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Shane found out about the divorce papers because Ilya had folded them too neatly.
That was the first thing he noticed, absurdly, before the language even reached him.
They were stacked with geometric precision at the edge of the dining table, aligned with the wood grain, clipped together in the top-left corner.
Not shoved there in panic. Not hidden. Not left carelessly like a threat.
It was rather placed deliberately. As though Ilya had set down a knife and wanted Shane to know exactly where to find it.
For a few seconds, Shane simply looked at them from across the room, still in his suit from the gala, one hand braced on the kitchen island, body running on the last thin strip of composure that had carried him through the evening.
The apartment was quiet. Too quiet.
No television. No music. No Ilya pacing, no heavy footsteps, no curse in Russian from the bedroom because he had dropped something or pulled the wrong drawer too hard. Just the hum of the refrigerator and Ottawa’s quiet creeping in from outside their windows.
Shane crossed the room.
He read the first line.
Petition for Dissolution of Marriage
Everything after that blurred for a second, then snapped back into focus so sharply it made his head ache.
He sat down.
Not because he wanted to. Because his knees did it for him.
The gala had ended less than an hour ago, and the fundraiser had been objectively successful—the room full, the donations generous, the board elated.
They had smiled in photographs beneath the Irina Foundation crest while wealthy people promised support for the new youth mental health initiative, a three-city expansion years in the making, something both of them had once spoken about in bed at two in the morning as though it were a dream too large to say aloud in daylight.
It had been inevitable, this event. Necessary. Important. Shane had known it would be difficult. He had thought difficult was survivable.
He had not known the foundation’s media team, with all their polished sincerity and weaponized sentiment, would include home video in the tribute reel.
He had not known there was footage of Irina Rozanov laughing in a kitchen that no longer existed, holding a ten-year-old Ilya by the shoulders and turning him toward the camera, her accent thicker than his now, her face alive and unruined, saying in Russian, Look at my beautiful boy. See? He smiles for me.
He had not known there would be a second clip, years later, grainy and badly lit, likely filmed by some relative, where twelve-year-old Ilya sat on a sofa too straight-backed for comfort while adults moved around off-screen, and someone asked him to say thank you to the people who had sent flowers after the funeral, and he did, expressionless and careful and much too still. A child already learning that grief, if it was tidy enough, could make adults praise him for being brave.
Shane had looked away from the screen and found Ilya beside him smiling politely at donors.
That had frightened him more than if he had cried.
By the time they got home, Ilya had gone straight to the shower without speaking. Shane had changed, poured water, stood in the dark kitchen trying to decide whether to insist on food or leave him alone, and somewhere in that fragile, ordinary gap between choices, Ilya had apparently printed the forms.
Shane lifted the first page again and read it properly this time. Their names. Their address. Standard language. Blank spaces. Checkboxes. A marriage collapsed into administrative possibility.
A sound in the hallway made him look up.
Ilya stood there barefoot, hair still damp, dressed in grey sweats and an old black T-shirt Shane had been trying unsuccessfully to throw away for six years. He looked younger when he was tired, but not in a good way. Like he was stripped down to the sharpest parts of himself.
His eyes flicked to the papers in Shane’s hands and stayed there.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Then Ilya said, in a voice so even it felt practiced, “I was going to tell you.”
Shane’s throat worked around a dozen possible responses and landed on the only one that came out intact.
“Why?”
Ilya leaned one shoulder against the doorway. The pose was lazy. The body inside it was not.
“We already talk about this,” he said. “Many times.”
No, Shane thought instantly. They had not talked about this. They had orbited it in exhausting circles for three weeks and called that communication because neither of them had the courage to stab the center.
Out loud, Shane said, “You printed divorce papers.”
A tiny muscle jumped in Ilya’s jaw.
“You look at me like I am serving you a lawsuit.”
“Yeah,” Shane said. “No shit. You might as well be.”
