Rating:

Mature

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

Multi

Fandoms:

Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Hayden Pike & Ilya Rozanov, Hayden Pike & Hayden Pike's Mother, Hayden Pike/Jackie Pike, Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Hayden Pike, Ilya Rozanov, Hayden Pike's Mother, Jackie Pike, Shane Hollander, Arthur Pike, Amber Pike, Original Characters

Additional Tags:

Post-Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), Hayden Pike-centric, Hayden Pike Needs a Hug, Hayden Pike & Ilya Rozanov Friendship, Mental Health Issues, Mother-Son Relationship, Past Child Abandonment, Exploring Blended Family Dynamics, Irina Rozanova Haunts the Narrative, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, References to Depression, Unreliable Narrator

Language:

English

Series:

Part 1 of The Hayden Pike Cinematic Universe

Stats:

Published: 2026-04-15 Completed: 2026-06-17 Words: 35,493 Chapters: 10/10

to protect my infancy

Summary

Hayden Pike's mother left when he was seven. She didn't come back. This, really, was not important, because Hayden built a family and a life and was happy - until it was important, when Laura Newfield (formerly Pike) reached out with a letter and an address. For Hayden, the question was whether whatever his mom had to say to him after all this time could tell him something about the parts of himself that he didn't quite understand and had never wanted to understand. How this ended up with him and Ilya Rozanov on the road to find these answers together, he wasn't entirely sure.

or - Hayden goes on an odyssey of exploring his relationship with his mother, with Ilya as his guide.

Notes

warnings - child abandonment, complex family dynamics, discussion of mental health (suicide/depression/bipolar disorder), referenced homophobia

This story deals with several complicated and difficult themes, especially concerning mental health. When writing it, I wanted to be certain that I could represent these issues as sensitively as possible. Whilst the below links are not an exhaustive list of resources I used when researching for this fic, I hope that they are a starting point for anyone who wants to begin to look into these topics themselves. I know that there is a stigma surrounding mental health issues (the stigma around bipolar conditions is explored most in this story), and so it was important to me to try and write something that dealt appropriately with all aspects of this story. Hayden is not a perfect narrator, but I hope that I have managed to do some justice to these themes through him. Please let me know if I've fallen short in anyway, and take care and hopefully enjoy <3

https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/bipolar-disorder/
https://www.mind.org.uk/
https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/types-of-mental-health-problems/bipolar-disorder/about-bipolar-disorder/
https://www.bipolaruk.org/

Anyway, this is my thesis on why Hayden and Ilya can be used as foils for each other :)

Chapter 1

Hayden Pike had not thought of his mother for a very long time - not since he was seven and tugging on the hem of her shirt, asking when she’d be coming back home to see him again. It had been normal, then, for Laura Pike to come and go - on work trips, or holidays with friends, or simply with a note stuck to the fridge and no firm return date. Hayden had not really minded then, because his dad had been awesome and his mom would bring some little trinket back with her as a present for him. It had always been exciting to see what she would bring - they were tatty, and it never really seemed that she understood what he was interested in, but he liked the idea that she was in some far-flung corner of the world (because, in his mind, his mom would only leave him to go to the coolest of places) and thinking of him.

It had been no different when he was seven, except that he had been awake to see her go. He’d tugged on her shirt, because he’d washed his hands and his mom only let Hayden touch her when she was sure that his hands wouldn’t be sticky, and he’d asked her when she’d been coming back, and she’d looked down at him with the eyes he had inherited from her and Hayden had felt, in that moment, like she wasn’t really seeing him. Like she was looking through him. It had scared him, and he’d wanted to wake Dad, but Mom had rested a hand on his head and promised, “soon.”

In hindsight, Hayden had been naive and stupid to believe her for as long as he had. But Mom had said soon and she had always come back before.

He’d kept the trinkets for longer than he’d had her, before the box that he had kept them in had gone out with the trash when he was sixteen. That had been when Hayden’s dad had gotten sick, and Hayden had had to step up because there had been no one else - his dad’s siblings lived too far away, and there was no Mom. It was just him and Dad, and he was growing up now. And even when he’d been keeping the trinkets, he hadn’t really thought much about Mom. They stayed in a box, on a high shelf in Hayden’s room, and they didn’t really mean anything. Even as a kid, they’d only held his attention for a little while before they were put away with the others.

The last time that Hayden remembers properly thinking of her is when the twins are born. Jackie had been asleep, upstairs in their bed, and Hayden - for the first time in his life as a father - had been left alone with his daughters. They’d been small enough that he had been able to prop his elbows up with cushions and sit by himself on the couch to hold them both, one kid in each arm, and he had looked down at their tiny, perfect little faces and he had wondered what had been so wrong with him that his mom could ever consider leaving him beyond. Because Hayden couldn’t fathom it. He held Jade and Ruby close to him, and watched the fluttering of their tiny eyes in sleep, and saw the wriggle of their little fingers, and felt their bodies shifting as they breathed against him, and he thought that he would rather die than leave them. That he would die to keep them near, and to keep them safe, and that it terrified him to think of them growing up when they were so small and vulnerable, but that it terrified him a little less to know that he would be with them every step of the way.

So, no, Hayden Pike didn’t like to think of his mom. Didn’t need to think of her. He had his family and he was happy. He knew that Jackie was curious sometimes, but it wasn’t something that they spoke about. Maybe she thought Hayden’s mom was dead. Maybe she thought Hayden hadn’t ever known her. Hayden, when he was asked, simply told people she wasn’t in the picture, which was true. He didn’t even have any photographs of him with his mom. His dad had a wedding photo set aside somewhere, but Hayden hadn’t seen it since he was ten, and his childhood home had gradually begun to forget that Laura Pike had ever lived there at all.

Honestly, for all intents and purposes, Hayden was okay with pretending that she never had. He sort of assumed that was how it was always going to be - he’d never gotten any evidence to the contrary. Sometimes, he wondered if Jackie maybe assuming his mom was dead would be far from the truth at all. Sometimes - and he always felt guilty for this after, like a kid getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar - he thought it might be better if she was, because maybe it meant that Mom had meant to come home to them, that she hadn’t broken her promise, that she had loved Hayden, that she thought he was worth something. He pictured himself in a year, or two, or five, or decade even, getting a letter to tell him there’d been an accident, and they were sorry that it had taken so long to inform him, but that his mom was dead. Maybe there’d be a grave that he could visit and leave flowers on; maybe, somehow, she would have left something for him - like a trinket but meaningful, a note or even a letter to let Hayden know that she loved him, and she’d wanted nothing more than to come home to him, and that she was sorry.

Hayden was a little old from childish fantasies, but he thought about it sometimes. Errantly, never seriously. Pretty much not all. Because he didn’t think of her - he wouldn’t. And if he did, well, it wasn’t really her at all, just some vague Mom-like figure that he’d invented. Someone like Yuna Hollander, or Jackie's mom, Christie, who like to pinch Hayden’s cheek and ask him if he was eating and made him sweaters for Christmas.

Not Laura Pike, who had never loved Hayden at all.

The compromise that Shane and Hayden had settled on was this: they would spend at least half of the summer together, to make up for the fact that they no longer live a fifteen-minute drive away now that Shane had moved to Ottawa permanently, and they would alternate whose turn it was to host. They worked this schedule around the Game Changers hockey camps, because it was nice to spend time with Shane when they were not working or doing something hockey related. The first summer, Jackie and Hayden had opened their home to Shane and his husband, because it was simpler with the kids to do it this way the first time around, and had then spent a frantic few weeks catering to the energetic whims of Hayden’s children and generally having a blast. The summer after, Shane and Ilya had invited them to the cottage in Ottawa, where there had been swimming and barbecues and romps through the woods.

This summer was Jackie and Hayden’s turn to host again, which was for the best considering that Ruby and Jade would be away at a summer camp, and Hayden and Jackie were supposed to stay close at home just in case they needed to go and pick them up last minute, whether it be because something had gotten broken at camp, like the plumbing or something, or because one of the girls had decided to wrestle a moose, or because they were simply homesick and couldn’t be consoled.

The problem began when Shane sprained his knee in one of the final playoff games, in an unintended check from a New York rookie that had sent him into the boards and then onto the ice at an awkward angle that his leg had not been able to compensate for. This had not stopped, of course, the Ottawa Centaurs stealing their second Stanley Cup in three years, because the momentum behind the once terrible Canadian team had been monstrous to behold, but it did mean that half the plans that Hayden had proposed for their summer had been nixed in favour of keeping Shane’s leg propped up on the couch or lounging around in the back gardens.

Shane was very hopeful to be recovered before the season started again, but for now, Hayden was subjected to watching Ilya Rozanov fuss over his best friend like he was expecting the limb to drop off. Arthur, who adored his Uncle Shane, had picked up on this mood and was drawing very heroic stick figures hopping about the page on one leg. At eight years old, Arthur’s penmanship was getting better, but he was still stuck on stick figures, albeit increasingly detailed ones. Shane and Ilya were treating each picture like it belonged it fucking Louvre or something. Arthur didn’t talk much, but he flushed and made pleased little noises at every compliment, rocking his hands back and forth in his excitement.

It was a good day. One of the best days, probably, and the sort of days that Hayden was getting to have regularly now. Sometimes, he couldn’t believe how lucky he was to get to have all of this, and to get to keep it. Soon, his kids would be too old and too cool to hang out with their parents the way that they did now, and family summers would become a different thing altogether. It was a good day, and, God, Hayden was going to appreciate it while he could.

“Hayd,” said Jackie, her voice a sleepy murmur against his chest. She had been lying against him whilst Hayden had reclined on the couch, half watching Arthur with Shane and Ilya and half watching a nature documentary that had been on whilst he was channel surfing for some background noise. For a while, she’d been snuffling against him, comfortable and asleep, and then she’d been texting her mom. “Could you check the mailbox for me? Mom said she was sending over those photos I want. Apparently they should have been delivered.”

Jackie had taken up scrapbooking recently. Arthur had done a show and tell about his family, so they’d spent a couple of days assembling a mini photo album for him to take in. It had been nice, and Jackie had recalled that her mom had a ton of old photos in a box in her attic. Christie had promised to mail them over as soon as she could. Whilst they had the more recent photos on their phones or saved to the family computer, there were childhood pictures of Jackie and her brothers that she wanted for the collection.

“Of course,” he said, dropping a kiss to her forehead as he shifted her off his chest, making sure that there was a mound of pillows to lower her back onto. She huffed anyway, as if she wasn’t the one who had asked him to move, and Hayden couldn’t resist the urge to drop another kiss to her forehead. “Anybody else want something whilst I’m up?”

Arthur, waving a hand to get Hayden’s attention, mimed plucking something from the flat of his palm and bringing it to his lips, eyes wide and beseeching as he looked up at Hayden from where he was kneeling by the coffee table. Amber was nodding in agreement beside him.

“Snack?” said Hayden. “You want a fruit platter, buddy? You too, Amber?”

“Please,” Arthur said. Amber nodded again, solemnly, at his side.

Hayden held out a fist for Arthur as he stepped by him, and - after a moment of consideration - Arthur bumped his own fist against it.

“Fruit platter for anyone else?”

“Will you cut it up into little bite sized pieces so that I don’t choke?” Rozanov asked, fluttering his eyelashes obnoxiously.

“I’ll garnish it with rat poison,” Hayden promised. “Shane, we got some pomegranate seeds?”

Shane looked delighted, and a little surprised, like he still was surprised by the fact that Hayden and Jackie were buying Shane-approved snacks, despite the fact it had been literal years of having another section to their grocery list that was mostly foods Shane enjoys, which was different to foods Shane will eat, because Shane was awkward and desperate to not offend. And though Shane’s performance diet was no longer as restrictive as it had been, there were still foods that he couldn’t bare to have, whether it be the taste or the texture or the smell. It was similar enough to the considerations that Jackie and Hayden were making for Arthur that the didn’t mind it at all.

“Mailbox and fruit platters for all,” Hayden decided, “except for Shane, who may have some pomegranate seeds - and Greek yoghurt?”

He got a thumbs up at that.

First on the agenda was the mailbox; Hayden found a thick envelope that was certainly the pictures that Christie had promised, as well as two takeout menus and a couple of items of junk mail. His hands paused shuffling through the stack when they unearthed a hand written letter, his name and address printed clearly on the front in pencil; that one, he decided, he would have to read. Sometimes, Hayden got fan mail sent to his home instead of to the Bell Centre, and it was always concerning to think that his address was floating out there somewhere on the internet, especially with the kids around. He checked the rare few that were sent to his house, just to make sure that it was normal enthusiastic fans as opposed to obsessive stalkery fans. Not that Hayden got many of those, and if he did, they mostly in connection to Shane, because the rumour that they had been having a decade long affair had a cultish following on corners of the internet.

He carried the stack inside with him, setting it on the kitchen counter as he began retrieving plates and punnets of fruit and a sharp knife to prepare the promised platters. He and Jackie would share one, he supposed, whilst Amber and Arthur got their own, his fruit decidedly not touching, and Shane got a bowl and spoon for his pomegranate and yoghurt. After a moment’s consideration, Hayden made a platter for Rozanov as well, cutting the pieces of fruit as small as he could without chopping off the tips of his fingers, mostly succeeding in turning them into a smear against the plate.

It was a balancing act carrying it all into the living room. He tucked the letters in the waistline of his jeans, and began the arduous task of distributing the plates. Shane took his with a thanks, and then took Ilya’s to pass it over, and Hayden set Amber and Arthur’s down on the table beside them. Then, he set his and Jackie’s down so that he could hand her the envelope with the photos, supposing that she would want to look at those first and also wouldn’t want sticky, fruit juice covered fingers anywhere near them.

“Anything else interesting?” she asked, eying the stack of letters in Hayden’s hand curiously.

“Maybe a fan letter,” he set, presenting it to her. “I’m going to make sure that there isn’t anything dodgy.”

“You have fans?” asked Rozanov, balancing a tiny morsel of strawberry on the tip of his finger and squinting at it.

Hayden flipped him off. “Mostly from people wanting me to bone your husband, so.”

Ilya’s eyes narrowed. Shane flushed bright red - even brighter when Ilya laid one possessive hand on his knee and declared, very clearly, “mine.”

“Yeah, yeah. Knock yourself out, man,” said Hayden, waving a dismissive hand as he began to tease open the letter.

He unfurled it, smoothing out the creases where it had been folded, and felt his heart simultaneously catch in his throat and plunge down to the pit of his stomach.

Hayden, it began.

I know it’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other, and I have no idea how you’ll receive this letter, or if you’ll even read it, but it was important for me to send it.

He felt, suddenly, a million miles away from his own body. He knew, somehow, even before checking the name at the bottom of the letter who had sent it. He’d known it, he thought, almost from the very the start. He checked, anyway - just in case he had made a mistake, or was making things up, another childish fantasy.

Laura Newfield.

He didn’t recognise the surname, and it seemed stupid, all of a sudden, to suppose that she had spent all the years avoiding the family that she had left behind carrying their name still. It seemed stupid to imagine that there was not any string that tied her and Hayden together that she wouldn’t be willing to cut. And maybe it should have made Hayden relieved to think that there was one less thing keeping him bound in some way to a woman he didn’t want to think about - but it was different, he thought, when it was her who was letting Hayden know that she had made this separation. It was different, as well, seeing it spelt out so boldly and simply in print. There was no obfuscation, no hiding. There was simply the existence of a whole new person Hayden had never met, a Laura Newfield that he had never known, and the old, worn out memories of someone whose blood he kept still in his veins and the veins of his children.

“Hayd? Baby, what’s wrong?” asked Jackie, her hand coming to rest on Hayden’s back as she leaned towards him.

He set the letter face down on the table. He didn’t her to read it. He didn’t want to read. He would have stood up to bin it if he had thought his legs would be able to get him anywhere without collapsing underneath him. The room in the living room had gone stale and wasn’t quite being inhaled into his lungs the way that it should be. There was a tremor starting in his hands, and then spreading, spreading until he felt like he was about to shake apart at the seams. Everyone was watching him - he could feel their eyes on him - but he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the letter. It was like it had taken on a presence all of its own, magnetic and impossible to avoid.

He cleared his throat. “Nothing,” he said, but his voice was strangled and unconvincing. “Just - er, just my mom.”

“Your mom?” said Jackie, and reached out towards the letter.

Hayden reacted before he could think better off it. He slapped his hand down on the letter and scrumpled it into a ball, tossing it across the other side of the room before Jackie could reach it. Her hand hovered above where the letter had been and where his own now, and he could feel the air thicken with her surprise, the way that she had startled when Hayden’s hand had slammed unforgivingly down. Hayden had never made such a violent move in her presence before, had never even dreamed of it, and he knew that she wouldn’t have expected from him. Guilt was the first emotion that he was able to isolate and name, in the screaming tumult that had made a home in his chest in the moments since reading the letter. Guilt, shame, fucking embarrassment, because he was Hayden freaking the fuck out about a woman who didn’t mean anything to him at all.

“Sorry,” he said, choking it out between numb lips. “Sorry, I just - I’ll be back in a moment. I need…”

He didn’t know what he needed.

He stood, shaking Jackie’s hand from off his back, and found that he was desperate enough to get away for his legs to carry him forwards.

He caught sight of Jackie’s stricken face beside him, and the confusion of Shane and Ilya, and the way that Amber and Arthur were watching as their dad freaked out, even though Hayden made a point not to do that in front of his kids. Arthur didn’t like chaos; he liked calm, which Hayden certainly wasn’t at this point.

He considered bending to pick up the letter as he went past, but he didn’t want to touch it. He didn’t want anything to do with it. He left the letter where he had discarded it and took the stairs two at a time as he left the room.

Chapter 2

Hayden, like the super mature adult man and father that he was, tried to lock himself in his and Jackie’s bathroom. He supposed it was probable that his wife would follow him upstairs, or maybe Shane, both of them well-meaning and earnest in the inevitable attempts that they would make to comfort him, but Hayden didn’t want to see anyone and he certainly didn’t want to talk about his mother, which both Jackie and Shane would encourage him to do. Especially because, if he knew them, and he did, he knew that they would be reading his mom’s letter right before coming to find him, so that they could understand what they were dealing with. Sometimes, their methodicalness was a good thing - but Hayden himself hadn't read the letter and he certainly didn’t know how he felt.

So, like a kid trying to avoid the monsters under his bed, Hayden hid himself in the bathroom. His hands were shaking as he fiddled with the lock on the door, and he couldn’t hear the click of it over the roaring in his ears, but he needed it locked. Needed to know that he could have just a few minutes where he did not have to be Hayden, husband and father and friend. He wanted to be a kid again, in that moment, washing his hands in the hope that Mom would let him hold hers, or sat next to Dad on the sofa, watching hockey or whatever sport that caught their fancy that afternoon. He wanted to be young enough for nightlights, and for missing his mom without being naive. He wanted, mostly, for none of this to have happened.

He slumped against the side of the bath, his back hunched against the rigid porcelain, and pressed his hands into the cold tile floor. It was one of the grounding techniques the child psychologist working with Arthur had recommended, finding one stable, sensory thing that Arthur could focus on when everything else was starting to overwhelm him - usually a fidget, but Hayden found this worked just as well. He focused on the flex of his fingers and the way that the tile did not yield when he pressed down on it, and tried to ignore the way that the world felt a little like he was collapsing in around him. He counted his breathing, and tried to calculate how long he could leave it until Shane or Jackie would come looking for him. He’d go back down stairs just before that point; he’d gather himself and he’d laugh it off and they could pretend like Hayden’s freak out hadn’t massively ruined the vibes of the summer.

Then, the bathroom door swung open. Hayden looked up and found the towering figure of Ilya Rozanov standing in the doorway.

“I locked that,” said Hayden.

Ilya shot him an arch look. “Clearly not.”

Hayden glanced at his hands, pressed still against the floor. His traitorous, useless hands, that had never been able to cling tight enough to his mom to make her stay, and now failed him again. He didn’t like the idea that Ilya was the one seeing him like this; it felt like any moment he would declare this as evidence of what he had known all along - that Hayden was worthless and weak and a little too much damaged goods to be loved in the long run. He and Ilya were not friends, really, but they tolerated each other for the sake of their spouses and Hayden’s children; in spite of the summers they spent together, they did not spend enough time one on one to be anything but polite. They were both aware that it wasn’t a friendship and was a truce more than anything else, both of them biding their time until they had amassed an advantage that would allow them to break that truce. Hayden had taken that opportunity early on, when he had told Shane that he would punch Ilya if he was an asshole and then had, the game before Shane and Ilya had launched their foundation. Ilya was still waiting on his, like a snake in the grass, and Hayden supposed he had just given the guy the perfect opportunity.

