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The nursery smelled like fresh paint, the soft gray-blue Shane had picked out three weeks ago, back when picking out paint had felt like the biggest decision of his life. Now he stood in the doorway in one of Ilya's old t-shirts stretched tight over his belly, one hand resting where their son should have been turning lazy circles.
"You okay?" Ilya asked, coming up behind him with two mugs—coffee for himself, the ginger tea Shane had been living on for weeks.
"Yeah. Just thinking." Shane took the mug but didn't drink. "He hasn't really moved since yesterday morning."
Ilya's eyes flicked down, that quick reflexive check Shane had caught him doing more and more these past few weeks. "Probably just having a lazy day. They do that."
"I know." Shane pressed his palm flatter, willing for the small, stubborn flutter he'd gotten so used to. Nothing. "I know, I just—I'll feel better once we're at the appointment."
From down the hall came the thunder of small feet—Masha, six and never once in her life having entered a room at a walk, with Mila toddling behind her clutching a stuffed rabbit by one ear.
"Is it baby brother day?" Masha demanded, skidding to a stop against Ilya's leg.
"Yes, Papa and Daddy will see Baby Brother today and bring home a new picture," Ilya confirmed, scooping her up despite his bad back, if only to buy himself a second to glance at Shane over her head. He's fine, the look said. You're fine.
Shane wanted, badly, to believe it.
The drive to the clinic was quieter than usual. Masha and Mila weren’t buckled into the back, Shane's mother having met them at the house to take the girls for the day. It was a small mercy, not having to wrangle a toddler and a six-year-old through a doctor’s appointment like this. Especially with how nervous and concerned Shane was. Now the car held just the two of them, and the radio Ilya had turned down low without really thinking about it.
Shane had one hand on his belly the whole way, the other resting on the door, watching the houses slide by. He kept very still, the way he did when he was concentrating on something only he could feel.
"Anything?" Ilya asked at a red light, trying to keep his voice light.
"A little." It wasn't quite a lie. There'd been something—a small shift, maybe, or maybe just Shane wanting there to be one badly enough that his body obliged. "He's probably just squished up in there. Running out of room."
"That's what I said." Ilya reached over and laced his fingers through Shane's free hand, giving it a squeeze. "Twenty-four weeks. We get to see him today."
Shane managed a smile at that. He loved the anatomy scan more than he'd expected to—the grainy gray world of it, the impossible small ribs and the flutter of a heart on the screen, Ilya always leaning so far forward in his chair that the tech had to gently ask him to sit back so she could see the monitor.
The waiting room, when they got there, was full in the particular way OB waiting rooms always were, a small ecosystem of bellies in every stage, partners thumbing through phones, a toddler stacking waiting-room blocks in the corner while her very pregnant mother dozed sitting up. Shane signed in at the desk and they took two chairs near the window.
He was quiet, turning his phone over and over in his hands without looking at it.
"Hey." Ilya bumped his knee against Shane's. "He's fine. You know how this goes. They'll do the scan, we'll see him kicking around like always, and you'll have spent two hours worrying for nothing."
"I know." Shane let out a breath, leaned his head briefly against Ilya's shoulder. "I just want to see him move."
"You will."
A nurse appeared in the doorway with a tablet. "Shane Hollander?"
He stood, and Ilya stood with him, and they followed her back down the hall. A few steps into their journey, Ilya grabbed his hand and held tight. Shane appreciated how the touch kept him grounded when his racing thoughts left him feeling like he was seconds from floating away. He was trying not to catastrophize but it was so hard not to when both of his other pregnancies had gone splendidly with no cause for concern. Both Masha and Mila had moved consistently and constantly from the moment they had enough growth to be felt. Up until yesterday their boy had seemed to be the same. And now, nothing.
Shane was so lost in his worries that he didn’t even register arriving at the examination room. Ilya gently rubbed his back and Shane shook his head, coming to attention. He forced a smile toward his husband as he climbed up onto the table, the paper crinkling below him. He clasped his hands together and started to wring his fingers as the nurse took his vitals and then left them alone.
“Shane, lyubimyy. Everything is fine. You’ll see. He’s just sleeping, being lazy. Like his papa.” Ilya’s quip was a call back to an old flippant response of his that stemmed from his father. Shane would normally argue with Ilya about the use of that word in relation to himself, but today he couldn’t.
