Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid, Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov & Irina Rozanova

Characters:

Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander, Irina Rozanova, Anya | Ilya Rozanov's Dog, Troy Barrett, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Wyatt Hayes, Svetlana Vetrova, Grigori Rozanov, Galina Molchalina, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander

Additional Tags:

Post-Book 6: The Long Game (Game Changers), Canon Compliant, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Married Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Good Friend Troy Barrett, Good Friend Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, Depression, Suicide Ideation, Grief/Mourning, Dreams and Nightmares, Hallucinations, Top Ilya Rozanov, Bottom Shane Hollander, Anal Sex, Begging Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov Needs A Hug, Possessive Sex, love is not the problem, love is also not sufficient which is the whole problem, the specific terror of turning the same age your mother was when she died, Inferno References (La Divina Commedia | The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri), Russian Orthodox Christianity, Domestic, NOBODY DIES Ilya is fine!!!

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-17 Words: 38,462 Chapters: 1/1

Something Borrowed / Something Blew

Summary

Shane is in the front pew. His face is—Ilya does not have words for what Shane's face is doing. He has seen Shane angry and afraid and exhausted and soft and undone. He has never seen this. This is something below all of those things, something that lives at the very bottom of a person, that surfaces only when the thing above it has given way.

This is what it looks like when Shane has nothing left to manage.

Ilya reaches for him.

His hand passes through air.

-

Or: Ilya Rozanov turns the same age his mother was when she died. Featuring strange dreams, tarot readings, and a woman with her back to him who keeps appearing where she shouldn’t.

A man who spent twenty years preparing to die, and one husband who refuses to let him.

Notes

Content warnings: depression, sustained suicidal ideation, past suicide (Irina only—not depicted, referenced), past child abuse, domestic violence (Irina and Grigori—referenced, not depicted), and funerals. No suicide attempts or self-harm occur on the page, but Ilya's relationship to his own safety is…complicated, and the text does not look away from that. These themes are central and sustained throughout. Nothing is gratuitous, but nothing is minimized either.

On timeline: This is set in 2023, two years into Shane and Ilya's marriage, approaching their third anniversary in July. Ilya has been in Ottawa since fall 2018; Shane joined in 2021, which is also when they married. References to five years mean the relationship; references to two years mean the marriage. I tried to stay canon-compliant but the wiki broke my brain somewhere around hour three, so if something is off: I know, I don't care anymore, and neither should you. 🥀

On POV: I am a single-POV loyalist and I stand by this. That said, a few scenes simply didn't work from inside Ilya's head, so there is a small amount of Shane and Troy in here. Consider it a treat.

On Russian: All Russian was translated by machines and assembled by someone who does not speak it. Native speakers are warmly invited to suggest corrections. I apologize in advance and also retroactively.

i. limbo—the country that stopped existing

The smell comes before anything else.

Beeswax. Iron. Something beneath both that has no name in any language he speaks: old stone, accumulated breath, the organic cold of a room that has been holding people's grief since before anyone living was born. Ilya knows this smell how you know something that predates conscious memory, from the inside of your body rather than your mind. He has been dreaming it since he was twelve years old. Until this moment he has never understood where it came from.

The church is full.

He moves through the mourners—not parting them, not touching them, existing in the spaces between their bodies as if he is made of something slightly less solid than they are. Once, someone's sleeve should catch on his wrist. It doesn't. Or it does, and then doesn't, the contact failing to complete itself. He does not look down to check.

At the front, there is a casket.

Open.

He notes it without shock, without recoil. Just: open.

He should know whose it is. Someone must have told him.

I must have forgotten, Ilya thinks.

The arm is the first thing.

Not reaching. Not resting. Dropped, with the lax quality of an arm that has come unmade from the person it belonged to. The unheld angle of it. The fingers have curled inward, slightly, the way fingers do when the effort of being held open has stopped, because the thing making the effort has stopped.

He knows this quality.

He learned it in a doorway on a Tuesday afternoon in March when he was twelve years old, when he came home from practice with his skate bag still over his shoulder and the apartment had changed temperature and he called her name and heard only silence that has taken something in.

He stops walking.

The arm. He knows this arm.

For a moment it is simple. It is hers. It must be hers. The thought settles with the same quiet certainty as the smell did, below argument, below inspection. The length of it, the way it falls, the fact of it.

Then something does not align.

Not visibly. Nothing changes in the arm itself. But the recognition fails to land where it should. The certainty doesn't hold. It slips, just slightly, like a foot placed where a step should be and isn't.

He has known this arm for twenty years in the body-knowledge way, below thought, how you know the route from your childhood home to the rink without being able to explain the turns to anyone else.

He looks at the face.

For a moment, he does not understand what he is looking at.

The features are familiar in the wrong direction. Not you look like her, which people have been saying since he was old enough to understand what the sentence meant.

Not hers.

His face.

Thirty-one years old. The face Ilya Rozanov watched in a bathroom mirror this morning before he decided whether to participate in the day.

He stands there. The candles burn without wavering. The priest continues. The mourners breathe.

Something is wrong with the distance.

Ilya is not sure how far away he is from the casket. It feels fixed, but not by him. He has the brief, disorienting sense that if he reached out, he would either touch it immediately or not at all.

He does not move his hands.

He stands there and looks at his own face in the casket and thinks: I must have remembered wrong.

He thinks: I have been remembering wrong for twenty years.

The memory of the doorway does not change. It does not correct itself to match what he is seeing. It remains exactly as it was: twelve years old, the arm, the silence, the name he called.

Both things are true, and neither accommodates the other.

He begins to move through the church again. The mourners do not see him. He passes Hayes, who is standing near the back with his hands in his coat pockets and his face arranged with sorrow of someone who learned to keep himself very quiet and has applied this skill to grief. He passes Troy Barrett, who is looking at the casket with the expression of a man confronting something he recognized before it had a name. He passes Cliff Marlow, who is looking out a window instead of at Ilya's body, something set and hard in his jaw. His face is blotchy and wet, and his knuckles are bleeding for unknown reasons. He passes Sveta, who is the only person in the room who looks angry instead of sad, which is correct of her, which is exactly right.

He passes a man he does not look at directly.

Ilya has never looked at Grigori directly, and he will not start now. He moves past him how he has always moved past him—making himself smaller, redirecting the center of gravity, choosing not to exist in his peripheral vision.

Then: Shane.

Shane is in the front pew. His face is—Ilya does not have words for what Shane's face is doing. He has seen Shane angry and afraid and exhausted and soft and undone. He has never seen this. This is something below all of those things, something that lives at the very bottom of a person, that surfaces only when the thing above it has given way.

This is what it looks like when Shane has nothing left to manage.

Ilya reaches for him.

His hand passes through air.

He reaches again.

He cannot touch him. He is made of the wrong substance. He is already past the membrane that separates whatever this is from whatever Shane is, and there is no crossing back, and he understands, with the clean absolute clarity of the worst kind of knowing, what this is. What this has always been heading toward. The conclusion of twenty years of arithmetic.

He looks at Shane's face.

He thinks: what did I do.

The thought comes out of sequence, as if it has been waiting for its place and taken the wrong one.

What did I do.

What did I—

Ottawa. Their bedroom. March.

The ceiling above him has the quality of ceilings at five in the morning—present, contextless, not yet trusted. His eyes are open. He knows this because the ceiling is there, pale and exact, with the small cobweb in the southeast corner that he has been meaning to mention and has not mentioned. He knows this is the room, their room, where the east-facing window is beginning to suggest, rather than declare, that morning exists.

His hand hurts.

He opens it.

The crucifix has left a red mark across his palm. Thin. Pressed deep enough to have texture, to be read like a sentence by a fingertip in the dark. He stares at it. He closes his hand. He opens it again. The mark is still there.

That was not her, Ilya thinks.

Then, three seconds later, the worse thought: that was not not her.

Ilya closes his hand around the mark and lies there. Beside him, Shane breathes in the even careful way he breathes even in deep sleep, the way a man breathes who has optimized even unconsciousness. Anya is at the foot of the bed, sixty-two pounds of her, a precise warmth and weight Ilya has been navigating in the dark since she came home. Outside, Ottawa is doing whatever Ottawa does at five in the morning in March.

He does not check the date. He already knows what month it is. He knows what today is. He always knows—this is one of the things that distinguishes the grief that has been with him for twenty years from grief that announces itself with occasion: this grief keeps perfect time. It has a calendar. It knows where it is.

March 3rd.

One hundred and four days.

He thinks: I was not surprised.

Here is what Ilya Rozanov knows about thirty-two:

His mother was thirty-two the last time she was alive. She died in March, on a Tuesday afternoon, while he was still at practice. He came home and the apartment had changed temperature—not in any measurable way, but in the way a room changes when the person who was heating it stops. He was twelve. His skate bag was still over his shoulder, and he smelled of ice and sweat. He called her name twice. He checked the kitchen. He checked the sitting room he was not to sit in unless his father was hosting important guests. He checked the bathrooms, his father’s office, and the kitchen again, just in case. Then he went into the bedroom.

He has been counting toward thirty-two since that afternoon.

He is thirty-one years old. His birthday is June 15^th.

He has one hundred and four days.

He has never let himself follow this arithmetic all the way to its end. He has never needed to. The end has been there since he was twelve, sitting at the bottom of the calculation like the last word of a sentence you already know, the period at the end, the fact of it. It doesn’t need following. It just needs noting.

The way you note ice on the road.

Ilya makes coffee he doesn't want.

Anya watches from the kitchen doorway with the focused attention of a creature who has identified the coffee machine as a precursor to breakfast and Ilya as, empirically, a thirty-eight percent more generous breakfast administrator than Shane. She has run this study across four seasons of cohabitation, two years married, and one before, right after the plane that almost wasn't. The data is unambiguous. She monitors.

Ilya fills her bowl too full. He knows. He watches her eat with the soft unearned thing that keeps arriving lately around her. Warm, present, nothing to do with the situation of a small dog eating kibble on a Tuesday morning in a kitchen in Ottawa. He has been feeling it for months. It arrives how warmth arrives from a good coat, from the inside, unexpected. He touches it how you probe a tooth: does this hurt, does this hurt, does this—

It doesn't hurt. It just feels like too much for a Tuesday in March.

He stands at the kitchen window with his coffee. Outside: his city. He has been in this city for five years and it still occasionally surprises him that it is simply there, not performing for him, not competing with him, just Ottawa, existing whether he is watching or not. He finds this restful in a way he has not been able to explain to anyone, how much it matters to live somewhere that will continue after he leaves.

He decides he is fine.

In Russian first—ya v poryadke—because Russian at least makes a structural claim. V poryadke means in order. Correctly arranged. Operating within acceptable parameters. It is a better container than the English fine, which is a closed door with nothing behind it. Any amount of nothing can live behind fine. V poryadke at least asserts that the principles are intact, that the load-bearing elements are still load-bearing.

Then he decides it in English, because English is more convincing. More clinical. More like something that could be entered into a record.

He needs both versions today. Russian for the truth of it. English for the performance of it. Some days these are the same and some days they are not.

Ilya's hand is at his throat before he notices it moving.

The cross is cool this morning. The metal hasn't had time to warm from his body yet, and he can feel the unambiguous cold of it against his sternum through his shirt, the cross itself pressed flat, the chain a thin weight along the back of his neck. He has worn this cross for twenty years.

He took it from her before anyone came, before Alexei came back from wherever Alexei had been that afternoon, before the neighbors knocked and the institutional machinery of death began, the phone calls and the forms and the people who arrive with their professional composure and their professional management of the transition from a person being alive to a person having been alive. He understood with the absolute certainty of a twelve-year-old's body, not reasoning but knowing, that it could not stay. He put it in his pocket. He walked out of the room. He has been walking since.

He lets go of the cross before he has pressed long enough for it to count.

Shane appears.

This is unusual. Shane is normally up before the coffee settles, before the light makes a decision, already in the day in the fully assembled way Ilya has spent five years finding both admirable and faintly alien. He arrives in the kitchen today looking like sleep took something from him—not tired, because Shane doesn't do tired, but slower. Still becoming himself. His hair is doing what it does when it has been left to its own devices. He is wearing the Crocs.

Ilya has extensive opinions about the Crocs. He is keeping them.

Shane makes his coffee, waving away Ilya's offer. He looks at Ilya with the look that is not yet a question but is taking very precise measurements.

"Nice morning," Ilya says, because the window is right there and because this is how he says I see the silhouette of what you're about to ask and I would like to be somewhere else for it.

Shane knows this. Has known it for fourteen years, probably, standing in the bitter cold of Saskatchewan and looking at him with too much knowing for comfort. Which means Ilya is simultaneously saying I'm fine and I am not having this conversation and I know you know I'm not fine, all in two words, while maintaining complete plausible deniability about all three.

Ilya is not given enough credit, really, in his opinion.

"You've been up a while," Shane says. Accurately. Flatly. Not quite saying what he wants to say, which is always the Shane way of talking about anything.

"Couldn't sleep." The sentence is precise and true in every syllable and withholds only the architecture behind the syllables, the thing they add up to, the conclusion they're pointing toward. He has been perfecting this sentence for twenty years: accurate, incomplete, unremarkable. A closed door that looks like every other door.

Shane crosses the kitchen and wraps his arms around Ilya from behind and puts his face between Ilya's shoulder blades. Doesn't say anything. Just his weight, the Shane-at-five-in-the-morning weight, less managed than any other hour. The version that exists before six and which Ilya has been receiving for five years with the wonder of someone who was not expecting to have access to this and has never gotten used to having it.

Ilya covers Shane's hands with his own.

He is fine. He means this from some layer of himself. The layer sits higher than it used to. It does not reach as far down.

