small. Warm. Relieved.

“Okay,” she says quietly. “Then I think both of you will be alright.”

—

Life continues.

Tim laughs more often now.

Still occasionally tinged by that same lingering sadness.

But lighter.

He no longer avoids the baby sections in stores. Stays beside Pai when they pass families in public instead of subtly shifting away. Once, Pai catches him standing motionless in the children’s furniture aisle, staring thoughtfully at a bookshelf shaped like a little house.

Tim notices him and immediately clears his throat.

“It’s structurally inefficient.”

Pai bites the inside of his cheek to stop the smile. “Mm,” he hums solemnly. “Tragic.”

"I mean it, Pai. Look at all the real estate wasted near the roof," he insists, even as they walk away.

But Pai notices him glance back at it once more before they leave.

He doesn't comment further.

—

Nearly six months since that night, Tim finds Pai in the kitchen attempting to make tea.

Keyword: attempt.

The tea bag string has somehow caught fire.

Tim stares at him. Pai stares back.

“… I can explain. Or, well, no. I can't.”

“How did you set something on fire with a stove that doesn't produce fire?"

“I wish I knew.”

Tim takes the mug away before Pai can burn down the entire kitchen. He directs Pai to go sit in the living room while he remakes the tea properly, then eventually follows. He hands one mug to Pai.

The second mug goes on the coffee table, the owner seemingly uninterested in it.

Pai notices that. He always notices now.

Not anxiously.

Not like he’s waiting for Tim to disappear.

Just present. Like he promised.

“You okay?” he asks gently.

Tim stares at the table for a long moment. Then he quietly says, “I think I’m ready to talk about it.”

Pai leans forward, waiting.

“I’m still scared,” Tim admits. "Terrified."

“Teerak…”

“I know there’s no guarantee it would end differently.” Tim swallows once. “And part of me keeps thinking that maybe it would be easier if we just stopped wanting it.”

Pai can hear the self-doubt in his voice.

“Sometimes I feel guilty about it,” Tim confesses. “Like I’m failing you because I can’t... be normal about this. I can't do this one thing for you.”

That hurts. Pai lets his own tea join the other on the table, and his now-free hands take Tim's own between them.

“Teerak.” Pai makes sure that Tim is really listening, and really looking at him.

The love in Pai's eyes is clear and steady when he speaks. “I married you because I love you,” Pai says. “You already give me more than I know what to do with every single day.”

Tim’s throat tightens painfully.

“And whether or not a child exists sometime in our future,” Pai continues softer now, “does not change the life I already chose with you.”

Something inside Tim finally gives way at that. An almost cathartic release.

Pai runs his fingers back and forth over Tim's knuckles when his eyes start filling, then gently tugs. Tim lets himself be pulled forward without resistance, forehead pressing into Pai’s shoulder as Pai wraps both arms around him.

“I’m still scared,” he murmurs almost inaudibly.

“I know.”

“But I don’t want fear making this decision for us anymore.”

Pai feels it, the resolve in Tim's heart. How much he still wants this. How much he still wants to reach for that dream with Pai.

He presses a kiss to Tim's head. “Okay,” he whispers back. “Then we’ll do it scared.”

—

The second IVF process is exactly this side of familiar.

Same clinics.

Same paperwork.

Same blood tests.

Same waiting rooms.

But this time with more caution around the edges.

Nobody lets themselves celebrate too early.

Tim checks Nana’s medication schedule obsessively, though this time Nana catches him trying to create a color-blocked chart and threatens to block both of them.

Pai still buys enough supplements to stock a small pharmacy.

Nana calls them insufferable. Neither denies it.

The embryo transfer succeeds on the first attempt.

Then begins the waiting.

Weeks pass measured cautiously between appointments and anxious optimism.

Hope slowly begins returning to the house.

Tentative.

Fragile.

Real.

—

At eleven weeks, Pai has to leave town for an emergency administrative issue with the site in Chiang Mai.

He reacts to this development like he’s been personally betrayed by the construction industry itself.

“This is targeted harassment,” he declares over a videocall the night before the appointment.

“Teerak, you are literally the only person who can fix it.”

“I should fire everyone.”

“You say that every time something inconveniences you.”