A knock sounded on the door and Shane took a deep breath. Now was the time for the truth. His doctor, Dr. Cartwright smiled as she came into the room and washed her hands. She had seen Shane through all his pregnancies so far. He trusted her more than any other doctor he’d ever come in contact with. She always knew how to talk him down from his panic spirals.
“How are we doing today, guys?” She turned to face them both and Shane saw it the moment she registered his concern. Her eyes softened and her smile faltered.
“Shane is worried that the baby hasn’t moved since yesterday. I told him it was probably nothing, but I think seeing will help.” Ilya spoke up before Shane could.
Shane was secretly glad Ilya had spoken because he was certain he would start to cry if he spoke at all. Dr. Cartwright gave him a sympathetic smile and gently squeezed his shoulder.
“Let’s take a look. You are right to be concerned. Any changes in baby should always be looked at properly.”
As she moved about the room getting the ultrasound machine set up, Shane leaned back and moved his clothes to get prepared. He took a deep breath and stared at the ceiling, trying his best not to start crying. The ceiling tiles were decent sized and perfectly square. While he waited, Shane attempted to calm his nerves by counting them. He listened in as Ilya and Dr. Cartwright made small talk.
“Masha is so excited to have a baby brother coming. She loves Mila, but I think a baby is more exciting to her. She loves her dolls so to her this baby is just another doll.” Ilya chuckled.
“That’s great. It shows that Masha will likely react well to the changes in the family once he arrives. What about Mila?” Dr. Cartwright squeezed some gel onto Shane’s abdomen.
“She is hesitant. She’s gotten clingier to me the more Shane’s belly grows. She’s always been our quieter child though,” Ilya shrugged with a soft smile. He leaned over and kissed the top of Shane’s head.
“Let’s take a look, shall we?” Dr. Cartwright turned all business, but left a softness in her tone that Shane had always liked.
Shane turned to Ilya briefly and they intertwined their hands together. Normally, an ultrasound would immediately become a ‘and there he is’ or ‘he’s growing on schedule’ with a quick turn of the monitor toward Shane and Ilya. Today, that didn’t happen. Instead, Dr. Cartwright’s face got longer and longer the more she pressed buttons and moved the wand.
“So sorry, just one second. I want to get a second pair of eyes,” Dr. Cartwright said suddenly before standing up and vacating the room.
Before Shane even had time to spiral even further, Dr. Cartwright returned with the other doctor at the practice, Dr. Santos. He was an older, more severe looking man. He didn’t say anything to Shane or Ilya as he started to go through the same motions that Dr. Cartwright had done before. Then, he gave a stiff nod, handed the wand to Dr. Cartwright, and left the room.
“Shane. Why don’t you sit up for me,” Dr. Cartwright pushed the ultrasound machine back and crossed the room to turn the lights back to full brightness.
Shane knew what she was going to say even before she said it. He could feel it in the air. The way she hadn’t let them see the image on the screen. The way she had asked Dr. Santos to come in and confirm. The way she had gone silent and her face had gotten stiff. Shane’s eyes welled up with the tears he’d been staving off up to this point.
“I am so sorry, guys. We couldn’t find a heartbeat this time.”
Shane sniffed and cleared his throat. He couldn’t fall apart. There wasn’t time for that. He swiped at his eyes and removed any evidence of tears from his face. Ilya’s hand squeezed his, reminding Shane that their fingers were still interlocked. Shane couldn’t look at his husband or else his very fragile resolve would completely crumble.
“So,” Shane took a deep breath. Hollander business mode in place, “What comes next?”
“Shane, moy lyubimyy.” Ilya’s voice croaked beside him, clearly distraught. “Is okay to be upset.”
Dr. Cartwright looked between Shane and Ilya before she spoke, “We will want to induce labor so that you can deliver before it causes further harm to your body.”
Shane nodded, not speaking because if he did he might crumble. His resolve was already fumbling despite all his efforts to lock the emotions up tight into a box in his mind.
“When,” Ilya finally asked, his voice barely above a whisper. His body having shifted even closer to Shane, eliminating any empty space between them.
“Today, if at all possible. I think that is best all around,” Dr. Cartwright leaned forward and placed her hand on Shane’s knee. “Shane, if you want some more time we can push it to tomorrow. Whatever you need.”