Ilya looked at him for a long, hard moment. He crossed the bathroom and slumped onto the floor, sitting beside Hayden with his legs sprawled out in front of him. They did not say anything for a very long moment, but Hayden was hyperaware of Ilya beside him.

“Shane and Jackie are reading the letter, aren’t they?” he asked eventually. Ilya just nodded, so Hayden added, “you didn’t get in on that?”

“It’s your shit,” Ilya replied. “Shane likes… he likes control. He thinks that it is the way he can be most helpful, if he is able to fix things. Is nice, sometimes, but sometimes.”

“You want to lock yourself in the bathroom and ignore it?”

“Da,” he agreed, with a half-amused breath of laughter. “Although I do better job of making sure door is actually locked.”

Hayden started to laugh. He started to laugh and he couldn’t stop and suddenly he was crying, the heels of his palms ground into his eyes, as if he could knuckle away the tears before Ilya could see him weep. But the tears were there and they did not stop falling, rolling fat down his cheeks as his shoulders shook. He didn’t understand why he was crying. He hadn’t cried when she had left the first time - he’d just waited. And nothing had changed since then - Mom was still gone and Hayden was still fine and everything was the same. But now he was crying - and Ilya slowly, carefully, rested his arm around Hayden’s shoulder. He didn’t say anything at first, but Hayden collapsed into his side like a puppet that had its strings cut and Ilya did not move. He let Hayden bury his face into the soft material of his sweater and cry. He let Hayden lean against because he felt as though he might fall and never stop if he didn’t have the support of Ilya to lean against at that moment.

Ilya began to talk in Russian. Hayden didn’t understand the words but they washed over him regardless. It was different listening to Ilya talk in his mother tongue - there was something less practiced and guarded about it, a little less like Hayden was slamming his fists against the stone wall of the facade that Ilya presented to him and a little more like he was being led by the hand to a door he could open and use to step beyond it all.

“You know,” said Hayden, inhaling a ragged breath. There’d been a lull in whatever Ilya was saying, and Hayden seized it, abruptly unable to cage the formless words that rattled in his throat. “You know, I think Jackie thought my mom was dead, ‘cause I never talk about her. I think maybe she thought I was just being, like, macho or something and repressing the hell out of it. Maybe she thought I’d come to her one day and we’d have this emotional conversation about my mom, and how I missed her. But I don’t think about her, ever, and I don’t feel anything about her, and it’s fine. It’s fine.”

“The letter was from your mother?” Ilya’s voice was neutral.

Hayden nodded. “Yeah. She left when I was seven. Just, gone - whoosh! No more Mom for Hayden! It was only me and Dad after that.” Ilya didn’t say anything, so Hayden continued, “I waited for her to come back for a bit, ‘cause she told me she’d be home soon and she always was. She was in and out all the time - I think the longest she stayed was a handful of months - but she always came back, and I thought, maybe, that her choosing to come back was all the evidence that I needed to know that she loved me. She wouldn’t come back if she didn’t love me. And then she didn’t.

“And Dad got sick. And it's me and him against the world. We didn’t need her. I was growing up, taking care of Dad and getting noticed for my hockey and working a part time job to make up for Dad losing his income. I stopped waiting. What was the point? She didn’t care about us. About me. Sometimes, I thought it would be better if she was dead, and then -”

Hayden cut himself off. He had never confessed that to anyone, and it struck him suddenly that maybe Ilya Rozanov was the worst person he could choose to be the first - Ilya, who had a mother he had loved and a mother who he had lost, who had died when he probably wished more than anything that she had not. And here was Hayden complaining about the fact that his mom was still alive. It was selfish, and insensitive.

“I do not have monopoly on, er, mommy issues, Pike,” said Ilya. “You are welcome to your own.”

“I don’t have mommy issues,” Hayden objected. “That would mean that I had to have a mom in the first place.”

Ilya waited a moment, and then said, “I am sorry, for what it is worth, that this has happened to you. You and Jackie are good parents - very good parents. I assumed you modelled after yours.”

“My dad was great,” said Hayden. “We’re still close. He’s about an hour away in Drummondville still.”

“But he was sick?” Ilya pressed.

“MS. Primary progressive, so there weren't, like, periods where it got bad and then better and stuff. It just got bad, especially in the start when we didn’t know what was happening. He’s good now - I mean, there’s no cure for MS, but we adapted. He’s in a wheelchair, so it’s difficult sometimes for him to come to me. It’s all good. The kids love him.”

“How old were you?”

“About sixteen.”

“And you were looking after your sick father by yourself?”

Hayden shifted uncomfortably. “He has a lot of siblings, but they all live in fuck-off Wyoming, so they weren’t really around.”

“Fuck-off Wyoming,” Ilya repeated. It wasn’t phrased like a question but Hayden understood it as one anyway.

“I meant, like, middle of nowhere in Wyoming,” he explained. “Rural.”

“And it is just you and your father?”

Hayden nodded. He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I just don’t understand why my mom thinks she can just send a letter now. I’ve lived pretty much a whole life without her. I don’t - I don’t understand.”

“What do you want to do about it?” asked Ilya.

“Overall? No fucking clue, man. Right now? I want to give my kids a hug and pretend that this isn’t happening.”

Ilya straightened decisively. “This is what we do,” he declared. He pointed his finger at Hayden. “You, wash your face. I will call off our spouses. Then you come down and hug your children, and once we put the Pike-lings into bed tonight we will talk about the problem of your mother.”

“Laura,” Hayden corrected.

“Laura,” repeated Ilya, and that was that.

Whatever Ilya had said to Jackie and Shane downstairs had worked its magic. Hayden swept down the stairs, determined to restore the energy he had drained from the party, to find Shane and Jackie sitting on the couch where he had left them, as if he had simply stepped into the other room for a glass of water and a bathroom break. Shane’s knee was still propped up, but Jackie was no longer lounging, sat up straight instead - straighter, when she saw Hayden. He avoided looking at her, avoided looking at Shane as well, and made a beeline straight for his child. Amber, always a tactile child, came straight into his outstretched arms, wrapping her own pudgy appendages around his neck and hanging on tight. And, in a testament to how much he must have unsettled Arthur, his son assented to being included in the hug as well. He didn’t return the hug, but he did lean into Hayden, knocking his head against Hayden’s chin as he swayed close.

“Daddy,” he asked. “Better?”

Hayden dropped a kiss into his blond hair. “All better, buddy. You want to play outside a bit?”

“Hide and seek?” Amber requested.

“You must still beat me,” Ilya, from where he was perched beside Shane, pointed out. “I am hide and seek champion.”

Arthur shook his head resolutely, nudging Hayden to agree. “We’re going to show Uncle Ilya who’s boss, aren’t we?”

Ilya gasped. “Alliances? Against me already? Is betrayal. I cannot believe this. Terrible, Pikes, very terrible.”

“We’ll topple his evil plans,” Hayden said. “Come on. We should all be outside.”

Arthur and Amber went streaking off ahead of them, already giggling and plotting amongst themselves. Passing Shane the sticks that he was using to get around, Ilya helped lever his husband off the couch and took his arm as they hobbled out to the back together, even as Shane protested, “I can walk, Rozanov.” Hayden stayed behind, because Jackie had made no move to stand, and he knew that the first time he spoke to his wife about all of this could not be at the same time as when he spoke to Shane and Ilya. The Russian shot him an inquisitive look as he left, like he was about to run interference again, but Hayden waved him off.

It was just him and Jackie; Hayden had never felt a reluctance like this to talk to his wife before, and he was determined that it wouldn’t start now. He sat. She moved closer and pulled his hand into hers, an errant thumb brushing over his knuckles.

“I don’t want to talk about it now,” he began, before she could say anything. “I didn't read the letter. I read the first line and I read the name at the end. I don’t know what she said or why she wrote the letter, or even if I want to. But, I never meant to keep anything from you. I don’t want you to feel like that. It just - just wasn’t important.”

“She’s your mom, Hayd,” Jackie said softly. “That feels important to me.”

“Laura wasn’t much of a mom ever, really,” he replied. “She left when I was seven. I don’t remember much of her before then either. She was absent a lot.”

“I wish that this was something I could have helped you with. I want to be there for you, always, and with everything, even if you think it isn't important.”

“You have been. You, and the kids - Jackie, babe, I wanted them to grow up with the sort of parental family I didn’t have. That was all I wanted. That helped me more than anything else you could have done.”

Jackie sighed. One hand reached up to cup his face, to cradle it close and gentle. “I don’t like to think of you being left behind,” she murmured. Her eyes were searching as she scanned his face, looking for clues no doubt as to what he was thinking, as if there was something lingering beneath the surface that she just needed to patiently tease out. “You’re so lovely, Hayden. I can’t imagine anyone ever thinking that wasn’t enough to stay.”

“Clearly, she did,” he said, and shrugged. “I made my peace with it.”

“We’ll talk about it later?” she asked.

He snorted. “Would Shane let us not?”

“We both read the letter,” confessed Jackie. “I wanted to know how to help you. I haven’t seen you like that, ever. It scared me. I thought - I don’t know what I thought. But I shouldn’t have read it. I should have let you come to me. Do you want to know what’s in it?”

“You still have the letter?” Hayden asked, and she nodded. “No, not yet. I don’t want her to ruin this as well. I want to enjoy our day, as a family. I want to play hide and seek with my kids, who know that I’m never not going to find them - mostly because I’m a competitive dickhead. And we can talk about it later, and decide what to do then.”

There were times when Hayden was struck by how beautiful Jackie really was, and how lucky he had been to marry her. He didn’t know what his life would have been like if he had not worked up the courage to ask her to dance that night in the club, if he had looked across the room at the woman who had shone like the sun and simply passed her by like a planet just outside of orbit. Certainly, he didn’t think that he would be as happy as he was now, as comfortable, as assured in the fact that he was going to grow old holding hands with the person beside him, loving her until they were both dust in the earth.

Now was one of those times, as she looked at him with wide, shining eyes and expression of such care on her face that Hayden was half-convinced that he was dreaming, that he would wake up to discover that his whole life as Hayden Pike - husband and father and beloved - would be nothing but an elaborate fantasy. He hated to see the sadness (for him - she was sad for him and everything she felt that he had suffered) mar her face, and he ran his thumb under her eye, catching the first glittering tear as it began to fall.

“We decide together?” she asked, quietly. “You’ll let me help?”

“Together,” he promised, and kissed her, hoping that she would be able to read all the emotions that he did not have the words to verbalise in the feeling that he put into it, that she might understand on some base level all the things that Hayden was not good or clever enough to say.

Chapter 3

Bedtime was one of Hayden’s favourite parts of the day: half an hour with his kids where they were small and sleepy enough that he could curl up with them and simply appreciate the fact that he got to have this. He led point on the actually getting ready of the kids for sleep so that Jackie could have a break, making sure that they brush their teeth and straightening the cuffs of overlarge pyjamas, and then he and Jackie would divide and conquer for storytime, Jackie with the twins (though it was more making sure that they were packed and ready for the next day, now that they were too old for stories) and Hayden with Amber and Arthur.

They were in separate bedrooms, which meant that Hayden would spend the duration of one picture book with Amber, putting on the voices until she was delirious with the giggles (not overly conducive to winding down for bedtime, of course) and then smothering her face in kisses as he tucked her in, before making his way to Arthur’s side. Storytime with his son was a more sedate thing; they lay side by side in Arthur’s tiny bed, the book held between them, and Hayden would not put on any voices at all, because Arthur preferred the sound of Hayden’s own voice. Sometimes he would lay his hand on Hayden’s throat as he read to feel the rumble of the words as they were spoken.

Bedtime was different with Shane and Ilya. Hayden still took the kids up to make sure that they were ready, but Arthur, whenever his Uncle Shane was around, was always glued to Shane’s side like a limpet, which meant that Hayden had been unceremoniously discharged of his duties. It was a similar story with Jackie, who had been passed over in favour of Ilya - though, admittedly, Ilya put on good voices for reading stories, never seeming to be embarrassed when he was caught talking in an exaggeratedly squeaky voice or trying best to encapsulate the spirit of the sneaky, conniving mouse from the Gruffalo.

Hayden made use of the freed up time in the kitchen. Jackie was lingering by the counter and he knew that, like it had been all day, the urge to begin their talk early was making itself known restlessly under her skin. Her eyes were heavy where they were watching him, as if she was expecting him to fly apart any moment, but she passed him the mugs he gestured for obligingly, and then the milk from the fridge, as Hayden began the process of preparing four cups of tea. He wasn’t a massive tea drinker himself, but Jackie had gotten some decaf bags during her pregnancy and they had been something that they had enjoyed together, even after all the kids had been born and there had really been no need for them anymore.

It was less about drinking the tea and more about the familiar motions of making it. Hayden didn’t know if Shane or Ilya drank tea, but he felt like he might explode if he didn’t have something to do, and making four cups of tea rather than two took longer and more of his concentration, and used more of his energy.

By the time that Shane and Ilya freed themselves from the bedtime routine, Jackie was helping Hayden distribute mugs of tea around the dining room table. They were each the same, which was because Hayden and Jackie had always taken their tea the same way, but if Shane or Ilya had any opinions about the ratio of milk that Hayden had put in, or how long he had left it to steep, or some other step of the process, they didn’t say. They sat, uncomprehending, around the table, waiting until Hayden sat as well - beside Jackie and across from Ilya.

The tension was a living and elastic thing. Hayden was waiting for the moment that it broke with all the sudden, sharp pain of an elastic band. The anticipation was almost worse.

“Where’s the letter?” he asked quietly.

From her pocket, Jackie produced the letter and slid it across the table to him. Hayden let it sit in front of him, not touching, not quite looking at it - it was hard to simply think of the fact that he had a letter from Laura in front of him, that here, at last, there was some evidence that she had been real and she had existed, and the place that she had occupied in Hayden’s life was not something that he had made up. He ran his fingers over it and couldn’t help but think that it was quite ordinary, written on the thin, lined paper that you could buy for cheap from any store. The words were all in pencil, the letters thick enough that it was clear that it had not been sharpened. The handwriting was much neater than Hayden’s chicken scratch, but they both wrote the a the same.

He turned it over. Someone - Jackie, or maybe Shane - had smoothed away the wrinkles from where Hayden had scrunched it up, but they were still, raised and tactile and livid.

Hayden, he read again. This was the name that she had given him, a non-returnable gift that he hadn’t been able to throw on the curb with the rest of them.

I know it’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other, and I have no idea how you’ll receive this letter, or if you’ll even read it, but it was important for me to send it. Maybe you haven’t worked out who this letter is even from yet, and I can’t blame you for that, because I never let you get to know me. But I’m writing this letter today as your mom, who misses you.

It’s strange. I’ve thought for so long about what I would say to you if I ever got to see you again, and now I’ve been given a chance and my mind is blank. There is nothing that I can write in this letter that isn’t better said aloud, only maybe this: that I am sorry to have been gone so long, and to have missed so much of your life. I think about you all the time - if you’re happy, what kind of man you grew up to be, whether you still hate the taste of carrots - and I miss you just as often.

Maybe this means nothing to you, and maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe I’m asking too much of you by even dreaming of sending this letter, but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try at least once to reach you. I made a mistake - a lot of mistakes - and I want to make up for them. I want to see you, and I want to talk to you, and I want to know my son.

I’ve written my address to be included in this letter. I hope that you might come and visit me, so that we can get to know each other again. My door is always and will always be open to you, Hay.

Your mom,
Laura Newfield

Hayden read the letter again. The words did not change. He slotted it back into the envelope and set it down on the table. Took a breath, and then very deliberately placed his hands, folded, like a choir boy in prayer, and set them on the table in front of him. He made sure that the letter was not touching him.

“I liked carrots,” he said quietly. It was not what he had intended to say, but it was the thing that had stuck in his head, looped around and around on repeat.

He had always liked carrots. His dad had packed them in his lunchboxes, because Hayden liked the sharp crunch of them between his teeth and because he liked Bugs Bunny. They weren’t his favourite - he didn’t like them cooked, because then they were too soft and mushy - but he’d always liked them. And Laura thought he didn’t. In her head, she was missing a son who didn’t like carrots. That wasn’t Hayden. Fuck, that wasn’t Hayden that she was missing.

Jackie rested her hand on top of his; he took it gratefully, twining their fingers together.

“Hayd,” said Shane, his voice soft. Pitying. Like Hayden was some rabbit he’d hit with his car now crawling around the road in some bloodied pantomime. “You never talk about your mom.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” said Hayden, and shrugged. Because there wasn’t. Clearly there was less and he’d thought there was, considering all his stupid dreams about his mom thinking about him had been replaced by Laura who was thinking about a Hayden-who-didn’t-like-carrots. “She was there. She left. That’s all there was to it.”

“But -”

“Look, buddy, your mom is great. Really, she’s, like, brilliant, and she’s always been good to me, putting up with me tagging along with you guys whenever you were in Montreal together, coming to my wedding and the kids’ birthdays and shit. But some people don’t get that. I’m just one of them. It doesn’t make me special.”

Shane blinked. “I wish I could fix this for you.”

“I know,” said Hayden. “But it doesn’t need fixing. I’m happy. I have a kick-ass wife, and the best kids a guy could ask for, and - I mean, he has atrocious taste in guys - I have this pretty sweet best friend. I don’t need anything more than that.”

“Are you going to speak to your dad about this?” asked Jackie.

Hayden, damningly, had not much thought about his dad when he had been reading the letter - about how Dad had been in his childhood, yeah, but not about how he would feel to know that Laura had reached out. Dad was happy as a bachelor, he said - although Hayden knew that Marjorie from the corner store his dad bought his newspapers from was sweet on him, just as Dad was sweet on her. It didn’t change the fact that, legally, Dad still had a wife out there somewhere in the world.

If Hayden told his dad that Laura had reached out, his dad would not actually tell him how he felt about it. He would tell Hayden to do what he felt was best for him. If it upset him to think about, that was something he would take to his grave. And it wouldn’t be fair on Dad to put him through all of that again; Dad had already done the years of dealing with a stroppy kid still waiting for Laura to come home, then the years of a still stroppy but equally resentful teenager, all while having his own shit to put up with.

“I think this is something that I need to deal with first,” he said. “She said she put an address in? Is that… somewhere?”

What a joke it would be if she had forgotten to put the address in! All this angst, only for her still to be lost in the wind. But Shane produced a slip of paper and passed it over to Hayden. There was the address. There was the place that Laura was, no longer a mystery. And Hayden was holding it in his hands.

“It’s a two and a half hour drive from here,” Shane said. “I looked it up.”

“What?” Hayden said.

Shane continued, “it’s this tiny town about two and a half hours from Montréal. It’s supposed to be very picturesque, only about five hundred residents.”

“Yeah,” said Hayden, “but you said two and half hours.”

Shane tilted his head. “I mean, maybe longer with traffic?”

“You could drive there and back in a day. That - That can’t be right. I can’t have been living two and a half hours away from her all this time.”

“Oh, Hayden,” Jackie said. She sounded devastated for him.

Hayden levelled his finger at Shane and Ilya across the table. “That’s only half an hour more when you guys were doing Ottawa and Montreal. That’s nothing. I’ve driven longer to get lunch before. And all along, she’s just - there? There aren’t any oceans or borders keeping her away. She doesn’t have to shell out a fortune for flights or train tickets. What - What do I do with that? Jesus. Jesus.”

“Shit, man,” said Shane. “I’m sorry. I didn’t - I didn’t think about it like that.”

In Hayden’s head, the thought of Laura had been better when he had imagined her very far away. Yes, it meant that she had been so indifferent about him that every new mile of distance between them was like pocket change instead of the physical ache that Hayden felt when he was on the road and missing his kids, and yes, it meant that it was probably more premeditated than he just stepping out the front door one day and walking until she realised it was easier to say away. But it also meant that there was a reason beyond her just not wanting to that explained the reason she had never come back. If she was far away, the distance was a hassle, and was more difficult to make up again.