Before the morning assembles itself into a day, before Shane finishes his coffee and goes to run and then shower, before Ilya pretends to eat the obscenely healthy breakfast Shane will make and leave on the counter, before the day begins being a day, Ilya reaches up and touches the chain at his throat again. Automatic. A reflex below the threshold of decision. He checks it. It's there. He lets go before Shane sees him do it.

ii. lust—the self-fulfilling hunger

Here is what Ilya has never examined too closely:

Shane wants him. Not the way people want things they have decided they want. Shane wants Ilya the way weather wants to happen. He has never seen anything like it and he has been the object of a great deal of wanting. It is not something Shane decided. He thinks it is something Shane is.

And then there is the other thing. The thing Ilya does not examine.

Shane running his hand through Ilya's hair. An absentminded gesture, comfortable and habitual, the gesture of a man half-asleep at nine in the evening when Ilya is already on his chest.

It makes Ilya's cock stir every single time.

He discovered this about himself with the unique horror of a man who realizes his body has been making commitments behind his back—the muscle memory of that grip tightening and releasing, over and over and over, encoded into his nervous system without his permission. The body takes notes. The body is thorough and has no sense of appropriate context.

He does not tell Shane about this. Shane would find it hilarious and immediately weaponize it.

What he will allow himself to think about, on mornings when he has run out of other things to hold, is a Friday in February: the windows cracked, the light going gold, and Ilya watching his husband come apart above him and entirely forgotten to perform anything. The little ah ah ahs, small and helpless. Ilya's name over and over in between them. The fine trembling in Shane's thighs that means he's been at this long enough that the muscle is beginning to give out, that his body is working harder to hold itself up than it has strength for.

Shane's hand pressed flat against his own stomach. Against the place where he can feel Ilya through the skin—can feel him inside, the fact of him, the warmth and presence of him—and that gesture. That specific hand. That needing to feel it from the outside as proof of the inside.

That tips something over in Ilya's chest every time and does not come back.

"More," Shane says. His voice is wrecked.

"You have all of it," Ilya tells him.

"More."

"My Shane. You have all of me, moya lyubov’."

Shane makes a sound that is not a word. His thighs tremble. His neck has given up holding his own head and Ilya has his hand at the back of it, holding him, because this is the part—this has always been the part—that gets Ilya: that Shane Hollander, who runs everything in his life with the precision of a man who has never once left anything to chance, cannot hold his own head up right now. Cannot hold anything. Has given it all over.

Ilya flips him. Not gently. Shane makes a sound between protest and encouragement which means Ilya has done the right thing.

He fucks him hard enough that the headboard kisses the wall and Shane claws at his back and says his name in a register Ilya has only ever heard in this configuration. Yes, yes this is more, this is what he meant exactly. He twists weakly in the sheets, fucked out and desperate, trying to crawl away from the overwhelm of the feeling, but Ilya uses all his weight and pins him right back down.

And then—right before the end, which Ilya can read now like a third language—Shane starts begging. He is completely shameless about it. He has always been completely shameless about it, which is one of the great revelations of Ilya's adult life. Shane Hollander, who manages every other thing, does not manage this. Does not want to.

Shane comes untouched—which still, after nearly fifteen years, lands somewhere in Ilya's chest like a proof, like evidence, like the universe confirming something he needed confirmed—his whole body going rigid and then completely loose, and for a moment he is somewhere else entirely: mouth open, no sound coming out, eyes rolled back, every muscle performing something that looks, from the outside, like the opposite of holding on.

Ilya holds him through it.

After, they lie in the room gone blue-dark. Shane's arm tightens across him. Anya scratches at the door.

Shane says, eventually, face against Ilya's throat: "Stay."

Not I love you. Not anything as legible as that. Just: stay. Here. Like this.

"Ya zdes'," Ilya says.

Shane's arm tightens.

Ilya lies there in the dark and does not examine what he is feeling, which is the warmth of a man who has everything he wanted and the cold floor underneath it, and underneath the cold floor the thought that has been circling for months, waiting for permission to land:

Who is going to take care of Shane like this after.

iii. gluttony—the overconsumption of signs

Ilya was born in June 1991. The Soviet Union ended in December 1991. He entered a country that stopped existing six months after he arrived in it—the whole apparatus, the name and the structure and the thing people had organized entire lives inside of, just: not anymore. He has always found this funny in a way that is not entirely funny. Born into a system already failing.

He has thought about this, in the years since Galina first gave him the vocabulary for what runs through him, the peculiar Russian melancholia that is not sadness exactly but the expectation of sadness, the metabolized certainty that things will fail, that systems are always already in the process of ending, that the ground you stand on is simply waiting to give way. It is the oldest inheritance. It has nothing to do with his mother specifically and everything to do with his mother specifically.

The cross is cold against his chest this morning, like it had been when he stole it, without a beating heart underneath to warm it.

He has been wearing her cross for twenty years.

He thinks this like how he thinks about his own height, his own handedness—as property of self, as something so continuous it has stopped requiring registration. He wore it through seven teams and three countries and two languages and one marriage. It has been under every jersey. It has pressed its mark into his palm every single morning for twenty years.

He presses his palm to it through his shirt now. Three counts. He learned this motion at twelve without learning it.

He lets go.

March 6th.

One hundred and one days.

It starts with the date.

Ilya knows the date how he always knows it—not checked, just known, the body reporting like it reports temperature or hunger. March 9th. He is thirty-one. His birthday is June 15th. He has ninety-eight days.

He has been doing this arithmetic since he was twelve. He has never done what he does next.

He is at the Ottawa airport, Gate G32, and he stops walking.

G32.

He stands in the middle of the concourse with his carry-on and his teammates flowing around him, Boodram saying something about the flight time, LaPointe desperately trying to cram a body pillow into a measly carry-on bag, and he stands there and looks at the gate sign.

He does not tell himself what he is checking for. He doesn't need to. The number has weight in his body that precedes language, a gravitational pull he has been navigating around for twenty years. He checks it the way you probe a bruise—does this hurt, does this hurt, does this—

He checks in. He finds his seat. Row 3, seat 2.

32.

He puts his bag in the overhead. He sits down. He does not tell anyone.

He is a deeply superstitious man. This is not something he has said to Shane, because Shane's response to Russian folk superstition—the whistling indoors, the sitting before a journey, the unique knock-on-wood with three beats not one—is a patient Canadian incredulity that Ilya has been provoking and enjoying for years. He has told Shane many times that all Russians are superstitious, it is in the blood, they carry their grandmothers' omens like you carry your father's last name, it is simply how they are built. And he can see Shane wanting to say you can't generalize like that, brow doing the furrowing thing, but Ilya has the grin, the individual grin that he knows drives Shane insane, and what is Shane going to do—argue with a Moscow-born Russian?

He doesn't tell Shane any of this.

The seat. The gate. What comes next is slower, more deliberate, how an addiction escalates. Not a decision, just a noticing that becomes a practice.

He stops taking the elevator to the thirty-second floor of the hotel in Tampa. Takes it to thirty-one. Walks up one flight. Does not examine this choice.

He checks the jersey numbers of players who retired early. Finds one that lands badly. Closes his phone.

He texts Sveta: do you believe in fate?

She replies in eleven minutes: I believe in bad luck, which is fate's more honest cousin. Why.

He puts the phone in his pocket.

It happens in tape review on a Wednesday.

Wiebe is running through the film from Tuesday's game, the second period, the sequence that cost them a goal, and Ilya is watching and also running the numbers how he has been running them for three weeks—not consciously, not as a choice, but as background process.

He becomes aware that he has written something on the margin of his notes.

He looks at it.

32.

Just the number, in his handwriting, in the margin of his game notes. He does not remember writing it. The pen is still in his hand. On the screen Wiebe is diagramming the defensive breakdown and Dykstra is asking a question and Hazy is in the chair beside Ilya being very still in how Hayes is still when he is paying attention to two things simultaneously.

He does not remember writing it. He looks at it like you look at something your body has done without you—like you look at a bruise you don't remember getting, the evidence of a collision you weren't present for.

Ilya turns the page.

He tells himself this is nothing. He has written the number because it is in his head, how songs get in your head, how you hum something without knowing you're humming it.

After, in the corridor, he tears the page out. Folds it. Puts it in his pocket. He does not throw it away.

He was born into a country that was already writing its own obituary. He has always thought this explains something about him that therapy has not been able to fully reach—the Russian certainty that the thing you are standing on is already in the process of failing, that the collapse is not coming but has been underway since before you arrived. You do not fear the fall. You metabolize it. You carry it in the body the way you carry the cold.

Anya sleeps on the couch one evening and drops a leg off the edge in her sleep, the paw hanging loose in the air below the cushion, the lax angle, the weight of it, something that has surrendered its own organization completely.

Ilya looks at it. He gets up and moves her paw gently back onto the cushion. She makes the protest sound. He says, in Russian: Sorry, beautiful.

He does not look at her legs for the rest of the evening.

The lost Wednesday arrives without announcement.

He wakes thinking it is Tuesday. Has the full memory of Tuesday—a practice, the work done, remembered with the precision of someone who has been tracking his own output for months as proof that he is still functional. Gets up. Tries to make coffee, but Shane has beaten him to it. He’s always beating him to it, these days. Shane mentions the two o'clock call. What call. The Wednesday call. It's Wednesday. He checks his phone. Wednesday. The Tuesday he remembers was Monday.

He says: right. He makes the call. He does not tell Shane.

He tells Galina the following Thursday.

She writes something down and says: that's worth monitoring. And asks how the sleep has been. And he says: fine. And she writes something else.

Dinner, David's recipe, the thirty-minute one, which Shane has mastered with the focus of a man who has decided that mastering a thing is the appropriate response to being told it takes effort. He made it the first time as a project. He has been making it since because Ilya ate two full bowls without commenting, which Shane has apparently filed as a green light.

They are at the table. Anya is under it, optimistic.

Ilya is listening to Shane describe a conversation with Wiebe about the penalty kill structure with the focused attention of a man who is also, simultaneously, reconstructing the exact angle of his husband's hands when he is gesticulating about hockey. It is a specific angle that does not appear in any other context and which Ilya has been cataloguing since before their official relationship without telling Shane, because Shane would immediately become self-conscious and stop.

"—and I'm not saying Wiebe's wrong, I just think the data supports a different read on the left side exposure—"

"Mm."

"—and honestly the issue starts before the zone entry, if you look at how—" Shane stops. "You're not listening."

"I am listening. You think Wiebe is reading the zone entry wrong and you have data. You want him to look at the left side exposure. You are going to bring this up in tape review on Friday and you want to think through how to frame it."

Shane gives him the look. The one that means he has been caught performing not-listening so skillfully that he has accidentally demonstrated the listening.

"I was also watching your hands," Ilya says.

"My—" Shane glances at his own hands. "Why."

"You move them differently when you are talking about hockey than when you are talking about anything else. Here." He reaches across and repositions Shane's right hand to the particular angle. "This is the hockey one. I have been tracking this for approximately nine years."

"That is," Shane says, after a moment, "unsettling."

"Is adorable. Actually."

Shane’s whole face goes red. "Why didn't you say anything?"

"Because you would have stopped." His heart does the thing it does sometimes, catching on the flush climbing Shane's throat, the way it always catches. Five years official and a marriage and he still folds completely for this man. It is, objectively, humiliating. He would not change it for anything.

Shane looks at him. The corner of his mouth does something. He picks up his fork.

They finish dinner. Ilya clears the plates. He is at the sink when Shane says, from the table, in the same voice he used to say I think we should have a bunch of kids—the voice of a man who has already decided and is now simply informing:

"I want to try something."

Ilya turns around.

Shane meets his eyes across the kitchen. He holds Ilya's gaze with the flat directness of someone making a request they have thought through and feel entitled to make. There is a brief moment—one second, maybe two—where something crosses his face that is not quite embarrassment and is not quite not embarrassment, and then it is gone, and he is just Shane, waiting.

“Tell me," Ilya says.

Shane tells him.

Ilya is quiet for a moment.

"You have been thinking about this," he says.

"Some." Shane's cheeks are still dark, the freckles sitting on top in a way that is, frankly, a lot to deal with across a kitchen. He picks up his glass with the energy of a man performing composure and largely succeeding.

"How long is some."

"A while."

"And you are telling me now."

"I'm telling you now." The composure has fully landed. He is just Shane again—direct, certain, done with the embarrassment portion of the evening and ready to move on. "So. Are you going to handle it or not."

Something red hot burns just beneath Ilya’s skin at the demand of it all. The arrogance.

He finishes the dishes with the focused attention of a man who is thinking about something entirely other than dishes. He is aware of Shane at the table behind him with the awareness he has always had of Shane in rooms—the specific presence of him, the weight he gives a space, the way the air organizes itself differently when Shane is in it.

"Okay," Ilya says.

"Okay you'll think about it, or—"

"Okay I will handle it." He sets the last glass in the rack. "When the time is right."

Behind him, Shane makes the small sound he makes when something has gone exactly where he intended. He gets up. He brings his glass to the sink. His hand lands briefly on the back of Ilya's neck, touches the base of his curls—and there it is, the Pavlov thing, completely involuntary, embarrassing, his—and then Shane is gone, down the hall, already on to the next item in the evening.

Seduce Ilya without trying and then leave him to suffer. Check.

Ilya stands at the sink.

He thinks: my husband just ordered something he wants like it was a thing from a menu and then walked away.

He thinks: I have married an insane person.

He thinks: I have created a monster I cannot control, the sexiest man alive, and I am so proud of myself I could die.

He thinks, filing it in the section labeled things Shane wants and will not ask for twice—which grows, Ilya has noted, longer every year: soon.

Anya appears at his feet, having determined that the interesting part of the evening is over and that proximity to the food area is now the correct strategy.

"Ya tozhe," Ilya tells her. Me too.

Ilya is at the entrance to a corridor.

He does not know when he arrived. He has the feeling of having always been standing here, of having turned toward this moment from a great distance and finally arrived at the point of it. The corridor stretches ahead. The lighting is institutional—not fluorescent, not warm, the specific indeterminate illumination of a place designed not to be remembered. The floor is not quite carpet and not quite tile. The walls are pale.

There are photographs on the walls.