Shane finally looked at her, “Today is fine.” His words felt hollow, even to himself. “Ilya and I can go to the hospital now if that’s what is best.”
Shane then got up and started to move as if to leave. Ilya and Dr. Cartwright exchanged a quick look before Shane turned at the door, waiting for Ilya to follow him.
“Shane,” Ilya started to speak, but Shane shook his head and cut him off.
“I’m fine, Ilya. Let’s just do this. Be done with it.”
The hospital room was too bright. Shane lay back against the pillows, gown thin and scratchy, the IV taped to the back of his hand pinching every time he moved his fingers. Ilya hadn't let go of his other hand since they'd checked in, not for the paperwork, not for the nurse threading the line, not for anything.
"You can talk to me, you know," Ilya said quietly, when the nurse had stepped out. "You don't have to be Hollander business mode with me."
"I'm not." Shane stared at the ceiling tile directly above him, a small water stain shaped like nothing in particular. "I'm just getting through it."
"Shane…"
"I'm fine, Ilya." The words came out smooth, practiced, the same three words he'd been handing out all day like business cards. He squeezed Ilya's hand, an offering in place of anything truer. "Really. Let's just focus on getting through this."
Ilya searched his face for a long moment, clearly unconvinced, but he didn't push. He never knew how, not when Shane got like this—polished and distant and utterly closed, a door shut so quietly you'd almost miss the click.
Inside, Shane was doing math he couldn't stop doing. Yesterday morning, the stillness he'd noticed and decided not to mention until that night. The hours between I should probably call someone and Ilya says he's probably just sleeping, it's fine. He turned it over and over, fitting himself for the blame like it was a coat he already knew belonged to him, and said none of it out loud. There wasn't a version of this where saying it made it true, only a version where saying it made it real for Ilya too, and Shane wasn't going to do that to him. Not today.
So he breathed through the next contraction, and the next, and let Ilya wipe his forehead and hold the cup with the bendy straw to his lips, and said I'm okay so many times it stopped meaning anything at all.
The induction took most of the day. Shane labored in a strange, muted quiet—no panicked rush, no countdown of contractions getting closer together with the giddy terror of we're having a baby right now. Just the slow mechanical climb of medication, the nurses moving softly, speaking in the gentle, careful voices people use around the newly grieving.
When it came time, it came quietly. There was no cry to fill the room, only the doctor's low voice and the particular silence that followed it—a silence Shane knew he would carry for the rest of his life.
They let him hold his son. Tiny, perfect, still. Shane memorized the curve of his nose, the same one Masha had, the same one Mila had. Ilya cried over his shoulder, unashamed, his hand resting against the baby's small back like he could somehow still protect him.
Shane didn't cry. He held his son and felt the box in his chest seal itself a little tighter, the math still running underneath everything, quiet and relentless. I felt it. I knew. I didn't say anything. He pressed his lips to his son's forehead and said none of it.
They named him Niko.
The house was too loud when they got home the next day, and that was almost a relief.
"Daddy! Papa!" Masha came barreling around the corner, and Shane's mom caught her by the shoulder just in time, crouching down to murmur something in her ear that made the little girl slow to a careful walk instead. Mila toddled after her sister, rabbit in hand, oblivious.
Shane's dad stood in the kitchen doorway, and the look on his face – careful, braced, already grieving – nearly cracked something in Shane that he quickly smoothed back over.
"Hi, sweetie." His mom pulled him into a hug. Shane let himself be held for exactly as long as felt expected, patted her back once, and stepped away before it could turn into anything more.
"We're glad you're home," his dad said, his hand heavy and warm on Shane's shoulder. "Whatever you two need."
"We're okay, Dad." Shane managed something close to a smile. "Tired, mostly."
Masha tugged at his sleeve, careful now, picking up on something even if she couldn't name it. "Where's the baby?"
Shane crouched down to her level, slow and a little stiff, and brushed the hair back from her face. "He had to go be with the angels, baby girl. He got too sick before he could come home to us."
Masha's face crumpled, confused more than grieving. She didn't have the shape for this kind of loss yet, and she threw her arms around Shane's neck. He held her, one hand spread flat against her small back, and pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
"I love you so much," he murmured into her hair. "So much."