“I am trying to make this easier.”
The sentence was quiet. Almost apologetic. It landed harder than anything else.
Shane put the papers down very carefully.
There had been a time, not even that long ago, when the idea of Ilya trying to make anything easier would have sounded like parody. Ilya sharpened situations. He escalated them. He kicked problems in the shins and grinned when they kicked back. If he was trying to make this easier, then he was already much further gone than Shane had let himself believe.
He rose from the chair.
“I do not want easier,” he said.
Ilya gave a strange little shrug, like that was unfortunate but not relevant.
“Maybe I do.”
That was how it had been, these past weeks. Every conversation beginning in one language and ending in another.
It had started the night they announced the gala. Shane knew why, even if he had not known what to do with it. The foundation asked Ilya to walk a line so fine it was almost cruel—to make something beautiful and useful out of Irina’s memory while standing directly inside the grief she had left behind. The foundation was, in one sense, a tribute. In another, it was a standing monument to what Ilya had been missing since he was twelve.
And Shane had felt, with mounting helplessness, that he was failing him. Because he did not know how to help. Because every instinct he had seemed to land wrong. Because what Ilya needed kept shifting shape the moment Shane reached for it.
So it had come to this. Conversations that were not really conversations at all. And maybe the divorce had been in the room for longer than either of them had been willing to name it, sitting quietly between them every time they mistook avoidance for mercy.
Shane had certainly felt it there, hanging in the air like weather he kept insisting would pass if he simply waited it out.
It was there in the smaller moments he had mistaken for temporary storms: in the way Ilya had sat up in bed after two sleepless hours and said, without looking at him, “Do you ever think people would like your life more if I was not in it?”
In the way he had started turning down dinners, calls, events, even the harmless things. In the way he began apologizing for taking up space—in the bed, on the couch, in the day itself.
Then the real fighting had begun.
Not shouting. Shane almost wished for shouting. Shouting would at least have felt alive.
Instead it was this terrible, disciplined version of conflict where Shane asked what Ilya needed and Ilya answered, “Nothing,” with the exhausted patience of someone tired of being a problem.
And somehow that turned into Shane asking the same thing over and over in smaller, subtler forms, as if changing the wording might finally make it answerable.
Are you okay? Are you sure? Do you want me here?
And then it became another burden Ilya had to carry. His fear. His watchfulness. Him standing in doorways and asking, too carefully, too often. Like love itself had become another thing pressing at his skin.
And all along, Shane had only asked because he loved him. Because he was afraid. Because some part of him feared that if he stopped checking, even for a second, he might look up and find Ilya unreachable
At some point, love and surveillance had begun to blur.
At some point, Ilya had said, “When you look at me like that, I feel worse.”
And Shane, already sleeping badly and thinking too much, had heard:
You are making this worse. Your presence is another weight on my chest. I cannot recover while having to manage your worry, too.
Then, two nights later, Ilya said the sentence Shane had not been able to stop hearing since.
“You are allowed to want peace, Shane.”
Not I want peace. Not I need space. You are allowed.
As though granting permission. As though Shane’s loyalty was a leash he might be too honorable to cut for himself.
That had been the first moment the word divorce crossed Shane’s mind, not as something he wanted, but as something Ilya might need and be too ashamed to ask for directly.
Now here it was, printed and clipped and waiting on their dining table.
Shane stared at him across the room and thought, with a terrible calm: He really believes he is doing me a kindness.
“Is this what you want?”
Ilya’s expression flickered, almost too fast to catch.
“No,” he said.
Relief hit Shane so hard it was almost painful.
“But I think maybe it is what you need,” Ilya added.
There it was. The knife.
Shane inhaled once, shallowly.
“Why would you think that?”
Something harsh flashed across Ilya’s face.
“Because I am not blind.”
“Then tell me what you think you’re seeing.”
“You,” Ilya said. “Exhausted.”
Shane almost laughed.