She was only two and a half hours away. Which meant that she had looked at the distance between her and Hayden, and simply decided that he actually wasn’t worth it.

“I’m going to see her,” he decided. He almost hadn’t realised that he had decided until he was saying the words and hearing them stiffen into resolve. “Fuck, it can be a fun little day trip, there and back again in no time at all. I’ll be back to join you guys for dinner, and then we can get on with the rest of our summer.”

“I don’t think you should go by yourself,” said Jackie. She twisted in her seat to face him properly. “I’ll call my mom to watch the kids. I’m coming with you - maybe, I should drive?”

“I know how to drive,” he said.

“Yeah, but I don’t think you should. I think it would be safer -”

“Jacks, I’m not going fucking run the car off the road,” he said.

He winced a little at how sharp the words came out, and hated it even more because the irritation that he said it with was not simply an accident of tone but a very real thing that he was feeling. He and Jackie had disagreements, of course, but they had been married for over a decade - they were adults. They spoke things out and were mature about it, not whiny and snapping and belligerent like Hayden was being.

He softened his voice. “Someone needs to be here in case the girls need us. Arthur and Amber won’t want to be away from both of us at once without more notice. It isn’t necessary. I won’t be gone for long. I just need to take care of this.” He held up a hand to forestall her, seeing the next suggestion as it was forming in her mind. “I’m not taking the kids to meet her either.”

“You’re being stubborn,” she argued. “I’m your wife. It’s my job to support you. If you need your family, and I think you do, then we should be with you. You show her that you’re happy, that you’ve made something for yourself, and that you have a network of support.”

“I don’t have to prove anything to her. And I don’t want her anywhere near our family. She walked out on all of that, and it isn’t hers to see. It isn’t fair to put the kids through that confusion either.”

“I’ll go,” said Shane. “I can’t drive, but I can be there for you.”

“You’re leg is fucked,” said Hayden, at the same time as Ilya said, “please, as if you could sit with that leg in Pike’s shitty car for two and half hours.”

“And what alternative is there?” snapped Shane, already rolling his eyes at his husband and his overprotective fussing. “You’ll go with Hayden?”

“Da,” said Ilya. “I’ll go with Pike.”

That gave everyone pause for a moment. They looked at Ilya, waiting for the moment that his composure broke and he rescinded the offer as a particularly unfunny joke, but his face remained steady and serious and sincere. They looked at Hayden, waiting for the moment that he would snap a standoffish refusal at the other man, make some crack about how he had thought nothing could make this situation worse until he’d been given the option of spending time alone with Rozanov in a confined space. But Hayden didn’t, examining Ilya from across the table.

“Rozanov will go with me,” he declared. “There, sorted. We’ll go tomorrow morning and then we’ll be back to tuck the kids into bed and do storytime.”

“Fuck my leg,” exclaimed Shane. “Hayd, man, you’re my best friend, and I can come with you, and we’ll do this together.”

“The only thing that could make this worse,” Hayden said, “is knowing you jeopardised your recovery over this. You’re my best friend as well, bud, but that isn’t what I need right now. I’ll bring your husband back in one piece, and it’ll all be fine.”

“I will also not murder Pike and discard his body in shallow grave in Canadian wilderness,” added Ilya, “if that helps.”

“That does not help, Ilyusha, thank you.”

Ilya shrugged. I tried, his deliberately innocent expression seemed to say. Shane eyed him up and down and said something in Russian, tone flat and deliberately ambiguous in the way that Shane always seemed to manage. In English, Hayden thought he had gotten good at decoding the various inflections of hidden emotion in his words, but Shane Hollander was a mystery to Hayden in  other languages. Soothingly, Ilya replied, also in Russian, and it seemed as though they had been absorbed into a world of their own. Hayden watched them a moment before turning to Jackie.

“Do you think I should be doing this?” he asked her, quietly. This conversation was for them, only, even if they did not have the screen of a language just for them to hide behind.

Jackie sighed. “I don’t know,” she admitted. She fidgeted idly with Hayden’s fingers. “I don’t like seeing you like this. I don’t like to think of you being upset. I want to fix it all for you, and I don’t know how.”

“I always wondered,” Hayden said, drawing out the words as he said them, sorting through which thoughts to share aloud and which he didn’t quite have the capacity to process yet, “what it said about me that she left. I always wondered what parts of myself I didn’t understand because she wasn’t there to show them to me. And now I’m going to find them, and I don’t know what to do with that. I just - I worry that, if I do this and I come back with some part of me that I’ve never had before, I’m risking all of this, the life we built together. Because there is no part of me that loves anything from my past more than I love you guys.”

“And there is no part of me that does not love all the parts of you,” replied Jackie. “You’ll still be my Hayden when you get back - funny and sweet and really sexy - and we’ll still be waiting for you. This isn’t something that you get to lose.”

Hayden ducked his head. He couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re really sexy too,” he informed her, “and I love you, a lot. Like, so much it makes me a little bit insane.”

“I’m so glad you got a vasectomy, because it makes me so less stressed to admit that hearing you talk about how much you’re willing to do for our family really turns me on,” Jackie said, laughing as well. She kissed the tip of his nose. “I love you as well, Hayden Pike, until death or school runs do we part.”

Chapter 4

Jackie and Hayden did not celebrate his vasectomy - in part because they had guests, and because they were always paranoid that they both end up naked with one of the kids banging on their door or another puking up their guts in the toilet or something, and also in part because Hayden still felt like he was about to vibrate out of his skin. He did make it worth Jackie’s while, because she was wearing a nightgown, which meant that he could remain fully clothed in case of emergency whilst he parted her thighs with his hands and kept his head underneath the quilt. There was the same thrill of excitement that he got from successfully performing some sort of stealthy sexual assignation, because they were - like most parents - mostly too tired even when they did have the time to consider anything, and the satisfaction of feeling Jackie clench around him and knowing that he had given her that.

She slept well after that, curled against Hayden’s chest. They didn’t always cuddle, because Jackie ran hot and Hayden was a chronic toss-and-turner, but he had wanted to be close to her tonight, to feel her at hand and assure himself, like she had promised, that this was something that he was keeping, that was his to have. And Jackie, though she had not said so, was still upset that she wouldn’t be going with him. She understood - God bless Jackie, who understood his shit sometimes even when he didn’t - but was not the same as accepting it, or even wanting to accept it. She was worried about him. In sleep, he watched as the worry was smoothed from her face, as the furrow between her brows vanished and the pinch at the corner of her mouth softened. They were getting older, both of them; the laugh lines (Jackie called them crow’s feet, but they were not that, to Hayden - they were not anything but evidence of their happiness) stayed.

Hayden did not sleep. Or, at least, the snatches of sleep he got were scant and restless. He thought maybe that he had been dreaming at one point, because he had jolted to attention with his heart in his throat and a sick sort of dread that broke out in a clammy sweat across his forehead.

When dawn began to break, creeping in pale fingers between the slats of their blinds, Hayden gave up on rest altogether. Careful not to jostle Jackie, he slipped from bed and out of the room altogether. He would start breakfast, he figured, so that everyone could have an easy start to the day. Being alone, as well, would give him some time to clear his head.

But he wasn’t alone when he made it downstairs. Shane, from where he had been sitting on the couch, a book in hand and his glasses resting on the bridge of his nose, looked up. Surprised, it seemed, to see Hayden, though that was a quick expression, barely there long enough for Hayden to catch. He patted the seat beside him, a clear invitation.

“I was going to make breakfast,” Hayden murmured, quiet, because he was still conscious of everyone sleeping upstairs.

Shane patted the seat again, more insistently. “It’ll be a couple hours at least until anyone else is up. Do you know what time it is?”

“Arthur’s an early riser,” said Hayden, but sat anyway. “What are you doing up, if it’s so early?”

“Usually I’d be doing yoga, but…” Shane gestured to his foot, scowling. “Apparently my internal body clock has caught on yet.”

Hayden didn’t know where Shane got the motivation for his routines from sometimes. He’d enjoyed running with Shane, but even that had left Hayden very much aware of everywhere he fell short in comparison to Hockey Jesus Shane Hollander. Yoga was something that he’d never tried, but he’d heard it was supposed to be good for mindfulness and shit.

“You recommend?” he asked.

Shane considered this with all the intensity of a personal trainer, before he said, “I mean, Ilya appreciates the extra flexibility… Maybe Jackie would?”

“Ah! No!” Hayden cried, shoving at Shane’s shoulder. “Visual was not needed, buddy, what the fuck!”

“Swear jar,” said Shane.

Hayden shuddered theatrically. “Yech.”

“I’m an adult man,” Shane deadpanned. “I have adult sex with my adult husband.”

“Nuh-uh,” said Hayden. “You’re my eeny-weeny, teeny-tiny, little baby brother who is too pure for such mortal sins.”

Shane rolled his eyes, but paused. Something uncertain stole over his face. “Brother?” he asked, far too serious for Hayden’s liking.

With a huff, Hayden slumped back into the couch. “Are we doing this now?”

“I think maybe we should,” said Shane. “We don’t talk about shit, do we? Like, feelings and what’s going on with us. Maybe a bit after the FanMail thing. But we don’t talk about those sorts of things. I think maybe we should start.”

“You’re my best friend,” said Hayden. “We’ve been good the way we are so far.”

“I didn’t know about your mom, Hayd. That feels like the sort of thing that best friends know about each other.”

“To be fair,” Hayden pointed out, “my wife didn’t even know about Laura. I don’t tell anyone. And I didn’t know about your ten year gay love affair with your rival, so I think maybe you’re good in the vein of not knowing things.”

“I feel like this isn’t the sort of thing we should be making into a competition. I just - I want to be there for you. I know that it can be lonely, feeling like you’re the only person existing with these feelings that you don’t know how to talk about. I don't do that for you.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t a better friend,” Hayden said. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t be there for you.”

Shane made a noise of inarticulate frustration. “That isn’t what this is about,” he said. “You apologised. We moved on. It’s good. It’s in the past. This - us - isn’t, and I want us both to be there for each other. I want to be able to do more than just chat shit - which is good, by the way! I’m not saying that what we have now isn’t good, because you’re my best friend and I have never been as comfortable with someone as I am you, and everything you’ve done for me is more than I have the words to talk about. I just want to be able to talk about other things as well. I wish that I could come with you.”

“I know,” said Hayden. “And, also, I want you to be able to talk about the other things with me as well. I wasn’t keeping this from you because I didn’t trust you, though. You need to know this. It was just - too big for me, I think.”

“A problem shared is a problem hallved.” Shane set his book down on the coffee table, turning to look scrutinisingly at Hayden. “And you’re sure? That it’s okay to have Ilya there with you? He’s trying to be helpful, but if it’s too much, I can talk to him.”

“No, no,” said Hayden, frowning. “He’s been surprisingly helpful. I - When he came up to talk to me after I got the letter… It’s not exactly the same, but I think he maybe understands a little, ‘cause he doesn’t have his mom with him anymore either. He was good. It was good.”

Shane leant against Hayden’s shoulder. “I wish I could take this all from you both. I hate that this is the thing that you guys are finding out you have in common.”

“I mean, what else would there be?” scoffed Hayden. “We’re both totally different people.”

“Ilya’s also a fan of Madonna.”

“I’m not a fan of Madonna.”

“Liar.”

The morning was easy, once everyone was awake, because they didn’t need to pack anything into the car except for Ilya and Hayden. It would be, Hayden was determined, a short, negligible trip barely worth thinking about. Arthur was already confused, and Amber devastated to be losing her favourite playmate (.. Ilya, her favourite playmate, not Hayden), and he’d asked that they didn’t turn it into something else that it wasn’t, just in case it upset the kids more.

Shane, determined on his promise from that morning to be a more ‘emotionally available’ friend, had bundled Hayden into an embrace much longer than the ones that they usually shared, almost long enough to be awkward - except for the fact that Hayden actually fucking love it. It was worth the envious glower that Ilya shot him, and also worth the fact that Ilya felt the immediate urge to overcorrect the perceived slight, dipping Shane into a kiss so deep and filthy that Hayden had taken that as the moment to hug his kids goodbye, tactfully turning them so that their backs were to their beloved Uncle Shane and Uncle Ilya.

It was saying goodbye to Jackie that was the hardest. Hayden hadn’t wanted her to go with him for the kids and for the fact that he didn’t like to think of her and Laura in the same room, because it meant that Jackie was seeing all the worst parts of Hayden, the ones that he had maybe inherited from Laura or from her absence. They were the sort of things that Jackie would probably find out about now that the issue of Laura Newfield was out in the open - but they were the sort of things that Hayden wanted to tell her himself. But just because he had not wanted her there did not mean that he didn’t want her with him. He wanted that more than anything. Things were better with her around, always. Maybe it was masochism that had Hayden keeping her away now, or some twisted sort of self-preservation, but saying goodbye to her was the closest he had come that morning to getting on his knees and begging her to ignore everything that he had said before and to come with him, please, because he did not want to be alone.

“I love you,” she said. “Very much. Will you let me know when you arrive safely?”

“I’ll keep you up to date,” he promised. “Let me know if you need me back early for the kids? Or just because you want me. Anything, really.”

“I always want you. I also think that you should get going, or you’ll put it off and it’ll never get done.”

“You’re right,” he acknowledged. “But I’ll be back. I love you.”

She squeezed his hand before releasing, and Hayden slid into the passenger side door. He’d wanted to drive, just to give him something to do, something to focus on other than what was waiting at the end of the road, but Rozanov had taken the keys before Hayden could and was already sitting in the driver’s seat, keying Laura’s address into the SatNav.

“Will you start it?” asked Rozanov, despite the fact that his fingers were still typing into the display.

He finished the address, and leaned back, both hands on the wheel. Obligingly, Hayden pressed START. Ilya muted the voice almost immediately (“I cannot concentrate with constant chirp-chirp-chirp,” he explained. “Is too much English when I am already thinking of stupid Canadian traffic rules) but the map scrolled out regardless, a web of two dimensional streets and blank spaces between them and a single blue line that would lead Hayden straight to Laura, like string tied to his ribs or a fish hook buried in the flesh of his cheek, inevitably drawing him forwards.

“You ready?” asked Ilya, unusually considerate.

Hayden nodded. Ilya began to coax the car out of the drive, and Hayden twisted around in his seat. Jackie and Shane were standing with the kids on the threshold of the front door, the kids already waving. Hayden waved too, blowing kisses and pulling faces until he and Rozanov were right down the end of the street and out of sight entirely. Then, he slumped back facing forwards and tried to breathe through the trembling panic that roosted itself in his chest, in his stomach, in his throat.

“I bring car snacks,” Rozanov offered, and produced an open bag of sunflower seeds from the pocket of his (Shane’s, actually, with a visible 24 embroidered on the back) Ottawa Centaurs hoodie.

Hayden took a handful. “Thanks,” he muttered, and was dismayed to discover that they tasted nice. It would be easier to hate them, he thought. He didn't. He counted them in his palm and ate them methodically, examining each before popping them in his mouth. It was the culinary equivalent of watching paint dry, but it gave him something to think about.

Ilya seemed content to leave him to his own devices. He ate his own sunflower seeds, and kept his eyes on the road, and they passed the first hour in silence. By the end of it, Hayden was forced to admit that Jackie had probably been right when she had thought him unfit to drive; on his knees, hisbhands trembled and shook, and his leg leapt up and down. Shane jiggled his knee when he was stressed sometimes, an outlet for his pent up energy, but Hayden had never felt that same restlessness - or at least he didn't often. But it was uncontrollable now. He couldn't have stopped even if he had wanted to.

“You will damage suspension like that,” Ilya observed, eventually. Clearly it had been bothering him a while and he was at last deciding that it would not be rude or insensitive to pull Hayden up on it.

“It has shock absorbers for a reason,” Hayden muttered, but apologised dutifully. He clamped a hand on his knee, and when that did not quite steady it as he intended, he leaned forward and propped his elbows atop them.

Ilya cut him a harsh look. Hayden felt that, somewhere, somehow, he had said something wrong. “I do not want your apologies, Pike,” he said. “I want to know if I should turn this car around and take you home and tell you to forget about it before you hurl your guts up all over me.”

Hayden ignored the last part. He asked, “do you think I should?”

“Should what?”

“Forget about it.”

“I think,” said Ilya, and it was clear that he was choosing the words carefully, parsing through the English he spoke with Hayden and the Russian that came naturally to him, “that depends why you are going.”

“She's my mom.” That is what he had said to Jackie, washing the dishes after breakfast, and it was what he had told Shane.

“She is Laura,” Rozanov corrected. “You said yourself. Now I ask why you are going to see her. I am curious.”

"You went back to Russia a lot, right?” observed Hayden. He was trying to keep his periodic glances at Ilya as inconspicuous as possible. “But you didn't feel much about your family?”

“Da,” obliged Ilya, content it seemed to ignore the tangent Hayden was leading him. “I love my mama. I would sit by her grave, sometimes, so that I could speak to her. I loved Moskva, and my old school, and my old ice rink, and my old friends. But my family - my father, my brother - maybe I love them, but I do not like them. Going back was… responsibility, I think. If I did not do it, it would not be done. And I wanted - I wanted Moscow to be my home still, because it had always been my home, and I couldn't admit that it wasn't anymore. Because I would lose it, forever.”

“I'm sorry that happened,” said Hayden, which was shorthand code for I'm still so fucking sorry for the FanMail video. Because it was Hayden who was responsible for Ilya losing that last moment of home.

Ilya waved a dismissive hand. “I love being Canadian. I love my Shane. I love Yuna and David. Was nothing for me in Moscow. But that is why I went back - for Moscow, for Mama, because I loved my papa and my brother, sometimes. Why are you going?”

Hayden slumped against the window. It was cool where the glass pressed against his face. He said, “Laura used to dip in and out of our lives a lot. We had this family presentation once, when I was six - Arthur’s just done a similar one, actually- and I got in trouble ‘cause I said that she was an astronaut. I thought that was cool as fuck. And I used to think that there had to be a reason she wasn't there much, and it had to be cool. She was a spy, or an Olympic athlete, or an astronaut. My teacher didn't think it was cool and I got a break detention. The other kids teased me mercilessly. Said it was ‘cause she didn't want me, actually.

“Probably, they were right. She left a year later. I watched her walk right out of that door - no suitcase, just a backpack and a summer jacket - and I asked her when she’d be back. It had stopped being cool, you see, to think of her as an astronaut or whatever. I just wanted her to stay. She told me she’d be back soon - spoiler, she wasn't- but I spent the two years after that convinced that she'd be back at any moment. And she wasn't. And I had friends, you know, with Mom and Dad and all, and their moms were there. Packed their lunchbags and took them to the park and actually spent time with them.

“Laura didn't do that. Even when she was there, she didn't have much time for me.” Hayden shrugged, swallowing past a lump that had grown in his throat. “So, yeah, probably I'm going to ask her why. You know, what was wrong with me to make her so desperate to leave. Why she couldn't stand to be in the same room with me. What I did to make her stop coming back.”

The silence stretched a moment. Hayden blinked back the burn of tears, determined that Ilya Rozanov would not be the first person to see him cry since his kids had been born for the second day in a row. It was a humiliating thought. And more unsettling was the fact that Hayden couldn't read Rozanov's thoughts from his face - not that he'd expected to, but he got the feeling, whenever Rozanov turned his gaze onto him, sharp and smarmy, that the other man was peering into the depths of Hayden’s soul.

Ilya’s hands flexed around the wheel. “Probably,” he said, studiously not looking at Hayden, “I will turn car around now.”

“Fucking what?”

“I said I will turn car around. We both go home. You stop being stupid, boring Canadian with stupid, boring angst.”

“Fuck you. I'll drive. I'm not asking for you to decide what I do and don't do.”

“You asked for opinion! I give!”

Hayden felt his nostrils flare. “Well, I fucking changed my mind. What the fuck are you going on about?”

“You should not go if you are looking to prove you are mediocre man with something wrong with you. Is stupid. You are stupid. This is only reason I would tell you is wrong for going to see Laura. Only one.”

“You don't understand,” Hayden appealed, uncertain what he was appealing to.

