Archive of Our Own ^beta

I. Crochet - 2010 to 2011

The first time anyone on the Montreal Voyageurs discovered the crochet, it was entirely Shane Hollander’s fault—though in his mind, he’d simply executed his perfectly calibrated pregame ritual.

It went like this. He’d arrive forty-five minutes before the pre-game debrief, as the first wave of guys filtered in, half asleep and already chirping, the air thick with the mineral bite of ice shavings, the rubbery tang of tape, and the nervous, caffeinated sweat of pro athletes. Shane would slide past them, a human ghost, and head straight to his stall. The bench was cold, always, and the overhead lights too bright, but the familiar discomforts steadied him. He’d unstrap his battered black bag from the steel hook, check the laces on his skates, and tap a knuckle on his locker door three times—habits that felt less like superstition and more like self-defense.

Then, the ritual. From the bottom of his gear bag, he’d retrieve the slim canvas pouch, the one weighed heavy with emerald wool and a single, wood carved hook. He’d slide it onto his lap, fingers already itching with anticipation. The first time he did it, last season, he hid it behind a tangle of stick tape and a spare helmet visor. But after the team’s sixth straight win with this pregame addition, he’d grown superstitious enough to let it peek out, the green yarn visible if you cared to look. Nobody cared to look, not really. Not until this morning.

In those precious minutes before the energy in the room truly ramped up, he’d set to work. The hook would loop and pull, loop and pull, until the world shrank down to the measured tension of wool stretched between his fingers. The repetitive motion soothed the twitchy anxiety that shadowed him, organizing his thoughts into single file. In the rising chaos of the room, the rhythm of crocheting was meditative; by the time he began to tape his stick, he usually felt like a person again. He never thought of it as remarkable. It was simply his way of making order from noise.

For six weeks straight, this system had run without a hitch. Six straight games, six straight scarves. The first went to his mom, who’d made a show of wearing it to his games even though the color washed out her skin. The second, nearly perfect, he mailed to his grandmother in Red Deer. The third he frogged three times before it passed inspection, then left it hanging on the doorknob of his neighbor Mrs. Chinheid, who gardened year-round and was always cold. The rest, unfinished, unraveled, or simply not up to his standards, accumulated in the bottom of his equipment bag beneath a layer of used tape, lint, and pride.

But today, the morning of the first playoff game, he let himself get comfortable. He’d started a sequence of granny-square motifs, test patches for a blanket he wanted to finish by the Cup Final. Maybe he was thinking ahead; maybe he was tempting fate. Either way, the squares were lined neatly on the bench beside him, their colors bright against the institutional gray of the locker room. Shameful, almost, but in a way that made him feel both more and less exposed.

Hayden Pike was the first teammate to really notice. Hayden was a rookie, new to the team, just like Shane, but not new to chaos. He had a gift for filling every inch of available air with noise, whether from his own voice or the clatter of gear, or the constant, aggressive popping of bubblegum. He was the kind of guy who could make a single Gatorade bottle into a projectile, a percussion instrument, and a status symbol in the course of five minutes. Shane had learned to survive him by building invisible boundaries: a foot of bench space, a moat of stacked towels, a passive-aggressive glare when Hayden’s shin pads crept too close.

Today, the ritual failed him. Shane was so absorbed in his work—hook, loop, pull, count, repeat—that he missed the warning signs. The spike in volume as the boys returned from warmup, the vibration of the floor as Pike stomped down the aisle in his skate guards, the sudden barrage of half-shouted nicknames that always preceded something terrible. Shane felt the impact before he registered what happened: the full, unshakable Gatorade bottle, hurled by Hayden in some performative display of athletic prowess, careened off the far wall and struck Shane’s equipment bag with surgical precision.

The force knocked the bag off balance, which was the first problem. The second problem was that the lid of Shane’s canvas pouch had not been zipped shut. He watched, paralyzed, as the entire granny-square collection—plus a tangled skein of emerald wool—burst from the pouch and tumbled onto the linoleum like a felled bouquet. The squares scattered, a half-finished infinity scarf trailed after them, and the crochet hook itself clattered with a sound uncomfortably similar to a dropped stick in a silent rink.

The whole thing would have been mildly embarrassing if not for Hayden Pike’s reaction, which was to go silent. Immediately. The effect was contagious.Conversation in the locker room stalled, then stuttered, then evaporated. Not total silence, not in a room full of pro hockey players, but something so close that even the pregame playlist—today, a subwoofer-heavy EDM remix chosen by the backup goalie—seemed to fade to background.

Hayden stood frozen, the Gatorade bottle still in his hand and his jaw unhinged. For half a second, Shane entertained the hope that maybe it hadn’t registered, that perhaps he’d retrieve the wool and the squares and the hook before anyone truly grasped what had happened. But the clock on the far wall ticked, and the moment stretched, and now it was definitely a scene.

Shane crouched, his palms brushing the rough threads. He breathed in—the mixed aroma of sweat, vinyl, and wet wool.

“That’s mine,” he said softly, because what else was there to say?

“Is that…” Hayden began, then stopped. Swallowed. “Is that knitting?”

“It’s crochet,” Shane replied, raising an eyebrow as he scooped the yarn back into its bag. Fibers would be crawling with locker-room germs. He’d wash it later.

“Knitting uses two needles. Crochet uses one hook.”

From the other end of the room, Mathieu Bouchard called out, voice thick with the kind of delighted incredulity you only got when a rookie did something objectively hilarious or mortifying, “Oh, well, that’s completely different, then!”

He lifted a tape roll in salute, like Shane had just declared himself a champion of some new and bewildering sport. The room, momentarily stunned into silence by the spectacle of a grown man crocheting in public, now snapped back to life, everyone’s attention ricocheting between the wool on the floor and Shane’s face.

Shane tried to keep his expression blank, but his ears burned. He checked the scarf in his hand, searching the stitches with deliberate care, as if it might hold the secret to vanishing on the spot.

“They are different crafts,” he said flatly, his voice cutting through the low laughter.

Bouchard grinned wider, stretching the gap between his front teeth.

“Sure, sure, man. Entirely different.” He dropped his roll of tape and knelt, scooping up a runaway granny square with surprising gentleness.

“This for your girlfriend or your grandma?”

Shane flicked a glance at the pile, then at Bouchard.

“Neither. It’s for me.” The words came out harder than he meant, but there was something calming in the act of saying them out loud. He reached for the fallen squares, gathering them up with careful fingers, then turned to Hayden, who was still frozen mid-chirp.

“You like scarves?” Hayden repeated, like he was genuinely struggling to connect the dots. His voice had lost a little of its bravado, replaced by a creeping awe.

“Montreal winters are cold,” Shane said, as if this explained everything. Which, to him, it did.

“I like being warm. Scarves help.” He stashed the yarn behind his gear bag, then brushed invisible lint from his hands.

Hayden nodded slowly, as though learning something new about the universe.

“You’re twenty, a first-rounder, and you spend your off-hours making scarves.”

Shane laced up his skates with quick, sharp tugs, channeling every ounce of focus into the task.

“It helps with hand-eye. Coordination,” he added, for emphasis.

Bouchard, not to be outdone in the realm of chirping, picked up the thread immediately.

“Oh yeah? Maybe I should take it up for my shot accuracy.” He pantomimed a slap shot with the crochet hook, barely missing J.J. Boiziau, who was watching the scene unfold with a kind of serene amusement.

J.J. piped up, “My mémère crochets. She made me a hat when I was little, with little bear ears.”

The memory seemed to genuinely please him, his smile softening.

“Do you make hats, Hollander?”

Shane shook his head, determined not to let the conversation spiral. “No.”

“Not even a toque?” J.J. pressed. “Every Québécois boy needs a toque.”

“No.”

“A scarf and a toque,” J.J. mused, as if this were a natural pairing. “For the warm.”

Shane finished tying his skates and forced himself to look up, meet the gaze of the guys crowding around his stall. He was used to being the focus, but not like this. Usually, it was for goals or assists, not for auxiliary crafts.

“I don’t take requests,” he said, and started taping his stick, hoping the ritual would make him invisible again.

The backup-backup goalie, Gino, was perched two stalls down, watching with the laser intensity of someone who made a living off reflexes.

“You should crochet a cover for your stick,” he suggested. “Stealth advantage, like camo.”

Shane considered, just for a second, what that might look like—a neon green and yellow stick cozy, unraveling every time he wound up for a slap shot. He snorted, then patched together a smile.

“Maybe for playoffs.”

Hayden’s hand landed on Shane’s shoulder, the weight oddly reassuring.

“You know, if this makes you snipe harder, I’m all for it.” He paused, then added, “But if you start making doilies for the cup, I’m gonna ask for a transfer.”

The boys burst out laughing, the sound bouncing off the cinderblock walls and carrying into the hallway where a trainer poked his head in, did a double take at the tangle of yarn on the floor, and wisely retreated.

“Hey, what’s with the arts and crafts hour?” Landreau shouted from the showers, still dripping and wrapped in a towel. “We got a game to win!”

“Shane’s making us all scarves,” Bouchard replied, not missing a beat.

Shane suppressed a sigh and pulled the scarf into his lap, using the edge of his skate blade guard to tamp down any stray threads. He could feel the familiar anxiety—tight in his chest, ready to spiral—but the motion of his hands steadied him. Loop, pull, loop, pull. He could do this all day, every day, and never get bored. It was pattern and predictability and quiet, all the things that hockey, for all its beauty, never quite managed to provide.

“I’m serious, though,” Hayden said, returning to his stall and poking his head around the corner, “you should make a mascot. Like a woolly little Voyageur.”

Shane didn’t respond. He finished his tape job, ran a thumb along the seam, and glanced at the clock. Fifteen minutes to warmup. The boys had already shifted topics—bets on tonight’s faceoff stats, ribbing the backup goalie for his fantasy team, Bouchard threatening to eat a whole jalapeño if he scored a power play goal—but Shane could hear the hum of it, the way his name kept surfacing, always in good humor, always just a shade away from honest admiration.

