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It’s five in the morning and Shane can’t sleep.
He’s tried everything: tried lying still, tried not lying still, tried counting backwards from one hundred, tried breathing in fours, tried unclenching his jaw, tried looking around the room and naming whatever things would hold still long enough. Window. Chair. Lamp. Glass. The shirt over the back of the couch that isn’t Ilya’s, not really, not anymore, not after laundry machines and conditioner and Shane’s stupid habit of pressing fabric to his face until Ilya’s smell is accidentally replaced with his own.
Eventually, he gives up and goes to the window. Ottawa’s at the peak of autumn, which is to say, very cold and deserted and pretty indifferent to him standing here in it—even if it’s just for a mere few days over the Thanksgiving holidays. The city looks the same at five in the morning as it does at one, or six, he thinks. It doesn’t shift like Montreal, or Boston, or other cities with nighttime personalities do. Ottawa at five in the morning is just Ottawa. Maybe quieter, definitely grayer, but the river still moves and still waits and still courses.
He thinks about Ilya, which isn’t new—he’s thought about Ilya his whole life. During games, during press conferences, during flights, during warm-ups while he was supposed to be listening to the anthem and was instead looking towards Boston’s blue line, during his father’s funeral back in 2017, which Shane didn’t attend because Shane couldn’t attend, obviously; because he and Ilya were, at that point, everything they were at that point, and it’s not like he could’ve just explained that to anyone who might ask why Montreal’s star center was standing graveside for his greatest rival’s dead father a whole continent away.
Nobody knew to ask, either way. Nobody would’ve even thought to ask.
That was the arrangement they had back then, after all. Grief in separate rooms, joy in separate cities, every single emotion in separate fucking rooms except love, which was always kept within professional boundaries and careful choreography and always at least five feet away from where the closest camera was. So, yeah—all they were left with were their thoughts, so Shane would score a goal and think of Ilya, and Ilya would fight on the ice and think of Shane, probably, and Shane would win and think of Ilya, and Ilya would lose—because he was on the fucking Centaurs, and all he did was lose—and think of Shane, which Shane only knew because Ilya made sure to remind him that Shane was at the center of every ugly thought he’d had during that horrible first season as often as he could. They were ridiculous like that, though Shane doesn’t really think ridiculous is the word he would’ve used back when they were younger, when everything had felt oh too serious to survive even just being named.
Now, everything has a name, and none of the names help, necessarily. Husband least of all, sometimes.
Shane wonders if by now he’s had more conversations with the Ilya inside his own head than he ever had out loud with the real one. Ilya's the same, probably—awake in this Ottawa apartment that he never quite managed to make feel like his, staring at the ceiling in the same bed Shane isn’t sleeping in just now, having some furious argument with imaginary Shane about fear or the Centaurs or the closet or whatever it was they fought about back then. Ilya saying things to an imaginary Shane he’d never say out loud to the real one, because the imaginary Shane couldn’t flinch, couldn’t misunderstand, couldn’t ask questions one degree too gentle or one degree too crude and make him feel cornered by either tenderness or pressure.
The real Shane could do all that. The real Shane had done all that. The real Shane had stood in a bathroom doorway with his heart trying to climb out of his throat and Ilya by the sink, pills flushed, toilet still running, saying, I didn’t, I didn’t take anything, I dropped everything in the toilet, Shane, I—
He closes his eyes, breathes through his nose.
He's alive. He's safe. He's okay. He's getting better.
The clinic, Shane makes himself call it. Not the hospital, even though that’s really what it is, and not rehab, because that’s not exactly right either, and certainly not the place, which is what he keeps calling it in his head, because apparently his mind thinks euphemisms are a new kind of mercy. A treatment center. A wellness facility. Five weeks, maybe six. Two months to get better, to rest, to be supervised, to be evaluated, to have people with degrees and badges do whatever Shane failed to do.
Somewhere safe, his mother had called it.
Outside, Ottawa holds its breath, and Shane thinks it's not a city Ilya would've ever chosen. Except he did—for Shane, no less. Ilya has an apartment here that doesn't mean all that much to him, has teammates he likes, and a coach who respects him, and a city that's learned to like him. He has a practice rink, and a favorite gym, and a coffee place around the corner where they already know his order from memory by now. He has a parking spot, a mail key, a couch he complains about constantly and never replaces. He has a life here, or a version of one he can stand—because, back in 2021, Montreal suddenly being close enough outweighed whatever cons there might've been to Ottawa.