“I understand,” said Ilya. “You think there is something terribly wrong with you so you go to prove it by hoping Laura will tell you that you are fundamentally unlovable. You do it with Shane - always you are bad friend who made unforgivable mistake and is on evil fucking team. Maybe people think you are fishing for people to give you compliments and tell you are really good, but I do not think this is what you do. I think you wish my Shane would tell you that you are bad friend, so you do not have to admit you think this yourself. But he will not so you wish to find someone who will. Is stupid. I will turn car around. I will not be part of this.”

“That's - fuck you, you don't know what I'm thinking.”

Quietly, Ilya said, “my mama left me too. People think I forget this, because she is dead, but she left me too.”

All the fight drained from Hayden. In place of the anger there was only a terrible, bone deep exhaustion.

“Your mom sounded like she loved you, a lot,” replied Hayden.

Ilya shrugged. “Still she left me. I thought for a while that there was maybe something I could have done differently, to make her stay. I talk a lot about it in therapy.”

“Are you saying I should get therapy?” asked Hayden, amused in spite of himself.

Ilya shrugged. “Yes.” Then he cleared his throat. “I am saying also that you were seven and she was not. That whatever made her want to leave was not your fault. Maybe it was you - maybe was not ready to be a mother - but that does not make it your fault. It says nothing about you, but something about her. That is what you find out when you see her. Nothing else - nothing about you. She has given you nothing. You are the person who has grown up, become average hockey player, married very much above your level, and made wonderful children. This is all the things you need to think of when you think of what kind of man you are.”

“Man,” said Hayden. “That was almost the nicest thing you've ever said to me.”

“You do not have your reasons to go now,” continued Ilya. “So, do you want me to turn around?”

Chapter 5

Chapter Notes

Sorry I forget to post this yesterday, guys. Currently slammed with final essays for my degree and I forgot what day of the week it was 🫠

It was like a postcard or a coming-of-age movie, the town that Ilya drove them into. Hayden hadn’t known what he expected but it wasn’t this - it felt far too on the nose for it to be this. The streets were wide and straight, shaded under the leafy canopies of the trees that lined them. They passed a quaint church with a riotous explosion of wildflowers gathered around the base of it, and a playpark with children running amok and their indulgent guardians watching over them. Every house that they passed was almost identical - all of them were cute and neatly contained red brick houses, with green lawns and white picket fences.

“Is like American movie,” Ilya wondered aloud. “Like, ah, cheesy one, or Hallmark.”

Hayden eyed him up dubiously. “You watch those?”

“Was recommended for learning American culture,” said Ilya, with a shrug, “to watch stupid American movies. I watched many.”

“It doesn’t seem like real life,” Hayden agreed, eventually, because in spite of the fact he would have loved to chirp Rozanov over this, the man wasn’t wrong. It did look like the set of a cheesy movie, the stereotypical small town. It didn’t at all fit the half-formed ideas he had of Laura Newfield and her life.

If he had been driving, Hayden probably would have driven past the house that the SatNav directed them to. It looked like all the others. He had kind of thought that he would know it when he saw it, like a gut feeling or a moment of intuition - which was stupid, because he had no reason to know it, and because this wasn't a movie and there was sentimental score swelling in the background to let Hayden know that he was on the precipice of some life changing moment, some cataclysmic shift. But the SatNav gave a cheery bing!, the route terminated, and Ilya pulled the car over to the side of the road, checking the house number nailed up beside the front door with the one in the address they had. 

“We're here,” he said. Nothing else. What was there to be said? They had spoken about everything they needed to.

Hayden, for the first time in years, was able to turn his head and look at a home with Laura inside. It was a weird thought. It didn't look any different to the houses around it. It was a family home; white pickets fences, a well-maintained lawn, two raised planting beds. The front door was newly painted, it seemed, or at least looked after, and there were curtains (light blue) in the windows. He pictured Laura inside, enfolded in every room of the house, enforced in the quiet and the solitude and the simplicity of her own company. It was a quiet she had never gotten, probably, with Hayden and his dad, in the tiny, one floor home they'd shared back in Drummondville.

Hayden stepped out onto the pavement. Ilya, around the other side, also stepped out.

“You're coming in?” he asked.

“I need to piss,” replied Ilya.

Hayden felt like this was not entirely the truth. But, he found, he didn't want to call Ilya out on it, if it meant that Ilya would maybe stay in the car. It would be easier, he thought, to have someone with him so that he did not have to face her alone. And Ilya had been helpful - more helpful than Hayden had ever thought he could be. He was comforting, in a way - and boy! Hayden couldn’t wait to confess that to Shane, who had always worried about the fact that his husband and best friend couldn’t ever seem to get along.

“Here goes nothing,” Hayden muttered from the corner of his mouth, and raised his hand to knock on the door. It sounded a little like a death knell. He stepped back.

Nothing happened.

Would Laura be working? He didn’t really remember if she had ever worked when Hayden had been little - he didn’t think so. Some of his friends’ moms had said she was a stay at home type of parent, but this had never really been the case because she had never been at home. But that had been then, and this was now, and people changed. After all, Hayden hadn’t been working the last time she’d seen him either. Or maybe she was simply out - grocery shopping or coffee or something. Or maybe she had never really stopped flitting about the place the way that she had with Hayden and his dad. Maybe this big family house was empty of even her.

Then the door swung open. Hayden took another step back. He didn’t recognise the woman standing there - he was certain, probably, that he had never seen her before. Had they gotten the wrong house?

She was older - grey hair secured behind her head, a face softened by lines and wrinkles and the evidence of many years alive. Laura (as Hayden remembered her) had been younger; he’d never thought about her old before. He remembered her with the vividness of red hair, a riotous exposure of curls around her face, and eyes that had always been bright, except for when she left, whether she was happy or not. There'd always been a feverish intensity about her. Her hands had been cold. Her sweaters had been warm. Hayden had taken after his dad. He’d never looked anything like her; if strangers on the street could have seen them together, they would not see them and think of them as mother and son.

This woman did not look much like Hayden, but she did not look much like how he remembered Laura either. But then - then she seemed to see him, to take him in entirely, and she gasped, a fluttering breath that seemed almost to be wrenched from her, and her hands came up to cover her mouth. They were shaking - like Hayden’s were, where he had shoved them deep in his pockets. And her eyes - green eyes - were shining, and then were shining with a sheen of tears as she seemed to well up every second that she looked at him.

“Hayden?” she whispered, and her voice was shaking too. It broke in the middle of his name. “Hay, is it you?”

He swallowed. Limply, fishing it out of his pocket, he held up the letter. “I got this in the mail,” he said. “You’re Laura?”

She nodded. Still, he didn’t recognise her. Still, in his head, he couldn’t equate her with the last memory he had of her. But she was in front of him. She was real. She had changed in the way that ordinary, real people did when time passed over them. This was not an invention; he had no cause to picture the woman in front of him, and suddenly there were two Lauras in his mind - the one stood in front of him now, and the one who had left all those years ago. They superimposed themselves over each other in his mind, even when the pictures did not seem to mesh together.

“I can’t believe you came,” she said. “I sent the letter, but I - I can’t believe you came.”

“I needed to see you,” said Hayden, honestly. The words burned as he said them, at the back of his throat. It was true, but he didn’t know what else he could say honestly to her. He didn’t know much - didn’t know, really, what he was feeling as he looked at her. Confused, mostly. Under that, maybe nothing at all, or maybe too much for him to recognise it.

Her eyes shifted to where Ilya was standing just behind Hayden’s shoulder, letting him lead in this interaction. “And - your friend?”

Hayden glanced over his shoulder at where Ilya was standing, and nearly winced. There was no expression on Ilya’s face - his eyes were dead, like a shark’s. It was the look that Rozanov got on the ice, staring down the next unfortunate bastard to stand between him and a goal, just before he set out to prove that his bite was just as bad as his bark.

“Ilya Rozanov,” Hayden introduced, and Ilya nodded.

“Privet,” Ilya said.

“Well,” said Laura, and she was looking at Hayden again, almost hungrily, “you’re both welcome to come in. I’ll make us some drinks and something to eat. We can talk. I have a lot I want to say to you, and I imagine that you have so many questions for me. I mean, that is, do you want to come in?”

She looked nervous. Hayden felt that. He nodded - couldn’t really speak, couldn’t find the words. But he nodded, and Laura held the door open wider, and they stepped, both of them, inside.

The hallway that they found themselves in was warm and wide and open, bright. The white walls seemed to glow in the golden light cast through open windows and rooms and the door from them which opened up into the hallway. There was a set of stairs disappearing upstairs - Laura would sleep up there, and so up there would be the most lived in part of the house, with all the evidence of the woman that Hayden couldn’t quite understand on display. Along the walls, there were picture frames, and in them, photos of everything - the glint of the moon through a blanket of fog laid heavy across a lake, the real posture of an old tree, the dizzying heights of a skyscraper maze much taller and complex than this small town would ever see.

Laura caught him examining them each in turn. She smiled, almost dotingly at them. “I took that one,” she said, pointing at the dizzying skyscraper photo Hayden had last been looking at, “in New York. It reminded me of the state park at Del Norte in California with all the redwoods towering above you.”

“I haven’t been,” said Hayden.

The photographs carried forward into the kitchen, an open space with an island separating the kitchen itself from a dining area. Hayden saw one of a murmur of starlings, a thick shadow against the magnificence of a colourful sky, and another of a teenage girl cradled in the upper limbs of an oak taken from a distance. The kitchen itself was homey and warm, all earthy tones and light that streamed in from a large back garden (the sort of garden, Hayden thought, that his kids would enjoy). Laura had clearly invested in more modern appliances however; they were sturdy and reliable models. Did this mean that she enjoyed cooking? Hayden felt like he was trying to construct a puzzle of her in his mind, except the pieces hadn’t been turned right way up yet and half of them were still in the box.

“Sit,” she urged them. “I’ll make drinks.”

Hayden took a place at a moderately sized dining table. A cotton runner ran down the middle of the dark wooden surface, and there was a glass vase with a spray of rightly coloured flowers which looked as though they had been plucked from nature rather than bought at a store, most of them wildflowers. Ilya took the place directly beside Hayden, which meant that Laura would either have to sit at the head or tail of the table, or directly opposite them.

“What’s your poison?” she asked, pulling out three mismatched mugs from a cupboard.

Ilya made a face of confusion. “You - poison us?”

“She means what’re you drinking, dude,” explained Hayden. “Like, tea or coffee or water.”

“I have pretty much everything,” Laura offered.

Ilya frowned. “Decaf?”

“Decaf tea,” she said, producing a box. Ilya nodded in assent; he’d had a caffeinated coffee that morning with breakfast, but he was apparently limiting himself to a cup a day. Hayden didn’t understand why - he’d thought it had been something to do with one of Shane’s dietary quirks reawakening itself, but Shane had said that it wasn’t - but Ilya was holding fast to it.

“Same here,” said Hayden, because it felt safer. Probably Laura would think he drank the stuff regularly, but that, he thought, was preferable to her knowing how he took his coffee or something.

Laura made three mugs of decaf tea, and brought them, a jug of milk, three tea spoons and a spoon rest over to the table. There were coasters already there, and she set each mug down atop them, very careful not to spill any at all. Her hands were clean and dry; Hayden couldn’t help staring at them. He wondered if it still bothered her, the thought of Hayden’s unwashed hands holding hers. He wondered what would happen if she spilled milk on them now. But she didn’t, and she sat opposite him, so her hands (clean, dry) remained in Hayden’s line of sight. For a moment, there was only the sound of clinking spoons as milk was added and stirred in. He took a sip of his and couldn’t taste a thing; it was all ashes, ashes, ashes.

“I have so much I want to say to you, and I don’t know where to  start,” Laura said. It was an echo of what she had written in her letter; these words Hayden had committed almost to memory. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He took another sip of his drink because it gave him something to do and some time to decide what he wanted to say. “I got your letter yesterday. Coming here was - spontaneous. I don’t know what I’m thinking about this all, or what I’m feeling. That’s why I’m here, I suppose.”

Her eyes shifted again to Ilya, as if she wasn’t quite sure what to make of him. “It was good of your friend - Ilya, was it? - to come with you.”

Ilya’s smile was all sharp teeth. “We are very good buddies, me and Pike.” It did not sound sincere; it sounded like every asshole-ish thing that Ilya ever said to him.

Hayden rolled his eyes, and said, “his husband was my teammate and is his best friend. He might’ve come with me, but he busted his knee.” And then, because Laura did not recognise Rozanov and because he had no idea if she had even known that there was a public way to keep tabs on his life, he added, “I play hockey. Shane - his husband - played with me for the Montreal Voyageurs. He got traded a few seasons ago, but I’m still playing.”

“I don’t watch hockey,” said Laura, “but I saw a bit of the Montreal game. That’s when I saw you. I didn’t - I remember that you liked it, when you were little, but I - I didn’t know that you were playing professionally. It was a massive coincidence. I was certain it couldn’t be you - I thought it was just someone with your name - but then I watched the interviews afterwards and… and it was you.”

“You watched me play,” said Hayden.

“I thought you were very good,” she replied earnestly, leaning closer towards him.

“Eh,” said Ilya.

“Ilya’s a hockey player as well,” explained Hayden, shooting him a glower. Laura seemed mostly confused at his presence beside Hayden, and he supposed that she deserved to at least know who the strangers in her home were. “There’s a rivalry. We tolerate each other for Shane.”

She nodded, like this made sense to her. Maybe it did. She asked, “have you been playing for long?”

“Since 2009, in the NHL for Montreal.”

“He is captain now,” Ilya added, and, for some reason, sounded almost like he was boasting. “Voyageurs were terrible team after my Shane left, but Pike was made captain after many shit players left and now rebuilds slightly better team. Mediocre. Is very big improvement.”

“Laugh it up,” said Hayden, “but we have the same amount of Stanley Cups as you, Mister Generational Talent.”

“My husband won you those.”

Hayden rolled his eyes. “Play-offs next season,” he said, somewhat optimistically. He thought, looking back on it, that he had not considered how much work Ilya Rozanov had put into the miracle resurgence of Ottawa. Certainly, it was less a miracle and more a lot of really fucking hard work. It had been easier after getting rid of old timers like Drapeau and Comeau however. He continued, “after that, I’m coming for your dynasty.”

“Captain,” Laura repeated. “Do you enjoy it?”

“I do. A lot of the younger guys have a lot of potential. If I can make even one of them feel comfortable and supported enough to achieve it, then it’s worth it. Hockey culture has been toxic for so long - very no talking about feelings or personal shit or whatever - and I ignored it for too long, just operating under the radar. But now’s the best time for change,” he said, with a shrug, “and I’d be a lot of a bastard if I just ignored it.”

“And things are changing?” she asked.

“Yeah. I mean, Shane and Roz over there are changing the narrative about LGBTQ players in hockey, and tackling mental health. Can’t let them have all the fun.”

“Really?” She sounded interested, almost. It was strange - strange to think of her wanting a window into his life when the door had closed behind her such a very long time ago.

“I help out with their foundation sometimes. It’s for mental health - the Irina Foundation.”

Her brows furrowed. “I’ve heard about that.”

“Is named for my mother,” said Ilya. There was the same weight to the word mother as there always was, something almost sacred, but in this room it felt heavier almost, and landed that heavily with Laura. “She struggled for many years before she left me. Suicide. The foundation and the camps for young hockey players are for her. Pike is good help with these. Good with kids.”

“That,” murmured Hayden, “is the nicest thing that you have ever said about me.”

Laura blinked and her eyes were shining - shining again, like she was in Hayden’s mind and how she had shone when she had looked like his appearance was moving her to the point of tears. “It’s not my place to say this, I don’t think, but any mother would be proud to have you as her son, Hay. I can’t picture the little boy I knew as the man that you’ve grown up into. It’s strange - really strange.”

“I mean, it didn’t have to be strange,” said Hayden. It was a little mean, but he felt a little mean, bitter and like he wanted - needed - her to know how bitter he felt. It was a strange feeling, facilitating in and out of his bitterness, and then again. “You could have been there. You could’ve known this stuff.”

“I know,” she said. “I know. And now - God, Hay - I wish that I had been there. That I could have seen you grow up, and - and watched your hockey games, and met your friends. But I didn’t. The person I was back then was different. She had different priorities. Different wants and needs. She was scared and hurting - and I’m still scared, a little, to be sitting here now, but the person that I am now knows how to be scared without running. I don’t want to run anymore. And I want to spend the rest of my life making up for running in the first place,”

“What was so scary about watching me grow up?” he asked. The question burst from him without his permission, in one whole rush. It wasn’t what he intended to ask, and he certainly didn’t intend for the question to be so desperate. “What about me made it impossible for you to come back? Because I don’t understand. I don’t understand. You were supposed to love me.”

Ilya, beside him, sucked in a sharp breath. Hayden shot him a steady look; the hurt was there, always there, having simmered to a boil in the time since placing the lid over it and finally lifting the lid off, but the self-recrimination, the doubt, the fear - that was gone. Or, at least, it had settled into something controllable. Something quiet enough that Hayden could hear himself when he repeated Ilya’s assertion - that this answer wouldn’t change anything about him, that he was not fundamentally unloveable, that people were not waiting for the excuse to leave him. All these answers would tell him was what Laura was thinking and feeling; that was enough for him.

As the words struck, Laura’s face crumpled in on itself. “Oh, sweetheart, no,” she breathed, and her hand reached out for him across the table. “Hayden… I -”

She was cut off before she could speak by the sound of the front door opening, and then closing, and then the rapid progression of footsteps - two sets, Hayden realised, one slower. He twisted in his chair, frowning; he had just assumed that Laura lived alone - was a friend visiting? Or a particularly bold burglar? Ilya also turned, and from behind them, there was a scrape of chair legs as Laura rose hastily to her feet.

“Hay,” she said. “Hay, I -”

“Mom,” came the call, and Hayden felt his stomach fall away, down and down and down into a dizzying abyss of numbness. “Moooooom, me and Dad are back early. We brought ice cream!”

A young girl - maybe seventeen, eighteen - rounded into the kitchen. She was the teenager in the picture, the one cradled in the branches of the oak tree; not, as Hayden had supposed, a random subject.

And he saw the moment that she saw him, saw the surprise as it fell onto a familiar face. Because, for as much as Hayden and Laura did not look similar at all, it was Hayden’s face staring back at him - his nose, his lips, the set of his jaw and chin. All of it was rounded off by Laura - the red curls and the bright eyes. And he imagined that the expression on his face was therefore a mirror of hers - the shock, the confusion.

“Mom?” she asked, and her voice had drifted towards confusion. And then she added, the pitch of her voice rising sharply, “holy shit, is that Ilya Rozanov?”

Chapter 6

Chapter Notes

If you guys saw the chapter count go up by one, no you didn't 🫣 (This is now featuring bonus chapter, which was going to be an addition to this in a series but I felt it functioned better here) (There will probably be others)

“What’s going on?” asked the girl, her voice sharp. Her eyes darted between Ilya, Hayden and Laura in turn.

If Hayden had the words to answer her, he would have. But he didn’t - all his words, which had been rushing out him like water from a burst dam only moments before, had dried up entirely. There was a vice grip fastened around his neck, tightening with every second of thick, tense silence that ticked by. He was going to choke on it, or stop breathing, or maybe scream - something embarrassing, something humiliating, something very far away from the grown up and put together figure he had been trying to cut in front of Laura. But his facade and the control was rapidly unravelling around him, and he didn’t think that he would be able to gather it back again.

Ilya’s hand settled on his elbow and squeezed. Hayden nearly went to shake it off, but paused. The physical contact helped - like his hands against the bathroom tiles. Ilya’s touch was firm, a reminder that he was real and that he wasn’t floating away miles outside and above his body.

At some point, he had risen to is feet. He turned a little to look at Laura, whose eyes were wide. Her lips trembled, the picture of restrained emotion. “Hay,” she said, beseechingly, and turned back away from her to stare at the teenager in the doorway.

An older man - button up and blazer, tie and business shoes, slacks and neatly combed silver hair - had appeared as well, standing over her shoulder and staring at Hayden with eyes that were far too knowing to be comfortable. Did he recognise Hayden? Did he know why Hayden was here? Clearly, the teenager did not. Clearly, Hayden had worked into something that he didn’t understand. Didn’t understand at all - because he had seen Laura’s stereotypical family home and had just assumed that she had lived alone, that there wasn’t some magic do-over button that she could press whenever she got sick of Hayden and his dad. Hayden hadn’t had one of those - maybe she could replace him, but he’d been stuck with the one mother and it was her.