It would have been easier if Ilya had accused him of cruelty. Easier if he had said I do not love you enough anymore or I cannot do this while being watched or even the more ordinary brutalities people reached for when a marriage stopped fitting around them.
But exhausted?
As though Shane were being dismissed on grounds of overuse.
“You think I want out because I’m tired,” Shane said.
Ilya looked down at the papers again, not at him.
“I think you are tired because I am like this.”
“Like what?”
The question came out sharper than Shane intended. It made Ilya flinch almost imperceptibly, which only made Shane hate himself more.
Ilya said nothing.
Shane forced himself to soften his voice.
“Say it.”
Ilya smiled then, but there was no humor in it.
“You want list?”
“Yes.”
That finally got him to look up. His eyes were red-rimmed, not from crying. From not sleeping. From being awake too long inside his own head.
“Fine,” he said. “Like this. Sad for no reason. Angry for no reason. Tired all the time. Needing you for stupid things. Then hating it when you help. Then hating you a little because you help. Then hating myself because I hate you. Is this good list?”
Shane stood very still.
“Ilya—”
“No, it is okay.” He held up a hand as though Shane were the one interrupting. “I know what it is. I know what happen when I get like this.”
“Then you know it passes.”
A muscle worked in Ilya’s cheek.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe next time is worse.”
There it was. Not just grief. Fear.
Shane took a step closer.
“So your answer is to leave me.”
“My answer is to stop making you live inside it.”
“You think those are the same thing.”
“Aren’t they?”
The room seemed to sharpen around that question. Shane could hear traffic thirty floors below, someone shouting faintly on the street, a siren passing somewhere too far away to matter. Inside their apartment, every sound felt obscene. Like noise intruding on surgery.
“No,” Shane said. “They are not.”
Ilya let out a breath through his nose, impatient, wounded.
In the deafening silence that followed, Shane’s mind did the only thing it knew how to do. It reached for structure. For sequence. For a plan. Something. Anything. Other than the papers sitting between them.
But the honest answer was that he had none.
He had solutions for training slumps. For media cycles. For bad habits and fractured chemistry and bodies that refused to perform according to schedule. He had routines, systems, plans. He was built for adjustment.
But depression was not a system. It did not respond to discipline. It did not improve because Shane loved carefully enough.
That had been the worst part of these last weeks. Not just watching Ilya disappear inward, but realizing that every instinct Shane had—to organize, to witness, to keep close—could become another way of pressing too hard on a bruise.
And in one moment, the silence grew too loud to bear.
“I thought maybe you needed me to let go.”
Ilya went still.
Shane had not meant to say that yet. Perhaps he had not meant to say it at all. But now it was out between them, exposed and impossible to take back.
A long silence followed.
Then Ilya asked, “You think you are why I am bad?”
Shane folded his arms. Not because he was cold, but because he needed somewhere to put himself.
“I think I’m not helping.”
He could see Ilya trying to assemble meaning out of that, watching the pieces fail to click.
“I know the gala brought a lot back up. I know the foundation has always been… complicated. And I know when you’re low, you don’t just want comfort. You want distance. Less noise. Less management.” He paused. “I thought maybe I was becoming noise.”
Something changed in Ilya’s face then. Not relief. Not yet. More like confusion profound enough to briefly knock depression aside.
“You think I want divorce because you ask if I eat breakfast?”
Shane stared.
That was not remotely the point, and yet in some way it was exactly the point.
“I think,” he said carefully, “that you have looked at me for three weeks like I’m standing in the wrong place.”
Ilya actually blinked.
“Shane.”
“And I think,” Shane went on, because stopping now would be cowardice, “that every time I try to help, you look more ashamed.”
The word landed. Ashamed. More accurately than anything else they had said tonight.
Ilya turned away first.
That small, ugly victory made Shane feel sick.
When Ilya spoke again, his voice was lower.
“Because you have help enough.”