He looks at the first one: himself at thirty, in Ottawa, in the specific caught-off-guard quality of a person who did not know the photo was being taken. He looks at the next: himself at twenty-two, in a Boston dressing room, the expression he used to wear that he later understood was not confidence but its armor. At seven: standing outside the rink in the kind of cold that gets into the bones of a city and stays.

He walks.

The photographs shift. He passes his mother at twenty-five, then thirty. Then thirty-one—and here the corridor does something unexpected, something the architecture of ordinary spaces cannot do: her face and his face begin to resolve into the same face. Not similar. The same face. Seen from different angles. The same stillness in the mouth. The same calculation behind the eyes.

He stops walking.

He is standing at the exact place where their photographs overlap. Where the inheritance becomes indistinguishable from the person who inherited it.

From somewhere further down the corridor—very far, too far to see—there is a sound.

Not a word. A voice. Her voice. The diminutive, the name only she ever used, going up slightly at the end the way she did when she was about to ask him something.

Ilyusha.

He walks toward it.

The corridor does not end.

He walks, and walks, and—

Ottawa. Gasping.

Shane is awake. His dark eyes catch the fragment of streetlight coming through the gap in the curtains, and the furrow between his brows, the one that arrives when he is worried and hasn't decided what to do about it yet, the one Ilya has wanted to press flat with his thumb since approximately 2017, is there and deep.

"Ilya." Not alarmed. Present.

"Fine," Ilya says, breathing harder than he wants to. "Just—a bad one." He is aware his hands are shaking. He puts them under his body so Shane won't see.

Shane sees anyway. Shane always sees. He doesn't mention the hands. He lies back down on his side and puts one arm across Ilya, not heavy, not a restraint, just a weight that is also a presence, an arm that is held and here saying I am here and I know and you don't owe me anything right now.

"Okay," Shane says. Quietly. "Go back to sleep. I have you."

He doesn't go back to sleep for a long time.

Ilya doesn't mean to spend four hours on it.

He opens his laptop at ten at night because he cannot sleep and because Anya is pressed against his side and Shane is down the hall still awake, blue light under the door.

He looks up Shostakovich first.

His mother had a cassette tape—one of three she kept in the kitchen, the tape player on the counter beside the spice rack, the volume low enough that it asked permission from the room rather than demanding it. Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8, which she said her own brother had listened to after the war. He remembers the sound of it the way he remembers the smell of the spice without a name: incompletely, in the body rather than the mind, things that were absorbed rather than learned. He hears it sometimes in hotel rooms, in the silence after a bad game, arriving without invitation.

He reads: Shostakovich wrote it in three days, in 1960, in a state his diary described as weeping without stopping. He wrote it as a memorial. To himself. To the people he had outlived. To the version of himself that had survived Stalin's purges by performing compliance, by writing what was asked of him, by staying alive in ways that required a price he never stopped paying.

He reads: some scholars believe the quartet is a suicide note in musical form. Shostakovich denied this. His denials were not convincing.

Ilya reads this and closes the tab.

He opens another one.

He looks up: hereditary depression. He reads about epigenetic inheritance, about the mechanics of early childhood exposure and what the nervous system learns from watching a parent's body, about the theory—contested, always contested, but there—that what you witness becomes a kind of blueprint, a groove worn into the floor of the self before you are old enough to choose your own route. The researchers are careful with their language. He is not fooled by the carefulness. He reads what the carefulness is covering.

He has known this for years. He has talked to Galina about this for years.

He is not looking for information. He is looking for confirmation. He knows the difference.

He looks up: Irina Rozanova.

Nothing. A business registration in St. Petersburg. An imports coordinator in Novosibirsk. Not her.

He tries: Grigori Rozanov. There is more here. A military record, partially visible. An address in a 2018 Moscow property dispute. A photograph from 1973 that loads slowly—

He looks up: Russian death omens. He has been raised inside these and has always held them at ironic distance the way men of his generation are supposed to—the whistling, the mirrors, the thresholds—but it is suddenly 2:47 in the morning and he is thirty-one years old and June is approaching like something that has been approaching for twenty years and the ironic distance is not available to him right now.

He reads about the bird that enters the house. He reads about the clock that stops at the moment of death. His great-aunt had insisted on this—every clock in the apartment stopped at the moment of passing, covered with cloth until the body was taken, because the soul needed time to locate itself and a ticking clock was rude. He had always filed this under the category of things old women do to manage the unmanageable.

He looks at the clock on his laptop.

He reads that in Russian tradition the soul lingers for forty days.

He counts from June 15th. Forty days forward.

He rises from the couch.

He goes to the kitchen. Anya raises her head from the cushions and regards him with the flat professional attention of a dog who is searching for food, does not see food, and therefore does not care. He opens the junk drawer, labeled Junk Drawer in the handwriting of a man who would label the apocalypse if given enough time. He finds a marker.

He goes to the small calendar on the wall—Shane put it there in September, the wall calendar with the little squares, the kind Shane has had in every space he has occupied since Ilya has known him, because Shane is the kind of man who has wall calendars and Ilya has always found this both absurd and specifically, privately correct, a thing that is so Shane that the Shane-ness of it is its own form of reassurance.

He counts from June 15th. Forty days forward.

July 25th.

He makes a small mark.

He puts the marker back in the drawer.

He goes to bed. Anya appears at the foot of the bed and circles twice and settles, pressing against his feet.

He thinks: she was thirty-two and the forty days started in March.

He thinks: mine would start in summer. The ground would be warm.

He thinks: stop.

He stops. He closes his eyes.

In the morning, Shane comes into the kitchen and looks at the calendar with the coffee in his hand and does not ask about the mark on July 25th because there is no reason for him to look at July 25th in particular, no reason for it to be anything other than a random mark on a random square.

July 26th is their third anniversary.

iv. greed—the hoarding and the spending

Shane notices Ilya eating standing up.

Not hurrying—there is no hurry. Just standing in front of the open refrigerator with a fork, eating cold from a container, not bothering with a plate or a chair or the small ceremony of sitting down. A man for whom the ritual of eating has become optional. A man fueling the body the way you fill a tank you're not sure you're keeping.

He notices the edge of the bed. Ilya, who spent the first year of the marriage sleeping in the proprietary sprawl of a man who has had a king-size bed entirely to himself for a decade—Ilya has migrated. Quietly. Over weeks. To the far edge. One side. Making room for nothing.

Shane moves toward the edge himself, casually, and lets the proximity be the offering. He doesn't say come back. He stops suggesting Anya sleep in her designated spot on the dog bed on the ground.

He notices the hand going to the chain. In the kitchen. In traffic. In the middle of a sentence about nothing. The cross is old gold, worn so long it has become part of the body. Shane has touched it twice by accident, straightening Ilya's collar. Both times something moved in him that he didn't name and didn’t pursue.

He notices the room kept slightly too cold. He puts on a second pair of socks. Does not say anything about the temperature.

David comes over with food one evening, just appears, how David sometimes appears, with a container of something that smells immediately right. He sets it on the counter and pats Ilya's shoulder. Ilya eats half. Says it's good. It is. It’s his favorite. Shane puts the rest in the refrigerator and thinks about the half-empty container for the rest of the night.

Ilya fills Anya's bowl too full every morning. He does it knowing. He does it anyway. There is something in the act of giving that has become urgent in a way he is not examining—the overflow, the excess, the deliberate spending. He watches her eat with complete attention, how she takes what is offered without suspicion, and the warmth that arrives around her lately is warm enough to be almost tolerable.

Ilya washes the pan Shane used for eggs.

The water is warm. The kitchen smells like toast and the slightly-burnt-butter smell that Shane always produces because Shane runs every pan too hot—a consistent technical error Ilya has addressed multiple times that Shane continues making because Shane learned to cook standing next to his father and David Hollander runs his pans hot and some things are not errors, they are just how someone's father did it, and you don't unlearn those things, you carry them forward.

The kitchen smells like something else.

Cabbage. Something beneath it—a spice she used, the name of which he asked her once. She told him. He forgot it. He has been trying to remember it for twenty years, not urgently, not dramatically, just the shape of an absence, the outline of a word without the word itself. He reaches for it. Finds nothing. He has been reaching for twenty years.

She is at the stove. Her back to him. He is seven, or nine. The light is the light of Moscow mornings before the sun decides to commit—provisional, asking permission before it enters, the light of somewhere that has learned to be tentative.

Ilyusha, she says, without turning. The diminutive. The version of his name that was only ever for him, that existed only in her mouth, that stopped existing in March on a Tuesday when he was twelve. Are you hungry?

Are you hungry.

He was. He said yes.

She brought him a bowl of something hot. She pressed her palm to the top of his head—the whole flat warm weight of it, resting for a moment, not long, not performing anything, just here, briefly—and went back to the stove.

This is the memory he returns to most. Not because it is significant. Because grief, left long enough with a person, begins making editorial decisions, selecting for the dramatic moments, building a myth. Grief is a very bad biographer. It cannot help itself.

What he returns to instead is the bowl of soup. The hand on his head. Are you hungry. The ordinary texture of her as he actually experienced her, before she became the figure at the end of the arithmetic.

She was a woman at a stove who asked if he was hungry.

He has carried this for twenty years alongside the cross and the name. It weighs exactly the same as everything else.

There is a spider on the bedroom ceiling. Southeast corner, above the closet. Medium-sized, dark, has been there for six weeks now, possibly seven. He does not kill it. He does not kill things by choice—this is a fact about himself that arrived during an afternoon in Toronto when he was nineteen, which involved a moth and a silence afterward that he has been living with since. He checks the spider every morning. Not to do anything about it. To confirm it is still there. Something in the same place it was yesterday. Something still present, still continuing.

He has not named it, although he did once say “where is he” upon entering the room and has chosen not to revisit the incident. He checks it anyway. Every morning before anything else. Before the coffee, before the cross, before Shane.

Shane knows about the medication on a Wednesday morning in April.

He is getting a glass from the cabinet and the bottle is on the shelf and the weight of it tells him through his palm. Too heavy. He puts the glass in the sink.

He opens the second file in his internal system—the one he keeps in parallel, the one labeled things Ilya will not tell me until they are very large or until he has no choice—and files it alongside the other things that have been accumulating since March. The weight of the bottle. The mornings where Anya gets the second bowl. The edge of the bed.

He files it.

He does not use it. Not yet.

He goes to sleep next to his husband and measures the distance between them in the dark.

Ilya doesn't plan the tarot reader.

He is on his way to the post office, genuinely, with a package for Sveta’s aunt in St. Petersburg, and he passes a girl—maybe nineteen—with a card table set up outside a yoga studio, her dark hair in a bun, a piece of gum moving steadily in her jaw. She has a hand-lettered sign that says READINGS $15. She is wearing a hoodie from the University of Ottawa.

He stands on the sidewalk for approximately forty-five seconds.

"You want a reading?" she asks, without looking up from her phone. Her fingernails fly quickly across her screen how young people type, and Ilya suddenly feels very, very old.

"Yes," he says. He does not know why he says this.

She pockets the phone. She gestures at the folding chair across from her with professional efficiency of someone who has done this many times and has long since stopped finding it unusual. He sits. The folding chair is slightly unstable. He redistributes his weight.

Immediately, Ilya knows she knows who he is. And he almost wants to lie, say the team put him up to this, a familiar farce rising above him.

But the square assessment she reads him with is flat and calculating. She pops her gum and holds out the cards.

"Okay so," she says. "There's a lot of like—past energy here. Which, for some people is like a past life thing, but I think for you it's more like you're carrying something that's not originally yours. Like someone else's story that you've been running as your own."

Ilya says nothing.

She points to the middle card. "The Hanged Man. Which everyone thinks is bad but it's actually just—you're suspended. Between something. Like a decision that hasn't been made yet. Like you're in a waiting period." She tilts her head. "I think you've been in a waiting period for a long time."

He looks at the Hanged Man. The man in the card is upside-down and serene, which Ilya feels is setting an unrealistic standard.

"It's not actually bad," she says again. "It all just sort of looks like that."

Ilya thinks this is rather profound without meaning to be. He keeps this information to himself because he remembers being nineteen and cannot responsibly encourage the species.

“Okay,” he says.

“And this one’s the Tower,” she says, tapping the card with one chipped purple nail. “Which honestly kind of sucks to get.”

The card shows lightning striking a tower. Tiny people falling from it headfirst.

“It’s not always bad,” she says. “People online are dramatic about it. It’s more like—sudden change. Stuff collapsing. Usually because it was already unstable.” She squints at the spread. “You’ve had kind of an intense year, huh.”

"Yes," Ilya says.

“Mm.” She nods like this confirms a theory she did not hold very strongly. “Yeah. That tracks. Are you scared of it?" she asks, which is not, he thinks, in the official tarot reader script.

He considers this.

"Yes," he says. "And no." He thinks about her, and there is only ever one her in his mouth, in the June light that she never saw. "The thing I am afraid of is also the thing I am trying not to do."

She blinks at him. "That's kind of deep."

He can't help the quirk of his mouth. "I am kind of deep," he says, diplomatically.

The girl pops the gum bubble in his face. "Not to be all up in your business," she says, and Ilya thinks that maybe reading his future is the only time anyone really shouldn’t apologize for being all up in his business, "but are you waiting for something bad to happen? Like—not worried about it. Not anxious. Just—waiting. Like you already know what's coming and you're just watching the clock."

The card table between them is plastic and has a small wobble on one leg. He is aware of this with a strange precision. The traffic behind him. The precise weight of the cross against his sternum.

"I don't know," Ilya says.

She holds his gaze for a moment.

She slides the third card—the leftmost—toward him. "Oh, okay, wait. That's actually good." She chews with her mouth open. "The Star. That one's nice."

She says this simply, without flourish.

Nice.

"What does it mean?"

She shrugs a bare shoulder. The strap of her tank top is sliding down, and Ilya briefly considers mentioning it before realizing that “helpfully noticing a nineteen-year-old girl’s clothing situation” is the kind of phrase that ends a professional sports career.

He says nothing.