“It is inconvenient. My child is developing organs and I’m a plane ride away arguing over title deeds.”

From beside Tim, Nana quips. “Your child is currently the size of a fig.”

“You’re both being very unsupportive during my time of suffering.”

“You’ve called six times today,” Tim points out.

“And none of them made me less upset.”

By the seventh call, Nana kicks him out of the group chat.

—

The next morning, Tim accompanies Nana to the ultrasound appointment alone.

Well.

Not entirely alone.

His phone vibrates every few minutes with messages from Pai.

Did they start yet?

This meeting is taking far too long

Has Nana eaten?

Have you eaten?

Tim snorts softly despite himself. Thanks for thinking of Nana first, I feel loved.

Nana's dietary requirements supersede yours.

Tim shakes his head, still smiling faintly, just as the nurse calls them in.

He stands near Nana’s shoulder when the scan begins, trying very hard to remain normal about all of this.

Calm.

Stable.

Controlled.

Then the sound fills the room.

Fast.

Steady.

Alive.

Tim stops breathing.

The pulse comes softly through the speakers and suddenly every carefully maintained wall inside him comes down at once.

A hand flies up to cover his mouth in an attempt to prevent what would have been an embarrassingly loud gasp.

Beside him, Nana makes a tiny broken sound of her own.

The technician smiles knowingly while continuing the scan.

Tim can’t stop staring at the monitor.

Heartbeat. There’s a heartbeat.

Tears blur his vision.

Not a single stab of pain this time.

No devastation.

Just overwhelming relief.

Nana quietly nudges his arm. “Call your husband."

Tim lets out a watery laugh and reaches for his phone.

Pai answers before the first ring fully ends.

“Did they start yet?” he demands immediately. “Because if you started without me —”

“There’s a heartbeat,” Tim interrupts softly.

Pai sounds almost afraid to believe it. “… Really?”

Tim closes his eyes, and the tears finally spill over.

“Yeah,” he confirms, voice cracking around the word. “Really.”

=========

The second trimester passes in increments of hyperawareness.

Sixteen weeks.

Twenty.

Twenty-four.

Each milestone settles into the house slowly, carefully, like hope itself is trying not to move too fast and scare them.

The anxiety never completely vanishes.

Every appointment still has Tim quietly contemplative. Pai still checks his phone too often on days Nana has scans. Neither of them says things like we’re in the safe zone now out loud, as if tempting fate might hear.

But optimism builds anyway. Small at first. Then harder and harder to contain.

—

Pai is the first one who starts talking to the baby regularly.

Mostly because he forgets not to.

He’ll be halfway through a story before realizing he’s directing it at Nana’s stomach instead of Nana herself.

“… and then the contractor tried to tell me the entire delay was because of weather conditions,” Pai says one afternoon while helping Nana carry groceries into the kitchen. “Which is interesting considering the weather has been completely normal.”

A small wince from Nana interrupts him. She raises an eyebrow. “Looks like someone disagrees with you.”

Pai stares at her stomach, evidently disturbed at the betrayal. “Don’t encourage this.”

Another wince.

From the dining table, Tim doesn’t even glance up from his laptop. “The baby clearly understands project management.”

“You’re both against me.”

“Correct,” Nana immediately agrees.

Pai narrows his eyes at the stomach. “Tiny traitor.”

Tim’s mouth twitches faintly before he hides it behind his coffee.

The first time Tim talks directly to the baby, he most definitely means it.

Nana is trying to step over one of the ridiculous anti-slip mats Tim secretly added to her condo after she nearly slid in socks once.

“You’re making my apartment look like a retirement home,” she complains while carefully navigating around it.

“Your kitchen has no traction, it’s unacceptable and unsafe,” Tim replies absently, focused on tightening something underneath her sink.

“I’m thirty-four.”

“You’re pregnant.”

Nana opens her mouth to continue arguing just as the baby kicks hard enough for her to jolt. "Ow."

Tim’s head snaps up instantly. “Hey,” he scolds before even thinking about it, tool in hand pointed scoldingly toward her stomach. “Architect number two. Be nice to Nana and stop rearranging her insides. You’re already expensive enough without causing additional medical complications too, you tiny future tax deduction.”