He packed the crochet hook away and closed the bag with a purposeful zip, then leaned back in his stall, breathing out. He’d survived worse than locker room teasing. He could live with being the team’s designated fiber artist, if it meant he got to keep the ritual. If it meant that maybe, just maybe, he’d play a fraction better because of it.

The captain, Roux, strolled in last, still buttoning his shirt, and took in the scene with a single, arched eyebrow.

“What’d I miss?”

Hayden grinned, eyes bright. “Just Hollander being a trendsetter.”

Roux nodded, not missing a beat.

“Good. As long as he sets trends on the ice.”

And that was that. Shane felt the tension slip off him, replaced by a low, steady hum. The boys filed out for warmup, jostling and chirping, and Shane followed, his mind sharper, his heartbeat just a little lighter.

That night, he scored two goals and tallied an assist.

On the bus ride home, Hayden collapsed into the seat beside him. “Hey. About the crochet—didn’t mean to be an ass.”

Shane glanced out the window at night-blacked streets. “I know. You’re loud.”

Hayden shrugged. “It’s just—my grandma does it, not you.” He waved a hand at Shane’s tall frame. “You’re five-ten, slapshot at ninety-eight, you cross-checked a guy into the boards, then you crochet?”

Shane considered the contrast. “I don’t see the contradiction.”

Hayden stared, then cracked up. “Nope, I guess you wouldn’t.” He grinned. “Can you actually make J.J. that penguin? He won’t stop pestering.”

Shane shook his head.

Later, he relented. The result was lopsided and only vaguely penguin-shaped, with one wing smaller than the other. But J.J. placed it proudly in his stall—and the Voyageurs won six of their next seven games. No one ever teased Shane about crochet again.

II. Bread Making - 2012 to 2013

Shane has always liked bread.

Not just eating it—though he’d be the first to admit that eating fresh bread was one of life’s rare, uncomplicated pleasures—but the act of making it. He likes the sound of the crust when it’s done right, the muted drumroll when you thump the bottom of a finished boule. He likes the flour-dust in the air, the quiet violence of kneading, the meditative counting of folds and turns and proofing intervals. The measuring, the mixing, the deliberate order of operations. Baking bread is chemistry and patience, a science of transformation, and Shane has always been good at both chemistry and patience, though almost nobody would guess it from the way he talks, or skates, or generally exists in the world.

He came to bread young, partly because hockey players, especially junior hockey players, are always starving, and partly because his billet family in the OHL kept a kitchen stocked with the cheapest grocery-store carbs known to man. He started out making banana bread—simple, safe, impossible to fuck up. But he got bored quickly. There’s only so much banana bread a person can eat, and Shane, even at sixteen, was the sort who needed escalation, improvement, some new goal to chase. He got his billet mom to buy yeast, then flour with a higher protein content, then a set of measuring spoons marked in metric.

When she came home late after her shift and found him elbow-deep in dough, flour crusted all over the counter and his face, she just blinked at him and said, “There’s a bakery down the street, you know.”

He ignored her. The point was not to eat the bread (though he did, and often, usually with half a jar of peanut butter in a sitting). The point was to work the dough, to see if he could get it perfect, to watch it rise in the proofing bowl and crest over the rim like a victorious wave. He liked the variables: the ambient temperature, the hydration, the timing of the bulk ferment. It was a controlled system, and it produced moderately predictable results, unlike hockey, which was by nature chaos and improvisation and luck. Even the best systems broke down on the ice; in bread, the system worked if you followed it.

By the time he was drafted, Shane had a sourdough starter that was older than most of his gear. He’d started it in the spring of his second juniors season, after reading Google for hours about wild yeast and bacterial colonies and how to create one from scratch. The first several attempts failed, but eventually he got one going. He named it Gerald. (He would never tell anyone he’d named it; the name was an internal joke, and he would take it to his grave.) Gerald went everywhere with him: billet house, apartment, road trip in a carefully cooled lunchbox. When they moved him to Montreal, Gerald came along, buckled into the passenger seat of his battered Corolla for the drive.

In Montreal, Gerald lived in a mason jar in the back of Shane’s fridge, and Shane fed him with a strict regularity that would impress even the most obsessive of hockey coaches. Every twelve hours, on the dot, during the season. Because an active starter made better bread, and it comforted Shane to know that in a world full of variables, Gerald would do his job if Shane did his. His nutritionist was the only one who knew about this, because she had to approve every calorie that went into his body, and she was surprisingly supportive, provided he used the flour she recommended.

“You need carbs, anyway,” she said, “might as well get them from something you like.”

She was the only one who ever hinted that the hobby was more than a quirk.

“It’s a good distraction, right?” she’d said once. “Takes your mind off the game?”

She looked at him too long, like she was expecting him to say something about his nerves or his headspace. He didn’t; he just nodded, and she dropped it.

Baking was the rare part of Shane’s life that felt totally private. His roommate, Landreau, spent most of his time at his girlfriend’s place, and when he was home, he was unimpressed by carbs in any form. (“Bread’s fine, but have you tried poutine?”) Thankfully he would be moving out to live with his girlfriend after their second season on the Voyageurs together.

The rest of guys on the team didn’t know, or if they did, they thought he was buying the bakery stuff that sometimes appeared in the locker room on off-days. If Shane brought in a loaf, still warm and wrapped in a towel, and set it on the counter in the kitchen, the boys descended on it in seconds and devoured it down to the last crumb, but no one asked if he’d baked it himself. It didn’t occur to anyone that he had the patience, or the skill, or the desire.

That suited Shane perfectly. He didn’t want to be known as the bread guy. He wanted to score goals and win games and maybe someday be the kind of captain people remembered.

Bread was just for him, a thing that made the days before games bearable, a ritual that kept his hands busy when his head was too loud. On off-days he’d wake up early, mix the dough, let it rise while he stretched and watched game film, then knead and shape it before heading to practice. The bread would rest, then bake, then cool, and by the time he got home the apartment would smell like a Paris bakery and all the anxiety in his body would have melted into the air like steam from a fresh baguette.

On game days, the ritual was even stricter. He made the dough at 7:00 a.m. sharp, let it bulk ferment for exactly four hours, then put it in the fridge for a slow proof while he napped, just like the internet said to do. As the game approached, he’d think about the dough in the fridge, about how it was transforming even while he sat in video review or team meetings. He liked that, the idea that you could set something in motion, then walk away, and trust that it would do what it was meant to do.

He never brought bread to the rink on game days. That was a superstition, and even if no one else knew about it, Shane stuck to it. The only one who noticed was Landreau, who once opened the fridge and found a nearly-finished boule cooling on the wire rack.

“You make this?” he’d said, tearing off a chunk and chewing it thoughtfully. “Not bad.”

Then, “Why don’t you bring it to the boys?”

Shane shrugged, too embarrassed to answer. He didn’t want to explain that bread baking was something he needed to himself. It was private. It was control. It was the only thing in his life that didn’t talk back, or hit back, or talk shit about his stats on Twitter.

Landreau never pressed. He ate the bread, left the crumbs, and said nothing about it again.

For two whole seasons, Shane kept his secret. Gerald grew stronger, his loaves got better, and though the team fell short in the playoffs, Shane made it through the off-season with something like hope. He went home, brought Gerald with him, and spent June baking for his parents and trying out new recipes in their kitchen, which was much bigger and cleaner than his own. His mother pretended not to notice that he was up at dawn every morning; his father, who had never baked a thing in his life, ate everything put in front of him and declared it “not as good as the Italian place downtown, but close.”

When Shane came back to Montreal for training camp, he brought with him a fresh jar of Gerald, two new bread pans, and a determination to start the season stronger than last year. He didn’t intend for anyone to find out about the bread. He just wanted to keep doing his thing, stay in his routine, and maybe someday, when he retired, open a bakery somewhere quiet and live out his days in peace. That was the dream. Not the NHL, not the Cup. Bread.

But then the team started winning. Really winning. Not just scraping by, but dominating, rolling over their opponents in a way that made the media take notice.

Suddenly there were cameras everywhere, and Shane was getting asked for interviews, and the team’s social media guy wanted more “human interest” content. Shane hated the attention, but he did what he had to. Smiled for the pictures, gave the same canned quotes, let the marketing department film him tying his skates or taping his stick or answering questions about pregame routines.

He didn't realize the kitchen camera was on until it was too late.

The documentary crew had somehow convinced management to follow players home. Shane was in his new apartment—the one with the marble countertops he'd specifically chosen for rolling dough—wearing ratty Voyageurs sweats with his hair sticking up, elbow-deep in flour and water when the doorbell rang. His neighbor let them in. The cameraman, Dave, appeared in his kitchen doorway with a lens already pointed at him. Shane froze mid-knead, hands coated in sticky dough.

"Don't mind us, just be yourself," Dave said, stepping over a still-unpacked box.

Shane didn't know how to do that, so he just kept working the dough against the marble. They filmed him for almost half an hour in his half-furnished sanctuary, asking questions about bread and then, eventually, about hockey. ("Is this about the carbs?" Shane asked, desperate for a way out. "It's about you!" Dave replied, panning to capture the row of proofing baskets Shane had carefully arranged on his new open shelving.) Later, Shane tried to get the footage pulled, but the PR director loved it, and the next thing he knew, his teammates were all calling him "the Carb King" and demanding post-game baguettes. He knew he was done for when the video was eventually uploaded on Youtube during a slow media day, some day in the future.

The bread-making became a problem—or, more accurately, became public knowledge—during the Voyageurs' Stanley Cup run, when a camera crew from Sportsnet was granted locker room access.

Shane is used to being ignored by management, but he’s not used to being ignored by management on national television.

The lockers are the only place in the world where his picture doesn’t hang overhead, where his image isn’t etched into the floor, where he can, for a few minutes, be just another guy trying to remember his lines from the last power play meeting. He protects this space with routines. Left skate before right, always sitting third from the end on the bench, towel over his head for the full sixty seconds of intermission. He has, over time, carved a little hollow in the chaos for himself, and he’d like to keep it that way.

