Chapter Text
She still checks her phone before bed.
David says it’s anxiety. David says a lot of sensible things, which is one of the reasons she married him and one of the reasons he occasionally makes her want to smack him over the head. She sets the glass of water on her nightstand, plugs in the charger, and looks at the screen the way she looks at the weather before a long drive.
It's a habit she has never been able to name properly, not quite anxiety, not quite hope, something that lives in the narrow, airless corridor between the two. Just checking. Just making sure. David is already asleep beside her, one arm thrown over his face, his breathing is slow and even and peaceful, and she loves him, but tonight it makes her want to put a pillow over her head.
She puts the phone face down. She picks it up again.
She has been doing this for seven years.
She liked Ilya. She needs to say that first, even to herself, even in the private accounting she does at midnight when the house is quiet. She liked him. They both did, her and David— genuinely, not just because he was Shane’s, not just because you learn to love whoever your child loves.
Ilya arrived with nothing. No mother to call, no father to disappoint. Just this absence that was baked into his bones. She remembers her hands closing over his at the kitchen island, the first Christmas together, his fingers too big, too rough from sticks and tape, fumbling the pasta dough. Flour clung to his knuckles like snow. She pressed her thumbs into the heel of his palm, guiding the fold. Like this, so it doesn’t toughen. His exhale shuddered out, shoulders dropping a fraction. She didn’t mother him because Shane asked her to, she did it because Ilya let her.
Her favourite son, they always joked.
She loved the Christmases sprawled on their living room rug, Lev a tornado of three-year-old limbs knocking ornaments to clatter against the pine needles. Ilya would freeze, shoulders locking up, and she would squeeze them. She wanted to tell him, Breathe, baby, you’re home, you’re safe here.
She loved the summers at the cabin— Shane and Ilya tangled on the dock at dawn, heads bent closer over their fishing lines, their laughter carrying faintly across the water to where she watched from the kitchen window. Her boys.
And of course, they loved him for how he loved Shane, too. Ilya was good for Shane in the beginning, or he seemed good, which she now understands is a different thing, though it felt identical at the time. Shane had been free-falling through the world for so long, stressed and terrified and chronically, exhaustingly overstimulated by the sheer fact of being alive and public and expected to be legible to everyone. This was Yuna’s fault, partly, but Shane wanted it too, and he was doing so well.
Ilya was the first thing that had ever slowed him down. He had this energy that Shane’s nervous system seemed to recognise as safe, the way a boat recognises a harbor, moving toward it without the sailor deciding to.
They had loved him for the way he put his body between Shane and the press scrums, moving through crowds like a ship's prow without asking. For the Christmas when he had driven six hours in a snowstorm because Shane's sensory processing had been so catastrophically bad that week that he couldn't bear the thought of the flight. For the patient way he had learned the architecture of her son— what sounds were too sharp, what textures were unbearable, what the silence before a shutdown felt like.
She had watched him do it with such quiet, methodical competence, and she had felt something she was a little embarrassed about now: relief.
Someone else knew how to hold him. Someone else had done the work.
She had thought: my son is loved. She had let herself have that.
She had cried at the wedding. She was not ashamed of that either.
She knew about the retirement before anyone else. Of course she did. She was his manager. She had been in that room.
It was a Tuesday, early evening, the light coming through the office windows in long, flat bars across the conference table. Shane had asked her to come in person, which she had noted without commenting on. He was sitting very straight in his chair with both hands flat on the table in front of him, which was his body doing the work of keeping him in one place, a thing he'd done since he was small. Ilya was beside him. Ilya's hand was resting on the table close to Shane's, not touching, just present, and Shane's eyes had moved to it once when she walked in, a glance so brief and so reflexive she almost missed it.
She had sat down across from them and opened her notebook and clicked her pen.