That was the whole miracle, wasn’t it? Distance made manageable, a highway, a dark drive, a calendar cleared with enough lying. Shane, who could be reached in two hours by car instead of a whole flight and a whole border crossing and a whole MLH rivalry away. Shane, who Ilya couldn’t call his. Shane, who the world believed he hated. And Ilya stayed, anyway—in a city he wouldn’t have chosen himself, on a team that was anything butcompetitive enough to justify the move. He stayed, just so he could be within driving distance of Shane’s life. Stayed in this furnished apartment and this foreign city, through the loneliness of having made a choice nobody else understood and which he wasn’t allowed to explain. Stayed close enough that Shane could sometimes—not nearly enough times, really—finish practice, get in the car, drive through two hours of dark and snow and arrive at Ilya’s house with his hands still cold from the steering wheel. Stayed so he could open the door and see Shane on the other side of it.
And Ilya still ended up alone in Ottawa.
Well, not alone, alone. Shane knows the distinction matters. He knows his therapist would make him say it out loud if he was sitting in her office instead of standing barefoot by Ilya’s window at five in the morning. Ilya hadn’t been abandoned. He was an adult man, in his own apartment, in a city where he had friends and a therapist and a husband who called him twice a day and meant to come sooner, meant to stay longer, meant to notice the bad thoughts before the bad thoughts became the horribly worse thoughts.
Shane thought he’d known how to read Ilya like an open book. Thought he knew every microscopic shift of mouth and shoulder and jaw that meant Ilya was angry, or tired, or jealous, or trying not to laugh; every version of, I’m fine, and, I’m okay, and, really, Shane, I promise. A whole secret lexicon out of what Ilya refused to say. Except, apparently, he could become fluent in all shifts of mouth and shoulder and jaw and still miss the sound of his husband wanting to die.
Morning pales at the edges of the glass. Shane doesn’t remember deciding to run—just the shoes, and the coat, and the keys, and the elevator too bright, and the lobby empty except for him, and then running along the canal, gray beside him.
Ilya didn’t tell him about his depression for a long time. It was the wrong decision, of course, but Shane thinks he understands it, looking back. Maybe Ilya knew it was the wrong decision even while he was making it, but made it anyway because he thought Shane already had enough to carry, or because Ilya had spent his whole life pretending he didn’t need help from those around him, or maybe because the loneliness of being depressed inside a secret relationship while in a foreign city he’d chosen for someone who didn’t know he was struggling was so fucking perfect in its irony, he didn’t know where to start explaining it. And Shane had let him.
That's the nice way of putting it, anyway, the version he can live with on the good days. He never pushed where Ilya didn’t want to be pushed, never pried doors open, never barged his way into conversations Ilya was clearly avoiding. He’d thought, at the time, that this was patience, respect, mercy. I’m here, he thought he’d been saying, over and over again, in the only way he knew how. I’m here when you’re ready. I’m here when you need me. I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.
There were things Ilya never said to anyone, and maybe he kept expecting Shane to ask, but Shane didn’t. Shane hadn’t. He’d just… left the door open. Every time, without comment. And maybe Ilya stood in the doorway for years on end, waiting for Shane to make the leap, and he never had.
He never had.
It hurts to think about now: two people trying so hard not to hurt each other they end up building an entire life around the bruise. Shane giving space because he thought space was love. Ilya taking space because he thought space was the only thing that could protect their marriage. Both of them standing on either side of the same silence, blissful and unaware.
Shane looks back now and all he sees is himself standing outside Ilya’s every locked room, hand raised and useless, telling himself, not yet, not now, not like this, and Ilya somewhere on the other side of it, waiting or not waiting, wanting to be asked or terrified that he would be. There’s no simple math for that, no replay that gives him the right angle, no version where Shane knows how hard to knock without breaking down the walls and cracking the floor. No version where he knows what the fuck he’s even doing.
The city is still asleep while breaths cloud in front of him, legs finding their old rhythm. The water hasn’t yet lightened. The night hasn’t yet become day. Ottawa opens itself up around him: bridge, path, streetlight, parked cars, bare trees, a blink of orange sunrise peeking through government buildings.