“I’m sorry,” he said, shoving the chair back into the table. He grabbed the keys from where Ilya had set them on the table in front of him. “We need to go. I’m sorry. We’ve intruded into your house long enough I think.”

“Wait,” said Laura, panic underlining her words. “Hay, please, I can explain. Just wait a minute - don’t go.”

“I need to go,” Hayden repeated. His words were mostly a mutter, thickened into a slur by the tumult of emotion that writhed in his chest. The floor felt uneven under his feet. “I told my wife I’d be back to help with the kids. It’s a bit of a drive. We’re intruding. We should go.”

“You’re married? And you have kids?” There was an ache in Laura’s questions, like Hayden had dug his fingers into an old bruise.

“What does it matter to you?” he snapped. “You weren’t there. My kids are nothing to do with you.”

“Just give me a chance to explain.”

“You had a chance! Twenty seven years of chances actually!”

The man stepped further into the room. He had his hands held in front of him in a universal gesture of surrender. “Look,” he said, very reasonably. Hayden glowered at him. “I think we all need to take a step back and calm down. My name’s Callum - I’m Laura’s husband. This is our daughter, Ella. And you must be Hayden. Laura’s told me about you.”

“Funny,” said Hayden. “You haven’t come up at all. Probably because you can’t be her husband, since she’s married to my dad and all.”

“Your father and I divorced,” said Laura, subdued. She couldn’t quite bring herself to look at Hayden, or at any of them.

“He would have told me,” said Hayden. “We don’t keep these sort of things from each other.”

“I was a while ago now. 2004,” Laura said. “Maybe he just forgot to tell you.”

“Sorry,” said Ella. “Is anyone going to tell me what fucking Hayden Pike and Ilya Rozanov are doing in our kitchen?”

“Language,” chorused Callum and Laura.

“Leaving,” said Hayden.

“Please,” said Laura. “I know I’m not doing this right - I’d wanted to explain properly, to talk to you. I didn’t want to do it like this, but, Hay, I wish you’d given me just a little bit to train and explain. Stay for dinner.”

“No,” said Hayden. “No. No. I told myself, you know, maybe that you weren’t ready to be a mother, but all along you’ve been doing this! You just didn’t want to be my mother, did you?”

“Sorry,” repeated Ella. “What do you mean mother? Mom?”

He looked over at her and it was strange. She was his sister. Hayden had a sister. He’d been an only child for so long, and he’d never really thought about having a sibling. He knew that some people couldn’t picture life as an only child - Jackie had three brothers, and, for all they were her tormentors, she loved them fiercely. They were built-in friends, she said, and protectors and confidants. She thought that childhood would have been lonely without them. His kids had siblings and the thought of them growing up and always having each other, even after Hayden and Jackie would be gone was a comforting one. Ilya had a brother as well, Hayden was pretty certain, yet he never spoke about him. But Hayden was an only child, and so was Shane - and whilst they were brothers in everyway that mattered, they hadn’t grown up together.

If he ever thought about what it would be like to have a sibling, it was usually an older brother. Someone who would run amok with him, or like sports as well, and attend all of Hayden’s hockey games. Maybe Hayden would have nieces and nephews to spoil. Maybe an older brother would have helped Hayden look after Dad when he had gotten sick. But he hadn’t had one. And he had never considered having a sister.

But she was stood in front of him now, and she was real, and Hayden didn’t know what to think about that. She had very obviously never heard about him either. A first time for both of them, it seemed, discovering the existence of the other. Had she ever wanted a brother? Probably not one like Hayden.

“I think you should stay, for what my opinion is worth,” said Callum. He was a very even man - his voice calm and placid, like everything he said so well considered and correct that it was inconceivable to him that Hayden simply didn’t want to fucking do that. “I think we’re all upset, and I don’t think that you’re in any state to be driving anytime soon.”

“Your opinion isn’t worth much. Roz drove.”

Hayden was being terribly rude, yet he couldn’t bring himself to care. Callum didn’t know Hayden at all. Callum clearly didn’t understand that anything was preferable to staying in this house even a moment longer.

“We’re going,” he decided.

Roz’s hand squeezed his elbow. He led him a little off to one side, glancing furtively at where Laura’s happy little family unit were drawing closer together. “Pike,” he murmured, voice low and intense, intended not to be overheard, “you want to leave?”

“More than anything,” replied Hayden fervently.

“Maybe, however, you will regret this. Is a lot to find out all at once. You do not have answers that you wanted. I think, maybe, you have more questions now.”

“So, you’re suggesting that we should stay?”

Ilya rolled his eyes. “I do not care. Stay, go - does not matter. I am asking if you think you can leave here still not knowing answers to your questions, and not think about them for rest of your very boring life.”

“So, we’re staying,” Hayden concluded. He laughed, but it wasn’t funny.

“You are certain?” Ilya pressed.

Hayden did not answer - he did not want to say the words himself. It felt like too big an admission, too enormous a surrender, to verbalise at this point. “I need to call Jackie. We won’t make it back for the kids’ bedtimes.”

“Do you think there is guest room?” asked Ilya.

Hayden eyed him suspiciously. “Why?”

“Will be dark, after dinner.” Ilya shrugged. “You are not driving, and Shane does not like me driving in the dark.”

“Surely he can make an exception,” Hayden objected.

“You want my Shane to go grey?” asked Ilya. “Have aneurysm? If we stay, we are staying. Then you may have all answers you need, and we do not have to come back ever, if you do not want. Besides, roads around here are not good for dark.”

Eventually, Hayden nodded his assent. There had been at least one stretch of unlit road that had wounded through a thickly forested area, with blind turns and a decided lack of signal. He didn’t want to admit it, but Ilya was right about the thought of driving back in the dark being absolutely terrifying. He turned around, eying up Laura who was watching him with wide, hopeful eyes. Callum now had an arm wrapped around her waist, holding her close, as if to comfort her, and Ella -

Ella was watching Hayden with wide, disbelieving eyes. She looked very young, he thought - only a handful of years older than the twins. And she was his sister - his sister, who Hayden had never even dreamed existed and was curious about in spite of himself. After all, what would someone raised by Laura turn out like? Hayden had never known the answer to this. And he found, as well, that he was wondering whether or not it mattered. Ella was his sister. And he was her brother. And that was a thought that he had never had before.

It was for Ella, then, that he turned and said, “we’ll stay.”

Laura, as encouraged by Callum, was insistent that they could probably all do with a break. Besides, she said, there were some things that she needed to tell Ella - nothing that Hayden needed to hear, because they certainly wouldn’t get into the sort of territory that would answer any of his questions, but mostly the basic stuff, like why fucking Hayden Pike and Ilya Rozanov were in her dining room, and  who Hayden was to Laura. Hayden consented to this, mostly because he knew how he would want this scenario to be handled if it was his kids having to have this conversation with.

So, whilst Callum prepared cups of tea for himself and Ella, both of them sitting at the table like they belong there (which they did), Laura led Hayden and Ilya up the stairs and to the guest bedroom that did exist, ostensibly so that they could refresh themselves but really because it had not been very long at all and Hayden and Laura were already falling out again.

Upstairs, the pictures were more personal. If Hayden had seen them before then he would have none that Laura had a family - and he would have known, as he did now, that she was loved by them. There was Laura on her wedding day, a white sundress instead of a wedding gown and no veil, with Callum holding her hands and watching her like the thought of Laura running out on his life had never crossed his mind. There were candids of a life that they shared: Laura, smiling over the breakfast table; Callum, asleep on the couch; the pair of them running on the beach, or picnicking in the park, or holding hands in a restaurant. There were pictures of Ella as well: Ella as a newborn, with a sonogram scan tucked into the corner of the frame; Ella as a toddler, stumbling clumsily to Laura’s waiting arms; Ella on her first day of kindergarten, middle school, high school; Ella at prom; Ella at breakfast; Ella at dinner; Ella on the couch, at the table, on a garden swing; Ella, at every stage of her life.

“We only have one guest room,” Laura said apologetically. “I hope you are okay with sharing.”

“Pike can have floor,” said Ilya. “Bathroom?”

“End of the hall,” she replied. Then she paused, and at last brought herself to meet Hayden’s stare again. “In the bedside table, there’s a photo album that you can look at, if you would like. I hope that you do.”

Hayden had not intentions to look at whatever album she had made up of the photos of Ella that hadn’t made it to the wall. He could think of nothing that he would rather do less, actually, but his acquiescence seemed to please Laura, who smiled, small and tentative at him, before making her way back down the halls and to the stairs. Hayden felt it like a punch, somewhere in his chest - like she was leaving again, and he would not see her for a very long time, even if the promise of dinner hung between them, even if this was her home instead of Hayden’s.

Soon, was the promise; soon was always the promise.

“I am going to piss,” said Ilya, moving to follow her in the hall. “Call your wife. I am calling my Shane.”

Ilya left and Hayden pulled his phone out of his pocket. He was ringing Jackie before he could think about it, or even what he would say. He was desperate, suddenly, to hear her voice. He knew that, if she had been there, she would have made everything better and easier.

She picked up almost immediately, like she’d been waiting to hear from him. “Hayd, baby?” she breathed down the phone.

And Hayden started to cry.

He hadn’t thought he’d needed to, when he’d called her, but the sound of her voice, her lovely, familiar voice, was all that it took. The sound of his name on her lips, soft, like she loved him - and Hayden couldn’t stop. Couldn’t even think. Every unnamed thing that he had been feeling and unable to recognised coalesced in his chest - and it was grief. Grief, so heavy and total that Hayden thought that he would drown under the weight of it. He clutched the phone tighter against his face, sinking onto the edge of the bed, covers ruffling underneath him, and sobbed.

“Hayden?” said Jackie. There was the distant sound of her moving, of the pitch and volume of her voice changing, like she was making her way into another room.  “Oh, babe, talk to me. What’s wrong?”

Hayden told her everything. He had spent so many years hiding this part of his past from Jackie, but he couldn’t do that anymore. The box was firmly open in front of him, the contents spilled out in front of him. They would not fit back in. They would not go neatly back into the attic anytime soon. So, he told her about Laura and the house and the photographs, and then he told her about Callum and Ella, and he heard the way that her breath caught.

“A sister,” she breathed. “What are you going to do?”

“We’re staying for dinner,” replied Hayden, forcing out the words from a hoarse throat. They did not want to come easily. “Probably the night. I’m sorry. I said I’d be back to help with the kids. I can still leave, if you need me back… I shouldn’t have said yes without asking you anyway. We’ll leave, and I’ll -”

“I think you should stay.”

“Why?”

“Because you want to, even if you’re not admitting that to yourself yet. And because you deserve this - a chance to know everything you’ve always wanted to, and, even if your relationship with your mom is lost completely, to get to know Ella, your sister. Hayd, I don’t think you’d forgive yourself if you left now, and then I’d never be able to forgive you, ‘cause I’m supposed to be holding my husband’s grudges, aren’t I?”

He laughed. “Even the grudges against myself?”

“Especially those,” she agreed, and then paused. “When you get home, I think we should think about counselling as well. For both us, together.”

“I - What?”

“It’s nothing bad,” she assured him, perhaps hearing the way that his panic spiked. “Just, I think there’s a lot of stuff that you need to process, and this is a family thing, and there’s the fact that we’ve been married for twelve years and you never thought to tell me about this.”

“I didn’t want my shit to ruin anything,” he said.

“Yeah, but that didn’t change the fact that you didn’t trust me enough to know that your shit is never going to ruin this marriage. I just think it would be helpful. At least consider it - for me, please.”

“I’ll consider it,” he said, sighing. He laid down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. “It wasn’t so bad when we did it with Arthur, was it?”

“Not at all. But, also, I think you should look at the photo album your mom asked you to.”

“Why?” asked Hayden, frowning. He turned his head to the bedside table in question; the drawer was closed. “I don’t want to see evidence of her happy family - not until I know what was so wrong with ours, or I understand what I’m feeling a little bit more.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be that. From the sounds of it, your mom doesn’t want to hurt you. I don’t think she’d tell you to look at that. And I think there’s a reason that she brought it up - I think maybe it could be helpful.”

“Maybe.”

“You know I love you, yeah? I’m going to keep saying it until you believe that means something.”

“It means something, Jacks. ‘Course it does.”

“Until you know it means very specifically that your ass isn’t getting rid of mine,” she amended.

“I like your ass.”

“Look at the album!” she said, laughing. “I have to go, ‘cause I’m trying to keep Amber from giving Shane a new and very permanent haircut.”

“Rozanov was calling him, I think.”

“Yeah. He’ll be taking the call from where he is though, because there is no way that he’s getting away. I love you, and I’ll see you soon.”

“I love you too,” Hayden said. “I’ll count down the minutes.”

Maybe it sounded desperate and pathetic, but he meant it. He’d spent so much of their marriage apart from Jackie, on the road and on the ice, and the summers were the times that were theirs. He didn’t like to be away from her when he didn’t have to. And he knew that, as soon as she hung up, he’d feel the ache of missing her like a physical pain.

And the feeling was instantaneous. The silence, when the connection was dropped, felt like a living thing around him, and he was aware of each and every one of the miles that were between them. For a moment, he thought that he could probably just wallow in, languish until dinner and then during dinner and then after, all the way until he was home with Jackie again.

Jackie had thought that he should look at the photo album.

With great effort, he heaved himself upright, sliding open the drawer. There was the photo album, a thin leather-bound book. He lifted it out easily, laying it on his lap. The colour of the cover had faded a little, like it had been well-worn and well-loved.

He opened it, and it was him. Hayden, maybe three or four, the same age as he was in some of the pictures that Dad had on display, stark naked in a bathtub; there were soap suds in his hair and on his chin, like a beard, and he was beaming with his eyes scrunched shut. There was handwriting, neat and cramped beside it (that same a, he recognised, with a pang): Hayden, age 4 going on ninety.

“This is you, Pike?” asked Ilya. Hayden hadn’t heard him coming back in, but the bed dipped under his weight as he sat down. “You are very ugly child.”

Hayden flipped the page. A picture of him on his dad’s shoulders, arms outstretched as he tried to grab a tree branch overhead. He turned the page again, and there was Hayden as a newborn, all ugly and pink and screaming. Another page, another Hayden - then another, and another, and another. Then he turned the page and paused, fingers hovering over the surface of the photograph. Hayden, a newborn, but tidier now, all the babby gunk cleaned away from him. He’d been swaddled in a blue cotton blanket - not hospital issued. Someone had stuck a hat over his wispy strands of hair. And Laura was there too - holding him close to her chest, gazing down at him with a slightly bewildered expression, like she couldn’t believe that she had just delivered and been handed this tiny person.

But there was love there too, under the bewilderment, and Hayden knew this because he’d seen the expression on his own face, in the pictures that he’d taken with his own kids. Yeah, there was love.

It was the first picture Hayden had ever seen of him and Laura.

Chapter 7

Chapter Notes

Posting this early because I'm just about to go into an exam 😔

This chapter deals with very heavy topics, as we get to the final hurdle of communication for Laura and Hayden. There'll be answers, but I can't promise they'll be satisfactory - are there ever satisfactory answers in situations like these? Hayden is also not the 'perfect' vehicle to explore these themes, but this is not the point of his journey unfortunately. I've tried my best regardless. Because they're spoilery, I'm going to leave a list of content warnings in the end notes for anyone who would like to read them.

Feeling a little like he had done something that he was not supposed to, Hayden had teased the clear plastic film away from the page and removed the photograph of him and Laura out from underneath it. He turned it over in his hands, and it did not seem like something for him to have - he had never had anything like it before. But he had this now, in his hands, and it only took a moment’s more thought before he was folding the picture down the middle (he winced, a little, as the stiff, shining surface creased) and tucking it in the pocket of his jeans, surreptitiously hidden away. He felt it, though, heavy and warm against his skin. He couldn’t tell whether it was comforting or not - but it meant something, to have it with him, when Callum knocked on the door of the guest room to fetch them for dinner.

That, and the hand that Ilya clapped bracingly on his shoulder as they moved through the doorway, was fortifying against the sudden lurch of anxiety. Hayden took a settled breath, following down the hall and the stairs. One dinner, he told himself. One dinner and this - this dizzying, sickly swooping sensation in his stomach - would be over.

The table had been set nicely - table setting and gleaming cutlery and glasses - and Laura and Ella were already sat waiting. He could not decipher the looks on their faces - Laura was pale, and Ella was watching Hayden with the sort of scrutiny that he knew meant she now had been told everything. About him, and that he was her brother. About Laura, and maybe how she had left. And now they were sat waiting for him, and it almost made Hayden feel as though he had been the one running behind and that they had been waiting for him, sat at that table. Laura was at the head, and Ella to her left, and the seat at Laura’s right had also been left open. For Hayden?

He sat beside Ella. From the corner of his eyes, he saw the way that she startled a little, shoulders jolting, stiffening and then relaxing out. He wondered, maybe, if she would have preferred him to sit away from her - he still did not know if she wanted a brother or not, or even to know Hayden at all - but it was too late. Ilya sat opposite Hayden, taking the opportunity without Shane to scold him to land a solid kick to Hayden’s shin under the table, and then Callum came over, dishing out the plates before sitting beside Laura, acting as though the seat had been intended for him all along. Maybe it had been.

Idly, eyes down, he poked at the dinner on his plate with a fork. Some chicken, diced and marinated in spices and a sticky sort of sauce, chopped vegetables chucked in, and resting on a bed of noodles. It was good food, hearty food - it just all tasted like ashes to Hayden, as he methodically and mechanically chewed and swallowed, even when he washed his mouth out with the water at his side. Ilya had no such compunctions, unhinging his jaw like a snake to shovel forkfuls of noodles in. If anyone found his poor table manners rude, they didn’t say; Callum was looking at his plate, but both Laura and Ella were watching Hayden, though Ella had the grace to do it somewhat subtly.

“Is it nice?” asked Laura, anxiously. “I can make something else.”

Hayden forced himself to swallow. “It’s good,” he said. “Better than what I can make.”

“You cook?”

“Basic shit,” he replied, ignoring Rozanov’s muttered swear jar. “Just stuff the kids’ll eat. Usually means I can be making two or three meals for them, so I make myself a portion of that. More efficient. During the season, I have meals, like, prepackaged by a nutritionist, ‘cause dino nuggets don’t cut it apparently.”

“And you have… four kids?” asked Laura. She was tugging on a strand of hair.

“Mm,” he hummed. He was trying not to let it bother him, the idea that Laura would know about this part of his life - or, at least, he was trying not to show it. “Three girls and a boy. Our eldest two are twins, our son is eight now, and our youngest is seven.”

“Hayden Pike’s one of the rare NHL players who likes his wife,” interjected Ella, and then flushed.

“You are hockey fan?” asked Ilya, and Ella went - if possible - even redder.

She explained, earnestly and with burning ears, that she wasn’t really a hockey fan. She’d started watching a few years ago (Hayden felt that made her qualified to be a fan, but what did he know?) and that had been because she was a fan of Hollanov. This, she revealed, was a ship name for Ilya and Shane. It wasn’t in a weird way or anything, she hastened to add, seemingly mortified when she remembered that Ilya Hollander-Rozanov was literally sat at her dining room table.

“But it was nice,” she said, “to see that - that it was possible to be, you know, open and successful.”

Laura squeezed her wrist comfortingly. Ilya looked touched, blinking twice. And Hayden - Hayden was reeling still, trying to come to terms with Ella was a real and multi-faceted person, with real person fears and real person dreams.

“What do you want to do?” he asked her, suddenly desperate to know anything that she was willing to share with him. “What’s your idea of success?”

“I’m into music and stuff,” she said, shrugging. Her eyes kept flitting to Hayden and away, like she was trying to gauge whether or not he actually wanted an answer, or if he was just trying to make polite small talk. “Languages. I want to do something with that.”

“Produce or write?”

“Both,” she replied. “I like coming up with ideas, but I also like putting them together.”

“It sounds really interesting,” he said, and meant it. Ella lit up slowly when she saw that he was genuine, perking up like a flower to the Sun.

“Pike listens only to dad music,” Ilya said. “He has terrible, terrible taste.”

“Fuck you,” said Hayden.

Gleefully, Ilya replied, “swear jar!”