Shane had talked; he had been prepared, she could tell he’d rehearsed it, the slight over-smoothness of sentences. This was a natural transition. The game had given him everything, and now he wanted to give back in a different way. This was true, hockey had been his oxygen for two decades, maybe he needed to breathe something else. He had looked at her steadily through most of it.
Almost steadily. There was a moment, early on, where he had paused at the end of a sentence and his eyes had moved, not to her, not to the window, but sideways, to Ilya— half a second, there and gone, that she had watched happen and did not ask about.
She had asked all the right questions. She had talked timelines, announcement strategy, the language they'd use with the league, which brands would want first access, and how to frame the narrative so it looked like a choice rather than a loss. She was good at her job, very good at it. She had drafted Shane Hollander’s public story for over ten years and she could do it with one hand behind her back.
She had sat in the parking garage for twelve minutes before she started the car.
She tries, now, to identify the exact moment she knew. It is the kind of exercise that feels important and is actually quite useless, like pressing on a bruise to find its edges. There isn’t a moment, that’s the terrible thing, there are only accumulations.
She had tried. She wanted that acknowledged, even in the silence of her own head, where no one could contest it. She tried in every configuration available to her. She called and she visited and she sat across from her son in restaurants watching him perform happiness so well that she could no longer find the seams. She tries obliquely, asking about Lev, about the house, asking how he was sleeping. She tried directly, once, in their kitchen when Ilya was at practice, and Shane had looked at her blankly, with an expression that said the conversation was over before she finished the sentence.
I’m fine, Mom. You worry so much, that’s your thing.
She had stood in his kitchen and looked at her son and thought: who taught you to say it like that.
Lev came to them every summer. That was the constant, the one thread that kept her tethered to him: Lev on the phone every sunday, Lev arriving in Ottawa in July with his duffel and his long legs and his watchful eyes that broke her heart a little every year, because she recognised it. She recognised the hypervigilance of it, the way he was always slightly angled toward the door, the way he looked at David. They tried to give him summers where nothing required tracking. She let him eat too much and stay up too late and be loud and take up space without calculating the cost of it. She did not ask him about his parents.
Because she had thought, he is an adult. He has said so. He has built his life. He has Lev. She had thought, I will not push, because I trust him. She had thought, I am his mother , not his keeper.
She told herself this for years.
The call from Shane came on a Saturday in November.
She was in the kitchen, the coffee was on, David had gone out to get groceries, and the house was very quiet in the way it got in winter mornings, light and still like she always loved.
Her phone rang, and she looked at the screen, and it was Shane’s number, which was not unusual except that it was because he never called out of the blue these days.
She picked up.
The first thing he said, before she could panic, before she said anything more at all, was: Mom.
She sat down on the kitchen floor. She didn't decide to. Her legs simply stopped being interested in holding her up and she went down, her back finding the cabinet, the linoleum cold through her pajamas. She pressed the phone to her ear and she listened to her son breathe.
He didn’t tell her everything. He still hasn’t told her everything, as if the whole shape of it had been engineered to make telling feel like betrayal. But he had told her just enough. He had told her in these gaspy fragments, some of it barely audible, and she sat on the cold linoleum and she did not try to pull out more, because she knew, she had always know, that the way to reach him in this state was not to push but to be a fixed point he could return to.
When he hung up she sat there for a long time.
David found her on the floor and crouched down without asking and she took his hand. She told him enough. She watched his jaw set, and she watched him look at the wall, and she watched him become very carefully, deliberately calm, the way David became when he needed to think before he acted. He helped her off the floor. He held her for a moment in the kitchen with the coffee still on, and neither of them said anything.
Shane called them again that evening.
Then they booked two tickets to Boston.