"I love you too, Daddy." She pulled back to study his face, the way kids do when they're checking whether the adults are really okay. "Are you sad?"
"A little." It was the truest thing he'd said all day, and even that came out measured, controlled, handed to her in a size she could carry. "But I'm going to be okay. I just need a little quiet time."
Mila, too small to understand any of it, simply held her arms up to be picked up, and Shane obliged, settling her on his hip and breathing in the smell of her shampoo for a long moment before setting her back down.
"Why don't you girls go pick out a movie with grandma," Ilya said gently, crouching to scoop both of them into a hug of his own. "Daddy and I will come watch in a little while, da?"
Once the girls had been steered toward the living room, Shane's mom caught his eye over their heads, something soft and worried passing between them, but she didn't say anything either. Just nodded, like she understood he needed her not to.
"I'm going to go lie down," Shane said, already moving toward the stairs. "Long day."
"Shane." Ilya's voice, low, careful. "Do you want company?"
"I just need to sleep, Ilyusha." He paused at the bottom step, not quite turning around. "I'm fine. I promise."
He wasn't sure which of them he was trying to convince.
Upstairs, he closed the bedroom door behind him, the click of the latch absurdly loud in the stillness. He drew the curtains until the room went dim and gray, the late afternoon light reduced to a thin seam at the edges. He sat on the side of the bed for a moment, very still, very upright, the same posture he'd held in the hospital, at the kitchen door, on the stairs – and then, slowly, he let himself fold.
He curled onto his side, knees drawn up, one arm wrapped around the pillow that still smelled like Ilya, and in the dark, finally, with no one to perform for, Shane let himself come apart. The sob that came out of him was silent at first, just shaking shoulders and a held breath, like even now some part of him was afraid of being heard. Then it broke loose—ragged, ugly, six months of hope and one terrible appointment compressing into sound.
I knew, he thought, the words finally given room to exist. I knew and I didn't say anything and now he's gone.
He cried until his throat ached and his eyes burned, until the worst of it had wrung itself out of him, and then he lay there in the dark, hollowed out and exhausted, listening to the faint, muffled sound of a cartoon playing below him, and his daughters' voices, alive and unaware, drifting up through the floor.
Ilya had buried his mama's depression before, watched it from the outside as a child too young to understand why she stopped getting out of bed, why the curtains stayed drawn for days at a time, why eventually there was a funeral and no explanation anyone gave him that made sense until he was much older and pieced it together himself. He knew the shape of this kind of darkness. He'd lived inside his own version of it more than once, knew what it felt like to have your body simply stop wanting to participate in being alive. He told himself that meant something — that he, of all people, would know what to do.
The first day, he let Shane sleep. That seemed right. The body needed to recover; the doctor had said as much, gently, on their way out of the hospital. Ilya brought up tea Shane didn't drink, sat with him in the dim room until Shane's breathing evened into something like sleep, and went back downstairs to two daughters who needed dinner and baths and bedtime stories he had to read in a voice steadier than he felt.
"Is Daddy sick?" Masha asked, very serious, over a plate of macaroni she wasn't really eating either.
"Daddy's sad," Ilya said, because he'd promised himself he wouldn't lie to them, not about this. "Very sad. He needs rest."
"Like when you were sad before?" Masha asked.
Ilya's hand stilled on Mila's spoon. He hadn't expected that — hadn't realized she remembered, or had absorbed more than he and Shane ever meant for a small child to absorb. It had been almost two years now, the months after Mila was born when his own mind had turned on him, when getting out of bed had felt like lifting something with no handles. They'd tried to shield the girls from the worst of it, but Masha had only been three, old enough, apparently, to keep the shape of it somewhere even if she didn't have words for what it was.
"Yes," he said carefully, throat tight. "A little like that. But Daddy is going to be okay. We're going to take good care of him."
He believed it when he said it.
The second day was harder to explain away. Shane surfaced only to use the bathroom, refused food in a voice so flat and small it didn't sound like him, and turned back toward the wall every time Ilya tried to coax him into talking. Ilya lay down beside him in the afternoon, pressed himself along the curve of Shane's back, and murmured into his hair — about nothing, about the girls, about anything that didn't require Shane to respond — just so Shane would know he wasn't alone in the dark even if he couldn't say so.