"Hope, mostly,” the girl says. “Or like. Relief after a hard time." She studies the card. "I always think this one looks tired, though."

Ilya looks down.

A woman, kneeling at water, pouring from two vessels, the stars open above her. She has long curly blonde hair, dipping into the river, and sad green eyes that are not quite looking at the horizon.

"She's supposed to be hopeful. But honestly she mostly looks exhausted to me."

Something in his chest tightens. He thinks of how people in photographs from the USSR always looked like they were borrowing the future for the moment of the picture.

"My roommate got this card right before she dropped out of engineering and moved to Quebec with her girlfriend, so. Sometimes it just means your life stops sucking in the same way."

Ilya laughs despite himself. A small, surprised sound.

"Sorry," she says. "I'm not, like, professionally mystical. I mostly do this because my ex said I was weirdly accurate once and now I've committed to the bit."

“That is very important,” Ilya says, “committing to the bit.” Despite it all, he can’t fight his fond smile. Twists the band around his finger so it sits properly again. “It’s how I got my husband.”

He pays her with a fifty and tells her to keep the change. He leaves.

But he thinks about the Star for the rest of the week—the woman at the water's edge, pouring out, the sky open above her. He thinks: that is a person who survived the Tower. He thinks: she is kneeling because she is tired, not because she has given up. He thinks: the stars are there even when you are not looking at them.

v. wrath—the anger that has no object

The room was cold.

This is the first thing Ilya learned about death—before grief, before any of the words for it: the room was cold the way hell was cold. It was not the thermostat, but rather the cold of absence, the cold of a space that has stopped being inhabited. He felt it before he opened the bedroom door. He knew before he knew.

Ilya was twelve. His skate bag was still over his shoulder. He had come home from practice on a Tuesday in March and the smell of the apartment was wrong. Not bad, not recognizable as anything specific, just a space that has stopped being lived in. He called her name. Then louder. The silence that came back was wrong in the same way the smell was wrong, with the same subtraction.

He went to the bedroom.

The arm was over the edge.

He stood in the doorway for a long time. Long enough for the skate bag to become heavy. Long enough for the light outside the window to shift slightly. Long enough for the evidence to accumulate past the point of arguing with it.

He understood slowly and then all at once.

He did not scream. He has spent twenty years returning to this, that he did not scream. He sat on the floor beside the bed and took her hand—the dropped hand, the hand that had come unmade from the effort of being a hand—and was very quiet. The room required quiet. He had learned this in other rooms: go still. Make yourself small. Don't interrupt. He applied it here. In the worst room. He was very still and very quiet and the city outside the window continued without him.

He took the cross before anyone came.

Ilya has told this to Galina over three years, and to Shane once, late at night in year one of the marriage, lying in the dark, and Shane had been very still and had said okay in the voice that means I am taking this seriously for a long time. He has told the story. The story doesn't get smaller for being told.

His father found the cross six months later.

Grigori had come into his room like someone who had been drinking since noon and had decided that this was the afternoon for inventory, for checking what belonged to him.

He held it up. He said: where did you get this. As though it could have come from anywhere except the place it came from.

Ilya said nothing.

Grigori threw it against the wall. The chain didn’t break—it was old gold, well-made, built to survive more than that—but the cross hit the plaster hard enough to leave a mark among the others.

Grigori left. Ilya picked it up. He put it on. He has been wearing it ever since.

He has never told anyone this part.

Ya neshu eto potomu chto eto bylo yeyo. I carry it because it was hers.

Ona nesla eto potomu chto u neyo ne bylo vybora. She carried it because she had no choice.

A u menya? And me?

The recklessness begins, as recklessness tends to, as something that doesn't look like recklessness yet.

Ilya shaves ten minutes off a twenty-minute drive and spends thirty minutes on his skates before anyone else arrives at six in the morning. Not drills. Not intervals. Just speed. He goes faster than he needs to and faster than is advisable without a helmet on a completely empty rink, and when the edge catches and he stumbles—not falls, just stumbles, his body knowing how to find itself—he laughs. Out loud. Alone. At nothing. At the stumble. At the speed. At the fact of still being upright.

He comes home with road rash on his palm.

Shane looks at it across the kitchen and does not say anything.

In Tampa, after a 5-2 loss that was his fault in the third, he drives back to the hotel at ninety on a road that suggests sixty-five, music too loud, and he thinks about the speed. The clarity of it, the way everything peripheral falls away and there is only the road and the momentum and the fact that you are moving and have not stopped. He thinks: this is why she stood in the church. He understands it bodily. You can narrow a life down to a single sensation until the sensation is all that's left and everything else has fallen off the edges.

He does not think about the math.

He thinks about the math.

In Ottawa, in April, Wiebe runs a contact drill. Ilya takes three hits he would normally duck. Not dramatically. Not with any statement attached. He simply doesn't move in time. Absorbs it. Gets up. Bood says you okay and Ilya says yes and skates back into position.

Shane starts the drill from the top.

Hayes watches Ilya from the crease and says nothing.

This is also new. Hayes not saying something is a more complex statement than Hayes saying something. Hayes's silence is curatorial. It means he has assessed the situation, made a decision about timing, and put the thing on a shelf to wait.

It feels, from the inside, like being held carefully by something that has not yet committed to holding on.

It's a Saturday in April and Cliff Marlow calls at noon Ottawa time, which is Cliff's way of saying he's been awake since eight running whatever ambient worry about Ilya has been running since March, and he finally had enough coffee to act on it.

"Roz."

"Marley."

"You sound like shit."

"Extremely good to hear from you too."

This is Marlow, which means no preamble, no performance, no agreement to pretend the call is about something other than what it's about. They played together for years in Boston. Cliff is the only person who ever saw Ilya at the actual bottom—the hotel room floor in Nashville, the two-game suspension in year three, the unequivocal variety of implosion Ilya was capable of before Ottawa, especially rookie year, especially Rose’s year, before Shane was his Shane, before he understood the difference between being free and being lost.

Marlow watched all of it and did not leave and did not pretend he wasn't watching. He made this choice quietly and has not rescinded it.

"How's the marriage," Marlow says.

"Good."

"How's Rozanov."

"Also good."

"Ilya." The pause that means he's put down whatever he was holding. "I saw the game Tuesday. You were in your head the whole second period."

"We won."

"I know you won. You were still in your head." Another pause. "What month is it."

He knows what month it is. Marlow knows what month it is. The question is not about the calendar.

"April," Ilya says.

"Right." His voice goes quiet. "Her anniversary was—"

"Exactly a month ago."

"I know." A breath. "How'd you do?"

Ilya looks at the kitchen window. Ottawa light. The city going on outside it, correctly, in its Ottawa way. "I dreamed about a funeral," he says. This is more than he intended to say.

Marlow doesn't make a sound for a moment. "Her funeral?"

"Mine."

The silence is long.

"Okay," he says finally, in the voice that does not mean okay.

"I'm not—I'm fine, Marley. I'm doing the things."

"Are you taking your—"

"Yes," Ilya says, which is not true, which he knows is not true, which Cliff almost certainly also knows is not true but cannot prove. "Yes. I'm taking my medication."

Marlow pauses. "Call me if it gets bad," he says. "Not after. During. You know the difference."

"I know the difference."

"I know you know it. I'm telling you anyway because you have a well-documented history of waiting until you're already underwater to ask for a rope." He pauses. "Hollander know what month it was?"

Silence.

"Rozy."

"He knows enough."

Cliff makes the sound of someone who has heard this formulation before. "You're a fucking disaster, man. Fuck." Which, from Marlow, is approximately an expression of love.

"Fuck you, too." Ilya smiles, a little, and hangs up.

The corridor is longer this time.

He knows it immediately—the photographs go on further than before, the institutional light extends further toward its vanishing point. He has been here before. He knows this. The knowledge does not alarm him the way it should. He has been in this corridor enough nights that he has begun to learn its rules, the way you learn the rules of any recurring place.

He walks.

He passes himself at seventeen. The year he understood, without anyone telling him, that Moscow was not where the story was going to take place. That he was already in the process of leaving. That all arrivals contain within them the exit they're moving toward.

He passes her. More of her now. More frames. He passes her at twenty—young, younger than he has consciously remembered, he has been adding years to her in his imagination because the mind does this, fills in what should have been—and she is laughing at something, she is leaning into someone who has been cropped out of the image, and she looks like a person. Just a person. Laughing.

He has so few images of her laughing.

He walks on.

At the corridor's apparent end there is a door that was not there before.

He knows, in the way you know things here: this door was always here. He simply did not walk far enough before to reach it.

He opens it.

Inside, it’s a room full of stopped clocks.

The clocks are every size, every shape—floor clocks, mantel clocks, small metal alarm clocks with faces half-fallen off. Every single one: stopped. Not broken. Just stopped. The stillness of a thing that has been waiting to be restarted.

He looks at the clocks.

He looks at the clocks for a long time.

Then—from the corner of the room, manifesting the way things manifest here, from shadow into presence, from absence into fact—she is there.

His mother.

Not the saint. Not the prophecy. The woman. The tired specific woman with the golden curls and the lines around her eyes of someone who has been carrying something at her own height for a very long time and has not yet been shown the door exists.

She looks at the clocks. She looks at him.

She says: Ilyusha. Ty chto zdes' delayesh'?

Ilyusha. What are you doing here?

He opens his mouth.

He cannot speak. He cannot—he does not know how to answer her in this place, in this form, in this version of the question that is also every version she ever asked him, the one she could never quite say directly: what are you doing here, inside all of this, what are you doing.

He says: Ya ne znayu.

I don't know.

She looks at him. Her eyes—tired, warm, the eyes he has been trying to reconstruct from photographs for twenty years and has never quite gotten right, not this right—do something complicated.

She says: Eta ne nasha komnata, Ilyusha.

This is not our room, Ilyusha.

And then she is gone, as suddenly as she came, and the room full of stopped clocks is just a room full of stopped clocks, and he is standing in it alone.

Ottawa. Their bedroom. Shane's hand on his shoulder.

"Ilya." Quiet. Not alarmed. Shane learns the landscape of Ilya's sleep disturbances over time and has developed calibrations for which require intervention and which require only presence. This one: presence.

"I'm fine," Ilya says, to the ceiling, to their room, to himself. Fuck. “Sorry. Fuck.” He’s coated in sweat, and shivering.

Shane's hand stays on his shoulder. He doesn't ask where Ilya was. He has learned not to ask when the answer requires more of Ilya than Ilya has in the first moments of coming back. He is simply there, warm, the specific familiar weight of him.

It starts, as most things start at two in the morning, with something small.

He is on his phone because sleep has left the building and taken the keys with it. Shane breathes in the even careful way. Anya is on his chest, ears twitching at the deep-sea documentary he has already watched twice.

He opens Reddit. He has been on Reddit approximately four times in his life, all of them accidents. It is 2:17 and the ceiling has nothing new to offer.

He types: mother suicide grief.

He tells himself this is research.

The first thread: Does anyone else feel like they can't be angry at a parent who died by suicide?

The top comment, 847 upvotes: She was sick. I know that. But she also just. Left. And I'm not allowed to be mad because being mad at a sick person makes you a bad son.

He reads the replies. Hundreds of them. All the same: I know. I know exactly.

He puts the phone face-down.

He picks it back up.

He has known, for twenty years, that he is not allowed to be angry at her. He built the structure himself: she was sick, the house was Grigori's house, the money was his, no one showed her the door. He has said these things to Galina until the sentences went smooth from handling.

The anger, he has always told himself, belongs to Grigori. Not her.

My mom left when I was nine, someone writes. I've spent my whole adult life defending her. And then one day I was thirty-four and I realized I'd spent twenty-five years being her defense attorney and nobody had ever let me be the kid she left with him.

He reads this three times.

Something is happening in his chest that does not have a name he has authorized.

Twenty minutes later he is in a different thread. He is not sure how he got here.

Survivors of domestic abuse who lost a parent to suicide—how do you reconcile it?

The thing nobody tells you, someone writes, is that staying was also a choice. I know how that sounds. I've been in therapy for eight years. I know the trauma bonding, the financial dependency, that leaving can be more dangerous than staying. I know all of this. And I still, somewhere in the place that was twelve years old and hiding in a closet, think: why didn't you just take me and go.

He opens the search bar.

domestic violence Russia statistics.

He reads with the same flat detachment he uses when watching game tape. Legislation. Decriminalization of certain categories of domestic assault, 2017. The gap between reported and actual incidents.

He puts the phone face-down on the nightstand.

3:22. Shane breathing. Anya at the foot of the bed.

He presses his palm flat against the cross and holds it until the metal warms.

She was good. She asked if he was hungry. She was, in the small hours of ordinary Tuesday mornings, the warmest room in the apartment.

She was good.

She also left him there.

He says it into the dark, in Russian, because the Russian is honest in a way the English isn't:

Ya zlus' na tebya.

Ilya is coming home from practice on a Tuesday afternoon that ended early, Coach Wiebe unusually merciful, everyone released into time nobody had scheduled. Shane has lunch with his mother. So Ilya goes alone, takes the long way, and somewhere in the long way he is parked outside a church he has driven past for five years and never once thought about entering.

It is not Orthodox but Catholic. Old stone. The kind of building that made a decision about itself a long time ago and hasn't revisited it.

He stays in the car until staying in the car starts to feel like a decision. Then he goes in.

The church is empty. He knew it would be empty, at this time, on this day. He is still surprised by the emptiness, the way a large cold space holds silence differently from a small warm one.

He sits near the back.

Her face in church was different from her face everywhere else. He understood this at seven without having words for it. She went every Sunday and stood with her eyes closed and her lips moving, fingers making the sign of the cross on herself—forehead, chest, right shoulder, left—and she looked like she had been carrying something at her own height for a very long time and had been given, for one hour, permission to put it down.

Grigori did not come. He never came. He had categorized the church as beneath him, the incense, the old women in headscarves, the priest's voice doing what it has been doing off stone for a thousand years, all of it beneath the consideration of a man who had decided his own judgement was the highest available authority on every subject. So the church was the one room he didn't enter. The one hour a week she stood somewhere he couldn't reach.