She had expected— she wasn’t sure what she had expected. She had expected to find him relieved, maybe. Angry. She had expected the door to finally be open. She flew to Boston and was let into their curated, airless house by Sam Marleau and found her son sitting at the kitchen island with both hands wrapped around a mug he wasn’t drinking from. He was so thin. You can see bruises on the phone, but you cannot see thin. She had wanted to say something, but her throat closed, so she just put her arms around him, and he went rigid for a second, as if being held was something his nervous system had to be coaxed into. And then he folded. All at once, catastrophically, his face pressed into her shoulder, and his hands gripped the back of her cardigan like a child.
He had suffered so much while Ilya was in the ward. She had watched it from the inside this time, and it was its own kind of unbearable, because the suffering was so entirely misdirected, the guilt so consuming, so precisely calibrated to Shane's wiring, that she could see the mechanism of it and could not reach in to dismantle it.
He blamed himself. Of course, he blamed himself. He sat in that waiting room and then beside that hospital bed and then at that kitchen island and he blamed himself with such methodical completeness that there was no room left for anything else, no crack she could get a finger into.
She had held her tongue. She had told herself: when he’s through the worst of this. When Ilya is home from inpatient and stable and things have settled. Then she would talk to him.
When Ilya came home, the door closed again.
Not immediately. Slowly, the way a tide goes out— you don’t notice each individual inch, only the distance when you finally look back. The visits got shorter, the calls got managed again, and Shane, her Shane, who had let her hold him in that kitchen, who had been briefly, heartbreakingly real with her, receded back behind the glass whilst she stood on the outside of it looking in.
Lev still came for summer. Lev at eleven and twelve and thirteen, getting taller every year, his voice dropping, his accent slowly fading away.
She thought about that too, whether the summers were enough. Whether she could have done something differently with them, said something, asked something, reached into whatever he was carrying and helped him set it down.
She doesn’t know. She has stopped being able to tell anymore, which of her silences were kind and which were just cowardice.
The doorbell rang at 11:43 on a Tuesday night in January.
David was asleep. She had been sitting with a book she wasn’t reading when the sound came through the quiet house and she startled so badly she knocked her tea off the arm of the chair, the mug hitting the hardwood, the sound cracking through the stillness. She stood in the hallway in her socks, and looked at the door.
She opened it.
Lev was standing on the porch with a duffel bag over one shoulder, a backpack on the other, a suitcase, and his jacket unzipped in the cold. He was sixteen years old and nearly unrecongizable— six feet of him, maybe more, the curls longer and darker than they were last summer. With, somehow, Ilya’s jaw, and Shane’s eyes, and an expression on his face that she recognised from a kitchen floor in November, from a facetime on a Wednesday evening, from every moment in her life when something had already happened, and she did nothing about it.
There was a bruise across his left cheekbone, yellowing at the edges.
He looked at her. He opened his mouth, and then something in his rehearsal failed him, some prepared sentence collapsing under its own weight, and what came out instead was very quiet and very young.
“Sorry. Dad got me the flight, I should have called, I didn’t know what else to do.”
Yuna stepped back, she held the door. He came inside and she closed it behind him and stood for a moment looking at the back of his head, at the suitcase, at the bruise she was not going to ask about. At least, not tonight.
She went to the kitchen. She filled the kettle. She got two mugs down from the cabinet with hands that were perfectly steady, because she had always been steadiest in the moments that required it, the shaking saved for later, for private.
She heard him drop his bags in the hall. She heard the exhausted sound of him sitting down at the kitchen table behind her— the creak of the chair, the soft thud of his elbows on the wood, the long, slow exhale of someone who has been holding their breath for a very long time and has finally, in this specific room, been allowed to stop.
She texted David: Lev is here. Come down when you wake up. Don't make a fuss.
She put the tea bags in. She waited for the kettle.
She did not cry until she was in the downstairs bathroom with the door locked and the tap running, both palms flat on the cold sink, looking at herself in the mirror above the basin. She cried quietly and thoroughly, the way she had learned to do necessary things privately. Then she ran the cold water and pressed it against her face and dried it on the hand towel and looked at herself for one more moment.
Then she went back out and poured the tea.