"I'm here," Ilya said. "I'm not going anywhere."
Shane didn't answer, but his hand found Ilya's where it rested against his stomach, and held on.
That was something. Ilya told himself that was something.
By the third morning, the tray of toast and eggs Ilya had brought up the night before sat untouched on the nightstand, the eggs gone cold and rubbery, and something in Ilya's chest went cold along with them. He'd been so sure he understood this — he'd survived his own collapses, had medication and a therapist and years of learning the shape of his own mind, had thought that experience meant he could hold both of them through it. But watching Shane lie there, hollowed and unreachable, Ilya understood with a sudden, sick clarity that knowing the terrain didn't mean he could navigate it for someone else. Not alone. Not when his own grief was a quiet animal clawing at him too, one he hadn't had a single private moment to attend to.
He went downstairs, made sure the girls were occupied in the playroom before going to the kitchen, and called Yuna.
"He hasn't eaten," Ilya said, before she'd even finished saying hello, his voice cracking on the words in a way he hadn't let it crack in front of Shane. "Two days, Yuna. He won't talk, he won't eat, he just — he sleeps, and when he's not sleeping he's crying, and I don't…" He stopped, pressed the heel of his hand hard against his eye. "I don't know what to do. I thought I would know what to do."
There was a beat of silence on the line, and then Yuna's voice, steady in the way mothers' voices sometimes managed to be even when their own world had just cracked open. "I'm coming over, Ilya. Put the kettle on. We'll figure it out together."
Ilya hung up and let himself slide down against the kitchen cabinets, just for a moment, just long enough to put his face in his hands and breathe. Upstairs, the girls' cartoons murmured faintly through the floor. Upstairs, his husband lay in the dark, grieving a son they would never bring home.
He had thought he could carry this. He was beginning to understand he couldn't carry it alone.
He wiped his face, stood up, and went to fill the kettle.
—
Yuna had known grief like this before she ever knew her son. Five losses before Shane — five times her body had started something and then quietly, mercilessly, let it go. She remembered each one with a clarity that never dulled, the way you remember the worst weather of your life. She'd been thirty-four when she finally carried Shane past the point where she'd let herself believe in anything, and even then she hadn't exhaled until she heard him cry.
She let herself into the dim bedroom without knocking, the way she had when he was small and scared of thunderstorms, and found him exactly as Ilya had described — curled on his side, eyes open but unseeing, fixed on some middle distance. She didn't say anything at first. She just toed off her shoes, climbed onto the bed behind him the way she used to when he was eight and home sick from school, and wrapped her arm over him.
"Mom," Shane said, very quietly, and something in his voice broke her heart clean in half.
"I'm here, sweetie." She pressed her lips to the back of his head. "I'm right here."
He didn't pull away. That alone told her how deep he'd sunk. Her son, who'd spent decades perfecting the art of being fine, who'd hugged her stiffly in his own kitchen three days ago like he was bracing against something, let her hold him now without protest, his body slack and exhausted against hers.
"I lost five babies before you," she said, into the quiet. She felt him go still, listening, the way you listen to something you've never really been told. "Five. Before your father and I ever held you. There was one I was almost five months along with — a little girl, we thought. I picked out her name. I had a whole life planned for her in my head, and then one day she just...wasn't there anymore." She breathed slow, steady, keeping her voice even for him even now, decades later. "I used to think something was wrong with me. That my body simply wasn't built to keep anyone alive. I carried that for a long, long time."
Shane's hand found hers where it rested against his chest, the same way it had found Ilya's two nights ago, and held on.
"It wasn't your fault, what happened to Niko," Yuna said, gentler now, feeling him flinch slightly at the name. "I know you don't believe me yet. I didn't believe anyone either, for years. But it wasn't, my love. Bodies do this sometimes. Cruel, unfair, senseless things, and there is no version of it that makes sense, and there is nothing you could have noticed sooner or done differently that would have changed it."
"I should have called," Shane whispered, the first real thing he'd said in three days, his voice cracking down the middle. "I should have called the doctor when I first—"
"No." Yuna turned him gently by the shoulder until he was facing her, until she could hold his face in both hands the way she had when he was small and inconsolable over something far smaller than this. "No, sweetie. You did not do this. Do you understand me?"