Shane frowned.
“That isn’t how this works.”
“For you maybe.”
“For anyone.”
Ilya laughed once, tired and sharp.
Something old and bone-deep in Shane rose to meet that. He had heard versions of this before in other forms, smaller and easier to dismiss.
I do not want to bother you. You already do too much. I can handle it.
The normal evasions of a proud man raised inside grief and hockey and the religion of endurance. But this. This was the darkest, cleanest version of it.
You have helped enough.
As though love came with quotas. As though Shane had already reached the maximum permitted.
“You don’t get to decide when I’m done,” Shane muttered.
Ilya looked at him then, eyes flashing.
“And you do not get to make me stay because you are too noble to leave.”
For one wild second, Shane wanted to throw the papers across the room just to force this into a shape more honest than theirs had been.
Instead he said, with forced calm, “Is that what you think this is?”
“I think,” Ilya said, breathing harder now, “that you are very good man, and very stubborn man, and if I tell you stay, you stay. Even if it hurts you. Even if every day with me feel like walking into storm and asking nice if maybe storm can calm down.”
“That is not what being married to you feels like.”
“It is now.”
And there it was. The sentence Shane had been waiting for without knowing it. Not it feels like that for you. It is now. A declaration. A belief. A verdict.
Shane realized, all at once, that they were talking about entirely different catastrophes.
Ilya thought he was protecting Shane from the interior weather of his illness.
Shane thought he was protecting Ilya from being observed by someone who loved him too intensely and therefore too clumsily.
Each of them had looked at the same suffering and concluded the only merciful thing was removal.
It would have been absurd if it were not devastating.
Shane sat back down.
The movement seemed to startle Ilya more than anger would have.
“I am not signing these tonight,” Shane said.
Ilya’s throat moved.
“Okay.”
But the word meant: later, then.
Shane rubbed a hand over his mouth.
“Go to bed.”
That earned him a faint, almost offended exhale.
“You are not my coach.”
“No,” Shane said. “I’m your husband.”
The silence that followed was so loaded it felt structural, like the apartment had been built around that word.
Ilya’s mouth softened. Then hardened again.
“For now.”
Shane looked at the papers once more.
“Go to bed, Ilya.”
This time, after a long pause, Ilya obeyed.
-----
They signed them together two days later.
In retrospect, Shane would think that was the moment most difficult to forgive.
Not the printing. Not the folding. Not even the first offering of release.
The signing.
Because by then, the cruelty had become mutual and therefore easier to mistake for consent.
The two days between were awful in the precise, tedious way true marital pain often was. Nothing cinematic. No shattered glass, no screaming, no dramatic exits.
They moved around each other in careful lines. Shane extended his practice to do extra reps. Ilya attended meetings remotely and canceled the rest. They ate almost nothing. Slept badly. Talked in fragments too small to qualify as repair.
Once, in the middle of the night, Shane woke to find Ilya sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark.
He asked, “What are you doing?”
Ilya answered, after a moment, “Trying not to wake you.”
It had not sounded like tenderness. It had sounded like resignation.
That was the thing that finally did it.
By Friday afternoon, the papers sat on the table again, this time with a pen placed neatly beside them.
Shane stood opposite Ilya in the dining room and thought with a strange, detached clarity that this was the ugliest room in the apartment. Because from now on, it might always be the room where they had agreed to stop.
Neither of them looked at the other while signing.
Shane’s signature was clean, legible, steady despite the pulse thudding in his wrist.
Ilya’s was faster. More violent. The pen bit through one layer of paper and left a faint imprint on the next.
When it was done, they each stepped back as though from something hot.
“I can take it tomorrow,” Shane said.
Ilya nodded.
That was all.
No one suggested one last meal. No one said maybe this was insane. No one reached for the other and said what they actually meant. Because by then, both of them were operating under the same terrible principle.
Love, if it is real enough, must sometimes make itself absent.