Now, the documentary crew—three guys, a producer, and one woman with a clipboard—have set up camp in the hallway by the showers. They’ve got lights and mics and a rolling cart of equipment that smells like warm electrical fire. Someone keeps tripping over the power cables. The woman with the clipboard, whose name is apparently “Lex,” keeps asking the rookies to “give us a little more personality, please.”

Shane overhears this as he’s passing the water cooler; she’s not being mean, just enthusiastic, but it makes him want to crawl out of his skin.

They have been here for three days. That’s about three times longer than Shane’s comfort can withstand, so now every interaction feels like an ambush. He can’t eat his lunch without a boom mic over his head. He can’t stretch without the camera guy tilting sideways to get “a candid angle.” He can’t even fart in the stick room without risking national broadcast.

Today, Shane has resolved to get in and out of the locker room with minimal contact. He has a plan: he will run his off-day lifts, collect his protein shake, and return to his apartment without speaking to a single soul. That is the plan. He is halfway to the weight room when he sees the film crew huddled around the communal fridge.

The fridge is nothing special. It’s three years old, the white plastic pocked with dried energy drink, the seal broken in two places. But to Shane, and to anyone who has ever lost a day-old container of chicken breast to a hungry linemate, it is sacred ground. Shane keeps his shelf pristine. Meals in glass containers, bottles labeled with the days of the week, a rotation of kombucha that he’s pretty sure no one else touches. Everything else in the fridge is a disaster, but his shelf is a shrine.

So when Shane sees the producer pulling out his mason jar, the one with the blue lid and the Post-It marked “Starter—Do Not Eat,” he nearly drops his gym bag.

“What the hell is that?” Lex asks, holding the jar up so the camera can zoom in. The cameraman, who seems to have a sixth sense for drama, immediately trains on the bubbling, living mass in the glass.

Shane’s brain glitches for a moment, then reboots.

“It’s my sourdough starter,” he says, as if he’s explaining to a child what a dog is.

Lex blinks. “Your… sourdough starter?”

“Yes.” He shifts his bag to his left hand, which is his thinking side, and tries to seem casual. “I use it for bread.”

“Why does it look like it’s alive?” The cameraman leans in, and the lens fogs up with the condensation from the jar. Shane is suddenly aware of the fact that the starter is at peak bloom, bubbles crowding the surface like it’s trying to escape.

“It is alive,” Shane says, before he can stop himself. “It’s a colony of yeast and bacteria.”

Lex makes a face, delighted, shocked, maybe a little repulsed.

“So you’re, like, raising it? Like a pet?”

“I mean.” Shane is mortified, but also a little proud. “You have to feed it.”

“What’s his name?” This is said as a joke, but Shane feels himself go red from collar to cheekbones.

He tries to play it cool. “Gerald.”

There is a beat of silence. Then the cameraman snorts. Lex grins. Shane braces for it, but instead of derision, there’s this bright, contagious enthusiasm.

“That is the best thing I’ve heard all week,” says Lex, and she means it.

Shane wants to die. Or, more accurately, he wants to disappear into the cooling rack of his own apartment, where no one will ever see him or Gerald again.

He grabs the jar and tucks it behind his bag, but the cameraman is already asking follow-ups, and Lex is leaning in, clipboard forgotten.

“Do you bake for the team?” she asks.

“No,” Shane says, definitely not mentioning the last two loaves he’d left anonymously in the locker room. “It’s just a hobby.”

The conversation dissolves quickly. Lex gets a call on her headset, the cameraman pivots to film the trainers, and Shane escapes, heart pounding like game seven overtime. He flees to the weight room, where he slams his headphones on and tries to drown out the memory by listening to a podcast about the history of leavening agents.

By the time he finishes his workout, he’s convinced himself it’s over. Maybe they’ll cut the footage. Maybe it’ll be boring. Maybe, if he never says another word about it, everyone will forget.

They do not forget.

Ten days later, the documentary airs. Shane has not seen it—he does not watch himself on TV, ever, unless the coaches make him—but within an hour of the episode going live, his phone is blowing up. The team group chat is a war zone. Guys are posting pictures of bread. Someone posts a screencap of Shane, flour on his face, looking like an orphaned Victorian chimney sweep.

One of the rookies, DeAngelo, changes his name in the group chat to “Yeast Daddy.” This is not even the worst thing that happens.

The account managers at the team’s PR office decide they love it. They post a highlight reel on the team’s Twitter, complete with montage shots of Shane kneading dough and gesturing at a proofing basket like a game show hostess. The clip goes viral. The hashtags #BreadBoy and #GeraldNation trend locally for two days. Someone, for reasons unclear, makes a Vine edit of Shane and his starter set to a romantic ballad. The PR team releases his day-in-the-life video.

Shane considers deleting his accounts, but it’s too late. The world knows.

The worst part isn’t the teasing from the team. He can handle that; it’s basically affection, just with more public humiliation. The worst part is that people seem to actually care. Random fans start DMing Shane with bread tips. An old lady from Vancouver mails him a handwritten recipe for “the perfect Montreal rye.” The marketing guy at the bakery down the street offers him a “collaboration partnership,” which Shane has to Google before declining.

Gerald, for his part, thrives under the attention. Shane has never seen the starter so active. Every time he feeds it, it erupts with bubbles and crests the lid, as if basking in its sudden stardom.

Shane tells himself it’s fine. He tells himself it doesn’t matter. But then, one evening, as he’s about to turn off his phone for the night, it buzzes. The screen lights up with a message from Ilya Rozanov.

Lily: you named your bread??? Lol

Shane stared at his phone. They didn't text often—they weren't supposed to text at all, really, because they were rivals, because they were playing each other in the second round of the playoffs, because whatever was between them was complicated and unresolved and Shane didn't have a label for it yet, which bothered him more than almost anything.

Jane: It's not bread. It's a sourdough starter. It's a colony of wild yeast and bacteria.

Lily: you named your bacteria Gerald

Jane: That's correct.

Lily: Shane

Lily: you are most ridiculous man I ever meet

Jane: *met

Lily: 😐

Shane put his phone down. Then he picked it back up.

Jane: Gerald is four years old. He's outlived most of my houseplants.

Lily: you kill plants too??

Jane: I don't kill them. They just don't thrive. The light in my apartment isn't ideal.

Lily: you are like little old babushka

Lily: baking bread, killing plants, crocheting

Jane: How do you know about the crochet?

Lily: Hollander

Lily: everyone in NHL knows about the crochet

Shane put his phone down again. He should not be texting Ilya Rozanov. They had a game in two days. Ilya was the enemy. Ilya was the person Shane was supposed to hate more than anyone in professional hockey.

He picked the phone back up.

Jane: My bread is very good.

Lily: I'm sure

Jane: It is. My nutritionist said it was the best homemade bread she'd ever tested for macronutrient balance.

Lily: sexy

Shane didn't know if Ilya was making fun of him. He was probably making fun of him. Ilya was always making fun of him, with that particular curl to his upper lip that somehow managed to be both mocking and fond, the way his slate-gray eyes would crinkle at the corners while he delivered the sharpest chirps on the ice. Even through text messages, Shane could picture that expression perfectly—the slight tilt of Ilya's head, the way his accent thickened when he was being deliberately provocative. It made Shane's chest constrict like he'd taken a hard check into the boards, his thoughts scattering like pucks during warm-up, which was absolutely the last thing he needed when they were three games into a best-of-seven playoff series.

Jane: I have to go. I need to feed Gerald.

Lily: give Gerald my love

Jane: That doesn't make sense. He's yeast.

Lily: goodnight babushka 😘

Shane fed Gerald, watching the starter bubble and froth as he stirred in the fresh flour with careful, methodical movements. He completed his evening stretches—thirty minutes of precise extensions and holds that made his muscles burn pleasantly. He laid out tomorrow's clothes on his bedroom chair: dark gray slacks, crisp white button-down, navy tie with subtle diagonal stripes. He did not think about Ilya Rozanov calling him babushka, or about the kissing emoji with its puckered yellow lips, or about the way the word "sexy" sat there on his phone screen in Ilya's text thread—four letters that made his stomach tighten like he'd just stepped onto the ice for overtime.

He thought about it a little bit. Just enough that his reflection in the bathroom mirror caught him smiling as he brushed his teeth.

He went to bed, pulling the precisely tucked sheets to his chin, staring at the ceiling fan's slow rotation until his eyelids grew heavy.

(The Voyageurs won the Cup that year. In the celebration photos, if you looked very closely at Shane's stall in the background, behind the champagne bottles and sweat-soaked jerseys, you could see the mason jar with the scratched blue lid. Gerald, undefeated.)

III. Bird Watching - 2016 into 2017

Rose Landry was, by all reasonable metrics, the greatest girlfriend Shane Hollander had ever had. Not that the bar was set especially high—his previous relationships had largely consisted of girls who tolerated his presence at the periphery of their social circles, girls who liked that he was clean and polite and that he never, ever forgot their birthdays, girls who quickly realized that Shane was, despite rumors to the contrary, an absolute weirdo.

But Rose was different. Rose was a real-life celebrity. Rose had been on magazine covers, hosted SNL, and played three separate women named “Savannah” on television. She was beautiful in a way that was both intimidating and oddly comforting: the kind of blonde that made Midwestern grandmothers call her “angelic,” with high cheekbones and big blue eyes and a laugh that made strangers turn in restaurants. She was, by any objective measure, completely out of Shane’s league.

This was a fact he reminded himself of constantly, as if repetition could transform his disbelief into gratitude. Rose Landry was his girlfriend. Rose Landry, who had been on billboards, wanted to FaceTime with him at one in the morning while she was filming in New Zealand. Rose Landry knew how to pronounce the names of all the fancy cheeses at Whole Foods and could pack for a month-long trip in under an hour. Rose Landry had introduced Shane to the concept of “brunch,” which he still didn’t entirely understand but which he respected for its organizational efficiency.

And yet, despite all of this, Shane always felt slightly unsettled, like he was waiting to be called out for impersonating someone who belonged in her world.