Ilya understood this later. At seven he only understood her face in church was the face of the thing underneath.

The anger doesn't arrive. It has been here the whole time.

He has been heating the room of it for twenty years and now he is finally inside it and his hands are shaking. He is a professional athlete. His hands do not shake. He watches them shake against his thighs.

He puts his fist against his mouth.

God did not change the seasons in that house. God did not make Grigori smaller. God did not tell her she could leave. God did not send anyone to show her the door.

He prayed once. Seriously. Twelve years old, on his knees on a cold floor, the night after a bad night in a sequence of bad nights that had accumulated past counting. Kto-nibud'. Pozhaluysta. Someone. Please. Not a specific request. Someone. Nothing answered except the cold and the dark and his own voice going nowhere.

At first, he didn’t fault God for the silence. His mother might have earned an answer; he never had. Silence, at least, is not the worst thing a father can give.

He has not tried since. He is not trying now. He is simply sitting in the pew and letting the room hold what he cannot.

He does not make a sound. He learned at twelve that sounds drew attention and attention in bad rooms was not what you wanted, and the body does not unlearn what it learned in the worst rooms. He sits in the pew of a Catholic church in Ottawa on a Tuesday afternoon and cries without sound how he has always cried without sound, how she probably cried without sound, and the church holds it with the patience of something that has been doing this for longer than either of them has been alive.

He cries until his body has nothing left to report.

The hollow after. Which is not peace but is the thing adjacent to peace, which is sometimes the closest available.

He says, out loud, in Russian, to the empty church or the candles or the form of something or no one at all:

Ya ne znayu chto delat'. I don't know what to do.

He already knew it would be quiet. He says it anyway.

Outside, a sparrow lands on the stone step and regards him with the flat professional attention of a creature that has found him non-useful and departed. The city goes on around him.

The city always goes on.

vi. heresy—the false doctrine

The smell comes first.

Ilya is making tea he doesn't want at midnight. The kitchen is dark except for the stove light.

The spice. The one without a name. The one he has been trying to remember for twenty years.

He is very still. There is nothing in the kitchen that could produce it. The kettle boils. He makes the tea. He goes back to bed.

Three nights later. Practice. A two-on-one drill, and the way the light hits the east boards makes him think of Moscow mornings, and for one second—one full second—she is there at the boards. Her particular expression. The exact face.

He stops. He looks.

Nothing.

He skates back into position.

His own backyard, a Saturday afternoon. Washing dishes. He looks up through the kitchen window.

A woman standing with her back to him.

He knows the back. The definitive width of the shoulders. The curls. The angle of her head when she was deciding about something.

He turns off the tap.

He does not move toward the door.

When he looks again: nothing.

He stands at the sink with his hands wet.

By the fourth time, Ilya is no longer surprised.

He is at the kitchen table at noon. Tea gone cold. Anya under the table with her chin on his shoe.

Irina sits down across from him.

Not violently. Not with drama. Sitting down across from someone you have been meaning to speak to and finally have the opportunity.

He looks at her.

Her face is tired. This is what grief had been editing out—the serene version, the mythologized version. Her actual face was tired. Tired how you are tired when you have been doing something very difficult for a very long time and cannot put it down.

He thinks: I look like that.

She says nothing. This version of her operates below language.

He says, in Russian: I see you.

Still quiet.

"I am angry at you," he says. "I have been angry at you for twenty years and I have never been able to say it out loud because how do you say that. How do you say that to a person who is gone? It doesn't go anywhere. It just sits in you and becomes something else."

He looks at his hands.

"I needed you," he says. "I know that is not a fair thing. I know all the rest of it. I have made peace with it eleven times and unmade the peace eleven times and I am still—"

He stops.

"I am still twelve years old in a doorway," he says. "In some room of myself I am always still twelve years old in a doorway with my skate bag over my shoulder."

She looks at him. Her face is tired and warm and exact and entirely hers.

She reaches across the table. Her hand almost reaches his. Almost.

Anya lifts her head from his shoe and looks at the other chair.

He looks at the chair.

Empty.

vii. violence—against the self

Ilya stands in the bathroom at six in the morning.

He has been standing here for some amount of time he cannot reconstruct. This is the newest development—time losing texture, the minutes going permeable, the between having no content. He used to track time how hockey trained him to, the precise internal metronome of a man who has lived by intervals since he was six, who can feel thirty seconds of a power play in his body the way other people feel an hour. That clock is running differently now. He notices. He doesn't call Galina about it.

He is looking at himself in the mirror.

Not the functional morning-mirror glance. Looking at. With the unique attention of a person searching their own face for something and not certain they want to find it.

Ilya looks like her.

Not in the literal way—he has his father's height, some of his father's coloring, except for the hair, the Grigori Rozanov stamp on him that he has always found darkly funny. But in the other way. The way the face moves in bad rooms. The stillness the mouth finds when it is not going to give anything away. The thing the eyes do when they are running a calculation behind them. He looks like her in ways that can't be photographed and can't be inherited on purpose, in the ways that are already his and have been since before he understood what they came from or where they were going.

The pill is in his palm.

Small. White. The uninspiring white of compliance medicine, designed to be taken without thinking. He has been taking this, or a version of it, for three years. He decided to with the commitment he brings to systems that work.

He looks at the pill.

The thought arrives exactly how the number arrives—not announced, not dramatic. A weather report. The clarity that lives at the bottom of worst mornings. This is already past the point where it helps. Not panic. Not intention. Just the arithmetic, arriving at its conclusion quietly, having followed the numbers far enough. She was thirty-two. He is thirty-one. He has seventy-three days. The protocol is for a person who believes in seventy-three days.

He puts the pill back.

The motion simply completes differently than usual. The bottle goes back in the cupboard. He closes the door. He washes his hands because the water was already running.

He finds a coffee Shane made him on the counter.

He stands there and holds the mug.

It happens three days later, in the kitchen, on a Wednesday afternoon, while Ilya is making dinner.

Not intentionally. He wants to be clear about this, even to himself, even inside his own head where no one is listening and the clarification serves no one: it is not intentional. He is cutting onions—David's recipe, the one that takes forty minutes and involves more steps than Ilya thinks any vegetable warrants—and his attention slides sideways at the wrong moment.

The knife catches the pad of his left palm. Not deeply. Not dangerously. The kind of kitchen cut that happens to everyone, that is in fact so ordinary it barely registers as an event.

He watches the blood well up.

Then it is on the counter. The good counter, the marble Shane got refinished last summer, the pale stone he chose out with that serious, handsome look on his face, and the blood is very red against it, and he grabs for the dish towel—the good one, the one Shane ordered from somewhere online because it is, apparently, a better grade of dish towel, which is a thing Shane has opinions about and Ilya has always found both baffling and privately correct, in the way he finds most Shane things privately correct—and he presses it to his palm and the cloth goes red immediately, a bloom of it, spreading through the fibers, and he thinks: I am ruining it.

The towel. The marble. He is bleeding on everything. He is getting it everywhere. His blood on Shane's things, on the counter Shane chose, the towel Shane bought. He presses harder and the blood comes anyway and the thought, which should be about pressure, about elevation, about the ordinary management of a kitchen cut, becomes instead a single frantic note played on repeat: ruining it, he is ruining it, he is always ruining it—

He turns on the tap too hard. Water everywhere. He shoves his hand under it and watches the water go pink and then clear and then pink again and he thinks: the towel. The towel is ruined, that is Shane's good towel, he has bled all over it. He thinks: I need to get that in the wash immediately. He thinks: the marble, if it sets—and he turns the tap off and grabs a different cloth, the plain one, and goes at the counter with it, left hand still bleeding, the pressure he's supposed to be applying now being applied to the wrong thing, to the marble, to the evidence, to making it so that when Shane gets home there is nothing to see and nothing to explain.

His hands are shaking.

He notices this the way he notices things lately—after the fact. Hands already shaking before the mind catches up to ask why.

He stands in the kitchen with a pink cloth and a bleeding hand and he thinks: this is a kitchen cut. This happens to everyone. He thinks: pull yourself together. He thinks: you are bleeding on the floor now too.

He looks at the floor.

There is a small dark drop on the expensive hardwood and he stares at it and the proportion is completely wrong, the size of the thing against the size of the response, a drop of blood the size of a coin and himself standing over it shaking, and this information comes to him from the outside, from some part of him that is watching and filing: the proportion is wrong. You are not responding to a kitchen cut.

Ilya sits down on the floor.

Not a collapse. A decision. He sits on the kitchen floor with his back against the cabinet and his hand wrapped in the ruined towel and he breathes, once, twice, until the shaking becomes something smaller.

Stop, he tells it. Internally, to the blood, because he is apparently a man who now addresses his own blood. Stop it.

After an uncertain amount of time passes, Ilya turns off the tap. He gets a bandage. He presses it.

He puts the towel in the wash. Erases himself from the marble, the good counters and floors. Puts a new good towel over the oven handle. Creases it how Shane likes.

He finishes the onions. He adds the next ingredient. He follows the recipe.

Shane comes home twenty minutes later and says something smells good and puts his keys on the hook and presses a kiss to Ilya's temple and Ilya says your dad's recipe and leans back into the kiss and does not think about the bandage on his left palm, the small square of it that Shane does not yet know is there.

Shane will notice it eventually. Shane notices everything. He will say what happened and Ilya will say onions, I was not paying attention, and this will be true, and it will be the whole truth, and it will also be, somehow, the thing Ilya cannot quite manage to feel clean about.

Sveta calls at ten in the morning Ottawa time, six in the evening Moscow. The hour she reserves for calls she actually wants to make.

She says oy instead of hello. She says ty zhivoy. You're alive.

"Barely," he says.

They talk about nothing for twenty minutes. Her work. A man she had dinner with who had opinions about everything and listened to none of them. He laughs. He cannot remember the last time he laughed like this.

Then she says: Ty ustal?

Not: are you okay. Just: are you tired.

Da. Nemnogo.

A pause.

Sveta does not pause. When Sveta pauses, something is pressing through from the other side of her words.

U tebya tot ton. You have that tone.

He waits.

Ona imela ego v kontse. She had it at the end.

Not: you sound like her. More specific and more terrible. That tone—as if there is a frequency Sveta calibrated herself to in the last year before it happened, listening harder than anyone knew, listening the way of someone afraid of what they'll hear, and she has been running Ilya against it ever since without saying so.

She heard it.

Silence.

"Sveta—"

Ya znayu. Fast. Ya znayu, prosti. And she pivots—voice lifting, another detail about the man, the terrible lighting. She learned to pivot before she learned most things.

They hang up. He says he loves her. She says da, da in the way that means obviously, stop wasting both our time.

He holds the phone.

She was afraid enough to apologize, and Sveta does not apologize.

viii. fraud—the performance of fine

Hayes appears at optional skates like the seasons appear—without announcement, already in position.

They skate laps before anyone else arrives.

"Goalies have a higher rate of depression than any other position," Hayes says, after one full lap.

Ilya says nothing.

"A certain kind of person wants the position where there's no one behind them." A beat. "Some people find out that what they thought was strength was actually just the absence of any help."

He says most things like this: not toward Ilya. Laid down. Available if wanted, not conditional on being picked up.

"My position," Ilya says, finally, "means I am never the last one."

"No," Hayes agrees. "You're the first one." A beat. "Which is its own thing."

After, in the locker room, Ilya pulls his practice jersey over his head. The mark from the chain is visible on his sternum.

Hayes glances at it. A fraction of a second. Then his eyes go to his own cubby.

He doesn't ask.

This is the second time Hayes has looked and made the decision: not yet. Ilya knows this choice. He has made it himself, in different rooms, wearing different faces.

It is also, he is aware, exactly how things stay unseen for a very long time.

It is a Wednesday in April and Troy is cutting through the back corridor on his way to the training room when he sees it.

Ilya is standing outside the equipment room with three sticks leaned against the wall beside him and one in his hand, and across from him is Petrov, the practice-squad kid, nineteen years old, just called up from the AHL two weeks ago. Petrov is holding the stick Ilya just handed him with both hands, how you hold something you are afraid to drop.

"You can use this one," Ilya is saying. "The flex is good. I had them adjust it in November. It's better than what you have."

Petrov says something Troy can't hear.

"No," Ilya says. "Keep it. I have others."

He picks up another stick from the wall. He looks at it for a moment—the tape job, the wrap he's been doing the same way since Troy has known him and probably since before Troy was even drafted. He looks at it, deciding about something.

He leans it back against the wall.

He picks up the third one. He walks back into the equipment room.

Troy does not move.

Ilya Rozanov does not give away game sticks. This is not sentiment. This is the possessiveness of a man who has learned to control the controllable, for whom the preparation of equipment is a ritual that belongs to him, that is his. In all their seasons together, Troy has never seen him lend a stick to keep, not to borrow, for forever.

He stood outside the equipment room and looked at that stick and leaned it back against the wall.

Troy goes to the training room. He lies on the table. The physio works on his shoulder.

He thinks about how a man clears out things he's decided he's done with.

He thinks about Toronto. He thinks about the silhouette of a person who has, somewhere underneath the day, made a decision they haven't told anyone about.

He thinks: I know this look because I had it.

Not to this degree maybe, and maybe not quite the vocabulary either—that's Harris's territory, the vocabulary Harris gave him over two years of patient, careful translation. What Troy knows is the other thing, the thing before the vocabulary: the loosening. The sense of having arrived somewhere you cannot name but which feels, in the body, like the end of a long walk. The giving away of things. He gave away a watch once, in Toronto, that his mother had given him. He told himself it didn't fit well. He told himself a lot of things.

He texts Harris: Hollander does pt Thurs right?

Harris replies: yeah why.

He doesn't reply.

Troy finds Shane outside the facility on a Thursday morning, which Shane will later recognize was not an accident—Troy timed it, found a reason to be there, which is itself a thing to know about what Troy is carrying when he walks across the parking lot.