That night they slept in the same bed, back to back, and neither of them slept at all.
-----
The next morning, Shane dressed for the filing office as though he were dressing for a game he could still somehow win if his tie was straight enough.
He made coffee.
Poured two cups out of habit.
Set one in front of Ilya, who was sitting barefoot at the kitchen island staring at nothing.
Ilya looked at the mug, then at Shane.
“Thanks.”
Shane nodded once.
The papers lay in a leather folder by the door.
Simple. Contained. Final.
Shane picked up the folder.
He got as far as the foyer.
Then he stopped.
For a moment, he simply stood there. Hand on the folder. One shoe on hardwood. One on the entry mat. Body split between departure and the life he had not yet quite abandoned.
Behind him, the apartment remained silent, which was what broke him. Enough that he set the folder down on the console table and said, without turning around, “Ilya.”
No answer.
Then, quieter but more precise: “I know we’ve talked this through a lot. But I don’t think I could ever forgive myself if I don’t say this.”
He turned.
Ilya had gone absolutely still at the island, fingers wrapped hard around the untouched coffee.
Shane walked back toward him slowly, as though any sudden movement might send the whole day shattering in the wrong direction.
“I need you to hear me,” he said. “And I need you not to interrupt until I’m done.”
Ilya swallowed. Nodded once.
Shane took a breath.
There were many possible starting points. He chose the ugliest truth.
“I do not want this divorce.”
Something in Ilya’s face cracked instantly. Not relief. Pain first, because pain had gotten there faster.
Shane kept going before he could lose nerve.
“I agreed to it because I thought you were asking for something you could not bear to say directly. I thought you were trying to be kind, and I thought if I loved you properly, I had to let you leave without making you defend it.”
Ilya’s grip tightened on the mug.
Shane said, “I thought the gala triggered something, and that being married to me inside that—inside all of this—was making it harder. I thought maybe every question I asked, every time I watched you, every time I stayed too close, I was confirming whatever worst thing your mind was already saying.”
He was shaking a little now. Not visibly, perhaps. But enough that he could feel it in the small muscles of his hands.
“I thought if you needed a version of life that had less of me in it, then keeping you anyway just because I was afraid would be selfish.”
Ilya’s eyes had gone wet.
Shane saw them. Refused to stop.
“But I need you to understand this part. I never wanted less of you. Not once. I have never, in any version of this, wanted a life that was quieter because you were gone.”
The tears slipped over then, fast and silent. Ilya didn’t wipe them.
Shane’s own voice faltered.
“If it were only up to me, I’d stay. For better or worse.”
He swallowed.
“Even at your worst, Ilya, I choose you. If you’ll still let me.”
Then Ilya put the mug down too hard, coffee spilling over his fingers, and stood so abruptly the stool legs scraped.
“You are idiot,” he said, voice wrecked.
Shane blinked.
Ilya was crying now in earnest, furious about it, not even trying to hide it.
“You think I want divorce because I need less of you?”
“I thought—”
“You thought wrong.” Ilya dragged a shaking hand over his face. “I want divorce because I am tired of you seeing me like this.”
Shane stared.
Ilya laughed, choked on it, tried again.
“I am so—” He broke off, searching for the English and failing. “Ashamed. All the time. Every day. I wake up and you are there being good and patient and loving and I feel…”
Ilya pressed the heel of his hand against his chest as though the word might be somewhere physical.
“Heavy. Dirty. Broken. And then you help me and I hate myself more because now I am also grateful, and I do not know how to be grateful without feeling small.”
Shane’s throat closed around the answer he wanted to give.
Ilya continued, reckless now that the lock had finally gone.
“And after gala—I know you see it. How bad it gets. I know I become quiet and mean and impossible. I know you watch me like one day I disappear if you blink. I know I am scary like this.”
“You are not scary.”
“I am to me.”
That stopped Shane completely.
Ilya wiped his face again, failing at dignity with extraordinary stubbornness.