Pai is horrified. “You cannot call our child that.”

“It’s the truth, though!” Tim defends.

Nana bites the inside of her cheek to stop herself from laughing.

Tim clears his throat and withdraws his hand. “Anyway,” he mutters with forced composure, “you still need better bathroom lighting.”

Pai says absolutely nothing about what just happened.

Mostly because if he opens his mouth right now, he might start crying directly into Nana’s fruit bowl.

—

Their hovering gets worse.

Significantly worse.

By twenty-six weeks, Nana comes home to discover motion-sensor night lights installed along the baseboards of her hallway, anti-slip grips added to her bathroom tiles, and padded guards attached to the corners of her dining table.

Three days later, she changes her locks.

Tim reacts to this development with clear offense. It lessens considerably once Pai points out that Nana can no longer come home to find Tim reorganizing her kitchen cabinets by “injury potential.”

Nana seriously contemplates quitting her job.

It doesn’t help that Pai is just as bad. He hires a nutritionist Nana never asked for. Starts arranging drivers for her without permission. Quietly replaces half the snacks in her kitchen with “better alternatives,” which results in Nana showing up at their house aggressively holding a family-sized bag of chips out of pure spite.

—

By the third trimester, a bassinet materializes beside their bed one weekend. Parenting books multiply across flat surfaces throughout the house like an invasive species.

The nursery door stays open more often now. There’s no drama or fanfare to it. It just happens.

One afternoon, they air the room out. Another day Tim vacuums quietly while Pai refolds clothes that didn’t actually need refolding. Neither of them acknowledge the significance of it.

Now the room simply exists again.

Warm and welcoming instead of foreboding.

Pai spots Tim inside on a day off, late afternoon light streaked across the crib holding Tim’s attention. He joins his husband.

“There’s really going to be someone in there soon,” Tim whispers when Pai is next to him, awed and in disbelief.

Pai slips his hand into Tim’s. “Yeah,” he answers softly.

—

At thirty-two weeks, Nana effectively loses custody of her own living situation.

It starts innocently enough. An overnight stay after a late appointment. Then another because “traffic conditions are unpredictable.” Then Pai casually asks why she would bother going home when the guest room is already prepared.

The transition from occasional overnight stays to outright relocation happens so gradually Nana barely notices it until half her belongings have somehow migrated into the first floor guest room.

Her skincare appears in the downstairs bathroom. Her favorite tea is stocked in the pantry beside an alarming quantity of prenatal vitamins. Tim installs additional night lights in the hallway “just in case.”

Nana stands in the guest room doorway staring in horror at the steadily growing evidence that she apparently lives here now.

“I still legally own my apartment.”

“Debatable,” Tim mutters from the bathroom.

Nana points at both of them. “This is kidnapping.”

“You’re being dramatic,” Pai says.

North, who happens to be visiting and witnessing this entire conversation, nearly chokes on his drink. “Hia,” he says weakly, “you added a pregnancy pillow to the guest room before asking whether she was staying.”

Pai looks confused. “Well obviously.”

“That’s not obvious!”

Yu glances toward Nana sympathetically. “At least they love you?”

“I fear for this child already,” Nana deadpans.

—

As the due date approaches, the anxiety returns a little.

Like all three of them are afraid to fully believe they’ve finally made it this far.

The night before the scheduled caesarean, the house is quiet in the way only nervous anticipation can bring.

Nana, one hand resting beneath the curve of her stomach, passes by the living room where Tim is lying with his head on Pai’s lap as they both pretend to be engrossed in whatever it is each of them is reading.

“Well,” she says to them, “enjoy your last night as a family of two.”

Pai nearly drops his phone. Tim covers his face with his book.

Nana smiles serenely. “Goodnight.” Then she retreats to her room before either of them can recover.

Pai stares after her. “She absolutely said that on purpose.”

“For sure.”

But neither of them moves to the bedroom afterward.

Instead, in silent agreement, they head toward the nursery.

The room is dim except for the soft glow of the nightlight near the dresser.

Tim’s hand brushes lightly along the crib rail as they stand beside it.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow there will finally be a baby in this house. More than just a possibility, more than just a heartbeat through speakers, more than just an ultrasound image on a monitor.