He didn't answer, but he didn't argue either, and for now, she let that be enough.
"You are not alone in this," she said, smoothing his hair back from his forehead. "You have a husband downstairs who has not slept more than a few hours a night because he's been so worried about you. You have two little girls who love their daddy so much it terrifies them to see him sad. You have your father and me, and we are not going anywhere. You have Hayden, who has called this house every single day asking how you are — and Ruby and Jade have made you cards, Shane, hand-drawn, with glitter, because at nine years old that's how they know to say we love you. Arthur asks about you too, wanting to know when Uncle Shane will come play again. And Amber's been worried about Masha, because Masha's been quiet at school, and that's worried her too. This whole family, all of them, they want to carry this with you. You don't have to hold it by yourself."
Shane's eyes were wet again, but it was a different kind of crying than before — quieter, less like drowning.
"You don't have to be strong for anyone right now," Yuna murmured. "Not for me, not for Ilya, not for the girls. You just have to let people love you through it. That's all. That's the only job you have."
They stayed like that a long while, Yuna holding her son the way she'd held him through fevers and heartbreaks and every hard thing life had handed him before this one, until finally, in a small voice, Shane said, "Can you get Ilya?"
Yuna pressed one more kiss to his temple and eased herself up off the bed. "Of course, my darling boy."
She paused at the door and looked back at him — her son, gutted and exhausted and finally, finally reaching for someone — and felt something in her own chest loosen, just slightly, for the first time in three days.
She found Ilya in the kitchen, hovering near the stairs like he'd been listening the whole time, his face a question he was almost afraid to ask.
"He wants you," she said simply.
She watched him go up two steps at a time, and stood there a moment longer, hand braced on the counter, hoping — praying, though she hadn't prayed in years — that this was the start of the two of them finding their way through this together, instead of each of them drowning quietly on opposite sides of the same bed.
Shane heard the door open and didn't have the strength to do anything but listen — the soft creak, the pause, the careful weight of Ilya's footsteps crossing the room like he was approaching something that might shatter if he moved too fast.
Then the bed dipped, and arms came around him from behind, and Ilya's face pressed into the back of his neck, and Shane felt the wet warmth of tears that weren't his own against his skin.
He's been holding this too, Shane thought, distantly, from somewhere far away. This whole time. While I was up here doing nothing.
The guilt sat in his chest like a stone, the way it had for three days, except now there was nowhere to put it but out loud. The words had been building behind his teeth since the ultrasound room, since Dr. Cartwright's stiff face, since the silence that should have been a cry. He'd swallowed them down so many times he'd thought he could keep swallowing forever. He couldn't, not with Ilya's heartbeat against his back, not with his husband's tears soaking into his collar like an accusation Shane felt he deserved.
"How can you stand to touch me?" The words came out cracked, barely above a whisper, scraped raw from three days of silence. "I killed our baby."
Ilya went very still behind him.
"I felt him go quiet," Shane said, the dam finally breaking, everything spilling out in a flat, exhausted rush, like he was confessing to a crime. "I felt it and I told myself it was nothing. I told you it was nothing. I went to bed that night and I didn't call anyone, I didn't do anything, I just laid there hoping I was wrong, and I was the one carrying him — I was supposed to know, I was supposed to protect him, and I didn't, and now he's—" His voice broke entirely. "He's gone because I didn't do anything."
"Shane." Ilya's voice was wrecked, but steady, turning him by the shoulder until they were face to face, until Ilya could hold Shane's face in both hands the way Yuna had an hour before. "Look at me. Posmotri na menya. Look at me."
Shane made himself look, because some small, exhausted part of him still couldn't refuse his husband anything.
"You did not kill our son," Ilya said, each word deliberate, like he needed Shane to catch every single one of them. "You did not do this. A few hours — Shane, even if you had called, even if they had seen you that same minute — the doctor told us, do you remember? She said this happens, sometimes, for reasons no one can ever find. Not because of anything you did. Not because of anything you didn't do fast enough." His thumbs brushed under Shane's eyes, catching tears as fast as they fell. "There was nothing to catch. He was already gone, moy lyubimyy. You did not fail him. His heart simply stopped, and there is no version of that night where you noticing one hour sooner changes what happened."
"You don't know that," Shane whispered.