Shane thinks of the Irina Foundation—because Ottawa does that too, apparently, gives him one thought and then pulls another from underneath it like a wire. Thinks of Ilya at that first press conference, answering questions about his mother in his second language with his shoulders squared, while Shane stood beside him and tried to be just the right amount of supportive. Not too much, not too little. Hand not quite at Ilya’s back. Eyes not too soft, smile not too intimate. Close enough to be there, but always far enough to be explained.
How absurd is it that they built a whole infrastructure just to be allowed in the same room, just so they could use it as a cover? That they named it after Ilya’s dead mother even, just so no one would look too closely and doubt whether it was real? It sounds so fucking ridiculous it makes him want to laugh, now.
Shane wonders how Irina would react, hearing it. Irina, who he knows almost entirely through Ilya’s unreliable archive: stories told too quickly, photographs with worn corners, recipes Ilya claimed to remember and then clearly improvised, a few Russian phrases Shane never pronounced correctly.
Would she have hated him for it? Would she have understood it? Would she have laughed at it? He hopes it’s the latter. He hopes she would’ve found it funny, that enormously inconvenient thing her son had done to himself. Ilya once told him she laughed warmly at human folly, like she knew people couldn’t help making their lives harder than they needed to be.
Shane has wanted, absurdly and for years, to hear that laugh directed at him. Has wanted a dead woman he never met to know the joke at the center of him: that for all his discipline, all his restraint, all the years of being praised for control, he’d loved her son with helpless stupidity like just about anyone else.
She would have loved you, he hears Ilya say, the words surfacing with terrible clarity. Like I love you.
Shane had believed him then. Ilya was alive—God, Ilya is alive—and love was still new enough between them to make impossible things seem possible, and the future had felt so real, so near, something they were already moving towards. Believing had been easy then, or, if not easy, easier. There’d been Ilya’s hand on his wrist, Ilya’s mouth near his ear, Ilya’s certainty assuring him. Love itself was all the evidence he needed, and Shane, by being loved by Ilya, had already been acquitted in Irina’s eyes, surely.
Now, though, Shane’s less sure.
He doesn’t think Ilya lied, necessarily. Ilya lies about plenty of things, stupid things, useful things—whether he has eaten, whether he's tired, whether a bruise still hurts when Shane’s hand finds it in the sheets, whether he has slept, whether he has taken his medication, whether he's fine—but rarely about love when he's brave enough to name it. Shane knows that. He knows the sound Ilya’s voice makes around the truth. But fear has made him mean about himself, meaner than Ilya ever was. Suspicious, too, of every generous verdict, every hollow kindness, every memory that tries to place a hand on his shoulder and tells him he was better than he knows he was.
Shane runs while the canal lies black beside him, and he thinks: maybe she wouldn’t have liked me. Maybe she would’ve looked at Shane and seen exactly what he fears there is to see—all that restraint, all that carefulness, all the ways he kept his hands clean at the cost of her son. Maybe there isn’t much to like in a man who loved her son with everything he had and still ended up with him hospitalized, begging strangers to help him get better.
He hates the thought as soon as it arrives, because it sounds self-pitying, and his therapist would probably look at him with that head-tilt that makes Shane want to crawl out of his own skin, and his mom would probably say his name in a voice that would undo him completely. But—still. There’s not much to love in someone who can make a whole life out of almost. Almost enough courage, almost enough patience, almost enough insistence, almost enough knocking on locked doors before assuming space is kindness and kindness is proof and proof is love.
Who knows. Maybe Ilya would've been better off if he’d never met Shane. Maybe he would've been better off if Saskatchewan hadn’t been Saskatchewan, and 2008 hadn’t been 2008, and hockey hadn’t been hockey. Maybe Ilya would’ve gone somewhere else, loved someone else, been someone else. Chosen another city, another team, another life with fewer locked doors and less careful distance.
Maybe there’s a universe in which Ilya never ends up on a bathroom floor because Shane isn’t there to leave him all alone for years in fucking Ottawa.
His therapist would tell him to stop there. She would tell him to breathe, and tell him he's safe, and tell him Ilya's getting better, and she'd notice the panic rising in his shoulders, and she'd ask him to name five things you can see and four things you can touch and three things you can hear and all the techniques a distant trained part of Shane recognizes.