Pai looks over at Tim quietly.

Tim is already looking at him.

The kiss happens softly. No rush or intensity, just the simple connection of two people standing at the edge of something life-changing together.

Pai’s fingers curl lightly against the back of Tim’s neck.

Tim exhales softly against his mouth. “Papa,” he murmurs teasingly when they part just slightly.

Pai lets out a quiet laugh, forehead dropping briefly against Tim’s shoulder. “You’re unbearable.”

“And you love me anyway.”

“I do.” Pai kisses him once more. “I really do.”

Later, in the dark of their bedroom, sleep proves impossible.

Tim lies on his back staring at the ceiling while Pai rests half-curled against his side, fingers tracing slow patterns over his wrist beneath the blankets.

Nervous energy lingers between them.

Excitement too.

And a hushed current of want underneath both.

Tim turns his head slightly when Pai shifts closer.

Another kiss. The kind that gradually dissolves into touch and warmth and quiet laughter against each other’s mouths. Close. Grounding.

Love expressed and shared between them in the dark while tomorrow waits patiently outside the room.

Much later, Pai settles on Tim’s chest, sleepier now.

“Well,” he murmurs softly into the darkness. “Tomorrow.”

Tim’s arm tightens around him instinctively. “Tomorrow,” he echoes.

Pai tilts his head just enough to press one last kiss against Tim’s jaw. “See you in the morning, Daddy.”

Tim closes his eyes.

And for the first time in a very long time, the future no longer feels frightening at all.

=========

Nobody sleeps much that night.

Tim drifts in and out at best, never fully unconscious long enough for it to count as rest. Every time he opens his eyes, Pai is still awake beside him.

At some point just after four in the morning, Tim gives up entirely and switches on the bedside lamp. Pai squints immediately, muttering a weak complaint about being attacked by artificial light before eventually admitting defeat too.

Tomorrow had become today.

Downstairs, Nana is already awake by the time they finally emerge from the bedroom. The morning passes in a blur of nervous energy after that — untouched coffee, repeated hospital bag checks, Pai pacing through the kitchen while Tim quietly redirects him away from reorganizing supplies for the fifth time.

Nobody is particularly hungry.

Nobody says they’re scared either.

The drive to the hospital feels strangely short. Bangkok is barely awake yet, the roads washed pale beneath the early morning light. Pai spends most of the ride half-turned toward the back seat checking on Nana every few minutes until she finally threatens to get out of the car if he asks whether she’s comfortable one more time.

That shuts him up for approximately two minutes.

The hospital itself feels unnaturally calm compared to the chaos inside all three of them.

Everything smells faintly antiseptic. Nurses move around with practiced efficiency while paperwork gets signed and bracelets appear around wrists and machines begin quietly monitoring things that suddenly feel terrifyingly important.

And gradually, the reality of the day settles into place.

Today. It’s happening today. Now, in fact.

Tim feels it most sharply when Nana disappears briefly behind the changing curtain and reemerges in a hospital gown.

Something about it makes the situation suddenly real in a way it hadn’t been before.

Pai notices the exact moment the tension shifts across Tim’s face and quietly moves closer until their shoulders touch.

Neither says anything about it.

After that, events begin moving too quickly to fully process. Nurses adjust IV lines. Procedures get explained. Consent forms are signed. Then Nana is being wheeled toward the operating room and Tim’s pulse is loud enough to drown out almost everything else.

One moment, they’re in pre-op.

The next, a loud cry fills the room.

After months of fear and grief and trying not to hope too much…

There’s a baby crying in the room.

Their baby.

The nurse lifts the newborn briefly into view and Pai starts crying without even attempting dignity anymore.

“Oh my god,” he chokes out. “Oh my god.”

Tim’s vision is blurred. “Nana, I –” he gets cut off by another cry.

The baby’s face is red and scrunched and furious at being born and somehow the most beautiful thing Tim has ever seen in his life.

“She’s perfect,” the nurse says warmly.

She.

It comes so...

Naturally.

Like it had simply been waiting to be properly used all this time.

—

The rest of the day passes in a mix of disbelief and celebration.

Visitors come gradually once Nana is settled into recovery.

North cries almost immediately upon seeing the baby.