"I know you," Ilya said fiercely. "I know that if there had been anything — anything — you could have done, you would have done it without a second thought. You would have walked through fire for that boy. This is not on you. I will tell you this every day for the rest of our lives if I have to."
Shane crumbled against him, and Ilya gathered him in, holding him together the way Shane had been failing to hold himself together for three days.
"We weren't meant to keep him," Ilya said quietly, after a while, his chin resting against the top of Shane's head. "I don't know why. I will never understand why. But it isn't because of you, and it isn't because of me. It just — happened. The way it happened to your mother before she got you." His arms tightened. "We have Masha. We have Mila. They are downstairs right now, missing their daddy so much, and they are enough, Shane. They are more than enough, and we still get to love them, and we still get to love Niko too. Both things are true. We will always love him. But his death is not your fault. It is not mine. It is no one's."
Shane didn't answer in words. He just turned his face into Ilya's chest and let himself sob loud, ugly, and unguarded, three days of held breath finally letting go. All the while Ilya held on and didn't let him fall.
The first morning Shane got out of bed felt less like a decision and more like something his body did before his mind had fully agreed to it. He sat on the edge of the mattress for a long moment, looking at his hands like he wasn't sure they still worked, before Ilya appeared with a soft gray sweater and sat down beside him.
"Arms up," Ilya said gently, and Shane lifted them without really thinking, let Ilya guide the sweater over his head the way he used to do for Masha when she was a toddler too tired to dress herself. There was no indignity in it, not from Ilya, who handled him like something precious rather than broken.
Downstairs, Ilya made eggs, fried the way Shane liked them, and set the plate in front of him with a glass of orange juice he didn't ask Shane to finish, just left there in case. Shane ate slowly, mechanically, more because Ilya was watching with quiet hope than because he had any appetite, but he finished most of it, and Ilya's shoulders eased half an inch at the sight of the empty plate.
"Coach Wiebe called the house yesterday," Ilya said, careful, conversational, like he was testing how much Shane could hold right now. "Wanted to know if there's anything we need. Said the whole team's been thinking about you. He didn't push for anything — just wanted you to know."
Shane nodded slowly, something in his chest aching at the thought of Wiebe, gruff and broad-shouldered, sitting in his office and dialing their number, not quite knowing what to say either. "That's nice of him," Shane said, his voice still quieter than usual, still moving slower than it should. "Tell him thanks."
"You can tell him yourself, when you're ready." Ilya squeezed his hand once and let it go.
Later, Shane found his way to the living room and sank into the corner of the couch, knees drawn up, while Masha and Mila staged some elaborate performance in front of the TV — Masha narrating loudly, Mila mostly just spinning in circles and falling down on purpose, delighted with herself every time. Shane watched them with a small, tired smile, the first real one in days, even if it didn't reach all the way up.
"Watch, Daddy!" Masha announced, launching into a cartwheel that was really more of a sideways flop. "I'm a mermaid princess!"
"That was beautiful, M," Shane said, and meant it, even through the heaviness sitting on his chest like a stone he didn't think would ever fully lift.
The doorbell rang a little after noon. Ilya answered it, and Shane heard Hayden's voice before he saw him — too loud, the way it always was, immediately softened the moment he caught sight of Shane on the couch.
"Hey, man." Hayden crossed the room and didn't hesitate, pulling Shane into a hug right there, careful but solid. Arthur trailed in behind him clutching a dinosaur toy, and Amber made a beeline straight for Masha, the two of them disappearing into whatever game required no explanation between six-year-old best friends. "Jackie's got the twins at their competition all day, figured I'd bring the troops by. See how you're doing."
"I'm okay," Shane said, the old reflex rising automatically, then catching himself, softening it. "I'm — getting there. Slowly."
Hayden sat down next to him, elbows on his knees, quiet for a second in a way that wasn't really his nature. "I don't — " He exhaled, shook his head. "I don't know what to say, man. I keep trying to think of something and everything sounds stupid in my head before it even comes out."
"You don't have to say anything," Shane said.
"Jackie and I, we got lucky three times over, you know? Never had to — " Hayden gestured vaguely, helplessly. "Never had to go through any of what you and Ilya have. I don't know what this feels like. I'm not gonna pretend I do."