Five things he can see?
The bathroom.
The bathroom.
The bathroom.
The bathroom.
Ilya in the fucking bathroom.
“Fuck,” he breathes out, the word coming out thin. He runs harder, breath tearing in his chest.
The thought should comfort him, shouldn’t it? Ilya elsewhere, Ilya happier, Ilya untouched by the whole long disaster of Shane Hollander. It should be a simple subtraction—take Shane out, leave Ilya whole—except Shane can never make it stay that simple. The moment he tries to picture his life without Ilya, the world starts cheating: details rearrange themselves, roads bend, rooms fill. Another city becomes another rink. Another home becomes another hotel lobby, another hotel hallway, another hotel room. Some stupid, random coincidence opens a door, and there Ilya is again, already turning towards him.
But there is, of course, a version of Shane’s life in which he never met Ilya. Of course there is. He’s thought about this version often throughout his life: casually, back when he and Ilya were just hooking up; existentially, after they got married; despondently, ever since Ilya’s attempt-not-attempt-who-the-hell-knows. More than he should, probably, though he’s not sure what the right amount of more or less is, these days. It’s not hard to imagine: a different draft, a different trade, one decision made differently by someone in an office somewhere who didn’t know and couldn’t have known what they were setting in motion.
In that version, Shane’s still successful. Still, probably, happy, like he was happy before, which was real, and steady, and good, but had a ceiling he couldn’t see until he’d cleared it.
He tries not to think about that version for long. There’s no point. It feels indecent, almost, to grieve a life that never happened when the one he has is still here, still happening, even if it feels somewhat dismantled around him. But sometimes, when memory turns cruel and gives him Ilya asleep next to him instead of away at the clinic, Ilya across the ice instead of some fenced-in garden, counting fucking butterflies or whatever it is they’re doing over there, Ilya on the other end of the line, the phone ringing long enough for Shane’s chest to tighten before Ilya’s voice finally came through, he feels the weight of it again, the sheer statistical improbability of them. Two people, two careers, two countries, two continents, two bodies moving through the world with all the blind force of separate cannonballs, and somehow still ending up here. A thousand moments that had to go exactly as they went, a thousand anonymous hands opening doors neither of them knew they were walking through.
Shane’s not a superstitious man, has never believed in fate. But Ilya, well—Ilya he could never really explain. Ilya arrived and rewrote the whole damn equation, and Shane’s been trying to do the math ever since, and still, it never comes out to anything except… lucky. Impossibly, undeservedly, whole-heartedly lucky.
Which is the worst of it, maybe. That he can know how it goes—how close it can come to ending—and still not wish it gone.
He’d been afraid of losing Ilya before, of course. Late at night, most often, with Ilya sound asleep next to him, when ordinary happiness felt so complete it’d start to scare him a little. Shane would look at him—the loose sprawl, his hair flattened on one side, his mouth gone soft—and understand that this, too, existed within time. Maybe they’d get years. Maybe they’d get decades. Maybe they’d get enough time to become one of those couples other people found annoying or unbearable, enough summers and grocery lists and bad movies and arguments over nothing, enough mornings where Ilya was exactly how Shane expected him to be—sprawled loose on the bed, the mouth soft, the hair flattened on that one side—until he’d catch Shane smiling and tell him to fuck off. Maybe they’d get old. Maybe they wouldn’t. The point is, there were no guarantees. There was just Ilya asleep beside him, and Shane silently panicking over how much of his life had already re-arranged itself around the sound of his breathing, and the fact that, someday, there’d have to be a final kiss, a final fight, a final ridiculous joke, a final morning neither of them realized was holy because it was just another morning. Everything had to end, one day, right?
And still. Even knowing now. Even with the knowledge sitting inside him like a second skeleton. Even with the fear spreading endlessly in every direction, even with the panic, even with the days and weeks and summers and years Shane came this close to having to go on living without him. Even with the cruelty of hindsight laid out before him, every missed sign glowing uselessly, like runway lights for a plane that’s already passed them by, Shane thinks: even so.
Even so.