His mother adored Rose. His teammates loved her—though they’d never admit it, believing girlfriends should exist exclusively as punchlines or Instagram trophies. Even the front office, who generally regarded Shane’s personal life as an unfortunate distraction, seemed to approve. Rose was a safe bet, a good influence, someone who could turn up to the charity galas and look fantastic in photographs while not embarrassing the team by screaming at officials or throwing drinks at other WAGs.

So why, Shane wondered, was he currently the one sweating through his practice tee while Rose sat across from him at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and gazing at him with an expression somewhere between confusion and genuine concern? The mug looked gigantic in her slim hands, and she wore one of his old sweatshirts, sleeves rolled up and collar drooping. Even in this state of domestic disarray, she looked like she belonged in a home décor catalog staged by people who had never spilled coffee on anything in their lives.

Maybe it was the fact that he’d spent the last five minutes explaining something—he couldn’t even remember what, exactly; all he knew was that he’d started with a logical train of thought and ended up in a conversational ditch about migratory patterns of Canadian geese—that had prompted Rose to reassess every life choice she’d made leading up to this moment.

He floundered, desperate for a save.

“It’s more interesting than it sounds,” he said, which only made her eyebrows climb higher, an effect both alarming and weirdly beautiful.

She set her mug down with a measured clink, as if to announce her intention to speak or possibly to brace herself for impact.

“You want to go... bird watching,” she said.

"Yes." Shane had already packed his bag. Binoculars, field guide, water bottle, granola bars (homemade, because he didn't trust the store-bought ones), a small notebook for recording sightings. "There's a warbler migration happening this week. The window is pretty narrow."

"Bird watching."

"You said that already."

Rose tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She did that when she was deciding how to phrase something carefully, which she did a lot around Shane. Most people did.

"I just... I thought maybe we could do something together today? Like, go to brunch? Or shopping?"

"We could go bird watching together," Shane offered. He thought this was a reasonable compromise.

"Shane. Honey." Rose put her hand over his on the table. Her hand was warm and soft and Shane let it stay there because that was what you did when your girlfriend touched your hand. "I love that you have hobbies. I do. The baking, and the crochet thing—"

"Fiber arts."

"—the fiber arts, yes. Those are great. But bird watching is... I mean, doesn't it get boring? You're just standing in the woods looking at trees?"

"You're looking at birds. That's why it's called bird watching and not tree watching."

Rose's mouth did something complicated. "Right."

"Also, it's not boring. Last week I saw a cerulean warbler. They're declining across most of their range due to habitat fragmentation. It was probably the highlight of my month."

"The highlight of your month," Rose repeated slowly. "A bird."

"A cerulean warbler."

Shane can't help himself. He says it again, the words neat and bright in his mouth. “Cerulean warbler.”

He can picture it even now, perched on a trembling branch in the morning light, its feathers bluer than the sky above, a shade so improbable it looked Photoshopped against the pale green shimmer of new leaves. Its breast, clean white, set off by the necklace of black streaks. He remembers the bird’s nervy, efficient movements—how it flicked its wings before hopping, how its tiny feet gripped the branch as it turned its head, as though aware of being watched but too busy for anything but survival. Shane had watched it for nine minutes and eighteen seconds, according to his notes, and had written the details down before his memory could edit itself into something shinier or simpler or less granular.

Nine minutes and eighteen seconds. Longer than some shifts on the ice. Longer than most of his conversations with Rose, lately.

He wants to tell her this, that it's not just a bird, it's a record, it's proof that despite concrete and lawn treatments and the slow creep of development up the escarpment, something rare and improbable had survived another season. The way he’d seen it, and recognized it, and documented it, felt like a victory—small, private, but real. He wants to say that sometimes, when he’s alone in the woods with only the sound of leaves and his own uneven heartbeat, he feels less like he’s faking something. Less like an imposter, more like a person who’s allowed to exist.

But Shane doesn't say any of this because he doesn’t know how to say it out loud without sounding like an idiot, or worse, a crazy person. He can read the tone of Rose’s silence perfectly, the way her eyes search his face for a hint of irony or for the punchline that will make this all make sense, the way she braces for the moment he drops the pretense of caring and becomes, for a second, a normal boyfriend who knows how to laugh at himself. Shane tries to want that, to be that, but all he wants right now is to talk about the warbler again.

He looks at Rose’s hand on his, at her long, perfect fingers and the crescent moons of her nails, at the impossibly even skin tone that neither sun nor wind nor brutal Canadian winter could ever seem to tarnish. She is so good at being a person in the world, so good at the things that make other people feel safe. She is good at brunch, at small talk, at smiling with her whole face. She is good at him, too, except when she isn’t, except when he asks more of her than she can give, which is the exact moment he feels most in need.

He tries to recalibrate.

“Do you want to come with me?” he offers again, as if the solution to their growing distance is simply to close it with proximity. “You don’t have to do anything. You can just...watch. Or not watch. Bring your book.”

Rose looks at him for a long moment, and he recognizes the micro-twitch of her left eyebrow, the way her jaw sets when she’s about to be gentle and disappointing at once.

“I think I’ll pass, hon. But thank you for inviting me.”

“It’s not that hard,” he says, and instantly hates himself for the defensive tilt of his voice. “You walk, you look, you listen. I mean, you don’t have to be good at it.”

She laughs, relieved that the moment is back to something she knows how to navigate.

“I would be terrible at it. I’d scare the birds away and you’d never let me live it down.”

“They have brains the size of sunflower seeds. They don’t care about you.” He realizes this sounds harsh and tries to soften it.

“I mean, they do, but only in, like, an evolutionary way.”

“See?” Rose says, smiling again, “You’re already better at it than me.”

He feels her hand squeeze his. She is trying. She always tries, even when he gives her so little to work with. He knows this is the part where he’s supposed to say something nice back, something to close the circuit of their affection, but all his conversational energy is spent. He finds himself looking past her, out the kitchen window, where a sparrow is perched on the edge of the patio furniture. It’s not a rare sparrow. He watches it anyway.

Rose reaches for her phone.

“I’ll call Marie,” she announces, letting the sentence drift into the air like a lifeline. “She’ll want to get brunch.”

“Okay,” Shane says, relieved that the performance is over. “I’ll be back by two.”

She is already scrolling, already elsewhere.

“Have fun with the birds, babe,” she says, and he knows it’s sincere, in the way you can be sincerely baffled by someone and still love them.

“I will,” he says, and this time it’s almost easy.

The weight of his binoculars swings against his chest as he steps outside, field guide and fresh notebook secure in his windbreaker pocket. Montreal stretches around him, still half-asleep, streets slick with overnight rain, spring leaves catching the dawn light like stained glass. By the time he parks at Îles de la Paix forty minutes later, anticipation has replaced the tightness in his chest. Here, at least, the birds will accept him exactly as he is.

He locks his car at the edge of the woods, double-checks the straps on his backpack. There’s something calming about the ritual. The checklist, the anticipation, the way he can control every variable except the birds themselves. The trail is muddy, and he likes the way his shoes sink just a fraction into the dirt, the sound of his own footsteps muffled by the new leaves overhead.

Within minutes, he’s swallowed by the canopy. The air smells like loam and water and the distant, sugary tang of something in bloom. He walks with careful, deliberate steps, scanning the branches for any flicker of movement, listening for the three-note call of the warbler. It is quieter out here than anywhere else in his life. No one expects anything from him, not even the birds, who are perfectly indifferent to his presence unless he makes himself known.

He sees the warbler again. It lands on a low branch not twenty feet from him, the blue so brilliant it almost hurts. He lifts his binoculars, steady hands finding the focus instantly. He watches the bird tilt its head, dart its tongue at a gnat, then flit upward and vanish into the thicket. He checks the time, seven minutes and four seconds. He writes it down. He underlines the entry. He does not think about Rose, or hockey, or the way he always manages to say the wrong thing right when it matters most.

He keeps moving, following a cardinal’s whistle to a clearing where a pair of red-tailed hawks circle overhead. He watches them for nearly half an hour, their spirals hypnotic, the lazy flex of their wings in the thermals reminding him of gliding on fresh ice, that perfect contradiction of effort and ease. He finds a bench and eats a granola bar, then records the number and species of birds he’s seen on a small grid he’s drawn for the purpose. He feels the day stretch out ahead of him, unspooling with possibility.

In a marshy patch by the pond, he waits. He doesn’t look at his phone; he doesn’t need to. He’s waiting for a woodpecker—he’s been told they nest here, but he’s never seen one for himself. He sits very still, barely daring to breathe, tracking every rustle and wingbeat. The world contracts to the radius of his hearing, the interval between his own heartbeats.

When the woodpecker arrives, it is almost silent, just a flicker of black and white against the bark. He watches it work the tree for bugs, the precise, methodical way it hammers, then pauses, then hammers again. He times the gaps. He doesn’t know why, he just does. He feels something in his chest unlock, some internal knot loosening. For these few minutes, he isn’t a disappointment or a mystery or a project for someone to fix. He’s just a person watching a bird, doing exactly what he set out to do.

He stays for forty-five minutes, unmoving, until his legs go numb. He doesn’t want to leave, but he’s promised Rose he’ll be home by two, and he is nothing if not dutiful.

He did have fun with the birds. He saw the warbler again, and a pair of red-tailed hawks circling over the mountain, and a woodpecker species he'd been hoping to add to his life list for three years. He sat on a fallen log for forty-five minutes without moving, barely breathing, watching a great blue heron hunt in a marsh, and his brain went quiet in the way it so rarely did—no hockey analysis cycling in the background, no social scripts queued up, no awareness of the way his body took up space in rooms full of people who expected things from him.

Just the heron. Just the water. Just the exact, specific silence of being alone in a place where nothing was required of him.

His phone buzzed. He checked it, expecting Rose.

Lily: what you doing today

Shane hesitated. He and Ilya weren't... they weren't anything. Not since Boston, when Ilya had whispered "Shane" against his collarbone and Shane had made the mistake of responding with "Ilya" instead of "Rozanov." Not since he'd fled the beautiful home Ilya had built, heart hammering so hard he thought it might crack his ribs. Not since he'd called Rose the next day and asked her to dinner.

They hooked up sometimes—or they used to—but they didn't text about their days. They didn't do this. Not anymore.