Hayden thought that he probably would have retorted if it was not for the fact that, beside him, Ella was giggling quietly to herself, the quiet sort of giggle that he thought maybe meant that she was feeling a little shy about it. Hayden wasn’t blind about the momentousness of the interaction that had just happened: she was his sister, no matter how recently they had discovered this, and she had trusted him - and Ilya, though maybe there had been less trust required for him - with something personal. He had not missed the emotion in her voice when she had spoken about Shane and Ilya, the unspoken implication. And Hayden had not always been the best of friends - he’d screwed up, epically and a lot, and there had been times where it maybe would have been better for Shane to have cut his losses. Hayden didn’t know what he'd done to deserve a second chance, but he’d gotten one - and he’d learned in the years since, as he’d toiled and fought to become the sort of guy that Shane deserved as a friend, what a massive show of trust it was to be open with certain parts of yourself. Ella had trusted him like that. It meant something. It was all beginning to mean something.

The rest of dinner’s conversation passed much in the same way. They spoke about Ella’s exploits at school - she was terrible, terrible! she said, at science and maths, but she was a favourite of her English teacher and she’d joined an afterschool music club. She had a good group of friends around her, kids who were on the right track and, more importantly, seemed to genuinely care about each other. It warmed the part of Hayden’s heart that was devoted to being a dad, soothing some strange, protective urge that had slowly kindled itself the more that Ella spoke.

Then Callum spoke about his job (he was a veterinarian), and Ilya was wholly devoted to the conversation once Callum plied him with pictures of a tiny puppy that he had treated earlier, the burly Russian cooing and baby talking a two-dimensional photograph like it might somehow materialise into a very real dog. Yuna and David were looking after both of Rozanov’s dogs: Anya, now fully grown and very confident of her place in the pecking order, and Dostoevsky (Hayden’s kids called him Toes, so Hayden did to, because he thought that it was pretentious to name dogs after classical authors, even if Ilya suggested that wasn’t where the name was from), who was still young and coltish and constantly seeking his sister’s approval. Hayden was pretty certain that Ilya was going into dog withdrawal.

It was easier than he expected. Simpler. Less weighted. He could pretend that it was a normal family dinner, that there had been many more occasions before this and that there would be many more occasions afterwards. It would have been easy to forget, he thought, all the years of distance and absence that had preceded. Really, he almost did, and the shock of remembering every few minutes was horrid, like having his heart broken all over again.

They didn’t address the elephant in the room. That was for Hayden and Laura alone to discuss. And so it sat there, between them all, and the air was heavier for it, waiting. He wondered when the opportunity would arise, because it didn’t seem to making itself known. They ate dinner, and there were forks scraping against plates, and there was laughter - Ella, as she listened to Ilya recount something from the camps, and Ilya as he told the story again, and Callum, polite as he followed along. Hayden sat in the middle of it all, and he laughed and he spoke and he felt it all flow around him, not quite touching.

It was the same, he thought, for Laura.

“I’m going to do the dishes,” she said, gathering the plates once everyone had finished. Hayden passed his over, fork and knife set neatly together, and their hands brushed for a moment.

“I’ll help,” he said.

There was a nod of understanding there. If there had not been, he thought maybe she would have told him no, you’re a guest, sit and I’ll take care of these, and Hayden would have sat in the middle of Ella and Callum and Ilya, and he would have felt every passing moment more and more until he couldn’t even pretend that he was enjoying himself, or that things were normal. But she did not protest, and Hayden gathered the glasses to carry through, following silently after Laura. Behind them, there was a scrape of chairs, and when he glanced over his shoulder, the others were filing out of the room; Ilya caught his eyes, and then he left.

“I wash and you dry?” asked Hayden.

Laura nodded. “I like to have them put away as soon as. I know where things are.”

Hayden nodded. Though he didn’t cook often, Jackie didn’t cook at all - it wasn’t her thing. He was more particular about the layout of their kitchen, and he too liked to have the dishes put away straight off the bat. Less chance of them being forgotten about in the hecticness of the rest of their lives, or accidentally nudged off the bench and shattered on the floor. It meant that they knew where everything was. And now it meant that Laura and Hayden would have the chance to talk.

He pushed the plug down, and turned on the taps. Laura passed him a bottle of washing up liquid and he added a generous amount, watching as the water rose and the white suds climbed with it. They waited until the sink was full and Hayden switched off the tap - the roar of the water was loud, deafening when combined with the ringing of his ears, though the quiet it left behind seemed equally as loaded.

“You have questions,” Laura said, at last, when the silence lasted a beat too long. She handed Hayden a damp cloth, and he began to scrub at plate, anything to keep his hands occupied. “I don’t know where to start.”

“You say that a lot,” he observed.

That made her laugh. “It’s just as true as the first time I said it.”

“Maybe start with why you left? No - not that. I don’t need to know that. Why didn’t you come back? I asked you when you were coming back and you said soon, but you didn’t. Why?”

Laura let out a deep, shaky breath. “I don’t remember that.”

“At all?”

She took the dish he offered her, drying it with a tea towel, mulling over the words as she did. Then she set it down beside her elbow and said, “I was very sick, when you were little.” She paused, thought again. “No, that’s not - that’s not right. I was sick before then Since I was a teenager, maybe - but it got worse when you were little.”

Hayden’s hands stilled on the plate he was cleaning. “Sick?”

“It comes in waves,” she said. She wasn’t looking at him. “Sometimes - sometimes, I felt… sometimes I felt like the world was moving on around me but I was being left behind. It was like nothing in the world was touching me. I would get low - not sad, just… empty, maybe, is the best way to describe it. It was like there was his hole in my chest, but it wasn’t just hollow - it was actively sucking me in, dragging me down, and making sure that I could never not be aware of it. And I couldn’t make myself talk to people, and I couldn’t get out of bed, and I didn’t think about wishing that I didn’t exist, or could stop existing, because it already felt like I didn’t exist at all.”

“Depressed,” said Hayden. The word was heavy on his tongue. He’d heard Ilya talk enough about his mother, and knew enough about the Irina Foundation and what it was concerned about, to understand even a fraction of it.

“Depressed,” Laura said. She took the plate from Hayden. Dried it. “Yes, I was depressed. And sometimes I wasn’t. Sometimes I felt - felt brilliant, actually. Felt like I was on top of the world. I had all this energy and nothing could stop me. I was convinced I was a genius. Mostly, I was convinced that I couldn’t be hurt. It made me reckless. You know, not looking when I crossed the road. Nothing could bring me down. I drank, a lot, and I gambled, and I got DUIs, and all the while I was convinced that I was going to change the world or something. It’s called mania, you know - it’s a high, a manic state - but I didn’t know that at the time. No one told me. I was just me - everything that entailed, the good, the bad, and the ugly… I was me.

“There were times I was stable. I thought that I’d gotten better, a lot, and then I wasn’t, and it was bad again, and I could be in between these highs and lows, and I would think about ending it all. You know, I’d have all the emptiness of the low points and all the ability to do something of the high points.”

Hayden didn’t know what to say, really. He didn’t quite understand - the image didn’t fit, either with the memory of his mother that he had (distant to him, implacable, or simply never had) or the woman who was stood in front of him now (steadier, warm, present). He’d considered a lot for reasons why Laura might have left, but this hadn’t been one.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” she said. “I just… I was not well, at all - since I was a teenager, and my teachers were able to say that it was just my hormones. Or my mom could say that I was dramatic and immature, lazy. And I didn’t have anyone who could sit me down and tell me that there wasn’t something wrong with me, or tell me that I could get better, or even how to get better. I was all alone.”

“Dad…” started Hayden, and trailed off. He blinked, screwed his eyes shot, and blinked again. His hand screwed shut and then he unfurled his fingers one by one. His chest was tight and he fought to breathe through it. “Did he…?”

“I don’t blame your father for anything,” Laura said firmly. “We were young when we met. My… spontaneity was fun at first, I think, which I was fine with because I thought I was just fun as well. And… Well, if I didn’t have the words for what I was going through, I couldn’t expect James to have them.”

“So you were alone,” Hayden echoed. He was fitting all of this into the puzzle that was Laura, watching the picture as it unfolded.

Laura’s brows furrowed. “Yeah,” she admitted. “I was alone. Or, at least, I felt alone.”

Could I have helped? Hayden wanted to ask. Was there something I could have done - spent time glued to her side instead of reading comics or watching television, spent more time on her mother’s day card, asked her where she had gone and where she was going to?

“I wasn’t in a place to be your mom,” she said - that admission sounded like it pained her. Hayden flinched away from it. “I wish I had been - God, Hay, I wish nothing more than that I had been in a good enough place to be your mom.”

Hayden realised, distantly, that he was crying. Not like with Jackie - just quietly, silent tears drip-drip-dripping down his cheeks and splattering onto the surface. “Did I make it worse?” Hayden whispered.

“Oh, Hay,” she said, and tentatively laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Did I?”

Her hesitation felt like just as much of an answer. “It did get worse,” she replied carefully, “after you were born. But it wasn’t you, baby, I swear. It was - There was so much changing, and I didn’t have the tools to cope and… and I struggled, a lot.

“When I got manic, I was sometimes convinced that there were people out to get me - that they were coming to hurt me. I tried to get away from them, and then the thoughts would fade, and then they’d come back. And… there was a point where I was convinced - I thought… I looked at you when you were a baby and I thought that maybe you weren’t mine, that you had been swapped or replaced. James hated me for that. I think he was scared - of me, for me, for you. And I was scared too. Scared to be in your life if it meant that I might hurt you. It was easier to leave.”

“But you could have come back,” said Hayden, and he hated how thready and desperate his voice was, how it shook and how the tears kept on rolling down his face. “You could have come back, and you could have been my mom again.”

“I needed to get help, Hay. I needed to -” She shook her head, and her lips twisted as she fought for her composure. “I spent a year or so in a really dark place. I wasn’t functioning. I - It was a complete breakdown. And it took a while to get to the place when I decided I needed help. And even then that was a really difficult road. I mean, it was a struggle every day. And I had to choose that struggle because, if I didn’t, I wasn’t getting out of the hole I was in.”

“But it helped?”

“I got into talking therapies at the right time for me. Medication - antidepressants and lithium. Cognitive behavioural therapy. I took up yoga and running,” she said, and laughed, and Hayden laughed as well, though his laugh was wet and not entirely amused. He thought, absently, that Shane would have a lot to talk to Laura about. “They diagnosed me with rapid cycling bipolar disorder. There’s a lot of stigmas around it, and maybe you think that it’s justified since, well, I’m your only example of it - and I did do a lot of harm. But I got better - I worked to get better. And I’m here now, and I’m alive, and sometimes it’s still difficult but I can be a person.”

“Did it help getting a diagnosis?” he asked.

Laura considered this. “Not at first. I was angry - all this time and suffering and loss summed up in one clinical phrase that no one had ever bothered to tell me about. And I was grieving, a little, the life I should have gotten to have, if I’d gotten help earlier. But that label meant here were people who were like me, who’d been through what I had been through. It was a complicated thought, but it made me feel less alone.”

“And you managed to be there for Ella?”

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she confessed, “and I don’t want to upset you.”

Hayden shook his head.

“It was difficult, with Ella,” said Laura, softly. “I had been out of your life for so long that I thought it would be better if I stayed away. Maybe it was just me refusing to confront the last parts of my diagnosis but - But I genuinely thought it was what was best for you. I’d reached out to James when I was in a better place, and we’d cut that last tie between us. I settled down here; I’d taken up freelance photography - and then I met Cal. He was so sweet, and it was nothing more than that at first. And then - then it was. And I decided to be selfish. We fell in love. And later - later we had Ella. And she was so perfect. And I was thinking about you, and everything I couldn’t do for you, and I was so fucking determined that I would make it up to you by being good for her.”

“And you didn’t come back,” said Hayden.

“I didn’t come back. I thought it was better. I thought we could all be happy - but I’ve missed you every day, and I’ve thought about you, and wondered how you were and if you were happy and if - if you had gotten to grow up into sort of man I dreamed you’d be. And nothing can change the fact that I didn’t, but I am telling you now that it wasn’t you, and that I love you.”

“I wanted you to come back,” Hayden told her. He looked up and there was anguish on her face, and he knew that it was reflected on his own, that he was shaking apart at the seams under the weight of all the grief that he had never let himself feel. “I wanted you to be my mom again.”

Laura hesitated a moment, like she was about to say something else. Was there anything left to say? She decided against it a moment later. She held her arms wide open, saying nothing, and when Hayden lurched awkwardly into her arms, not quite sure where was best to put his arms or whether this was something she even wanted, she didn’t stagger back. Her arms wrapped around him, one hand running soothingly over his back, and he ducked into the embrace. He was so much taller than her. She was small - not a hockey player, and certainly not built like one - but she hugged him with a sharp fierceness.

“Laura,” Hayden choked out, into her shoulder. He didn’t say anything else - it didn’t need to be said. And really, there was nothing that he had ever or would ever be able to say that could fix anything. It was done.

Chapter End Notes

content warnings - mental health issues, mental break down, bipolar conditions, stigma around mental health, postpartum depression, symptoms of psychosis/postpartum psychosis, threat of violence against children (this does not actually occur), past intrusive thoughts, undiagnosed mental health conditions, child abandonment, complicated family dynamics

Chapter 8

“Smoke break?” Hayden asked.

For where he was sat on the steps up to the front porch of Laura’s home, Ilya looked up at Hayden as he slipped through the front door and out into the frigid air. It was summer, yes, but the night was clear and cold, and Hayden’s skin prickled into raised goosebumps even underneath the jacket that he had shrugged on. If Ilya was cold, he did not show it; he wasn’t wearing his own jacket, and his face was unbothered, still and placid as far as Hayden could tell. It was difficult to see; Ilya was backlit by a weak, flickering porch light and the tiny pinprick of light that shone from the butt of the cigarette he held lazily between his fingers.

“Only one,” he replied, exhaling a plume of smoke. “Do not tell Shane. He thinks I quit.”

Hayden sat down beside him. “Can I bum one?” he asked, holding out an expectant hand.

Ilya looked delighted. “Pike, you smoke?”

“Not since I was, like, eighteen or something. I had one to celebrate my first game in the NHL and then quit. The Voyageurs were pretty insistent about that.”

Ilya snorted but handed over a cigarette. Hayden took it and waited as Ilya pressed the butts of their cigarettes together until Hayden’s own kindled and lit with a curling lick of smoke. He brought it to his lips, inhaling the pungent smoke, feeling the burn at the back of his throat as it raced into his lungs - then coughed, a choking splutter that made him sound as though he had never smoked in his life. Ilya thumped him obligingly on the back, perhaps a little more forcefully than necessary.

“You are very bad at this also,” said Ilya, as if he was commiserating.

“Add it to your list.”

“Da, right after hockey.” Ilya laughed. “At Boston, they tell me to quit. I do it secretly for many years, then I am captain and I tell my boys ah! If you want to win, first you must smoke! Is secret Soviet training plan, you know.”

“Is it now?” Hayden asked dryly.

Sagely, Ilya nodded. “Da. Very effective. Makes good, strong men for hockey. You are captain now; you should bring back smoking.”

“I like my team’s lungs the way they are, thanks. As in, non-cancerous.”

“You say, but who is smoking now?”

Hayden took another drag. His exhale, this time, was much more controlled. “Don’t tell Jackie,” he said, knowing full well that he would probably tell Jackie himself.

“Our secret,” said Ilya. The smoke leaked from out between his teeth. “It went well? With Laura?”

Hayden shrugged. “I got my answers. She was - ill. Bipolar. She was alone and she didn’t have anyone to help her.”

“But she has help now? She is not alone?”

“No,” said Hayden. “She does therapy and shit - medication, mindfulness. She says it helps a little.”

Silently, Ilya ashed his cigarette, tapping it woodenly against the porch. There was a strange look on his face, a little twisted and a little stiff, like he was mulling something over and was still undecided about what he was thinking or how he felt about it. Hayden looked at him and wondered if he was thinking about his own mother. He looked at him and wondered if he was thinking about his dad fit into it all, like Hayden was doing. He didn’t often have the desire to be able to read Ilya Rozanov’s mind - he was scared, maybe, of what unimaginable things lurked in Rozanov’s weird brain - but he had it now.

“You are still upset,” Ilya concluded.

“I shouldn’t be,” replied Hayden, “but yeah, fuck, I’m still upset.”

Ilya canted his head to one side, like a particularly inquisitive dog. “Why shouldn’t you be?”

“‘Cause she left me, and I was angry, which was fine when she did a bad thing and maybe had bad reasons or no reasons at all behind it. But now there are reasons, and they’re good reasons, and I understand now, why she left, so I shouldn’t be angry. She didn’t - she didn’t want to hurt me.”

“Wow! Is true! Pike, you have fixed big and complicated feelings. Is all so simple now.”

“Fuck you, Rozanov,” Hayden snapped. “Jesus.”

Ilya sat a moment. He was looking at Hayden still, intent. “I am very angry at my mama sometimes,” he said, casually, as if this wasn’t the most earth-shattering confession (beyond, of course, I have been fucking your best friend for many, many years in spite of the fact that we are rivals who hate each other, and you are actually not just finding out that we’re boyfriends but that it’s actually very serious and I’m going to be forever) Hayden had ever heard from the Russian. It was common knowledge that Ilya Rozanov revered Irina Rozanova; she was in everything he did, the way he loved, the cross that he wore around his neck.

Hayden had never heard Ilya say something even remotely mean-spirited about her - certainly, he had never implied that he felt any anger towards her.

“Yes,” said Ilya, and sounded almost at this point like he was talking to himself. “I am very angry at her sometimes. She was the best mama that she could be. I wouldn’t have any other mama. But it can make you selfish, being sick in this way, especially when you feel like you are all alone. I have felt this way. Probably I have been selfish and cruel because of it. There was once I thought my Shane would probably be better if he left me - he could have an easy life, with someone who does not mock his gross bird food and push all his buttons.”

Hayden had said something like that once. Had asked Shane if there had been no one else that he could have chosen - the gay thing wasn’t a problem, but Ilya Rozanov was. Hayden had not made it a secret that he thought this. He had probably said it to Rozanov before. He had just never expected that Ilya himself would think the same things.

“He loves you,” said Hayden earnestly. “You make him happier than I have ever seen him before.”

“I know this,” Ilya said. “It is just hard to remember sometimes, when things are difficult. This is how it was for my mama, I think. She did not have a Shane - my papa was very hard on her, you see, and he had so many expectations of her - but she had me and she had Andrei, my brother. We made her happy, sometimes. She was the reason I started skating - it made her laugh when I wobbled around. She liked to watch me play. All of my celebrations were for her - to make her smile, to make her laugh. She had the best laugh in the world. Dyusha - my brother - and I, we would do anything to hear it.

“It made it more difficult when she was bad. It felt like failing, like I was not a good enough son. I tried so much to make her happy… and it would not work. I brought her flowers to put in a glass beyond her bed, and sometimes they made her smile and sometimes they made her cry. I would sing old Russian songs for her when she was sleeping, which was often, and I was never sure if she was listening or not. I would make food, because she could pull not herself out of bed to eat or even to cook. Papa would eat out, so Andrei and I would have to fend for ourselves and Mama. I got this,” said Ilya, tilting his forearm for Hayden’s inspection, where there was a silvery scar distorting the skin, “making borscht.”

“How old were you?” Hayden asked, looking at the mark and trying, and failing, to picture Ilya as smaller and more vulnerable, on his tiptoes trying to reach a counter or stove top, trying to make his mama smile, make sure that she was eating and happy.

“Maybe ten when I got this,” said Ilya. He shrugged. “Maybe not. I cannot remember very much. She was never not depressed when I knew her.”

“And… you’re angry, that she was like this?”

Shifting a little where he was sat, Ilya said, “I am going to tell you two things. One I have only told Shane and my therapist, the other I have only told Shane. I will tell you and then we will never talk about it again. Swear it?”

“Swear it.”

“First thing,” said Ilya, and turned very deliberately away from Hayden, “is that… I am like my mother. You know this, yes, but I am like my mother in that I - I have never wanted to die, but sometimes I think that I could. I look at pills in my medicine cabinet, and I think, maybe, that I understand her more than I wanted to. I will not do anything, so no need to worry, Pike, but I have these thoughts, and I do not do anything because I know that my Shane will be angry with me. I know this because I was angry at my mama, when she left me, when she made the choice that she did.