"Hollander," Troy says.

"Barrett," Shane says.

They have been doing this, the two of them, for nearly two years now—the slow negotiation of two people who both love the same person and have had to figure out what they are to each other in the meantime.

"I need to tell you something," Troy says, "and I need you to hear it before you react."

Shane goes still. This is his stillness, the one Ilya calls the press conference face.

"On Wednesday," Troy says, "I saw your husband in the back corridor giving away his game sticks."

Shane looks at him.

"Not borrowing. Not lending. He took three sticks out of the room and he handed one to Petrov and told him to keep it and he leaned the other two back against the wall like he was—" He stops. He finds the sentence. "Like he was going through a closet."

The parking lot is quiet. A car starts somewhere at the other end of it.

"He didn't know I saw it," Troy says. "He wasn't performing anything. He was just—" He shakes his head slightly. "He stood there and looked at one of them for a while and put it back and I don't know what that means exactly but I know what it felt like to watch and I know I couldn't not tell you."

Shane says, very quietly: "Okay."

"I'm not saying anything is happening," Troy says. "I'm not a doctor. I'm saying I know this look. I had this…problem for about a year before things got better. In Toronto. The—" He looks for the word. "The loosening. The letting go of things that are his. Like something had already been decided and he was just—tidying up."

He says this to the parking lot rather than to Shane, which is its own kind of mercy. Saying it to the parking lot means Shane doesn't have to hold his face for it.

"He's going to know it was me," Troy says. "Eventually. I know that." He opens his car door. "Tell him I said sorry. Or don't. I'll handle it either way."

He gets in the car.

Shane stands in the parking lot after the car has gone.

He thinks about the sticks. The medication. The bowl, overfull every morning. The mug he puts out every morning, already waiting.

With a wave of nausea so sudden it feels chemical, he grasps the hood of his car to steady himself.

It isn't mess. It's order.

It always was.

Ilya is on the plane.

The Ottawa-to-Tampa route, three winters ago. The smell of recycled air and mediocre coffee. He knows this flight from his body.

In reality: somewhere over Georgia, the engine made a sound that wasn't right. The descent changed. The flight attendants moved with the controlled speed of professionals performing calm. They landed in Tampa with fire trucks that didn't end up being needed. Hayes had looked at him from across the aisle—not panicked, just recalibrating his assumptions about the morning.

In the dream: the plane goes down.

He is in his seat. The window shows him the cloud and then the cloud doing something different and then no cloud, only the ground approaching at a speed that removes the conditional from every sentence. The calm has arrived—the terrible calm, the body releasing, the arithmetic reaching its conclusion and going quiet.

He has his phone in his hand. He doesn't remember taking it out.

The chain is loose in his palm—it is always against his chest, always tucked inside, but it is loose in his palm, the chain pooled against his fingers, the cross at the end of it.

He looks at the draft on his phone. He has typed something. He doesn't remember typing it. He reads it:

Shane. I have been trying to find a way to give you the whole of it. I never found the way. You know more than anyone has known and it was still not enough and I am sorry. The cross will be in the top drawer. Give it to someone who will carry it right.

He looks at this.

He looks at the window.

The reading of those sentences feels like looking at something written in his own handwriting that he has no memory of writing. The recognition of self in the unrecognized. He has thought, before, that the worst thing would be knowing. He understands now that the worst thing is having already decided without noticing the decision being made.

He thinks: oh.

Not no. Not please. Just: oh. The syllable of arrival. Of confirmation. The arithmetic reaching its conclusion and at the end: oh. Of course. He recognizes it. He has been recognizing it since he was twelve. This is what thirty-two is.

He is completely calm.

The calm is the worst thing. He will know this when he wakes.

And then—pressing through the calm, a current running against the current—

The message to Shane, still on his screen, unsent.

He looks at it.

He thinks of Shane's hands. The texture of Shane's hands, the calluses in the particular places, how they move when he is arranging something with precision. He thinks of Shane making coffee in the mornings with his back turned, already with the mug out.

He starts to type something else—something that is also a goodbye—

The seat lurches.

Around him: the screaming. His teammates, several rows back, the sounds of men who spend their professional lives performing fearlessness and have reached the genuine article.

Across the aisle, Hayes is in the brace position, both hands braced on the seat ahead, his face becoming very still like faces do when calm is the only remaining available option.

Two rows forward, Troy has his hand clamped in Harris's. He is not typing. He has already said what he needed to say.

Ilya looks at his hands.

The phone screen goes white.

Not the white of a dead battery or a crashed system. The white of overexposure, like a light source too close. And then, in the white, something that is not white—a shape, standing in the aisle.

He knows the shape the way you know something in your body that precedes photographs, that precedes language, that is simply there the way breathing is there.

She is standing in the aisle.

She is standing in the aisle of a plane that is falling and her face is not the face grief made. This is the face he saw once, twice—in the doorway of a room, when she thought he was in the other room, in an unguarded moment that he has carried for twenty years without looking at it directly because the looking was too much.

She is furious.

Not the fury of a woman raising her voice. The fury of a woman who has been watching something happen for a long time from a place where she cannot intervene and has finally found a door.

She looks at him.

She says his name.

Not Ilyusha. His full name. And in her voice his full name has the specific weight of a woman who chose it, who pressed her hand to the top of his head with this name in her, who contains the whole architecture of who he is and is saying that architecture back to him right now like an accusation.

Ilya.

The plane shudders.

He cannot speak.

She opens her mouth.

What comes out is Shane's voice.

Not like an impression. Not like a blending. Her mouth opens and Shane's voice comes out of it with the cadence Shane has when he has run out of management, when the careful has been used up, when what's underneath has surfaced because there was nothing left to hold it down.

How dare you, Shane's voice says, from his mother's face. How fucking dare you sit there and let it happen.

He tries to say her name.

She takes a step toward him down the aisle, and the wrongness of it—her face, Shane's voice, the plane, the calm he can still feel in his own body like a held breath—the wrongness is total, is the worst thing, is the horror of a moment where two things that cannot be in the same place are in the same place and the mind cannot process the overlap.

He tastes metal in his mouth. Did not know fear had a flavor at all.

Ilya. Still Shane's voice, but now something else is in it—something that might be both of them or neither, the sound of two griefs finding the same frequency. This is not what I meant to leave you. Ya ne eto khotela tebe ostavit'. I did not mean to leave you this.

Her face does something.

It is still her face and it is doing something no photograph ever captured and no dream before this one has allowed him to see—it is breaking like it has finished performing and there is nothing left but the actual thing underneath the performance, and the actual thing is: she is afraid for him. Not grief. Not even love, exactly. Fear. The pure animal fear of a mother seeing her child from a place she cannot reach.

Ya ne hochu, he thinks. Ya ne hochu etogo.

I do not want this.

The thought arrives from somewhere below the arithmetic, below the twenty years of carrying, from the absolute bottom of him where the arithmetic cannot reach. He does not want this. Not as a therapeutic statement. Not as something he is telling anyone. As the most bodily fact he has ever had, from the very floor of himself:

He does not want this.

She was right there. She was right in front of him and the plane was falling and her face was his mother's face broken open with fear for him and Shane's voice was coming from her mouth and he understood, in the terrible clarity of the worst dreams, the ones that show you what you actually know—

She was afraid too.

Not of dying. She knew dying. She had decided about dying with the deliberateness of someone who has run the arithmetic and followed it to the end. She was afraid of him. Of what she was leaving in him. Of the blueprint, passed without consent, the inheritance that requires no signature.

He is crying. He realizes this how you realize things in dreams—after the fact, the evidence arriving before the experience.

She reaches for him.

Her arm—

Ottawa. 3 AM. Shane's hand on his arm before he's fully back, the grip firm and immediate. Ready.

Ilya comes back so hard he's grabbing Shane's wrist with both hands, a hammering pulse pouring from each vessel, which he has never done before, which alarms him even through the not-yet-fully-woken state.

"Hey." Shane's face in the dark, the streetlight through the gap in the curtains. The furrow. Both of his hands reaching right back. "Hey. I've got you. Look at me. Look at me, Ilya."

He looks at him.

Shane's face. Just Shane's face. No one else in it.

Ilya puts his hand over his own mouth. Breathes through his fingers.

"The plane," he says, when he can.

"I know," Shane says. He doesn't know—doesn't know what was different this time, doesn't know about the draft on the phone or the face. But he moves closer, and his arm comes around, and the weight of it is exactly the weight it always is.

"The plane. It ended differently."

Shane is quiet for a moment. "Differently how?"

Ilya looks at the lamp. He thinks about telling Shane about the message, the draft that does not exist outside the dream. He thinks about the dream-version of Shane's face, reading it, and the dream ends before that part, before he knows what Shane's face does.

"She was there," he says instead. "On the plane. She was angry."

Shane waits.

"She was—" He stops. He doesn't know how to say it. He doesn't have the English for it and he is not sure he has the Russian either, and he sits in the dark with the thing that has no language and Shane's arm around him and thinks: she was afraid for me. From whatever place she is, she found me in a falling plane and she was afraid for me.

He puts his face against Shane's shoulder.

He closes his eyes.

He is still here. He will check tomorrow. He will still be here tomorrow.

The clock on the nightstand reads 3:04.

He watches it tick to 3:05.

The second version of the dream is different in the way that matters.

He is in his seat again. The engine again. The descent again. He has his phone in his hand.

The draft is already there. He wrote it before the dream began, apparently—the text exists when he looks: I should have said everything. I never learned how.

He puts his thumb on the send button.

He does not press it.

He deletes the message.

He opens a new one. He types:

Stay.

Just that. One word. As if it is himself he is messaging. As if the instruction is for someone who is not Shane.

He looks at it.

The plane shudders.

Shane is at the end of the aisle. He was not there before. He is there now—standing, which makes no sense, because Shane is in Washington when the plane almost wasn’t, but this is where he is. His face is doing the thing. The underneath thing. The thing that lives below the management.

He says: Ilya. You're getting off first.

Ilya says: What?

Shane's voice is steady how it gets when he is preventing himself from being anything other than steady because the alternative is not useful. You're getting off first. I can't follow you there. I can't go where you're going. So, you're getting off first and then you're going to stay on the ground and wait.

The plane is still falling.

Ilya says, "What the hell." Because he is only a man. Then: "Come with me." Because he doesn’t go anywhere without his husband. That was the whole fucking point, he thought.

Shane says: Ilya. Baby. Please.

The please—Ilya has never heard Shane say please like this. He has heard please as a form, please as courtesy, please as the civilized management of a request, please writhing in the sheets beneath him, seeing stars he wasn’t looking for. He has never heard please as an open wound.

He is moving before he decides to move. Standing.

The plane tips, the nose following the path that always was and always will be.

Shane catches his arm. Holds it. Keeps him upright.

He says: Go. I'll be right behind you. I promise.

Something prickles at the back of Ilya's skull. "You can't be right behind me. It is not safe."

Shane raises a brow. "But you chose it."

The door opens.

The wind whips around him, boisterous and vicious. The engine’s fire is smoking so darkly he can barely see his husband through it.

“No, I—” Ilya can’t see through the smoke, he can’t see. His husband. His husband. Shane. “Shane—"

"How could you do something and think I wouldn't give anything to come after you?"

He steps through.

He wakes.

Shane is sitting up, watching him, dark eyes and the furrow and both hands already braced to reach him if he needs it.

"Shane," Ilya says.

"I'm here."

"Don't—" He does not know how to finish this sentence. Don't leave. Don't follow me. Don't let me. All of them true. Stay, stay, stay.

"You're okay," Shane says, gently. "You're here."

"Yes," Ilya agrees.

Shane pulls him into his arms. Ilya goes. They lie in the dark and Shane holds on with a child’s grip—tight, instinctive, as if faced with his worst fear.

Ilya holds back.

The third version he will not tell Shane about.

He is on the Trans-Canada, somewhere west of Ottawa, in the hour when the light is still considering the day. He is driving very fast. Not because there is somewhere to be—there is no destination on this road, he already knows there is no destination, the road is the point of it, the speed is the point. He is driving like speed is the only available form of control. When the only thing left you can do is choose how fast you arrive wherever you're going.

The speedometer is too high.

He knows this. He watches the number and does not slow down.

She appears in the passenger seat.

Not gradually. She is simply there.

He does not look at her directly. He keeps his eyes on the road. The road is doing something strange—not ending, not curving, just extending, the same stretch of highway repeating in a way that is not possible and also, here, completely ordinary. The trees on either side of him are the same trees. He has been passing the same grouping of pines for some time now and has not arrived anywhere.

She says: Ilyusha. Pomyedlyennee.

Ilyusha. Slow down.

He doesn't slow down.

She says: Ya ne uchila tebya etomu. I did not teach you this.

He says: Ty nauchila. You did. He says it without anger. Just the fact of it. She taught him the ground gives way. She taught him systems fail. She taught him, with the absolute authority of experience, that things stop. He has been metabolizing this lesson for twenty years.

She is quiet.

The road repeats. The same pines. The same distance between them. The number on the speedometer climbs.

She says: Ya khotela nauchit' tebya drugomy. I wanted to teach you something else.

He says: I know.

She says: No ya ne znala. But I didn't know how.

He knows this too. He has known it. He presses harder on the accelerator and the number climbs and the trees repeat and he does not look at her and the road goes on and on into itself.

Then she stops talking.

He notices this like noticing a sound that has stopped rather than one that has started: in retrospect, in the sudden absence.

He looks at her.

She is not looking at him anymore. She is looking at her own hands in her lap. Both of them, palm up, open, like the woman with two vessels pouring the water. She is looking at them with the expression he knows from the doorway when she thought he was in the other room—not the constructed face, not the face available for observation, but the other one. The one that was always there underneath, the one that only had an audience once, when he was twelve and the door was cracked and he saw something he was not supposed to see and has never been able to unsee.

The face of having already decided.

He says: Mama.

She does not respond.