But his fingers moved before his brain could intervene.

Jane: Bird watching.

The three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Lily: of course you are

Jane: What does that mean?

Lily: it means of COURSE Shane Hollander is watching birds on a beautiful Saturday

Lily: what kind of birds

Shane blinked. No one ever asked what kind.

Jane: I saw a cerulean warbler. They're a declining species. Bright blue, about 12 centimeters. The males have a white breast with a dark band across it.

He sent a photo he'd managed to capture—blurry, but you could make out the blue.

Lily: is beautiful

Lily: tiny little thing

Jane: They migrate thousands of kilometers. From South America to here. Every year.

Lily: like me

Jane: You fly on a chartered plane with leather seats.

Lily: 😂

Lily: still. long way from home

Something turned over in Shane's chest. He stared at the phone screen, at Ilya's words, at the small bright rectangle in his hands in the middle of the quiet woods. The heron had moved on. The marsh was still.

Jane: I should go. Rose is expecting me back.

The typing indicator pulsed, then stopped.

Lily: ok. enjoy your birds babushka

Shane slid his phone into his pocket, the weight of it against his thigh suddenly heavier than before. The marsh spread before him—cattails swaying in the breeze, water rippling in concentric circles where unseen creatures disturbed the surface. Dragonflies hovered, their iridescent wings catching sunlight. He watched for another ten minutes, pen hovering over his notebook, but recorded nothing, not even when a red-winged blackbird landed nearby, its scarlet shoulder patches bright as warning flags.

When he got home, Rose glanced up from the kitchen island. Her blonde hair was twisted into a messy bun, tendrils escaping around her face.

"How'd it go?" she asked, nail polish—coral pink—gleaming as she scrolled.

"Good," he said, setting his backpack down with careful precision. "I saw some good birds."

"That's nice, babe," Rose said, already looking back at her own phone, the blue light reflecting in her eyes as her thumb moved in the mindless rhythm of someone half-present.

Later, alone in the bathroom with steam fogging the mirror from his too-hot shower, Shane opened his text thread with Ilya. Water droplets splashed onto the screen as he reread is beautiful three times, the Cyrillic keyboard suggestions hovering at the bottom of the screen. Then he closed the app with a decisive swipe, brushed his teeth until his gums ached, and went to bed next to Rose, her breathing already deep and even. He stared at the ceiling for a very long time, counting the faint shadows cast by streetlights through the blinds until they blurred into meaninglessness.

IV. Quilting - 2017

The Tampa All-Star Game changed things.

Not all at once—Shane is still Shane, still a champion over-thinker with the emotional metabolism of a sea turtle, still capable of burying anything under enough routine to kill a horse—but something happened in Tampa that will not go away, no matter how many times he cycles it through his internal compactor.

Tampa is flat and hot and smells like salt and weed killer. The All-Star break is three days of being forced into a costume version of himself, all grins and media answers and hugs from guys who would sooner take a slapshot to the balls than say what they actually mean. Shane manages it the way he manages all things, with obsessive prep and a fixed smile and a silent, gnawing countdown until he can get back to his own schedule and his own bed and his own precise oatmeal. He expects this. He plans for it. He has a color-coded spreadsheet for it.

But he does not plan for Ilya Rozanov.

On the ice, Ilya is all swagger and teeth and perfectly calibrated cruelty, his game a sledgehammer disguised as a dance. Off the ice, he’s smarter than people think, better at reading rooms than anyone gives him credit for, and Shane has always respected that. Sometimes admired it, in the privacy of his own mind, where he can safely file it under Opponent: Notable. But at All-Star, everyone is pretending to be just friends, which means they are thrown together for endless photo ops and charity events and mandatory "team-bonding" mixers at themed restaurants with too-loud music. Shane keeps his distance, terrified someone will see how his eyes track Ilya across every room.

The first night, Shane is so tired he's vibrating, but the league wants the stars at a pop-up nightclub for "informal meet-and-greet." He's halfway through a club soda when Ilya appears at his elbow, close enough that Shane can smell the cologne he bought him last Christmas.

"You still wearing your media face, Hollander?" Ilya murmurs, lips barely moving.

"Seven more hours until I can take it off," Shane replies, their code from Vancouver still intact. Ilya's fingers brush his wrist under the bar, and Shane's pulse jumps like it's their first time all over again.

They end up in a corner booth, knees touching beneath the table, talking about nothing that matters while Shane catalogs the new lines around Ilya's eyes, wondering if they appeared in the months since he'd whispered "I can't do this anymore.” When the club empties, they're still there, Ilya's hand now resting openly on Shane's thigh.

“Is crazy,” Ilya says, leaning in conspiratorially, “this media shit. You don’t like it. I don’t like it. But,” he shrugs, “they pay us so much, we pretend.”

Shane catches his own reflection in the mirrored bar and forces himself to look for the man Ilya sees: someone who, maybe, is actually having fun. Ever since 2010 he’s been living that double life—playing hockey and slipping away to Ilya’s room—until a few weeks ago when he finally broke things off with Rose and admitted he’s gay and in love with Ilya. So it’s startling to discover in that moment that maybe he can believe it.

That night in his hotel room, he can’t sleep. His skin feels like it’s been stretched over a heart that’s finally beating too fast to ignore. He tries to burn off the tension by scrolling through his season stats, but every time he lands on Ilya’s name, his brain fries. He ends up in the empty gym, sprinting until his lungs threaten mutiny.

The next day there’s a players’ lounge—nowhere to escape. Ilya finds him leaning against a table, shoving cards toward him.

“Loser buys dinner,” he says. Shane’s never played poker for money— Ilya figures that out in five minutes— but he doesn’t press the advantage. Instead he teaches Shane the basics, drills him on keeping a straight face.

“You already have a good face,” he says, and Shane feels something loosen inside him—pride, maybe, for the first time in years.

That evening they wind up at a steakhouse tucked away from the main strip. The lighting catches the amber in Ilya's eyes when he orders for both of them, his voice low and certain. Their knees touch beneath the white tablecloth—not by accident. When the waiter brings the wine, Ilya's fingers brush Shane's as he passes him a glass, lingering a half-second too long. Shane feels warm all over, not from the alcohol. Between bites of perfectly cooked steak, Ilya leans in close enough that Shane can smell his cologne, can almost taste it on the back of his tongue. Walking back to the hotel, their shoulders bump together under the streetlights, and Ilya's hand finds the small of Shane's back, just for a moment.

"You're not so bad, Hollander," Ilya murmurs, his voice rough at the edges. "One day you come to Moscow, I show you everything."

Shane makes a noncommittal sound but tucks the offer away. In his room he lies flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, tracing the echo of Ilya’s hand on his shoulder—warm and heavy, everything he never let himself admit he needed.

Day three is All-Star Game, no defense, goals everywhere, pure display. Ilya gets two goals and feeds Shane on both. When Shane taps in the winner, Ilya’s the first across the ice, grinning like it hurts.

"Krasava!" Ilya roars, lifting Shane in a bear hug that presses their bodies together in that familiar way that still makes Shane's breath catch. When Ilya's lips brush against his temple—lingering just a half-second longer than teammates should—Shane's skin burns with the memory of those same lips tracing paths across his collarbone in darkened hotel rooms.

In the locker room afterward, their eyes meet across the benches as they towel off. Shane can't help but track a droplet of water sliding down Ilya's chest, following the path his fingers have memorized over seven years of stolen nights.

At the afterparty, Ilya's hand finds the small of Shane's back by a melting ice sculpture, thumb stroking just once against his spine—their code since juniors.

"Last night in Tampa," he murmurs, his breath warm against Shane's ear. "You want to see real view?" Shane swallows, remembering Montreal, Vancouver, Boston—all the cities where they've slipped away together. Ilya leads him up to the locked roof and the city stretches below them, familiar in its beauty but nothing compared to the man beside him.

They stand quiet until Ilya finally says, "You ever want to just—," and gestures like tossing something off the edge. Shane knows exactly what he means—the weight of secrecy they've carried for years.

When Ilya leans in, Shane meets him halfway, their lips finding each other with the practiced ease of countless goodbyes. But something's different now—this kiss holds a question. Shane pulls back too quickly, bumping Ilya's chin.

"Sorry," he blurts. Ilya just laughs, fingers tracing Shane's jawline exactly how he likes. "After all these years," he teases, voice low and intimate, "and still you tremble. But is okay. I have time."

They don’t speak on the flight home, but Shane’s phone buzzes the moment they clear the runway: “krasava.”

He stares at it. Won’t reply. Hasn’t a clue what to say.

The next weeks blur into routine—hockey, press conferences, reheated dinners—but Shane can’t shake Ilya. He dreams in Russian words he only half understands; sometimes he wakes tasting Ilya’s cologne on his lips. His skating flickers between razor focus and fraying edges. Teammates say he’s in his own zone—but they don’t realize it’s more like being out of one.

He looks up “krasava” online and finds only loose definitions. A Canadian ex-KHL buddy shrugs and says it’s “beauty, but more…legend? Or stud?” Shane writes it down, deletes it, writes it again in tiny letters.

For two weeks he tries to expel Ilya from his system. Hours on the stationary bike. Closet reorganized. Fridge alphabetized. He eats oatmeal until his skin rebels. Nothing helps.

Then he runs into Ilya in the handshake line after a game. Ilya’s grinning, blurts something rapid in Russian, winks, and skates off. Shane spends the whole day replaying it, trying to lip-read on TV—but the cameras are always angled wrong.

He tells himself it’s just the All-Star haze, that everyone crashes back to reality eventually. But when Ilya’s next text arrives—a photo of a stray cat captioned “found your cousin”—Shane’s chest tightens. He drafts a reply, deletes, drafts again, then finally sends a thumbs-up emoji. Forty minutes later he’s still wondering if it came across as sarcastic.

Three days after that he finds himself in a fabric store. He’s buying cotton for the massive crochet blanket he’s been working on—something to keep his hands busy on the long nights of not-calling Ilya—when he drifts into the quilting section. Without realizing it, he reaches for a bolt of color and smiles. Maybe some things are worth sewing together.