“Second thing is that - I have told only Shane this - when my mother killed herself, I was twelve and I… I found her. I thought she was just sleeping. But… she would not wake up, and she was very cold, and - Da, I knew she was dead.”

“Holy shit,” whispered Hayden. “Ilya…”

“I do not tell you this for pity. I do not want pity. I want you to know that I am angry. I can understand my mama, and I can love her and mourn her and wish that there had been someone, anyone, who had been there to help her. Maybe she would not have done what she did. But I am angry also, because she got to leave and she got to leave me. What does it matter if I understand why? She still left. It still hurt. I am still angry.

“I am even angrier because I cannot even say that it would have been easier if she had lived. If she had lived, what help would she have had? We would have both been alone with both of our problems, and we would not have been able to help each other. She would be depressed and I would be depressed. Maybe it would be less lonely, maybe it would be more lonely. Sometimes, when I am very angry, I think that she took the easy way out, which is a terrible thing to think about someone who killed herself.”

“I thought that same,” confessed Hayden, “when Dad got sick and Laura was still gone. That she’d somehow known he was going to get sick and was leaving before she had to deal with it. You’re right - it does feel like a shitty thing to think about someone who was having a mental breakdown. I don’t think I mean it.”

“I do,” said Ilya. “Maybe I am allowed to say this because I am also depressed.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works.”

Ilya shrugged. “She would probably hate me now,” he said. “She would be alive but in Moscow, and I would be alive and here. She would have Andrei still, and they could spit on my name together.”

“What do you mean?” Hayden couldn’t read the expression on Ilya’s face. “Your mother loved you, I’m sure.”

“Yes, but now I am cocksucker. I tell Shane that she would love him, and I pretend that I mean it, and I make inclusive hockey camps in her name. I don’t know how she felt about being gay. She was kind - but kind people can be hateful. I know this. Maybe she would try to - how do you say, ah - pray the gay away.”

“Maybe she would love you,” Hayden countered, “because you’re her son and she loved you. And she would love Shane, because he makes you happy and that’s all a parent wants for their child.”

“Da, but if you believe that this happiness is - is bad, like addiction, like poison. False kind of happiness - death of the soul in pretty packaging. What do you do then?”

“I don’t know,” replied Hayden. “I can’t imagine what it would be to think like this.”

“Easier,” reiterated Ilya, “that she is dead. I can pretend that she would love me, and be happy for me, and I can be angry for reasons that are complicated and make me feel many things, rather than simply anger. Simple anger is worse - it means that she deserves my anger. I do not want this. If I am going to be angry, I want it to be because I love her and she loved me, and she hurt me anyway. But I get to know that she loved me.”

“So,” Hayden said, “you’re telling me that it never goes away?”

Ilya snorted. “Ha. Who tells you this nonsense? Of course, it never goes away. It just gets different. You grow, and you change, and it does as well. Maybe I will be angry at my mama for the rest of my life. I will love her just as long. I will understand her, and I will miss her, and I will never stop wishing that she had gotten help. Mental illness is not pretty, Pike, and often it does not go away. It affects everything it touches. It’s naive to think that you can make it go away through the power of love. It takes hard work - Laura does this hard work, and that is very good, but it doesn’t fix everything.”

“It’s a start.”

“You want it to be?”

Hayden looked over his shoulder, towards where the light spilled out the windows, where there was warmth and love. It was his, if he wanted it. Laura had made that clear enough - she had made it clear that she loved him, and probably had never not, and that he had always had a place in her family, if he wanted it now. And Hayden did want it - almost equally as much as he didn’t. The anger was there, burning steadily under his skin; the urge to snap and snarl and shout at her. He could get in the car now and drive away. He could never see her again, if he chose. He has Jackie and the kids, and he was settling. Settling, into the type of person that he wanted to be - not ten-year-old Hayden who was realising that his mom was never coming back, or stroppy teenage Hayden, or sixteen-year-old Hayden who was caring for his dad, or Hayden the hockey player who kept his head down and kept quiet.

He was captain of Montreal Voyageurs, and it was slow process, but the vets were retiring and the rookies were good, both on the ice and off it, and Hayden was actively helping, in the sort of way that he should have stepped up for Shane. He was a husband with a woman who both awed, inspired and terrified him in equal measure. He was a father of four kids who he wanted to give the entire world to, or at the very least make sure got to grow up to be the best versions of themselves, the ones that Hayden loved and was proud of. He was a friend - yeah, that was a work in progress, but it was good. He was still a son - to Dad, maybe now to Laura again. He was settling into it all.

And the question was whether or not he needed Laura.

It was such a harsh thought, so clinical and detached. But he hadn’t had Laura all these years. He’d never really needed her. And now she was back, and she loved him, and she wanted to be involved in his life - but what did it change? Hayden would go home to his wife and his kids and his friends and his team, and Laura would still be here, where she had always been. His normal life did not include her. It did not need to include her. But -

“I want it to be a start,” said Hayden. “I spent so long wanting her to come back, and then just as long hoping I'd never hear from her again. But she's here now... and - and I get to choose what I want. I've never had that before. Fuck, I want Jackie to get to meet her. And I could give the kids another grandma - they love Jackie's mom and I've never been able to give them that. Not straight away, maybe. I think I need a little time to think about it all. I’m not ready to make any decisions now. But I think that I want it to be a start. I think that I really want this.”

Ilya nodded. “I think you are making a good choice, choosing what you want.”

“Really?”

“I think,” said Ilya, absently running his fingers over the gold chain looped around his neck, “that if my mama was alive today, if I got the chance to see her again and reconnect… I think I would choose it always, no matter how angry I was.”

Chapter 9

Chapter Notes

We're coming to the end now - this chapter and then the last - and I just wanted to say a massive thank you for everyone who has read and interacted with this. I'm a little bit behind responding to comments because work has been hectic recently, but I love seeing everyone's thoughts and will get around to replying!

It was an uncomfortable night - that was the one thing that Hayden was certain about.

He had sat with Ilya on the decking until both of their cigarettes had crumbled away between their fingers and the noxious smell of ash clung to their clothes and hair. They did not talk much more, because they had both said so much that it was as if the words had been forcefully stripped from them, hollowing out their insides. Hayden had tried to speak, swallowing past the discomfort, because he had thought that maybe Ilya would want to feel like he had company, but the other man had simply shaken his head. His eyes had been shining. Hayden had not wanted to suggest that he was crying - but, well, he thought that Ilya had been.

After, Ilya had wanted to call Shane, Probably Shane was the only person that Ilya wanted to talk to ever again. Hayden had left him on the porch with his phone pressed to his ear; the screen had lit his face, and Hayden had spied, briefly, his lock screen. It was picture of Shane, smiling. There was nothing else recognisable about the picture. It had been a close up. All Hayden ha been able to see was how incandescently happy Shane had looked.

Hayden had left him to it. He had gone inside, and he had found Laura and Callum and Ella in the living room. There was space left from him, beside Laura; Hayden had sat down and let himself sink into the cushions. Both he and Laura ignored how her breathing hitched and then settled when he sat, as if she had thought that this offer would also be rebuffed, and this felt like a fair exchange for ignoring how Hayden’s hands were still shaking. There was a feeling in his chest, an enormity of being out of place. On the television, there was some inane drama reeling by. Hayden hadn’t had any interest in watching but it gave him an excuse not to talk. Everyone else seemed to be appreciative of this reprieve.

Hayden watched one episode, and in that time, Ilya joined them. He was composed yet again, and he sat beside Ella on the couch. Quietly, Hayden heard them begin to talk about hockey, and it was clear - no matter what Ella protested - that she did, in fact, know her shit.

Here, Hayden took the opportunity to excuse himself. He called Jackie, for bed time, and leant against the kitchen counters so that he could say night to both the kids. They were videocalling, which meant that Arthur could sign (the CSL was a work in progress - more to support communication than anything else - but it was handy at times when Arthur simply didn’t feel like talking, especially when it was late and he was tired and it had been a whole day of being overwhelmed) and Hayden could see his kids. Amber wanted to talk about her day before bed, forgoing a story despite the fact that Shane offered to read to her, and so Hayden got to watch her flit and skip about her room for five minutes. She’d done him a drawing, she told him, to make him feel less sad, but it was a surprise and (on what he was sure was an entirely unrelated note) did he have a favourite colour rocketship. The answer to that was green.

“Your kids are forever on the move,” said Shane, who had somehow inherited the phone. Jackie was tucking Arthur into bed, one hand smoothing over his curls, and Shane angled the camera so that both he and Hayden’s little family were in view. “I don’t know how you do it.”

“Lots of coffee,” replied Hayden, “and despair.”

Shane laughed, shaking his head. “Jeez, okay, I’m going to let Ilya handle all of that, I think.”

Hayden did not ask Shane if he was thinking of kids soon, because they’d had this conversation. It was going to be soon for definite - but Shane didn’t want to think about that, because he and Ilya had agreed that they’d both step away from hockey when it came time to have kids.

“Are you okay?” Shane asked. “I spoke to Ilya, but he was being a dick.”

“Really? Rozanov, a dick?”

“Tell me he’s at least being helpful.”

“He’s being helpful.”

This, Shane accepted. Maybe there was something particularly truthful on Hayden’s face, or maybe he simply knew his husband that well. His eyes were searching as he looked at Hayden. “And have you decided what you’re doing? With everything?”

“I’ve spoken to Laura,” Hayden said. “We have - we’re getting on the same page. I want to sleep on it. It’s just…”

“You have a half-sister?” Shane guessed, and, like he mostly always was, managed to guess what it was that Hayden was thinking.

Mutely, Hayden nodded.

“I’m going to sleep on it,” he reiterated. “It’s just not what I expected.”

When the phone call was over, Hayden went back to the living room, back beside Laura. She asked, tentatively, like she still wasn’t sure that it was her place, about his kids, about his wife. His kids - usually Hayden loved to talk about his kids, and could do it for hours on end. He avoided the topic now - it was a strange thought, his mother and kids and him, and how all of those concepts and realities fit and melded together - but he did talk about Jackie. Jackie was easy - hard to reduce to a few pretty words to tell a stranger, but Hayden could spend his life talking about Jackie. He picked a few nice memories, which said more about her than Hayden could ever find the words to verbalise, and Laura clung to them like a lifeline, like it was an olive branch that Hayden was offering her, or the white flag of surrender. In a way, it was.

The memories that they swapped between them were easy one - he spoke about the time he had forgotten to wear sunscreen on his and Jackie’s first holiday as a couple, before the marriage and the kids and everything else, and gotten burns so serious that he’d been admitted to the emergency department, with heat stroke that maybe him a little delirious to boot. It had been under the influence of that heat stroke that he’d told Jackie that he’d loved her for the first time - three months in, on a drip for fluids, surrounded by the bustle of a hospital. In return, Laura told him about the first time that she had met Callum, and the idea is bittersweet for Hayden, because somewhere out there was a boy and his dad without Laura Pike, but there, immediately at hand, there was a Laura who was terrified and a little spiky and falling in love all over again with the vet technician trying to save the life of an injured dove she had brought in for treatment.

Hayden had never gotten the chance to know his mother, not in the way that many people did, but it seemed as though the process had begun - a little late, a little stilted, but there. It was only a little thing, but it seemed to speak for itself. Here, they seemed to say - here are all the ways that my life has changed since I last saw you, and here in the gaps and the absences left by the fact that you weren’t there is the love that had grown over it. Not into it, and never filling it, but over it, covering it, like a bandage on an open wound. His problem was that he couldn’t tell if, now covered, the wound had been disinfected at all.

Laura’s life, it seemed, was just as defined by the absence of Hayden as his life had been defined by an absence of her. That, too, was a bittersweet thought.

At the end of the night, she walked up with him to the guest room. Ilya was straight over to the bed, wriggling under the covers, but Hayden lingered a moment in the doorway.

“I want to say goodnight,” she said softly. “I don’t know how to do it anymore - I don’t remember.” She laughed wetly. “I suppose you’re too big for me to tuck you in, huh?”

If she had ever tucked Hayden into bed before, he didn’t remember it. But she spoke like she had before, and it felt like another thing that he had lost.

“Just a little bit,” he said, and leant down to hug her.

He did not sleep well that night. She was down the corridor, and if he wanted her to tuck him in then he could have that. Which he didn’t, but it was a strange thought. He thought of one of his kids up in the middle of the night, faces tacky and damp with tears after a bad dream, and the way that he - giving Jackie a well-deserved break - would carry them back to their rooms, holding them tight and safe against his chest. He would put them to bed and pull the covers up around them, and then he would lie beside them until they settled again, singing or talking, soothing away the bad dreams. He wanted them to know that he was always at hand, even if they thought it was stupid and childish.

And now Laura was close at hand. And Hayden wasn’t sleeping well. And these things, for him, were unconnected. It was something he would never get, no matter how well his visit went or if he decided to pursue something after. That, and all the years of a childhood with a mother weren’t for Hayden. How that reconciled with Laura now, just down the hall, he didn’t know.

He slept, a little - fitfully, when he did manage to drop off. Tossing, turning. Ilya had let him share the bed, topping and tailing like kids at a sleepover at first, and then tossed him out of the bed when it was clear that Hayden was unable to settle. Hayden made himself a nest of pillows with a spare duvet on the floor; when he rose later, around midnight, he saw that Ilya had starfished out across the bed, mouth gaping openly somewhat unattractively as he snuffled and snored and drooled, a little.

He tried to sleep again, and lasted until three, and then until five, and then gave up around half-six. He knew that he wouldn’t be getting anymore sleep, which was a shame because he and Jackie had both shaken on the deal that, if they were away from the kids, they’d try and scrounge up all the extra sleep that they could. It was the reason that, when Shane had been sneaking out of shared hotel rooms to see Boston Lily, Hayden had not be wanking off, like he often told Shane he would be, but had been napping with a little bit of white noise looping in his ear buds.

As silently as he managed, he extricated himself from the room, shutting the down behind him. It felt… wrong, walking around Laura’s house without her there, to oversee him like he was an errant trespasser being monitored for sticky fingers or something. But he was going to go crazy if he was stuck in that room for another moment, not doing anything, simply listening the wheeze of Ilya’s fucking mouth breathing.

The air of the house was stale and cold, still. There was no noise - just the soft pad of his sock-clad feet against the wooden floors, the frigidness of it creeping into the soles of his feet and up his legs mercilessly. One of the stairs creaked when he set his wait on it, and his breath caught as he paused, waiting to hear if he had disturbed anyone else. There were no sounds of someone stirring, and so he continued, moving deeper into the house

He’d make breakfast for people, he decided, because it was a hospitable thing to do, and the sort of thing that Hayden might have done if he had been helping out at home. He hoped that Laura and Callum would not mind him using groceries or equipment, but he needed to do something, anything, with his hands, just to settle the way that they were still shaking. He had not calmed down in the slightest, it seemed, despite everything. He needed to calm down - distract himself maybe? So, breakfast; he was certain people would be awake soon, because Hayden had been clear with his intentions to leave early in the morning and Laura had been insistent that she would be sending him off, though she had not looked very enthused at the prospect.

Hayden settled on omelettes. There were eggs in the fridge, and he gathered peppers, mushrooms, cheese, and ham to add, beginning the laborious process of dicing the fresh produce into little cubes to be fried up. Usually, the repetitiveness of the task would be a monotonous drag for Hayden, without podcasts or Jackie perched on the countertop beside him or one of the kids tugging at his shirt and demanding attention. His thoughts raced too fast, and escaped away from him, and Hayden could never concentrate. It was stupid, to be grown up and have such a shocking attention span, but that was who Hayden was. Grown up, easily bored, in constant need of occupation.

This time was different. His thoughts settled into the rhythm of his hands. They had been racing anyway - this just directed them.

He cored the bell papers, scything around the stem with a sharp knife and then using it as purchase to yank out the innards with a slight wet schlunk! sound. He cut it into thin strips, flicking away the stray seeds that cling still to the pepper, and then begins to dice them into little cubes, laying five side by side at a time. The finished pieces went in a bowl. The discarded pieces he left by his elbow. He was thinking about making a composter, back home, because the twins were learning about sustainable nature in their camp and they wanted to take up gardening. Hayden certainly wasn’t going to cart the peppers all the way back to Montreal, because that was stupid, but he was thinking about his girls and the process as a whole again. Maybe he’d help them. It sounded fascinating, even if all their talk about worms and the thought of them, wriggling and pink and fleshy, was a little unnerving to Hayden.

Someone shifted in the door; Hayden didn’t know exactly what it was that clued him into their presence, the minute movement or the sudden prickle at the back of his neck, but he glanced over his shoulder, knife pausing. Ella was stood in the doorway, hands twisting awkwardly in front of her. She looked unsure, like the sight of Hayden in her kitchen had surprised her - probably it had. He couldn’t imagine everything that she was thinking and feeling. If Hayden felt vulnerable, surely, he thought, she must feel the same, without the comfort of her own home to run away to - like Hayden could - because he was in her home. There was no safe place for her to get away from it. If she had friends she was close enough with to crash over there, he didn't know, but he did know that he didn’t want to chase her out of her own home.

“Morning,” he said, keeping his voice as even as he could possibly manage.

Ella scrounged up a tiny smile for him. It felt sincere, though Hayden had no way of knowing that for certain. “Morning,” she replied, still lingering in the doorway.

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” he said, because it was the polite thing to say, and because it was still early, and because Hayden had been mucking around in her kitchen without permission.

She was still wearing her pyjamas, an overlarge tee shirt and pair of plaid pants, and her hair was a mess of red around her face. Jade’s hair got similar sometimes - Hayden had taken to braiding it back before bed, so that it was easier to brush out in the morning, but he wouldn’t suggest that to Ella. It was a dad thing (or maybe an older brother thing?) and it wasn’t his place at all. Ella moved a little closer, drifting further into the room. Her footsteps were muffled by the slippers that she was wearing - they had whiskers and little cat ears attached, calico, and were clearly well-loved, having rubbed away in some places.

“You didn’t,” she replied. “I just couldn’t sleep.”

She boosted herself up onto the countertop, out of arm’s reach from where Hayden was working. It was the complete opposite side of the room - but it was in the same room, and she was looking at him frankly, with interest, and he supposed that this was the way that these things probably started.

“I thought I’d make omelettes,” he told her, tapping the carton of eggs with a demonstrative finger. “I hope that’s alright.”

She swung her feet idly, heels drumming against the cupboards. “Omelettes are good. I’m not a fan of mushrooms thought.”

“Omelettes, no mushrooms,” Hayden recited. “Peppers and ham good?”

She nodded.

“They’ll be a while anyway. I wanted to make them for when people were starting to wake up.”

“It’s nice of you. You didn’t have to.”

Turning back to the food preparations in front of him, Hayden shrugged. “I’d usually be making breakfast for Jackie and the kids anyway. Keeps me busy.”

“Jackie’s your wife, right?” she asked.

There something hesitant in her voice, a little unsure. He knew that she - who seemed familiar enough with the sporting and personal side of the NHL - knew that his wife’s name was Jackie Pike, because it was the sort of thing that was easily found out by a quick Wikipedia dive. But it was new territory for the both of them. Technically, he supposed, Jackie was Ella’s family as well - a sister-in-law, married to a secret brother. Hayden’s kids were her nieces and nephews. His thought process felt repetitive, even to him, as it worked around and around in circles - but this was what stuck out to him. His kids had family they had never met before, just like Hayden had family he had never known about. A sister, a step-father.

“I didn’t know,” Ella said, abruptly, “that Mom had a whole other family. That you were - well, you know, my brother. I didn’t know until yesterday.”

“I’m sorry you had to find out that way,” he said. “It can’t have been easy.”

He couldn’t see Ella’s face. He still had his back to her, but he couldn’t tell whether or not this was the sort of conversation he should turn around for, if he should be facing her. He thought that he probably should, but he couldn’t bring himself to. He didn’t know what expression she would be wearing, and it scared him.

“It’s strange,” she replied. “I don’t know what it is yet. I never wanted a sibling.”

Hayden straightened his shoulders only a second after they caved in around him, weighed down my some immeasurable, or at least unmeasured, disappointment. He steadied out his cutting as the knife faltered. He took a breath.