Shane looked at his friend — sincere, fumbling, clearly having rehearsed something better than this on the drive over and abandoning it the second he sat down — and felt something almost like fondness cut through the fog. "I know," he said simply. "I appreciate you trying anyway."
"I just…" Hayden glanced toward Arthur, who'd commandeered Mila as an audience for his dinosaur, then back at Shane. "Whatever you need. Even if it's nothing. Even if you just need someone to sit here and not talk about it. I can do that too."
"That's actually exactly what I need right now," Shane admitted, the smallest huff of something like a laugh escaping him.
So that's what they did — sat together while the kids filled the room with noise neither man was responsible for managing, Hayden occasionally narrating Arthur's increasingly improbable dinosaur battles, Shane watching his daughters and letting the ordinary chaos of it wash over him in small, bearable waves, grateful, in his tired and aching way, not to be alone in it.
The afternoon with Hayden bled into evening, then into weeks Shane could barely account for in detail — therapy appointments he almost canceled and then didn't, slow returns to the rink, mornings that got a little easier to face, grief that never left but learned, eventually, to sit a little quieter beside him instead of on top of him.
And then, almost without Shane quite believing it, it was April.
Late April, and the backyard was warm with early spring sun, the kind of soft gold light that made everything look gentler than it was. A young Japanese maple stood near the edge of the garden bed, its leaves a deep, tender red, planted two weeks earlier by Shane and Ilya together, both of them on their knees in the dirt, saying very little, needing to say very little.
The small bronze plaque at its base caught the light.
Niko Hollander
Loved beyond measure. Held for a lifetime in a moment.
Shane stood in front of it now, Ilya's hand laced through his, the late afternoon sun warm against the back of his neck. Masha stood close to his other side, more solemn than her usual self, a fistful of wildflowers clutched in one hand. Mila, three now and not entirely sure what the occasion called for, hovered near her sister, mimicking her stillness as best a three-year-old could manage.
Yuna and David stood just behind them, her hand resting lightly on Shane's shoulder. Hayden and Jackie had come too, the twins and Arthur and Amber spread out quietly on the grass a respectful distance away, sensing without being told that this was not a day for noise.
"You want to say something, baby?" Yuna asked softly, when everyone had gathered.
Shane looked at the tree a long moment before he spoke, his thumb tracing slow circles against the back of Ilya's hand. "He would've been born today," he said, voice steady in a way it hadn't been able to manage back in January, steady because he'd worked hard, with help, to find his way back to it. "We never got to know him. Not really. But I think about him every day. I think about what he might have looked like, what he might have sounded like laughing." He glanced down at Masha and Mila. "I think about how much his sisters would have loved him."
"I would have taught him hockey," Masha announced solemnly, with the absolute certainty of a child who had clearly given this some thought. "Even if he didn't want to learn."
A soft, surprised laugh rippled through the small gathering — the good kind, the kind grief eventually makes room for — and Shane felt his own throat tighten with something that wasn't only sadness anymore.
"He would have loved that," Shane said, crouching down to press a kiss to her hair.
Ilya knelt and helped Masha set a small stone at the base of the tree, one she'd painted herself that morning at the kitchen table, lopsided blue and yellow swirls that meant nothing and everything. "For Niko," she said proudly, patting it into place.
Then it was Mila’s turn to place her stone, one painted in a mashup of various colors that all mixed together in an almost brown color. She looked so proud as she toddled up and threw the rock down. It ricocheted off the trunk of the tree and still managed to land paint side up near where Masha had placed hers.
Ilya straightened, pulling Shane against his side, his voice quiet enough that it was only for the two of them. "We made it here," he murmured. "Moy lyubimyy. We made it to today."
Shane leaned his head against his husband's shoulder, watching the maple leaves stir gently in the breeze, watching his daughters arrange their small offerings at its base, watching his mother dab quietly at her eyes while his father's arm stayed wrapped around her.
"We did," Shane said.
The tree would grow taller every year, its leaves turning that same deep red each spring, a small steady marker in the corner of their yard — not an ending, exactly, but a place to come back to. A place to remember a little boy who never got to take a breath outside his father's body, but who had, in his short, silent existence, been loved entirely.
They stood together in the golden light a while longer, a family that had been broken open by something no one could have prepared them for, and had — slowly, imperfectly, together — found their way to standing in the sun again.