It was the patterns that got him. Quilting was geometry. It was triangles and squares and hexagons arranged in precise mathematical relationships, and there were names for all of them—log cabin, flying geese, bear's paw, drunkard's path—and each one had rules about how the pieces fit together, about seam allowances and grain lines and pressing directions. It was a system. A beautiful, logical system that turned flat pieces of fabric into something layered and warm and whole.

Shane bought a rotary cutter, a self-healing mat, a quilting ruler, and four bolts of fabric. He watched eleven YouTube tutorials in one sitting. He cut his first pieces at two in the morning, sitting on his living room floor in his boxers, and felt something unclench behind his ribs that had been tight for weeks.

The quilting stayed private longer than the crochet or the bread. Shane wasn't hiding it, exactly—he just didn't do it in the locker room, and his apartment was his own space where no one was going to knock over a Gatorade onto his quilt blocks. For three peaceful months, the quilting was just his.

Then Hayden came over for dinner.

Hayden came over for dinner sometimes. This was part of their friendship, which Shane had not precisely chosen but which had happened to him anyway, like weather. Hayden would text dinner at yours? and Shane would say fine and make enough food for two and Hayden would show up with beer and talk at Shane for two hours while Shane nodded at appropriate intervals.

On this particular evening, Hayden went to use the bathroom and made a detour past Shane's spare bedroom, which Shane had failed to close the door to, and which now contained a quilt frame, a cutting table, a design wall pinned with fabric squares in a half-finished pattern, and approximately forty small bins of fabric organized by color and fiber content.

"HOLLANDER."

Shane closed his eyes. He was plating the salmon. He'd been having a nice time plating the salmon.

"SHANE HOLLANDER, WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?"

"Please stop shouting in my house."

Hayden appeared in the kitchen doorway. His eyes were very wide.

"You have a quilting room."

"It's a spare bedroom that I use for quilting. It's not a 'quilting room.'" Shane put air quotes around the phrase, realized that made it worse, and went back to plating.

"There's a—there's a wall of fabric. Like a wall."

"It's called a design wall. You pin the blocks up so you can see the overall pattern before you sew them together."

"Shane."

"What."

Hayden sat down heavily at the kitchen island. He put his head in his hands. "I need you to understand something. I need you to hear me."

"I'm listening." Shane put the plate in front of him. The salmon looked excellent.

"You are a twenty-five-year-old man who just won the Stanley Cup. You have a quilting room. You have a design wall. You have—" He gestured wildly. "—bins. Little bins. With labels."

"Organization is important. The bins are sorted by color family and then by fiber content within each—"

"Stop. Please stop."

Shane stopped. He sat down across from Hayden with his own plate.

"Is there a problem?"

"The problem is that I'm going to have to live with this knowledge for the rest of my life." Hayden picked up his fork, then put it down again. "Does anyone know about this?"

"You know about it."

"Anyone before me?"

Shane considered.

"My mother knows. She thinks it's a waste of time, but she knows."

"Of course she does." Hayden rubbed his face. "What are you even making?"

"A quilt."

"Yeah, I got that. What's the pattern?"

"It's called Tumbling Blocks. It creates a three-dimensional optical illusion using three different values of fabric—light, medium, and dark. The effect is that the flat quilt appears to have depth." Shane paused. "It's essentially applied mathematics."

Hayden stared at him. "You know what? Fine. You know what, that actually tracks completely. Shane Hollander does math quilts. Of course he does."

"Eat your salmon. It's going to get cold."

Hayden ate his salmon. He was quiet for almost four entire minutes, which was a personal record.

"Can you make me one?"

"No."

"Just a small one. For Amber. She's the only one of my kids who doesn't have something you've made."

"The others don't have quilts either."

"But they have those hats you crocheted. And Arthur sleeps with that shark blanket every night. Poor Amber's going to develop a complex."

"No."

Hayden ate another bite of salmon. "This salmon is incredible, by the way. Where'd you learn to—actually, you know what, I don't want to know. You probably took a class. You probably have a certification."

Shane did not have a certification. He had watched approximately two hundred hours of cooking videos and read fourteen books on fish preparation. He felt this was a reasonable amount of research.

"The quilt is really pretty, though," Hayden said, more quietly. "The math thing. With the blocks. It's cool."

"Thank you," Shane said, and meant it, and went back to his salmon.

Later that night, after Hayden had left and Shane had washed the dishes and wiped down the counters and checked that all the fabric bins were properly closed with their color-coded snap lids, he went into the spare bedroom and stood in front of the design wall. The pins holding the fabric squares glinted under the track lighting he'd installed himself, each one precisely positioned at the corners to maintain perfect alignment.

The quilt wasn't for anyone. He'd told himself that when he started it. It was practice, a learning project, something to do with his hands while his brain sorted through the mess of Tampa and Ilya and the thing they were and the thing they weren't. His fingertips still remembered the feel of the rotary cutter slicing through the layers of fabric, the satisfying click of the ruler against the cutting mat.

But he'd chosen the colors without thinking about it, and now, standing here with his arms crossed tightly against his chest, he could see what he'd done. The light fabric was a warm cream that caught the light like morning sun on hotel sheets. The medium was a deep forest green that reminded him of the trees outside the Tampa practice facility. The dark was a blue so dark it was almost black—the exact color of a Voyageurs jersey with its silver trim, or a clear sky at dusk just before the stars emerge, or Ilya Rozanov's eyes when the light hit them a certain way in a dim hotel room, pupils wide and fixed on Shane's face.

"Fuck," Shane said, very quietly, to no one, his breath barely disturbing the careful arrangement of fabric before him.

He turned off the light with a decisive click and went to bed, leaving the quilt blocks to hold their secrets in the darkness.

V. Embroidery - 2018

Shane Hollander came out on his own terms, in his own time, in his own extremely Shane way: with a prepared statement, a press conference, and a binder of research on LGBTQ+ athletes that he'd offered to share with any journalist who wanted to write a responsible article about it.

The press conference was fine. The public reaction was, mostly, fine—better than fine, even, because Shane was the best hockey player in the world and people were willing to overlook a lot when you were the best at something. The chirping from opposing fans, and players, was predictable and boring and Shane tuned it out the same way he tuned out everything that didn't directly contribute to winning hockey games.

What was different, after coming out, was that people paid attention to him differently. Every interview was a chance for someone to ask about his personal life. Every public appearance was scrutinized. Shane, who had spent his entire life carefully constructing routines and systems to manage the gap between how his brain worked and how the world expected him to operate, suddenly found that all his systems were being examined under a microscope.

Including, inevitably, the hobbies.

The embroidery had started as an extension of the quilting, which was itself an extension of the crochet, which was—if Shane was being honest with himself, and he always tried to be honest with himself—an extension of the fundamental fact that Shane Hollander needed to do things with his hands or his brain would eat itself alive. He'd tried meditation. Meditation was just sitting still while his thoughts screamed. He'd tried journaling. Journaling required him to know what he was feeling, which was a separate and unresolved problem. Fiber arts gave his hands something to do and his brain something to count, and the counting was the closest thing to peace he'd ever reliably achieved.

The embroidery was different from the other crafts in one important way: it was art. Not math, not chemistry, not geometry. Art. You could embroider anything—flowers, landscapes, words, abstract patterns. Shane, who had never considered himself an artistic person, found that when he sat down with a hoop and a needle, something happened that he couldn't entirely explain. The world got very small and very precise, and his hands knew what to do even when his brain wasn't sure, and when he pulled the thread through the fabric it was like writing in a language he hadn't known he spoke.

He posted a photo on Instagram without thinking about it too hard.

This was unusual for Shane, who thought about everything too hard. But it was a Tuesday evening, and he'd just finished a piece he was genuinely proud of—a small hoop with a botanical illustration of a cerulean warbler, worked in satin stitch and French knots, with every feather individually rendered in slightly different shades of blue—and he wanted someone to see it, and the person he most wanted to see it was several time zones away and Shane couldn't text him because they'd agreed to keep their communication careful, but Instagram was public and if Ilya happened to see it then that wasn't Shane breaking any rules.

He posted the photo with the caption: Cerulean warbler (Setophaga cerulea). Embroidery on linen.

The internet lost its mind.

Not in a bad way, mostly. The photo went viral in the peculiar way things go viral when they're unexpected—hockey blogs picked it up, then lifestyle blogs, then it crossed over into the embroidery community on social media, which was apparently vast and extremely enthusiastic about having an NHL player in their ranks. Shane gained two hundred thousand Instagram followers in forty-eight hours, most of whom appeared to be middle-aged women who wanted to discuss thread brands with him.

Shane discussed thread brands with them. He didn't see why he wouldn't. They had good recommendations.

The hockey world's reaction was more predictable.

"Okay, I have to ask," said the Sportsnet interviewer, three days later, during what was supposed to be a segment about the upcoming season. "The embroidery. It's everywhere online. Where does this come from?"

Shane looked at the interviewer. The man's tie had a small stain near the knot.

"I like making things," Shane said.

"But embroidery specifically? That's not exactly a typical hockey player hobby." The interviewer chuckled.

"What's a typical hockey player hobby? Golf?" Shane paused, his face completely neutral. "I tried golf once. I organized all the tees by color and height while my group was on the third hole."

"Fair enough! And is it true you also crochet, bake bread, do quilting—"

"Yes."

"—and go bird watching?"

"Yes."

"That's quite a list. Your teammates must give you a hard time."

"They do," Shane confirmed. "Yesterday Keller asked if I could embroider him a jockstrap. I told him I'd need his exact measurements. He hasn't brought it up since."

The interviewer's laugh came out as a startled bark. Shane blinked at him, waiting for the next question.

After the interview, back in his car, his phone buzzed.

Lily: saw interview

Lily: keller is stupid

Lily: 😂😂😂

Jane: I was being serious.

Lily: I know. That is why is funny.

Then, a minute later:

Lily: the bird is beautiful Shane

Lily: you are very talented

Shane sat in his car in the parking garage for a while. The engine was off. The light was gray and flat. His hands were in his lap, very still for once.