“I did not want you to have to keep loving me through this if one day it becomes too much. I did not want you stuck because paper says you are husband and you are too good person to leave.”
The symmetry of it was so terrible Shane almost laughed.
Instead he said, helplessly, “I am not here because I am trapped.”
They stared at each other.
“Ilya,” Shane said, quieter now, “I am here because I love you.”
Something in Ilya’s face gave way. Not all at once. Just enough that Shane could see the fear underneath the pride, the part of him that had been braced all this time for love to turn conditional.
“I don’t want—” Ilya started, voice breaking.
“I don’t need you happy,” Shane interrupted.
He stepped closer.
“Or steady. Or even a functional adult.”
That startled a wet, disbelieving laugh out of Ilya.
Shane’s mouth twitched, but he did not look away.
“I just need you,” he said. “And I love you. Always. No matter what.”
Ilya sat back down first, covering his eyes with one hand.
“Shane,” he muttered, voice wrecked, “this is so stupid.”
“It is,” Shane said.
They were quiet for a while after that.
The city kept existing around them. Light moved slowly across the floor. Somewhere downstairs, a dog barked twice and then stopped.
Shane pulled out the stool beside him and sat.
Their shoulders did not touch. The space between them felt newly precious, not because it was distance, but because it was still bridgeable.
After a minute, Shane asked, “Do you want me here?”
It was the same question he had asked too many times over the last few weeks. But this time he asked it differently. Not as an assessment. Not as surveillance. Just as information.
Ilya lowered his hand.
“Yes,” he said immediately, with a firmness that made Shane close his eyes for half a second. “I always want you here. I just…” He looked down. “Sometimes, I do not want you to have to see.”
Shane let that sit.
“Okay, but you do not get to end my marriage for me.”
A helpless smile pulled at Ilya’s mouth.
“You are so romantic.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.” He swallowed. “I am serious too. I do not know how to do this better right now.”
“That’s fine.”
Ilya glanced up at him, suspicious of ease on principle.
“What does that mean?”
“It means depression is not a referendum on whether I should stay married to you.”
Ilya looked like he wanted to argue and cry at the same time.
Shane went on.
“It means if the gala triggered something deeper, then we deal with that. Properly. Not by dissolving our relationship and pretending that counts as treatment.”
Ilya huffed a small laugh through his nose.
“It means,” Shane said, more gently, “that if you need more help than I can give, then we find more help. Not less marriage.”
Something in Ilya’s face gave way then. Enough that Shane could see the frightened man underneath the pride.
“I am tired,” Ilya admitted.
“I know.”
“And I do not want to do foundation stuff for a while.”
“Then don’t.”
“It is my mother.”
“It’s also yours to step back from.”
Ilya was silent.
“We can tell Farrah you’re taking a leave from foundation appearances. We can tell the board you need privacy. We can call Galina.” He held Ilya’s gaze. “And if medication needs adjusting, or therapy needs changing, or you need me quieter, or louder, or sitting outside the bathroom door like an idiot for an hour, then fine. But we are not getting divorced because your brain is lying to both of us.”
The last line landed. Ilya’s mouth trembled once before he bit down on it.
“You make it sound simple.”
“It isn’t.”
“No?”
“No.” Shane looked toward the folder by the door. “Simple was what we were about to do.”
For a long time, they just sat there breathing the same air.
Eventually Ilya said, very softly, “I am sorry.”
Shane turned to him. “For what?”
“For giving you papers instead of words.”
The honesty of it hurt.
Shane answered with his own.
“I’m sorry I was already half out the door in my head.”
Ilya looked at the folder too, then back at Shane.
“You were going to file them.”
“Yes.” Shane considered lying. Settled on the truth. “And then I was going to come home and hate myself.”
Ilya made a small, wrecked sound and reached for him at last with both hands as though he had finally remembered Shane was solid and present and not in danger of vanishing if handled directly.