“I never thought about it,” she continued. Was she frowning? Glaring? Did she resent him enough to wear it clearly on her face? “By the time Mom had me, she was older. She went through the menopause not long after. I don’t know if she and Dad wanted more kids. When I was, like, a young and dramatic teenager, I used to swear that she never wanted me. I think that was maybe because she felt bad about you.”

“Laura loves you,” he said, and turned at last to face her. “That’s the important thing to remember. Your relationship has nothing to do with mine. She loves you - you’re her daughter.”

Ella tilted her head, curious. She wasn’t glaring. She looked perfectly, infuriatingly neutral, like she was determined to keep her cards to her chest until she divined how best to play them against Hayden.

“I know that,” she replied. “But you’re her kid too. She loves you as well.”

“Yeah,” said Hayden. “I think I’m beginning to get that.”

“I was watching the Ottawa-Montreal game,” Ella informed him, “when Mom walked in. Usually I watch it upstairs on my laptop, ‘cause Mom and Dad aren’t big sports people, but my laptop was broken, so I watched it in the living room instead. She saw what I watching. You made this assist - and the commentator said your name, and she went white. I thought she was feeling ill, but she said she wasn’t, and she sat down to watch the whole game with me.”

“She was watching for me,” he said - mostly to himself, but Ella nodded anyway.

“It doesn’t feel real,” she said. “Like it’s all this big dream I’m having, or someone is going to jump out from around the corner and yell that it’s all a joke and I’ve fallen for it, like an idiot.”

Hayden turned his attentions to the mushrooms, twisting the stem out with a satisfying pop and peeling the outer layer of skin away. Then he began to slice them. Concentrating on the mushrooms gave him something other than Ella to focus on. He didn’t know what he was supposed to say to her yet - she didn’t want a brother, yes, fine, but Hayden was in her house and talking to her mother and eating her food, using it to make breakfast. And, for what it was worth, she had seen him in the kitchen and she had not walked the other way.

“I’m sorry if this isn’t what you want. I mean, a big change - finding out that you have a brother, that your mom had this whole other life. And now I’m in your house… It’s not ideal. I know it’s not ideal.”

“I have nieces and a nephew. I’ve never met them. They don’t even know my name. I - Yeah, it’s a big change.” She huffed a laugh, little more than a sharp exhalation of air. “Lots of my friends have big families, but it’s always just been me and Mom and Dad.”

“Callum’s parents aren’t around?” he asked

“Grandma and Pops passed away when I was a baby. I don’t remember them. I don’t know about Mom’s parents.”

“I don’t either,” said Hayden. “Never met ‘em. We were a small family as well - just me and Dad. He has a lot of siblings but they’re all in America and we don’t see them very often.”

“Is your dad nice?” asked Ella, curiously.

“Oh, he’s the best. We were really close growing up. He got sick when I was about sixteen, so we relied on each other a lot. We had a closer relationship than a lot of people get with their dads, which I’m grateful for.”

“Bad sick?”

“MS. He’s in a wheelchair now, but it’s being treated. It was difficult for a little while, but we adapted.”

Ella nodded, then nodded again, slower. “Mom used to tell me that she was ill when I was little, ‘cause I was asking questions about what she was like before she met Dad. And she’d say she was ill. I thought it was cancer or something. She never said she was - was living with a bipolar condition, or whatever.”

“And you never… you never saw her with it?”

“There was once,” said Ella, voice distant as she was sounding through whatever memory she was trying to unspool from the depths of her memory, “when I was maybe nine? And Mom got sick. She turned out all the lights in her bedroom and drew the curtains, and she stated in bed for a week while Dad slept on the couch. But then she was better - she was Mom again. And there were times where she was really energetic and we’d go on spontaneous trips to take photos, or she’d - she’d have this wonderful idea for both of us.  But that’s who she is - it’s nothing to do with her having a bipolar condition. And I don’t want to look back on every memory I have of my mom and wonder if she was sick then, or struggling here, or if this was her and some chemicals in her brain, or - or -”

She sniffled, and the sound was sudden and loud and harsh in the relative quiet of the kitchen. When Hayden glanced over his shoulder, her eyes were shining, glistening with a sheen of unshed tears, and she scrubbed a rough hand underneath them. Her words had fallen away entirely, swallowed by the enormity of whatever it was that she was feeling.

And Hayden didn't think twice. He moved towards her, arms opening, and she launched herself from the bench. He rocked back as the force and weight of her knocked into him, but managed to steady himself just before he toppled over and hit the floor. Ella buried her face in his chest. Her shoulders were shaking, even as Hayden tentatively and carefully, mindful of the fact that - although the urge to comfort her had felt the same as it did with his children - he did not really know her at all, or who she responded to hugs, pulled her tight against his chest. He could feel her tears soaking into his top already.

“Hey,” he murmured, running a hand up and down her spine. “Hey, it’s going to be okay. You’re fine. We’re all fine.”

She didn’t really respond much, still crying, but she didn’t pull away either. And it was a lot - of course it was a lot. It would be a lot for anyone. But they were going to be fine - he hadn't been lying when he had said that. And he had, for as long as she needed him. As a shoulder to cry on, as a friend, as a brother - he had her. And it was easier than he thought it would be, to have a sister, and it was nice. He thought that sixteen year-old Hayden, alone and angry and scared in the wake of finding out that his dad was sick and feeling his whole world fracture under the weight of realising that, actually, his dad wasn’t invulnerable, would have loved a sister as well. If he could be to Ella what sixteen year-old Hayden had needed, good.

He pulled her closer. He hugged her tighter. And eventually, he felt it - her breathing, evening out, and her sobs calming into nothing. But she idn’t let go - she was still clinging to him like a limpet. Hayden clung too. This was something he had never gotten before and he was determined to make the most out of it.

Chapter 10

Chapter Notes

When Hayden Pike was seven years old, he clung to the hem of his mother’s shirt and asked her when she would be coming home. Soon, she had told him, but Laura Pike had never returned to their little, single storey house in Drummondville, with the hardwood floors that had made it impossible to silently manoeuvre through the house and the front door that creaked whenever she closed it behind her.

Hayden Pike was thirty-four years old now, and he was the one who was leaving.

Laura Newfield lived in a two storey, family home in a little town not far from Montreal. The door did not make much noise when it was closed, nor when it was open, and the floors were quiet enough that Hayden had been able to drift around the house pretty much unperceived. There was the kitchen were Hayden had made omelettes, and the counters where he had embraced his sister for the very first time in his life, and the dining table where he had two family meals after a lifetime of eating on the sofa with Dad whilst they pretended that there wasn’t a third, empty seat at their own table, and the bedside table that had all the evidence that Hayden had been loved by his mother, in her own way, and that there was not some terrible quirk of personality that rendered him unwanted.

Hayden didn’t know if he would ever return to this home. He didn’t know if it mattered whether or not he returned to this home, or what he was feeling about the idea that he might not return. The Hayden of yesterday morning had been certain that he never wanted to set so much as a foot within; the Hayden of yesterday morning had been certain that he was simply going to live forever with a lifetime of questions for Laura Pike. That was no longer the case.

“Will you come back?” Laura asked.

She was stood on the porch, watching him with heavy, mournful eyes. He was, in that moment, very aware of her age, and the fact that an entire lifetime had passed whilst they were separate. Laura Newfield would never again be the bright, burning, vivid figure that existed in Hayden’s childhood memories - nor was she the pallid and faded figure that had left that last night. He was aware, because of this, that Hayden did not have all the time in the world to figure out what he was feeling. The world would keep spinning, and time would keep slipping by, and they would both keep getting older and changing and becoming new evolutions of their old selves.

He wondered, then, how he could ever start to get to know her when everything was always so constantly changing. It seemed like a Herculean task. Hayden didn’t know if he was up for it. He didn’t know how to start, or even how to think of it - but he knew that he needed to start, otherwise it would chew him up and swallow him alive.

“I don’t know,” he told her truthfully, because they had been truthful and it didn't seem worth it to stop now. “I think I need a bit of time to think. It’s been a lot. I’m - I’m thinking.”

“Of course,” said Laura. “I - Of course.” She inhaled a long, shaky breath. Then she was fumbling in the pockets of the hoodie that she was wearing, pulling out her phone. “Let me give you my number, please. You don’t have to do anything with it - you can even just have it on a scrap piece of paper if you don’t want it in your phone. But I want you to have it, so you can get in touch with me if you ever need it.”

Wordlessly, Hayden created a new contact in his phone. He named it Laura Newfield, which looked out of place surrounded by his other contact names, mostly nicknames or first names only, colloquially and familiarly informal, but he didn’t have anything else that he could change it to just yet. He typed in the digits that Laura shakily read out to him, then read them back to her, just in case. He clicked create, and put his phone back in his pocket. He didn’t offer to give her his number, but he would probably call her, he thought, and then she would have his number anyway - on Hayden’s terms, in his own time.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you,” she said, “and I’m even more sorry that I wasn’t.”

Hayden replied. “I’m sorry too. That you were alone, and if I’m not what you were expecting. I don’t know - I don’t know if I’m anything like what you thought your son would grow up to be, or if you hoped…”

“I hoped that you’d be happy,” she said softly.

He swallowed, fighting past the lump in his throat. “I’m happy,” he said. “I’ve been happy, I am happy, and I think that I will be happy. Are you…?”

“I didn’t know people could be this happy, when I was younger,” she said, and laughed. There were tears in her eyes and wet on her cheeks, but she was smiling so wide that he thought it must hurt. He had never seen her smile before, like that, and decided that he liked it.

“I’m glad. I really glad about that.”

She nodded, stepping down from where she had been above him on the porch. Her eyes were sharp and probing as she looked at him - up at him, now, because he was much taller than her.

“I love you, you know that?” she told him, and the words were fierce. “I’ve always felt it, always, even when things were at there darkest. You were my baby and I got to bring you into this world. I got to hold you in my arms and you were so very small and so very perfect. I didn’t understand how you could be mine. Even when it scared me, I felt it.”

There was nothing, really, that Hayden could say in reply to that. He hugged her instead. Hugged her, and hoped that she could read everything that he couldn’t say in it - that he had missed her, that he had been scared, that he was glad that he had came to see her, even if he didn’t know what to do with it all. The letter was no longer in his pocket; he had binned it that morning, because it was no longer necessary. Everything she had written, she had told him aloud. He would not forget it any time soon. He had her phone number now. Things would not be the same again, even if he never spoke to her again.

But he said, “I’ll call you, soon,” and he felt like he meant it in that moment, like he might look at the number saved to his phone one day and want to dial it.

“I’d like that,” she said, and she let him go.

Callum Newfield shook his hand, his grip firm and sensible. In another life, Hayden might have grown up with this man as some sort of father figure - a stepparent, a mentor, another member of some haphazardly patched together family dynamic. In this mind, this was a happy life, where Laura got the help she needed and did not have to be alone, and got to fall in love with a veterinarian who liked the fact that she was kind, and his dad got to see Marjorie so that he was also not lonely, and Hayden would teach Ella to ride a bike or climb a tree or whatever it was older brothers were supposed to do.

In this life, he was little more than a stranger. Hayden accepted his handshake and felt almost like he was leaving a meeting with Montreal’s management, professional and sharp and completely and utterly detached.

Callum was nice about this anyway, though Hayden was certain that he would also be feeling it.

“It was nice to meet you,” he told Hayden. “I hope we’ll have the chance to get to know each other better one day soon.”

Hayden nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I’d like that.”

Callum Newfield smiled like a dad - eyes crinkled at the corner, a little crooked, all warmth. He was not Hayden’s dad, but his role in this life - and every life imaginable - was clear. Hayden - also a dad, mostly at that moment a son - smiled back. It was more a grimace than anything, really, despite the fact that he had being genuine.

“We’ll have to do this again soon,” Callum added, because this was what you said to acquaintances when parting. It was almost hysterically funny, if not for the fact that he probably mean it.

And then Ella…

Hayden did not know how to say goodbye to Ella.

They had none of the history that he and Laura did to muddy the waters between them, nor was she superimposed over a pre-existing figure in Hayden’s life, in the way that Callum was. It was complicated, of course, but Ella existed only as herself, a new thing in amongst what Hayden already understood about himself. And even the complicated bits - that she was the chosen daughter and he the once-lost, found-again son - did not seem as tangled around her.

He’d never had a sister before, and he found that he wanted one desperately, now that he had been shown it was an option. He thought about his kids - there would never not be a time where they would not have each other. Arthur would grow up with three sisters. Grow up, and grow old with them too. That was a relationship that would long outlast Jackie and Hayden.

Ella stepped towards him, gait looking slightly unsure. Her face was set though, determined. Her shoulders were square. “So,” she said, “this is it. You’re leaving.”

“Me and Jackie originally agreed that I would only spend a couple hours here,” he replied. “I’ve stayed longer than I intended.”

“I’ve had a brother for one night and now you’re just leaving again. Most people get to keep ‘em longer than this.”

He snorted. “Yeah, I feel that.”

Then he hesitated, looking at her. She looked like him, in some ways, but also like Laura. Hayden had never thought that he looked much like his mother, but here was Ella, existing as an illustration of the bridge between them, and all the similarities that had faded from his mind. And here was Ella, existing also as his sister and as herself - Ella, who liked hockey and music, who climbed trees and was kind to her friends, who Hayden didn’t really know at all. If he left here, and he never spoke to Laura again, he would never know her. They would be like two cars on the highway, passing each other in the dark as they hurtled in opposite directions. She’d watch him play hockey and give interviews, and maybe there would be pap shots of him with Jackie and the kids, or (more likely, because people were not that interested in Hayden Pike and his white picket fence, conventional Canadian lifestyle) with Shane and Ilya. He would not have these things of her, because Ella would exist in some out of sight place away from the public eye.

Or maybe, one day, she would release her music and Hayden would hear it on the radio or something. And the radio host would announce her name (Ella Newfield, rising musical star) and Hayden would have to try and explain that she was his sister except not really. And there would be the sound of her voice to know, and pictures on the internet, or maybe even interviews - but she would still be a stranger to him. A stranger, and his sister, all at once.

“Here,” he said, pressing a folded slip of paper into her hands, “it’s my phone number. Give me a call or a text, if you want, and if you’re ever in Montreal, let me know and we can try and arrange something.”

She took the paper. Slipped it into her pocket. “You’re serious?”

“Yeah, of course. Like you said, most people get their siblings for life. We gotta a bit of catching up to do.”

“My friends and I go to Montreal quite regularly in the summer. Maybe… Maybe I’ll see you then?”

“I’d love that. And - if your friends are hockey fans too, or even if they’re not - there’s some tickets I’m sure that can be spare with your name on them.”

Ella’s eyes shone, a grin leaping to her lips. “Really?” she asked, slightly breathless.

“You ever watched a game of hockey in person?”

She shook her head.

Hayden grinned at her. “I can make that happen, I think, or I’m not captain of the Montreal Voyageurs.”

She flung her arms around his neck. He lifted her a little, as she rose onto her tip toes for a better vantage, and thought about how long it would be until he could no longer carry his own kids. When they were Ella’s age, he wouldn’t even have the benefits of hockey to fortify his muscles. There’d be a day when he couldn’t twirl his girls around, or give them piggy backs, or let Arthur sit up high on his shoulders. With the age difference between him and Ella, these were all things that he might have done with her as well, but he hadn’t. This was a start - a slow, faltering, poor start, but a start nonetheless.

“I’ll talk to you later,” said Ella, like she was testing the words, seeing how their weight fell from her tongue.

Hayden would have to learn the weight of how they sounded as well - but he thought, for now, that he liked it. The weight was not so heavy and burdensome as it might have been, when the connection that tied him to Laura was less a tether and more a shackle.

“I’ll talk to you later,” he repeated, and then stepped away.

He looked back over his shoulder, and the three of them were stood together. Callum’s arm was around Laura’s waist, and his other hand was resting on Ella’s shoulder. They were pressed together like peas in a pod; it didn’t look like there was room at all for Hayden to fit himself in there. Except… Except for the fact that Ella was still grinning at him, with one hand resting atop the pocket were she had stowed his number, and Callum was lifting the hand he had laid on her shoulder to wave at Hayden, both a send off and invitation to return in one, and Laura…

Laura rested both her hands on her chest, right over where her heart would beat, as though she was scared that it might fly from her chest and shatter on the ground between them if she did not stopper the dam with her own hands. The tears were still flowing steadily from her eyes, dripping off her chin. She was still smiling - fond, bittersweet, almost loving. And then she moved her hands from her chest. With her right hand, she pressed the tips of her finger against her lips and blew him a single, shaking kiss.

Hayden held up his hand to catch it, then flushed. He felt his ears burning like someone had lit a match behind them, and shoved his hand in his pocket - then realised that that probably made it look like he was storing the kiss, like a keepsake. It was the dorky sort of thing that the twins groaned at now, when he dropped them off at school and made the mwah! as loud and theatrical as he could in front of all their friends, and it made Jackie laugh and shake her head.

But Laura lit up, and her smile, in that moment, was worth the embarrassment, but it was a nice last sight of her to replace the one that seven year old Hayden had internalised. This time, Hayden Pike was the one leaving. But Laura Newfield was happy and she was alive and she was close at hand. There was the promise of soon, and it was genuine. It was actionable.

He’d be back, if he wanted to. He could return whenever he wanted. He had this now, and it would not be taken for him.

“Are you ready to leave, Pike?” Ilya asked.

He had been standing a few feet away to give Hayden some measure of privacy as he said goodbye, having made his own rounds inside. Hayden didn’t know what it was that had compelled Ilya to separate himself from their dysfunctional family unit, but he had, and Hayden saw him watching them now with eyes that seemed almost envious as they darted between Hayden and the Newfields.

At some level, Hayden thought that he understood. He had been Ilya, when he had been little and watching friends with their moms, getting dropped off and picked up and going to parks and cinemas and all the sort of things that you were supposed to do with your mom. These were the sort of things that his friends complained about having to do, because they were too old and too cool to be hanging around with their mom, and it was embarrassing in front of their friends, and these were also the sort of things that Hayden had been more jealous of than anything else in the world.

Now, Hayden was his friends and Ilya was like Hayden growing up, watching as Hayden chose to leave his mom behind, a separation blunted by the fact that he had the choice and the opportunity to go back to her, whenever he wanted - if he wanted.

Ilya didn’t have that choice. He would never have that choice. There was not even a grave for him to choose to return to - at least, not one he could reach safely.

But he had come with Hayden because he had understood something about the hurt that Hayden had felt, the absence and the wanting and the way that everything else seemed pale and small in comparison to the enormity of the loss. It had been more understanding than Hayden had ever expected to find in Ilya Rozanov - and here they found the limits of it, because Irina Rozanova was never going to write Ilya Rozanov a letter, nor send him any address at which he could find her happy and alive, nor would there be a phone number with which Ilya could reach her across any distance.

Hayden looked back, once more, at Laura Newfield.

Then he turned away. He slung an arm over Ilya’s shoulder, a half hug as they made their way down the path together. Ilya stiffened at the contact, maybe because it was unexpected or maybe because it was Hayden - and then, slowly at first, and then all at once, melted into it.

“Spasibo,” he said, quietly. Hayden didn’t know what it meant, but he thought that he understood the feeling behind it.

He held out his hands for the keys. “Let me drive us home?” he asked.

Ilya handed them over. “Home,” he agreed, and his voice was rough, burred thick with his accent in a way that was more noticeable than it usually was.

Hayden didn’t mention it. They didn’t need to. The feeling simply existed - between them, by itself, with no justification needed for its existence, nor explanation. He didn’t think that there would be the words for it anyway, and so he did not try to find them.

They got in the car. The house stood behind them. And Hayden set a course for home.

Chapter End Notes

So, we have reached the end... I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has read this, and everyone who has stuck around until this point. Reading your thoughts and feelings every week has honestly meant the world, and I love seeing what everyone is making of my tiny corner of this fandom. I'm going to miss this fic now that it is finished but I'm very happy with where I have left it and hope that you will all agree that this is a good place for it to finish. I'm not going to say that this is the end for this 'verse (some of you might have noticed the chapter count go up and then down again, which is because there is a collection of deleted scenes/bonus chapters that are currently languishing in a Google doc that may be posted separately), and this fic is going to part of a larger, mostly unconnected Hayden Pike-centric series (I apparently like to put him into situations), but I am content, for now, to draw this to a close. Thank you all again and I hope that you have enjoyed this! <3