Jane: Thank you.

Lily: you make me something sometime?

Shane's heart did something arrhythmic and unhelpful.

Jane: What would you want?

Lily: I don't know. Something you choose.

Lily: something that makes you think of me

Lily: or make me jockstrap. you know my measurements

Jane: Fuck off

Shane closed his eyes. Everything made him think of Ilya. That was the whole problem. The cerulean that caught the light like Ilya's eyes when he laughed. The indigo that reminded him of bruises blooming across Ilya's ribs after a particularly vicious game. The arctic terns that flew from pole to pole each year, twenty thousand miles of impossible longing. The sourdough starter that sat on his counter, demanding daily attention, bubbling with stubborn life even when neglected—that needed his hands, his warmth, his patience to transform into something worth keeping.

Jane: Okay.

Lily: okay?

Jane: I'll make you something.

He started it that night. A small hoop, just six inches across, the linen drum-tight against his fingertips. Two birds perched on a slender branch—one a midnight-feathered raven, one a snow-white dove—their heads turned toward each other, beaks angled with millimeter precision. Not touching. Close enough that the air between them seemed to vibrate.

He worked on it for three weeks, hunched under his desk lamp until his neck ached, picking out stitches and redoing them, his fingers calloused and pricked. The raven's eye gleamed with a single French knot of obsidian thread. He layered colors—twenty-seven shades of gold for the dove's wing, charcoal gradients that captured every shadow, deep forest greens that made the branch seem alive beneath their talons. When it was finished, he wrapped it in cream-colored tissue paper that crackled like autumn leaves, nestled it in a box lined with midnight-blue velvet, and buried it in his closet behind winter sweaters. Sending handmade art to your secret boyfriend was a declaration he wasn't ready to inscribe into reality.

He sent it four months later, after a game in Boston where Ilya scored the game-winner against Shane's team with a backhand that shouldn't have been possible. Ilya had looked at Shane across sixty feet of ice, chest heaving, sweat-damp hair plastered to his forehead, with an expression so nakedly triumphant and tender that Shane's carefully organized interior life collapsed like a house of cards in a hurricane.

He mailed it to Ilya's address with no note. None was needed.

Ilya texted him a photo three days later, the embroidery hoop, hanging on the wall above his bed, the white dove catching morning light from the window, the dark bird watching over Ilya's pillow.

Lily: is most beautiful thing anyone ever give me

Lily: спасибо, my Shane

Shane stared at his phone. My Shane. His thumb pressed into the screen hard enough to whiten the nail bed, as if he could absorb the words through his skin. Heat surged behind his eyes, his throat constricting until each breath scraped raw. His hands trembled violently—a catastrophe for the embroidery project waiting on his desk, the needle that required surgeon-steady precision now impossible to control.

He slammed the phone down. Snatched it back up. Hurled it onto the couch.

Lunged for it again.

Jane: You're welcome, Ilya.

+1. Ottawa, 2019

The trade to Ottawa was supposed to be a disaster.

That's what the analysts said, anyway. Shane Hollander, perennial MVP candidate, franchise cornerstone of the Montreal Voyageurs, traded to the Ottawa Centaurs—a team that hadn't made the playoffs in three years, a team in the middle of a rebuild, a team that most hockey experts regarded as the place where careers went to politely decompose.

Shane did not experience it as a disaster. Shane experienced it as the first time in years that he could breathe.

In Ottawa, he had a house instead of an apartment. The house had a yard—a real yard, with trees, where birds came to the feeder he'd installed on the first day. It had a kitchen big enough for real bread-making, with counter space for kneading and a proofing drawer he'd had custom-built. It had a spare bedroom that was, openly and without apology, his craft room, with the quilt frame and the design wall and the organized bins and a new addition: a large embroidery desk positioned under the window where the light was best.

And it had Ilya.

Not every day, not yet—Ilya was still in Boston, and the commute was a thing they navigated carefully with schedules and flights and the particular logistical precision that two professional athletes in a public relationship required. But the house was theirs in a way nowhere else had ever been theirs. Ilya's clothes were in the closet. Ilya's terrible Russian snacks were in the pantry. Ilya's protein powder was on the counter next to Gerald's mason jar, and Shane had not even considered asking him to move it, which was probably the most significant emotional development of his adult life.

The Centaurs were young. Very young. The average age of the roster was twenty-three, which made Shane, at thirty, feel approximately ancient. They were also very, very enthusiastic about Shane, in the way puppies were enthusiastic about whoever was currently holding a tennis ball. Shane was not holding a tennis ball. Shane was holding a Hart Trophy and two Stanley Cup rings and two decades of professional hockey experience, and the puppies didn't know the difference.

"Holy shit," said Marcus Webb, twenty-one years old, a second-round pick from Michigan who played left wing with more energy than skill and who had been assigned the stall next to Shane's. Marcus was staring at Shane's crochet bag, which was tucked neatly behind Shane's equipment bag, right where it had always been, because some things didn't change even when everything else did.

Shane didn't look up from his row. He was working on a sweater—a real one, cabled, in a charcoal merino wool that would look extremely good on Ilya and that Shane was absolutely not going to admit he was making for Ilya because Ilya already had a big enough ego.

“Is that…” Marcus tilted his head at the looping yarn.

“Crochet,” Shane replied, draping one snarky stitch over the next. “Uses a hook, not needles. Far too exotic for the knitting crowd.”

“I wasn’t going to say knitting.”

“Most people do. Or they ask if it’s macramé. Either way.” Shane paused, counting stitches with the air of a man defusing a land mine. “Helps me focus before games.”

From the other side of the room, Luc Thibodeau, the resident rebuilt-team veteran with four Ottawa seasons under his belt and the calm tolerance of a Zen monk, didn’t even glance up from his taped stick.

“Don’t bother, Webb. Shane’s been crocheting since day one.”

“You knew about this?” Marcus asked, incredulous.

“Everyone knows. He went viral multiple times. Google it.”

Sure enough, ten minutes later the locker room had reached full decibel as Marcus unearthed: crochet patterns, sourdough starter, birdwatching, quilting, embroidery, that Instagram humdinger, Gerald the Starter’s two-hundred-thousand-follower Twitter, and BuzzFeed’s stellar “21 Times Shane Hollander Was the Internet’s Favorite Hockey Grandma.”

“Oh my God,” Marcus breathed. “Oh my God.”

“The BuzzFeed article?” Luc asked. “With the grandma thing?”

“Yep. He’s got a whole personality crisis online.”

“Welcome to life with Shane Hollander,” Luc said, tightening his tape.

Shane kept crocheting, utterly unfazed. Up here in Ottawa—where nobody hands you strange looks if you show up at practice asking for yarn instead of pucks—he’d learned to treat these reactions like background noise. You let them have their fun, you supply a dry retort if you feel like it, then you get back to your stitch count. He’d been told by his therapist last year—bless her—that it was part autism, part eldest-only-child-of-Yuna-Hollander thing, and part “world’s-best-defensive-forward” syndrome. Categories overlapped, sure, but none of it altered the master plan: Shane does Shane. The rest adjust accordingly.

“Okay,” Marcus said, hauling his chair forward like he’d discovered buried treasure, “what’re you working on? It’s huge.”

“It’s a sweater.”

“A whole sweater? By hand?”

“That’s how crochet works.”

“For who?”

Shane hesitated—less from embarrassment than from not wanting to talk about a half-finished project. In Montreal, he’d have kept it locked away like national secrets. In Ottawa, he could at least tell the truth.

“Ilya,” he said, quietly.

Marcus’s eyebrows performed gymnastics. “You’re… making Ilya Rozanov a sweater.”

“Yes.”

“By hand.”

“Yes.”

“That’s…” Marcus stumbled around before settling on, “actually pretty adorable.”

“It’s not adorable. It’s a cable pattern demanding uniform tension across four stitches. It’s medieval torture.” Shane draped a stitch over his hook. “But thanks.”

“It’s super cute. You’re knitting…crocheting, your rival a sweater.”

Shane tapped his hook against his palm. “Crochet.”

“Right, sorry. Crochet.”

He ignored Marcus and returned to his row, anticipating the next cable cross. He might be able to roast a guy on skates, but drop four loops in a pattern and all the world’s pressure floats right off him.

“I think it’s cool,” Hayes piped up from behind the goalie mask. “My girlfriend knits. She says cable’s a nightmare.”

“Crochet,” Shane corrected, automatically. “Nightmare or not, I’ve got it under control.”

“Hey, Hollander,” Luca Haas, the shy forward on Shane’s line, finally spoke. “Is it true you have a sourdough starter named Gerald?”

“Correct.”

“How old is he?”

“Twelve years.”

A hush fell. Even Marcus looked impressed.

“That’s next-level commitment,” Luca said.

“Gerald’s low-maintenance.” Shane slipped another loop through. “Feed him twelve-hour intervals during the season, twenty-four off-season.”

“And if you miss one?”

“I don’t miss feedings.” Shane tilted his head.

“Besides, in Ottawa no one’s going to riot because their starter spent the night binge-watching Netflix.” He smirked and went back to crocheting.

This was said with enough finality that even Marcus didn't follow up. Shane finished his row, tucked the sweater back into his crochet bag, and started getting ready for the game.

It was a big game. Not in the standings—Ottawa was fighting for a wild card spot, which was already more than anyone had expected from them this season—but in the way that mattered to Shane, which was that they were playing Boston.

They were playing Ilya.

Shane had been playing against Ilya Rozanov for twelve years. He had hated him, and wanted him, and feared the wanting, and denied the wanting, and finally, agonizingly, stopped denying it. He had come out for Ilya (who was planning on coming out when his Canadian permanent residency came through after he moves to Ottawa next season)(They have lots of plans, and back up plans)(They, meaning Shane). He had rearranged his entire life for Ilya. He had traded fiber arts with Ilya, which was a sentence that would have made zero sense to anyone outside their specific and peculiar love story.

But on the ice, they were still rivals. That never changed. That was the engine of the thing—the fact that they were both willing to tear each other apart for sixty minutes and then hold each other afterward. Shane didn't understand people who thought love and competition were opposites. They were the same goddamn drug.

