Chapter Text
Shane Hollander was buried the week before his birthday.
The day itself felt like an insult.
That was Yuna’s first coherent thought, and it remained with her stubbornly, returning again and again. The morning had dawned with that particular, impossible clarity that belonged to late spring, and the sky was a brilliant, merciless blue. The light lay cleanly over everything. The air smelled faintly of damp earth and new grass.
The beauty of it all felt not merely inappropriate but obscene to her.
It should have rained. It should have been grey, or bitter, or raw with sleet, some weather equal to the violence she feels standing there unmoored. There should have been enough clouds to lower the world. There should have been a sky that understood.
Her hands were clasped so tightly in front of her that the bones of her fingers throbbed. She had not realised she was doing it until some distant part of her noticed that her nails were pressing crescents into the flesh of her palms even through the lining of her gloves. But loosening her grip felt dangerous. It seemed to her, in the irrational logic of bereavement, that if she let her hands drift apart, if she allowed even that much softness, the rest of her body might follow. Her shoulders would fold. Her knees would give. Her mouth would open, and some sound would come out of her that she would never be able to take back.
She heard the celebrant speaking and knew, in an abstract way, that he was doing well. He had a voice suited to funerals, low and measured and neither too solemn nor too warm. He spoke of leadership and discipline and public generosity. He spoke of legacy. He spoke of Shane’s work with children, his integrity, the admiration in which he had been held by teammates, opponents, staff, and supporters. He spoke of excellence in the way people always did around Shane, as though excellence had been the defining feature of his life rather than merely the one most legible to strangers.
Yuna let the words pass over her.
She did not have room for them.
There were not many people here, and that too felt a different kind of wrong, but she knew her son. No spectacle. No public mourning in a stadium. No endless line of dignitaries and executives and former players who had shaken his hand twice and believed this constituted intimacy. No cameras. No performance of grief.
It still broke her heart. The world had loved Shane, or said it had. It had filled arenas for him, sung his name, bought shirts with his number on the back, mythologised his instincts, his patience and his impossible reading of the game he loved. They had called him a natural because that was easier than recognising the strain, easier than understanding the hours of thought and notation and repetition that lay beneath the illusion of grace. It had made him into something usable, something bright and uncomplicated, the captain, the perfect Canadian son, polite in interviews, incapable of pettiness, great without seeming to labour for greatness.
The world adored that version of him. It had not known the rest.
It had not known that bright supermarket aisles could leave him drained and brittle if he had already had too much noise that day. It had not known how much effort it took for him to sit through a loud dinner in a crowded restaurant and emerge still smiling. It had not known how carefully he arranged himself in rooms, how he always took the end seat if he could, how he preferred lamps to ceiling lights, how the wrong fabric at the back of his neck could make him distracted and irritable for hours. It had not known him as a boy who could not bear the seam in his sock turning under his toes. It had not known the books on hockey systems and transition structures and neutral zone traps stacked by his bed, the margins thick with his impossible, angled scrawl. It had not known the private cost of being, always, the calmest person in the room.
The people here knew more than that.
Troy stood with his shoulders squared in that way men sometimes adopt when they are close to breaking and believe posture might save them. His jaw was set too hard. The muscle in his cheek jumped once, then again. Beside him stood Harris, close enough that Yuna noticed the shape of the space between them before she consciously registered why. Not touching, not in any overt way, but angled towards one another all the same. Harris’s hand shifted once at his side as if some instinct had urged him to reach out, and then he restrained himself, perhaps because of the solemnity of the setting, perhaps because Troy would not have survived kindness publicly just then.
Cliff stood a little behind Troy and Harris, older than when she had first met him but still carrying himself with the unconscious balance of a man who had spent most of his life on skates. Age had settled into his face without softening it. There were new lines at the corners of his mouth, silver threaded through the dark at his temples, and something in him that looked permanently altered by the accumulation of losses other people had not witnessed. Cliff had seen more than most. He had been one of the first people in Boston to realise that the much-discussed girl in Montreal had never existed. He had not confronted Ilya about it, at least not in any way Ilya would ever confess to, but he had seen. Yuna remembered the first time she realised that Cliff knew. It had been in the way he looked at Shane and Ilya across a room years later, with resignation and affection and not the slightest trace of surprise.