He can’t really imagine any universe where he doesn’t find Ilya somehow. Maybe in that other life, Ilya’s still impossible and Shane’s still looking, or Shane’s impossible and Ilya’s the one looking, whoever finds the other first. A carpenter in some cold northern village. A king with blood on his sleeve. A magician with smoke on his hands. A tired analyst in Manhattan. An actor in a bad play, a man on a train, a boy at the wrong rink in the wrong city looking up at exactly the wrong second.
Shane thinks they would know. No evidence, no faith, no desire to defend it—but he thinks they would know, and they would meet, and they would ruin each other a little, and they would love each other anyway, time and time again, across whatever cruel machinery the world put between them. Whatever lives between them has survived distance and rivalry and fear and secrecy and the closet and their own worst instincts. It has survived so much more than it probably deserved to survive, honestly, given how badly they’ve managed it.
It's survived everything—except the very fact that being loved hasn't made Ilya any happier, apparently.
Shane had thought, stupidly maybe, that once Ilya was his husband, there would be some jurisdiction to it, some legal, moral, cosmic right to reach him in whatever dark room his mind had locked him inside and protect him, shield him, love him unconditionally. But there wasn’t. There was just the bathroom door, and the pills already gone, and Ilya near the sink, ashamed and too far away from him, even with Shane’s hands on his face. There was just Shane saying his name, saying it again, saying it again and again in a voice he’d never recognize again.
Ilya, Ilya, Ilya, he'd kept saying.
Four letters, two syllables. How do you even reduce a person like that into a single name? The incomprehensible largeness of him. The fury, the tenderness, the thousand and one facets that cab come out on just a single morning depending on the weather, what he’s eaten for breakfast, if he’s slept well, if he’s seen a dog on the way home. Ilya, who loves so intensely it seems to rupture him from the inside, like his body's never learned how to contain the sheer scale of pure feeling inside it. Ilya, who stands barefoot in their living room at two in the morning some nights, eating huge spoonfuls of peanut butter straight from the jar or ordering Shane to come out of their bedroom so they can watch Jurassic Park again, even though they’ve watched it a hundred times already, or just the weekend before. Ilya, who presses sleepy kisses against Shane’s throat without even realizing he's doing it, who cries at orchestral John Williams scores and hungry stray dogs and those stupid fucking videos of soldiers coming back home to their families on his phone, face twisting up in sheepish embarrassment every single time Shane catches him at it.
Ilya, who loves ugly things tenderly. Burnt toast. Broken people. Himself least of all.
How the hell is Shane meant to accept he came this close to having to go on living without him?
He keeps running, and the city starts to brighten around him.
Shane guesses he's been trying to think about Ilya fairly ever since he went away for treatment, but it's become its own kind of labor, somehow, and he’s managed to fail at that, even. He builds a domestic picture of him out of memory, piece by piece, and then immediately doesn't trust it. Too gentle, and he's lied, made excuses for his actions. Too cruel, and he’s betrayed him, punished him. Too sick, and he’s reduced him to an illness. Too happy, and he’s pretending like the problem never existed.
There are these odd moments here and there when he remembers Ilya laughing on the dock of the cottage, sunburned and beautiful, and Shane can almost believe nothing ugly ever managed to find them. There are other moments when he remembers the closed doors, the deflections, how Ilya can weaponize silence and exile Shane from his own house, and then the anger comes so fast it scares him.
Fear, he learns, is a dirty archivist with even dirtier hands. It touches everything, mislabels boxes, preserves the wrong things and lets the important ones rot. It places the beautiful next to the unbearable and refuses to tell him which one is truer. It drags ordinary days back under the light and makes Shane look again: Ilya sleeping late, Ilya sleeping bad, Ilya laughing too loud, Ilya not laughing at all. A plate left practically full, a text answered too quickly, a call picked up too late. Every harmless thing made suspicious, every suspicious thing made obvious. Whole years now lit up with significance he’d missed the first time, every hesitation made obvious by hindsight, every joke carrying a bruise beneath it, every ordinary morning suddenly ripe with meaning because it’d been ordinary and he hadn’t known to kneel before it.
Shane can remember the exact sound Ilya made whispering his name in bed, or some of the worst things Ilya ever said to him—maybe you will not leave, maybe you are too much of a coward for that—take your shit and get out, then, see if I run after you—maybe if you stop being so perfect all the time, I will not want you anymore—I think you want me to be sad, I think you need me to be like this, because if I’m not, then what the fuck are you doing here—you like that I need you, don’t you, you like it, because you love being the hero, you fucking love it—and still not know how to answer the simple question of whether Ilya’s truly happy with him or not. Whether Shane's making his life better or worse.