She is still looking at her hands. And then—slowly, with the unhurriedness of a person alone in a room who does not know they are being watched—she begins to go still. Not asleep. Not relaxed. The other kind. The specific kind. The kind of still that he has only ever seen once, in a doorway, in March, when he was twelve years old and his skate bag was over his shoulder and the room had changed temperature.

She is showing him.

He understands this with the sick absolute certainty of the dream: she is showing him what it looked like. From the outside. The thing he only ever saw after—the arm, the angle, the nature of a person who has become a room that is no longer inhabited. She is doing it in the passenger seat next to him while the road repeats and the number climbs and she is showing him what he looked like from where she is, from the place she has been watching from, and the thing it looks like is—

He takes his foot off the accelerator.

Not because he decided to. The foot moves. The number begins to fall.

She is still going still beside him. The process continuing, or: she is still in the doorway, twenty years ago, and the process is already complete and what he is watching is the memory of it and there is no stopping a memory.

He reaches across the console.

He cannot touch her. He has never been able to touch her in these nights. His hand passes through the place where her arm should be, through the air that has the shape of her in it, and makes contact with nothing.

But she stops.

The stillness arrests. She is sitting in the passenger seat and she is tired and she is real and she is looking at the hand he has extended into the space where she is, the hand hovering there, and her face does something complicated.

She says, very quietly: Ty videl.

You saw.

Da. He has to pull his hand back to the wheel. The road is still there. He has to steer. His hands are shaking. Ya videl. I saw.

She looks at the road ahead.

She says: Ya ne khotela, chtoby ty videl. I didn't want you to see.

He says: Ya znayu. I know.

She says: Ty vse ravno prishel domoy. You still came home.

Da.

She puts the memory of her hand—not quite solid, not quite not—on the dash. The gesture is: I am here. I am with you on this road. I am sorry for what the road is and I am here anyway.

He drives the rest of the way at the ordinary speed. The trees stop repeating. The road goes somewhere. The number on the speedometer is correct.

When he looks over again, she is gone.

Ottawa. 4 AM.

Ilya lies very still and does not wake Shane.

He thinks: she showed me.

He thinks: she has never shown me before.

He lies in the dark and lets this be large, the full size of it, the thing she must have known she was doing when she did it—that she was leaving him, specifically him, to come home and find it. That the showing now is not cruelty. That the showing is the only door she found.

He closes his eyes.

Secretly, and this is the part Ilya will never say out loud: he is afraid, too.

He puts his hand on the cross and lies there until the light changes.

It is the playoffs. This is relevant to the architecture of the next several weeks in the following way: everything is louder.

The stakes recalibrate everything upward. Media every morning. The additional games, the travel, the brutality of a team that is in it pushing against the brutality of a team also in it. Wiebe is tightly wound. The tape sessions go longer. Hazy has the stillness of a goalie entering the game consciousness, a job is to not let anything through—he is in it fully now, every day, the kind of focused that looks from the outside like calm and is from the inside like being on fire very slowly.

Ilya plays well.

He plays well in the way that a man in his condition sometimes plays very well, which is with the nothing-to-lose condition of not protecting anything anymore. He is dangerous on the ice in May in a way he has not been since Boston, since the years before Shane, when the recklessness was all he had and he deployed it indiscriminately. He knows what this is. He knows what it means when a man stops protecting himself on the ice.

He scores nine goals in seven games. Shane says: what the fuck and you're playing incredibly. And Ilya says: yes.

Hayes says nothing. But after a particularly dangerous shift in game six—a hit Ilya takes and that nobody on the bench can quite believe he walked away from—Hazy finds him in the corridor and stands next to him for exactly ninety seconds and then walks away.

This is, from Hayes, a significant statement.

Ilya does not tell him he was counting.

Ilya knows the appointment is at three.

He has known all morning. The knowledge sits in the back of his awareness of something he is not going to act on—present, unignored, simply not acted on. He carries it exactly as he carries the number. Just noting. Not following.

At two forty-five he is on the couch. Anya is on his feet.

He thinks: I'll go next week. He knows this is not true. He says it anyway because the sentence still exists in the version of the future where he is still the person he is supposed to be.

The rationalization is practiced and clean: I've been doing better. He skips past the medication question. He is still playing hockey. He is not on a floor somewhere. He knows this logic is wrong. He can identify the precise mechanism by which it is wrong. He can describe it in the vocabulary Galina gave him: the depressive cognition tells you that care is unnecessary at the exact moment care is most necessary. He knows this. He can explain it.

Knowing and explaining have never once been the mechanisms by which his problems resolve.

He does not call Galina.

His hand goes to the cross. He thinks, very quietly, in the below-thought layer: she didn't have anyone to call.

He does not follow this. He lets it sit.

Three o'clock.

He does not move.

Three-fifteen.

He says: next week. Into the silence.

He thinks about Galina, who is probably at her desk now, who probably made a note. She will not call—that is one of her protocols, one of the things about her that is actually a kind of respect: reaching out when something has gone wrong must be a choice, not a condition of the relationship. She will not call. She will simply be available on Thursday, and she will say: how was last week—not where were you, not why did you miss, just: how was last week. With the exact patience of someone who is not going anywhere.

He says: next week. Until it sounds almost true.

Anya's feet twitch in a dream. He puts his hand on her side. He watches her dream and does not move.

The thing about wanting—the real kind, the kind Shane has for Ilya—is that it is not tidy.

There is a version of it Ilya understood before Shane, the desire that has edges and a purpose, that arrives and departs on schedule. Then there is Shane. Shane who woke at two in the morning once, in their first year of marriage, simply to move closer. Not awake enough to speak. Just: the body deciding, in sleep, that the current distance was insufficient and correcting it. Ilya lay there in the dark with Shane's arm across him and thought, dazed, receiving something he had not budgeted for: this is a different category of thing.

It shows up everywhere. In the kitchen when Shane appears behind him while Ilya is trying to cook and presses his mouth to the back of his neck with absolutely no agenda, no instigation, just: you are here and I want to be in contact with you. In the car when Shane reaches across without looking and puts his hand on Ilya's knee and leaves it there for the whole drive. In the locker room after a loss—Ilya's losses, especially, the ones that sit on him—when Shane finds him and doesn't say anything. Just stands there. Just exists in the same space, pointedly, until the space changes temperature.

The sex is its own language inside the larger language.

They were good at it before they were anything else, which is its own kind of joke, the universe leaving an obvious trail of breadcrumbs that both of them ignored for years in favor of complicated feelings about rivalry and professionalism and the insanity of being in love with someone you are also trying to beat. The sex before they had a name for it was—charged is too small a word. It was the concentrated form of fifteen years of something that had nowhere else to go.

Now it is different. Now there is a name for it, and a house in Ottawa, and a dog, and an anniversary coming in July, and the sex is still that—still the near fifteen years compressed into sensation—but it is also something else. Something longer. Something that has learned the person rather than just the body.

Ilya has thought about this more than he will admit.

He has thought about it in the context of the arithmetic, especially. About what it means that he has spent five years inside this thing—this specific, unrepeatable thing—and that there is, somewhere under the pills he is not swallowing and the appointments he is not keeping, a voice that keeps finding the same unbearable question:

Who is going to take care of Shane like this after.

He will not examine this question.

He has made that decision.

ix. treachery—against those who trusted you

It is eleven at night when Ilya hears it.

Shane is in the other room. Ilya can hear fragments through the wall—I don't know what to do. I'm trying everything I know how to do. A longer pause. No, he says he's fine.

Then, quieter:

I think I'm losing him.

Ilya stands in the hallway. He does not move.

He has heard Shane afraid. He has heard Shane exhausted. He has never heard this—Shane in the voice he keeps when Ilya isn't watching, the voice that exists before six in the morning, less managed, the voice of a man holding a posture for no one.

I think I'm losing him. Not accusation. Not confession. The plain statement of reporting a fact to someone he trusts.

Ilya puts his hand flat against the wall.

He does not go in. He cannot go in. He does not know what you say to a man you have put in the position of calling someone at eleven at night to say that about you. He does not know how you apologize for being the reason that sentence exists.

He returns to the bedroom. He picks Anya up from the foot of the bed. She protests sleepily.

He holds her against his chest.

He thinks: she didn't have anyone to call.

The thought again. The thought that keeps arriving and going nowhere. He holds the dog and lets it be both things at once—his love for Shane and his exhaustion and his guilt and his gratitude, all of it in one room, all of it his.

He thinks: I am lucky.

He thinks: I know I am lucky.

He thinks: I know this and it does not help and I do not know what to do with that either.

The next morning, Thursday, Ilya sits across from Shane at the kitchen table.

Shane is reading something. Ilya watches the side of his face. The jaw. The focused line of his brow.

He opens his mouth.

He is going to say it. He knows what he is going to say. There is something I haven't told you. It is the sentence. It has been the sentence for months. He has been building toward it and now he is at the edge of it and Shane looks up—

"More coffee?" Shane says.

"Yes," Ilya says.

Shane gets up. Ilya looks at his own hands on the table.

He does not say it.

He had it. He had the door in his hand.

He lets it close.

It starts with the dawn.

He wakes before Shane and goes outside at four-thirty in the morning because the sky is doing something he cannot describe but which requires witnessing. He stands on the back steps in his socks and watches the indigo at the horizon become something else. Something pink and then orange and then gold that is offensively end-of-May.

He texts Shane from the steps: come outside.

Shane texts back seventeen minutes later: Why?

Ilya texts: there is a sunrise. it is occurring right now. come and see it.

Shane texts back: I'm aware of how sunrises work. It's 4:47am.

Ilya texts: you are missing it.

Shane comes outside eventually, in a coat over his sleep clothes, holding both their coffees, hair doing the thing it does before any intervention has been applied to it. He hands Ilya a cup. He stands beside him. He looks at the sky.

"Okay," Shane says. "I see it."

"You see it," Ilya confirms.

"It's a good sunrise."

"Is the best one I have ever seen."

Shane looks at him sideways. "It's a sunrise, Ilya."

"Every morning," Ilya says, and he means this with a completeness that is difficult to convey, "it does this. Every morning. Even in winter. The sun has been rising over this city for as long as there has been a city and before that too, and every single morning it is a new one. This is actually—I am just saying—quite remarkable if you think about it carefully."

Shane looks at him. Something in his face—not suspicion, not tenderness exactly. Fear wearing the shape of tenderness. "Are you okay?"

And Ilya can see the question underneath the question, the one Shane has been carrying all spring, but it is four-thirty in the morning and the sky is doing something enormous and he is not ready, he is not ready yet—

"I have been missing a lot of mornings," he says. Which is true. Which is not the whole of the truth.

Shane is very still.

Then he looks back at the sky. He lets it go. He has always been able to hold the thing he sees and the thing he cannot say yet with the same careful hands.

They stand there until the gold gets less polite, more committed. Anya appears at the screen door, looks at both of them, looks at the sky, makes a sound of extreme judgement, and goes back to bed.

The next two weeks are the best weeks he has had in years. They go deep into the playoffs on a run nobody quite predicted. The city gets loud how cities get loud when their team is alive in late May, and Ilya is alive in it, incandescent—the word he will later use for this period, looking back, when he understands what it was.

He does not analyze it. Analysis would require slowing down.

He scores nine goals in seven games. He drives to Gatineau at six in the morning to watch the river. He buys Shane seven things in four days.

He calls Cliff Marlow from a park bench: “I am feeling very alive this week, Marley.”

Cliff is quiet for a moment. "That's great, man," he says, in a tone that means I need more information. "How long have you been feeling this way?"

"About ten days."

Cliff says, carefully: "Ilya. The last time you felt like this in Boston, you went out at two AM and adopted a stray cat that you then gave to your neighbor because you remembered you were allergic, and then you didn't sleep for four days and you played the worst game of your career against Columbus."

"I was allergic," Ilya confirms. "This is different."

"How is it different."

Ilya thinks about the corridor and the clocks, and the plane, and her in the June light, and Shane saying you're getting off first, baby, and the dream where she told him to slow down.

"I am not using the joy as an exit," he says. "I think I am just using it as joy."

"Call me if anything changes," Cliff says.

"I will actually call,” Ilya says.

Shane watches all of it with love and terror in equal measure, and does not yet say anything.

Then, one evening, lying in bed at ten-thirty, in the middle of Ilya explaining octopus cognition with genuine urgency—

"You're scaring me."

They are in bed. Ilya has been talking about a documentary he watched earlier—about octopuses, which he has decided are the most interesting animal and possibly more intelligent than humans, which Shane has disputed on empirical grounds and Ilya has dismissed because empirical grounds, Shane, are exactly the kind of rigid thinking that octopuses have already evolved past.

“Ilya.”

Ilya stops.

He turns to look at Shane. Shane is looking at the ceiling, which he does when he is having a feeling he has not yet decided whether to have.

"The octopuses?"

"No." Shane doesn't move. "You. The last two weeks. You."

Ilya waits.

"You're—" Shane stops. Starts again. "You're happy. You've been happy in this very intense way that I don't—" He turns. He looks at Ilya. His eyes are very bright. "Ilya, I don't know this version of you."

"What do you mean. I am—"

"You drove to Gatineau at six in the morning to watch the river. Alone. You called me from the riverbank to describe the geese."

"The geese were excellent—"

"You bought seven things this week. You haven't slept more than four hours. You're—" Shane's voice does something. "You're shouting your joy from the rooftops, and you don't do that. You don't do that, Ilya. That's not how you're happy."

Ilya is very still.

Shane sits up. He is looking at Ilya with the look Ilya has come to understand is the look beneath the managed look, the one that lives under the competence and the control and the carefully maintained surface of a man who learned very young to keep his interior landscape private.

"How am I happy," Ilya says. Very quietly.

"You text me from rooms I'm already in," Shane says.

His voice is careful now. Careful like people are careful around injured animals and unexploded things.