The game started like a bomb going off. Boston came out hunting—they were clawing for a division title, and Ilya was playing like the version of himself that had haunted Shane's dreams since he was eighteen: all savage flash and calculated violence, a blur of impossible speed, the kind of player who made your chest ache with how beautiful destruction could be.

Shane watched him during warm-ups, blood pounding in his ears. The familiar contradiction slammed through him: raw desire and cold determination, aching tenderness and the bone-deep, animal need to crush him. Ilya caught his eye across the center line and winked. Shane didn't wink back—he wasn't built that way—but he locked onto Ilya's gaze until the air between them practically crackled.

The first period was warfare disguised as chess. Shane carved out two perfect scoring chances that his linemates squandered. Ilya drew blood with a penalty and scored on the power play—a vicious wrist shot from the circle that beat Ottawa's goalie like he wasn't even there. Ilya celebrated with that savage joy that was uniquely his: arms flung wide, face split in a wolf's grin. He skated past Ottawa's bench spitting something in Russian that Shane knew was filthy.

Shane answered three minutes later, hammering home the tying goal so hard his stick vibrated. A one-timer from the slot that Marcus—who apparently had hands after all—served up like an execution. Shane didn't celebrate. He just skated back to the bench, sat down, and drank water while his pulse thundered in his throat.

"Dude," Marcus said. "You just scored on Ilya Rozanov's team and you look like you're waiting for a bus."

"I'm thinking about the next shift."

"You're always thinking about the next shift."

"That's correct."

The second period was war. Boston's forecheck slammed Ottawa's young defensemen into the boards like rag dolls. Shane took a cross-check that cracked against his ribs, stealing his breath but not his focus. Ilya's elbow caught Luca's jaw—a calculated penalty that left blood on the ice. The two of them blazed across the rink while everyone else seemed frozen in amber—predators in their own separate ecosystem, each anticipating the other's next heartbeat, each reading the other's body like a book they'd memorized cover to cover.

Boston buried two pucks past Wyatt Hayes, Ottawa's goalie. Ottawa clawed back one. 3-2. The arena's energy bled out like a wound, fans slumping in their seats, the collective exhale of a building losing faith.

Shane sat rigid in his stall during intermission, sweat burning his eyes, lungs still heaving. His crochet bag sat untouched. His fingers twitched, but not for yarn. For victory.

He slammed his eyes shut, teeth clenched. The game replayed behind his eyelids in high definition—Boston's defensive box collapsing low, the seam opening high, Ilya's tendency to cheat toward the boards on the backcheck. The patterns burned white-hot in his mind, as clear as cable stitches, as tactile as bread dough under pressure, as predictable as a peregrine's dive. Not magic. Not instinct. Pure, relentless, obsessive attention—thousands of hours of seeing what others couldn't.
The kind of attention that made him both blessed and cursed.

"Hollander." Coach Wiebe was standing in front of him. "You good?"

Shane opened his eyes. "I'm good."

"I need you to be Shane Hollander right now."

"I'm always Shane Hollander."

"You know what I mean."

Shane did know what he meant. He meant: be the thing that you are. Be the thing that no one else in the world is. Be the player who has won two MVPs and two Stanley Cups and who has been the best in the world for so long that people have stopped being amazed by it, which is itself the most amazing thing about him.

"I know," Shane said.

The third period started.

Later, the highlights would be replayed hundreds of thousands of times. Later, the analysts would call it one of the greatest individual periods in recent NHL history.

Later, Sportsnet would run a segment called "The Shane Hollander Show" that would include every touch, every pass, every moment of the twelve minutes that followed.

Shane didn't experience it as a show. He experienced it the way he always experienced hockey at its highest level: as a state of total clarity, where every piece of information his brain was processing collapsed into a single, unified understanding of the ice. Where to be. When to move. Which gap would open, which lane would close, which fraction of a second was the difference between a good player and the best player alive.

He scored at 2:14 of the third. A wrister from the high slot that whistled through a forest of legs and sticks—not a pretty goal, just a smart one, threading the puck through a window that existed for maybe half a second before collapsing. The red light flashed, bathing the ice in crimson as the arena erupted. Tie game.

He assisted on the go-ahead goal at 7:38. A laser-precise stretch pass from his own zone that bisected two defenders in black and gold and landed flat on Marcus's tape as he hit full stride—the kind of pass that required knowing not where your teammate was but where he was going to be, the same spatial processing that let Shane see the intricate geometry in quilts and count stitches without looking and track a yellow-rumped warbler through the dense, dappled shadows of maple canopy.

And then, at 14:22, with the score 4-3 Ottawa and Boston pressing for the tying goal, Ilya Rozanov—the love of Shane's life, the best player he'd ever faced, the man who slept in his bed and ate his sourdough and had his painstakingly embroidered chickadee hung over his pillow—came barreling down the left wing with locomotive speed and raw power, his black jersey rippling, stick blade cradling the puck with the clear intention of hammering home the tying goal.

Shane read it. Not consciously—there wasn't time for conscious thought at this velocity. His body knew what Ilya's body was going to do before Ilya did it, and maybe that was twelve years of rivalry and maybe that was something else entirely, but he stepped into the lane with surgical timing and stripped the puck from Ilya's stick with a move so clean it looked choreographed, the rubber disk suddenly magnetized to his own blade, and then he was going the other way, alone, just him and the goalie and ninety feet of pristine, unmarked ice stretching before him like a canvas.

He scored. The puck left his stick like a bullet and nestled in the top corner where the crossbar meets the post with a metallic ping that somehow cut through the arena's roar.

5-3. The arena exploded into a cacophony of horns and screams. Shane's teammates mobbed him, a tangle of white jerseys and gloved hands pounding his back. Marcus was screaming directly into his ear, his breath hot and voice hoarse, which was unpleasant but understandable. Twenty thousand fans were on their feet, a sea of red and white, the goal horn blaring its triumphant note, and somewhere behind him, Shane knew without looking, Ilya was skating back to his bench with that expression he got when Shane did something extraordinary against him—the one that was nine-tenths frustration etched in the tight line of his jaw and one-tenth something else, something that flickered in his ice-blue eyes that looked, if you knew how to read Ilya Rozanov's face the way Shane did, a lot like pride.

Shane skated back to the bench. He sat down. He drank some water.

"Dude," Marcus said, still vibrating. "You just—that was—how did you do that?"

Shane considered the question seriously. How did he do that? How did he do anything? He paid attention. He noticed patterns—the way a defender's weight shifted microscopically before a pivot, the infinitesimal tells in a goalie's stance. He practiced until his hands knew what to do without being told, until muscle memory became as automatic as breathing. He organized the world into systems he could understand—angles, trajectories, probabilities—and then he executed within those systems with a precision that other people called genius and Shane just called paying attention.

The same way he crocheted, feeling the yarn's tension between his fingers, counting each stitch with mathematical certainty. The same way he baked bread, understanding exactly how the dough should feel at each stage—tacky but not sticky, elastic but not tough. The same way he watched birds, identifying a warbler by the flash of yellow fifty yards away through dense foliage, and quilted, and embroidered tiny perfect feathers onto linen stretched in a wooden hoop, each thread laid with surgical exactitude.

The same way he loved Ilya, with his whole brain, every part of it, the parts that counted stitches and the parts that read ice and the parts that tracked the specific cadence of Ilya's Russian-accented English when he was tired versus when he was angry. The parts that most people didn't understand and that Shane had spent most of his life trying to hide—like how he sometimes needed to touch each doorknob twice before leaving a room—but was learning, slowly, to stop hiding.

"Practice," Shane said.

Marcus looked at him like this was the most insufficient answer in the history of language, which it probably was.

Shane drank his water. On the ice, the game was winding down—the last few minutes of a contest that was already decided, the clock running out on a night that Shane would file away in the long, organized catalog of his career. He'd think about it later, lying in bed, replaying every shift the way he replayed crochet patterns—stitch by stitch, looking for errors, admiring the parts that worked.

After the game, in the hallway between the locker rooms, Ilya found him. This was not unusual—they always found each other after games, drawn together by the gravity of whatever it was between them. Ilya was in his suit, tie already loosened, hair still damp from the shower. He looked tired and annoyed and beautiful, and Shane wanted to put his hands on him so badly it was almost a physical ache.

"That steal," Ilya said.

"Yes."

"You know what I'm going to do before I do it."

"Usually."

"Is annoying."

"I know."

Ilya shook his head. But he was smiling now—the real smile, the one that wasn't for cameras, the one that softened everything about his face and made Shane's carefully maintained composure go slightly blurry around the edges.

"My babushka," Ilya said quietly, and there was so much affection in it that the old joke became something else entirely. "My little old grandma who is also best hockey player in the world."

"I don't think those things are contradictory."

"No," Ilya agreed. He reached out and straightened Shane's tie, his fingers lingering for a moment on Shane's chest. "No, I don't think they are."

They stood there for a beat, in the fluorescent-lit hallway, with arena staff moving around them and the muffled sound of two locker rooms' worth of postgame activity bleeding through the walls. Shane wanted to kiss him. He couldn't—not here, not with people around, not that they were hiding anymore but because some things were still just theirs.

"Come home with me tonight," Shane said. It wasn't a question.

"Of course."

"I'm making bread tomorrow morning. I don't want to hear any complaints about the alarm."

"I never complain."

"You always complain. You complained last time for forty-five minutes."

"Was very early, Shane."

"Gerald needs to be fed."

Ilya laughed—the real laugh, the big one, the one that made his whole body move. "Okay. I come home. You feed Gerald. I complain. Is perfect."

It was. It really, really was.

They walked out of the arena together, into the cold Ottawa night, and Shane thought about all the things his hands knew how to do—crochet and bread and birds and quilts and embroidery and hockey, and the way all of it, every single part of it, was just a different kind of attention, a different kind of love, a different way of saying I am here and I am paying attention and I am making something with my hands because my hands need to make things or I will fall apart.

And the best thing his hands had ever learned was how to reach for Ilya's, in the dark, in the cold, and hold on.