Aunt Kia somehow manages to look both emotional and incredibly smug at the same time.

Da Zhan spends nearly ten full minutes staring at the infant in complete fascination before quietly declaring, “She’s so small.”

“She was literally born this morning,” Yu reminds him.

Meanwhile Pai sits in the middle of all of it holding the baby securely against him, as if he can't believe she's finally in his arms. Every few minutes, his eyes drift downward again as if checking she’s still there.

Grandpa Soephon arrives sometime later that evening. The moment he sees the baby, every trace of the intimidating patriarch disappears, leaving only a soft and utterly smitten great-grandfather behind.

Pai carefully adjusts the blanket wrapped around her before announcing, “We decided on a name.”

The room quiets down almost immediately.

Pai looks down at the baby in his arms, and when he speaks again, his voice gentles in a way Tim has only ever heard a handful of times before.

“Sratthara.”

North repeats it softly under his breath.

Grandpa’s gaze lifts slowly. “Faith.”

Pai nods. “Hope,” he adds in continuation. “Trust. To keep believing even when you’re afraid.”

Grandpa’s hand settles lightly against Pai’s shoulder, quiet approval wrapped into the gesture.

North looks suspiciously emotional again. Da Zhan absolutely is.

Grandpa regards Pai for a long moment before asking, “And her nickname?”

Pai looks to Tim.

Tim has been standing slightly apart from everyone else near the window for the past several minutes, quietly watching the scene unfold.

Watching Pai holding the baby.

Watching everyone melt around her.

Watching love move through the room so openly it almost feels tangible.

Wordlessly, he crosses the room and joins his family. His family. He carefully brushes one finger against the thin wisps of hair across the baby’s forehead. She stirs, then blinks up at him sleepily.

And something inside Tim gives way all over again.

“… Gift,” he decides.

Pai smiles. “Gift?”

Tim nods once, still staring down at the baby.

“… Because she feels like something I was never supposed to have.”

His voice trembles slightly around the next words.

“But she’s here anyway.”

A pause.

Then, softer:

“And she’s mine.”

Emotion breaks openly across Pai’s face as he looks at Tim. 

Then, still holding the baby carefully against one arm, he reaches for Tim with the other and pulls him down just enough to kiss him softly.

No teasing this time.

No laughter.

Just love.

=======

The nursery is silent except for the soft rustle of fabric and Gift’s tiny sleep noises as Tim slowly walks her around the room.

Even exhausted after the rollercoaster of the past few days, he holds her with careful reverence, one hand supporting the side of her head while the other protectively holds her entire tiny body to his chest, like he can’t quite bear to loosen his grip just yet.

Pai observes from the doorway, feeling strangely breathless.

Then his gaze catches on the shelf beside the crib.

The duck.

Sometime during the nursery conversion, Tim must have moved it there and Pai never noticed before now.

It stares back at him, looking exactly the same as always.

And suddenly, all at once, in a lightning moment — Pai gets it.

Oh.

That’s why he kept it.

Not because it's part of their past.

But because, without them knowing, it was always meant to belong to their future.

Before he can think too hard, he crosses the room and reaches for the plushie. Gently, he touches it to Gift’s cheek, smiling faintly when her little hand instinctively reaches up and her impossibly tiny fingers try to grip onto it.

Then, just as carefully, he sets the duck back onto the shelf beside the crib.

It settles easily, a silent guardian to watch over the room until she’s old enough for it.

Tim watches him quietly, something knowing in his expression. He asks anyway. “Teerak?”

Pai shakes his head quickly before his emotions can overwhelm him. “Nothing.”

He looks at Tim, at the warmth written plainly across his face. At the man who built this home with him piece by piece, whom he loved long before either of them could even begin to imagine what that love would have to survive.

Then he looks down at his little girl sleeping peacefully in Tim’s arms, unaware that her parents are already so hopelessly in love with her it almost hurts to breathe around the intensity of it.

Something inside Pai aches with the enormity of it all.

This is the future he once thought had slipped out of his reach.

And, against all reason, they had found their way back to it. Together.

“Just…” Pai whispers as Tim’s free arm wraps around his waist and pulls him close, voice thick with tears despite his best efforts to hold them back.

“Welcome home, sweetheart.”