Shane moved into him immediately.
The first touch after a near-ending always felt a little holy.
Ilya tucked his face against Shane’s neck and held on hard enough to ache. Shane wrapped his arms around him and let the weight come fully this time. No questions asked. No calibrating. No careful monitoring of whether he was doing it right.
They stayed like that until the coffee on the counter had gone cold.
Finally, muffled against Shane’s collarbone, Ilya said, “You really think we can do this and not ruin each other?”
Shane rested his cheek in Ilya’s hair.
“I think we already ruin each other,” he said. “I’m just not interested in doing it apart.”
That earned him a wet, offended laugh.
“You are terrible at comfort.”
They drew apart only enough to look at each other.
Ilya’s eyes were swollen now. His lashes stuck dark with tears. His face open in a way he hated and Shane loved with ruthless tenderness.
“Shane,” Ilya said, quieter. “You should also know that it is same for me.”
Shane blinked.
“I do not want a life without you either,” Ilya said. “It is just… hard, sometimes, having my brain.”
Shane’s mouth softened into a sad smile.
“I know.”
“If I get like this again—”
“When,” Shane corrected automatically.
Ilya rolled his eyes with exhausted affection.
“Fine. When I get like this again and start saying stupid shit about you deserving better—”
“I’m going to stop you there.”
“Shane—”
“When you get like this again, you do not get to become my divorce lawyer in your spare time.”
That made Ilya grin for real.
“I am serious,” Shane said.
“I know. But listen.” He took a breath. “When I say stupid shit like that again, you need to tell me no sooner.”
Shane frowned.
“I did tell you no.”
“You told me no with face. I need with words.”
He reached up and pressed his thumb briefly under Shane’s eye, a tiny grounding touch.
Shane nodded.
“Okay.”
“And you,” Ilya said, because of course he was not finished, “when you start thinking you are trigger or burden or making things worse, you need to say that before we are signing state documents.”
That startled a laugh out of Shane. He glanced toward the folder. Then stood, crossed to the console table, and brought it back.
Ilya watched him without speaking.
Shane opened it, removed the papers, and looked at them one last time.
Then he tore them neatly in half.
Ilya inhaled sharply.
Shane tore them again.
And again.
Not theatrical. Precise. Methodical. A clean destruction for a clean mistake.
When the stack of ruined pages was finally small enough to fit in one hand, he dropped them into the recycling bin beneath the sink.
Shane turned back, unable to help the small smile pulling at his mouth.
“I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
“I am not,” Ilya said honestly. “But I am feeling less stupid.”
“That’s a start.”
He went back to the island. Took Ilya’s cold coffee away and poured him fresh.
This time, when he set the mug down, Ilya caught his wrist before he could pull back.
“You really stay?”
The question was quiet enough to break something all over again.
Shane leaned down and kissed his forehead.
“Yes,” he said. “I really stay.”
Ilya closed his eyes briefly.
When he opened them, some of the fear was still there. So was the grief. So was the depression, no doubt, waiting just below the skin of the day.
But there was something else now too: not certainty, exactly, but the possibility of not having to survive it by subtraction.
It would not be easy. They both knew that now.
There would be doctors. Adjustments. Silences that were not personal and bad days that felt personal anyway. There would be moments Shane would want to fix what could not be fixed and moments Ilya would try to disappear before Shane could watch him hurt. There would be the foundation, eventually, and Irina, and all the ways grief could still ambush a grown man from inside a room full of applause.
Big things. Inevitable things.
But not, perhaps, ending things.
Not if they were together.
Ilya lifted Shane’s hand and pressed a kiss into the center of Shane’s palm.
Across the kitchen, the city kept glittering. The day kept moving. Their marriage, against all available evidence, remained intact.
And in the sink, beneath torn legal documents and grounds from this morning’s coffee, water ran warm and ordinary over everything they had almost thrown away.