Rose stood off to one side, dark glasses pushed up onto her head, her face bare and younger for the absence of careful public polish. She had always been beautiful, but there was nothing glossy about her now. Grief had stripped her to essentials. Yuna had liked her from the beginning, though not in the simple way she had once imagined she might like the woman her son brought home. Rose had been kind to Shane at a moment when kindness mattered more than romance. She had understood things about him before he understood them about himself, and she had not punished him for that. It was difficult not to love someone for being gentle with your child when he was afraid.
Hayden stood with Jackie and their children. Hayden’s expression was wrecked in a particular lost way, as though he did not know what grief was meant to look like on his own face and had therefore settled for looking stunned by the continued existence of the world. He had been one of the first to tease Shane about Boston Lily, long before any of them had understood the shape of the lie they were participating in. Yuna could still hear him saying it in memory, broad grin, waggle of eyebrows, all easy nonsense. As if the thing lighting up Shane’s face whenever the name on his phone appeared was ordinary flirtation rather than something far more dangerous.
There were others, too. Former staff. Friends from the foundation. A retired trainer whose name escaped her even though she recognised the slope of his shoulders and the care with which he held his cap in both hands. She saw them and did not. Grief had narrowed the world to a series of unbearable points. Everything beyond them blurred.
And Ilya.
She had known where he was from the moment she stepped onto the grass. Before she had consciously searched, before she had allowed herself even the smallest turn of the head, she had felt him there, the way one feels a change in weather, a pressure before a storm. Something fixed to her left.
She could not bear to look at him. Not yet. Because if she did, if she allowed herself even that small concession, she did not think she would remain standing.
So she kept her eyes forward, fixed on the open ground, and refused, for as long as she could, to meet the full weight of where he was because she knew it would break her.
Yuna watched the polished wood descend and thought, with the detached absurdity grief sometimes imposes, that it looked too small to hold all that Shane had been. Not physically, of course. But in every other sense. He had contained so much. Such discipline. Such gentleness. Such ferocious, secret longing. Such love. The body could fit anywhere in the end. It was the rest of him that made the box seem inadequate.
Then came the first handful of earth.
The sound of it striking the lid was soft enough that no one else seemed to react, yet to Yuna it was the loudest thing she had ever heard. It was not dramatic. Not theatrical. Just a dull, granular tapping.
She felt David’s arm tighten across her shoulders. David had been her steadiness for so long. A man who made her laugh in her twenties, who still holds such love and affection in his eyes for her even to this day. He was the man who made room for panic without becoming infected by it, who could sit in hospital corridors and rinkside bleachers and late-night kitchens and somehow reduce catastrophe to something survivable.
They had wanted more children once. There had been pregnancies after Shane, and then there had been none. There was blood and hospital rooms, and doctors whose faces arranged themselves into sympathy before they spoke. Yuna carried those losses quietly. She did not know how not to. There are griefs that settle not in the centre of marriage but in its folds, small enough to live with and large enough never to disappear. David mourned too, though differently. They learned, eventually, to stop waiting for the family they had imagined and to attend to the one they had. Grief folded carefully away so that Shane would grow up under love rather than under lack.
Only one. Until, somehow, they had ended up with two. Much later, when Ilya began appearing in their lives with his sharp tongue, watchful eyes and impossible appetites, Yuna would feel, with something very like astonishment, that the heart had made room after all.
That love, denied one shape, had simply waited for another.
Because that was the truth of it. It had taken her time to admit it, even to herself. Somewhere in those years, without ceremony and without anyone deciding it aloud, he had become her son too. Not by blood. Not by law, not then. But by accumulation. By the storing-up of shared holidays and late-night conversations and exasperated affection and mutual worry and the particular pride one feels when someone wounded begins, at last, to trust the house they are in.
Her vision blurred for a moment through a memory overlaid with the present, so that behind the coffin and the open grave, she could see Shane at five years old, distraught over the sound of a public hand dryer, lower lip trembling with indignation and genuine distress while David knelt in front of him, broad hands gentle. She saw Shane at twelve, all elbows and concentration, skating circles around boys larger than him because he could already read space better than they could inhabit it. She saw him at seventeen, tightly held and beautiful in that wary, unfinished way boys sometimes are just before the world notices them.
No mother should outlive her children.
The thought returned, not dramatic, simply true.
She opened her eyes that she had not realised she had closed, and the grave remained where it had always been, but so did the sun. So did the wind. So did the impossible fact that her son was now being returned to the earth.
And still she did not turn to look at Ilya.