Memory doesn’t care about fairness. It keeps what it keeps. It turns his life into evidence and forces Shane to walk through it—husband, witness, suspect, obstacle—furious at what’s missing, furious at what remains. It hands him the same damn question every day, from a hundred different directions, and forces him to answer: what was love supposed to notice, and what is love supposed to forgive?
He’s alive. He’s alive. He’s alive.
Shane knows that. He knows. Ilya’s alive in a clinic forty-three minutes away by car, depending on traffic. Ilya’s alive with his phone taken away at night and his wedding ring in a small plastic plate beside his bed, because they don’t let him keep it on during certain exams, or maybe because his hands shake, or maybe because Shane’s started making up details when the real ones aren’t available and then punishing himself for believing them. Ilya’s alive and probably awake, or asleep, or pretending to be asleep, or staring at the ceiling and conducting some new version of those furious arguments Shane thinks he has with an imaginary version of him.
He can picture it too easily, since apparently this is where he keeps leaving Ilya: in rooms that aren’t his, with a version of Shane he can safely hate and freely blame, arguing about whether this was necessary, whether Shane had betrayed him, whether their marriage could withstand a bag packed, a consent form signed, a visiting schedule arranged, whether he’d hate Shane for making the choice, whether he could forgive him for it.
Shane doesn’t know. He only knows that keeping Ilya alive mattered more than being forgiven, and that he loved him enough to risk being hated for it.
Three weeks, he thinks. Three weeks and he’ll be home again.
The path curves. When he turns back, the sun is up and ruining the horizon. A church bell rings: seven a.m. sharp. Somewhere, a bus slows near a stop. Elsewhere, a cyclist glides past. Ordinary life, continuing like normal. Shane slows near the bridge with hands on his hips, head bowed, panting in ragged bursts.
His phone buzzes in his pocket.
For one second, his mind gives him everything at once: the clinic, his mom calling him in May because Ilya wasn’t answering the phone, a stranger's voice about to say, am I speaking with Shane Hollander? Something has happened with your husband, and—and—some new catastrophe arriving again, and he—God, he's not prepared for it, he's really fucking not, he's—
But it’s Ilya.
Ilya: good morning
Ilya: I slept okay :) what about you?
Ilya: miss you
Shane stares at it, then breathes out so hard his knees buckle.
He starts to type slept fine immediately, out of habit, then deletes it. They’ve both done enough damage with small, merciful lies.
His thumb hovers over the screen. Finally, he sends:
good morning, baby
rough night. didn’t sleep much
went for a run
I miss you too
I’m coming by today! 2pm, don't forget
His phone buzzes again a few seconds later.
Ilya: of course
Ilya: always running lol
Ilya: can’t wait to see you ❤️
Ilya: nurse Pattie says hello, by the way
Shane reads it once. Then again.
We’re okay, he thinks, desperately. We’re okay.
He thinks of Irina again. The woman who gave Ilya his first joy and his first grief. A face reconstructed through photographs and longing, a laugh Shane never heard and still hopes, absurdly, it might’ve made room for him. That unbearable, unimaginable specter, silently haunting every corner of every room they’d once stood in. The face of the ghost story of Ilya’s life.
He hopes she would’ve liked him.
He hopes she would’ve seen through the composure and the captain’s posture and the careful management of everything, how Ilya said she saw through things. He hopes she would’ve understood that he wasn’t enough, not even close, and liked him anyway. That he’s loved Ilya badly sometimes, and carefully, and silently, and he should’ve been braver sooner, should’ve made noise louder, should’ve noticed the quiet earlier, but he’s loved him wholly. God, he’s loved him wholly. With every stupid, little, disciplined and insufficient piece of himself.
He hopes she would’ve found the place where Shane is just a person, uncertain and trying and so in love with her son it makes him less impressive and more himself, standing in the cold city Ilya once chose for him, because love, for all its grandeur, is sometimes just that—a lease signed, a highway learned, a room endured, a winter survived, a life rearranged around the hope of being close enough.
He hopes, he hopes, he hopes.
He hopes she would’ve liked him very, very much.