"You like early bedtime. You like sleeping on my chest and complaining that I breathe too loud and falling asleep in the middle of your own complaints. You like the joke I make about Vancouver weather that I have made forty-seven times and you always act like it's the first time because you know it makes me feel good. You like taking Anya window shopping and coming home with something for me every time even when you swear you're only looking. You like—"

Shane exhales heavily.

"You like small things," he says. "Quiet things. Repeated things."

Ilya looks at him.

"And right now you're acting like—"

"Like what," Ilya says.

Shane presses the heels of his hands briefly against his eyes.

"Like nothing matters," he says finally.

The sentence lands wrong immediately. Both of them know it.

Shane exhales sharply, frustrated with himself.

"No," he says. "No. That's not it."

He looks at Ilya directly now.

"This is worse."

Ilya says nothing.

"I knew you in Boston," Shane says. "Before we had any stake in each other. Before there was anything between us we were allowed to name. I watched you destroy yourself there and I didn't say anything because I told myself it wasn't my place. Then you put yourself back together enough to function and I let myself believe that meant you were fine."

He swallows.

"It wasn't true then either. You're very good at performing the theater of fine. I just didn't know yet which parts were real."

His voice breaks slightly on the next sentence.

"I know now."

Ilya's chest feels suddenly tight.

"The sunrises. The river. The seventeen texts. Buying things. Talking to strangers. Staying awake like you're afraid to miss part of the day." Shane's eyes are bright now, frightened in a way Ilya almost cannot bear to look at. "You're doing it all at once."

And then Shane says the thing he cannot take back.

"You're acting like there's a last time."

Ilya does not move.

Shane is crying. Not dramatically—Shane doesn't cry dramatically. Just the actual thing, quiet, his face doing what his face does when it has given up maintaining the surface.

"I'm married to you," Shane says. "I want children with you, exactly like you. I want a thousand more dogs if that's what you want. I want to watch you teach me enough Russian that I can understand your dreams. I want to grow old and embarrassing with you. I want to outlive our enemies and attend their funerals in excellent coats." He wipes his face. "I want you to turn thirty-three. It is not a negotiation."

Ilya says nothing.

He is looking at his husband, who has apparently been paying attention to him with catastrophic precision for years.

The Vancouver joke. The window shopping that is never just window shopping.

"I know I am not easy," Ilya says.

"You're not supposed to be easy." Shane's voice is rough. "You're supposed to be here."

A long silence.

"The octopuses were really very interesting though," Ilya says.

Shane makes a sound—not quite a laugh, not quite not a laugh. He lies back down. He puts his arm over Ilya.

"I know," he says.

"They have three hearts."

"Mm."

"Is just—is a lot of hearts."

"It really is," Shane says. His arm tightens slightly. "Galina. Friday. Yes?"

"Yes."

"Good."

This is the thing no one tells him until he is twenty-four, when he has a particularly rough patch and Sveta calls at an unreasonable hour and says: I need to tell you something I should have told you years ago.

She was happy at the end. Not relieved—happy. Euphoric, even, in the days before. She danced in a field in late May, which was not something she did, which was so unusual that Sveta has been carrying the image for years as both a gift and a wound. She let her hair loose, the golden curls down her back and shoulders, which she usually kept contained, and when Ilya was at practice, she showed Sveta all the constellations of her childhood—the ones her father had shown her, the ones only visible from a certain hillside outside the city if the smog cooperated, the ones that no one else remembered she knew.

They lay in the grass and Irina pointed at the sky and named things and laughed at things and was, Sveta says, the most fully herself she had ever been. The most present. The most here.

The next afternoon, she was dead.

Ilya has been living with this for seven years now. He has brought it to Galina. He has held it in the dark.

He thinks: I did that.

He thinks: Shane was not wrong to be afraid.

He thinks: I am not done.

x. the thing below the thing

It begins on a Thursday evening after dinner.

The thing that has been building since March has been waiting for an ordinary container. It always waits for ordinary containers. The extraordinary requires small doors.

Shane is washing the dishes. Ilya is at the table with his phone, not looking at it. Anya is under the table with her chin on Ilya's foot, which is her evening position, which she has held with the consistency of a creature who has decided that this is her job and is taking it seriously.

It is a completely ordinary Thursday evening.

Shane says, with his back to the room, in the voice he uses to ask if they need more coffee, "How was Galina?"

Ilya looks up from his phone. It's a split-second decision.

"Good," he says.

Shane nods. He keeps washing. "When was that?"

Another pause. Just slightly too long.

"Last week," Ilya says.

Shane sets a glass in the drying rack. He picks up another one. He does not turn around. "Which day?"

Ilya looks at the back of his head. He knows this tone. He knows this is not a question about which day.

"Tuesday," he says.

Shane nods again. He dries his hands on the dish towel. He folds it over the oven handle in the Shane way he folds it, aligned with the edge, which he does when he is doing something with his hands so he does not do something else with them. Then he turns around, and leans against the counter, and looks at Ilya with the look that is not yet a question but has been one for a long time.

"I called Galina's office on Wednesday," he says. "To ask about adjusting the billing address. For this summer."

Silence.

"Her assistant mentioned she hadn't seen you in three weeks."

The kitchen is very quiet. Outside, somewhere, a car passes. Anya's breathing continues against Ilya's foot, small and even, a creature in a dream.

"I was going to go," Ilya says.

"I know."

"I just—"

"I know." Shane's voice is entirely level. "I'm not—I'm not angry about Galina. I understand why that happens. I understand the whole mechanism of why that happens." He pauses. "I'm concerned because you're lying about it. About several things, in fact." He steels himself. "I found the medication bottle in April. I've known since April that you stopped taking it."

The silence lands differently this time.

Ilya does not move.

"I've been waiting," Shane says, "for you to tell me."

Something shifts in the room. The temperature of it, the atmospheric charge. This is the moment both of them will later identify as the one before—the last moment where the conversation could have gone somewhere else, taken a different road, arrived at a different place.

"You knew in April," Ilya says.

"Yes."

"You knew and said nothing."

"I was giving you room—"

"You were saving it." Not angry yet, just flat precision. "Like a coin. Keeping it. For the right moment."

"That's not—"

"When it would land the hardest."

"Ilya." Shane's voice is still level. Still careful. "That is not what I was doing."

"Then what were you doing?" Ilya asks. "You had this since April. You sat on it for months. You watched me every morning with your mug already out and your careful eyes and said nothing. And now, tonight, here it is. And I am supposed to believe the timing is a coincidence."

"I kept thinking you would tell me." And now something enters Shane's voice—not volume, not yet, but texture. Something rougher underneath. "I kept waiting. Every morning. And you didn't, and I didn't know what to do, because every time I come near this, you—"

"I what?"

Shane stops.

"Say it," Ilya says.

"You disappear. You go somewhere I can't reach and I lose you for days and I—" He stops again. He looks at the dish towel on the oven handle. He looks back at Ilya. "I was scared to bring it up. I am telling you honestly that I was scared to bring it up because I knew what you would do."

"And what would I do?"

"This," Shane says. Very quietly. "You would do exactly this."

They look at each other across the kitchen.

This is the last moment of the careful register. Ilya feels it end. Like ice that has been making a sound under your feet for thirty seconds—you know before you know.

"You are not scared for me," Ilya says, and the flatness of it is the first thing that sounds like something other than a conversation. "You are scared of failing. There is something in this house that does not respond to Shane Hollander working harder at it and you cannot stand it. So you collect evidence. You file it. You wait. You come to me when I am already on the floor because at least then you feel like you did something. You intervened."

"I'm standing here telling you—"

"You are scared for yourself." The sentence placed with care. With precision. "There is a difference."

Something happens in Shane's face. The surface holding, but the cost of holding it visible.

"The mug," Ilya says. "The socks. The Russian." He pauses—and here is where the aim shifts, where it goes from analytical to surgical. "You practice somewhere private because you need to believe you can reach me. Not for me. You cannot stand the idea that there is a part of me you cannot learn your way into. So you study. You make yourself fluent in my grief like it is a skill set. Like if you master enough of me I will not be able to leave." His voice is level. Precise. The voice of a man who knows exactly where the blade will go. "That is not love, Shane. That is a surveillance system. And you are the only one in this house who cannot see what it is."

Shane's jaw tightens. Something working behind his eyes.

"I do it," Shane says, very quietly, "because you think in Russian. You love in Russian. You dream in Russian. And I cannot follow you there." He stops. His voice has gone somewhere past careful. "I could not stand the idea of you being somewhere I could not reach you."

"That is my point."

"That is love, Ilya—"

"It is love and it is control and you do not know how to tell the difference because for you they have always been the same thing." The sentence lands clean. He watches it land. He does not take it back. "Every act of love in this house is calibrated to what you can handle watching. I am sick of performing recovery for an audience of one."

"I'm not asking you to perform—"

"You are asking me to take the pill so Shane can see. Go to Galina so Shane knows I went. Get better on a timeline that makes Shane comfortable." He stands. "You are calling it love so I cannot say no to it."

"What was I supposed to do?" Shane's temper finally arrives, and it does not arrive as volume—it arrives as the opposite, the voice going very quiet and very precise the way it does when Shane has run out of careful and what is underneath careful is something colder. "Not notice? I found your bottle in April and it was almost full and you looked me in the eye every morning and I put the mug out and I waited because I love you and I did not know what else to do, and every time I come near this you go further away." A breath. "And yes—yes—I was scared to bring it up because I knew exactly what you would do, which is this, which is stand there and make me the villain for caring whether you—"

"Don't—"

"Whether you live, Ilya." Shane's knuckles go white against the counter. "That is what we are talking about. Not the mug. Not my feelings. Whether you are going to be here. Whether I am going to come home one day and—" He stops. He has not been able to say it in five years and he will not say it now. "Every morning I put that mug out and I think: today. Maybe today he'll tell me. And you never do. And I am so—" His voice breaks. "I am so tired. I have been so tired."

A silence. The kind that has weight in it.

"I thought this was what it was all for," Shane says. "Your move to Ottawa. The ten years before that. We finally got it, we finally got two years of actually being married and I thought that's what we were fighting for. I thought—" His voice cracks on the I. Just once. He puts it back. "I thought we were fighting for each other. I thought that's what this was."

The quiet before the next sentence is long enough that both of them hear it.

"And you're not even trying."

Something tears loose in Ilya.

"I am trying—"

"You're not!" And the volume arrives, finally, both of them past the point of the careful registers. "You put the pills back in the bottle and you skipped Galina and you are standing in the middle of your own life and you are not trying! I can’t just watch you do this, Ilya, I cannot, I physically cannot stand here and watch you fold in on yourself and leave me here! You were just going to let your brain finish what it started and leave me in this house and I'm supposed to what—accept that? Call it an accident? Stand at your funeral and tell people you tried your best?"

"Don't you dare—"

"I cannot survive that." Shane’s hands tremble. "I want you to know that clearly. I cannot survive it. So, if you are going to do this—if you are just going to let it happen—I need you to know what you are taking with you when you go."

“That’s not fair.”

"Fair,”  Shane laughs, cold and terrible. “Your mother! Your mother was thirty-two years old and she was very sad and nobody showed her another way out and I know that—I know that, Ilya, I have known it for years and I have never said it because I knew it would land like this, like a weapon, but you are standing here lying to me and I am out of careful! I have been careful for months and I am out of it!” His voice tears through the room, raw and unstoppable. "You are not her! You have a door! You have Galina and you have your medication that I will pour down your throat myself, so help me God, and you have my parents, your friends, me, you have me, standing right here, and you keep turning away from all of it and calling it—what? Math?”

He slams his palm against the table so hard it rings throughout the room.

"Your mother kept the arithmetic running too," Shane says. His hands fly as he talks, too much anger to stay contained in a voice or a face. Bleeding out to the rest of him. "Right until the end! And you stood in a doorway and watched the conclusion and you have been running the same numbers ever since and calling it fate. But it is not fate, Ilya, it is loyalty. You are not haunted by her. You are finishing her sentence. And you are so fucking blind and deep inside it and you have named it mathematics—"

“Get out of my grief!" The words come out of Ilya at a volume he didn't know he had, loud enough that Anya scrambles up from the hallway. "Get out of it! You do not get to use her! You do not get to put her in your mouth in an argument like she is a point you are making—"

"I'm not using her—"

"You just did! You used my dead mother in an argument to win a fight and you want to talk to me about what I'm doing to this marriage—"

"I'm trying to keep you alive!"

"I didn't ask you to!"

The words sit in the room.

Both of them breathing hard. Flushed.

Shane's face has gone somewhere past the shouting. Something white and still underneath, the specific stillness of a person who has just heard something they cannot unhear.

"You didn't ask me to," Shane repeats.

Ilya does not answer.

He knows what he said. He knows the shape of it, where it landed, why he aimed there. The mechanism knew where the opening was and he let it find it—needed to make someone prove they would stay by pushing hard enough that staying required a choice. This is what he does. This is what he has always done. And he knows, in the same breath, that what Shane said about the arithmetic was not weaponization. Cannot be called that. Was the most accurate thing anyone has said to him in twenty years, said in a kitchen on a Thursday evening, and he rolled right over it—that the arithmetic is not inheritance, that it is love, transmuted, that Ilya has been faithful to a conclusion for twenty years because faithlessness to it would be faithlessness to her.

He knows all of this.

He used it anyway.

"Okay," Shane says. Very flat. "Okay."

"Shane—"

"I know you didn't ask me to." Shane's voice has gone somewhere Ilya has never heard it go—past managed, past careful, past the version of Shane that runs things. Down to the thing underneath all of that. "You never asked me for anything. Not once. I have been putting things out for you for fifteen years and watching you not pick them up and telling myself that was okay, that was just how you were, that was the shape of you." A breath. Something working in his throat. "And I kept putting them out. Every morning. The mug. The socks. The Russian I practiced at the kitchen table at night when you were asleep." He stops. His eyes are very bright. "Because I thought if I stopped, you would take it as permission."

Ilya does not move.

"That is not a marriage," Shane says. Very quiet. Not shouting. Not crying. Something worse—the voice of a man stating a fact he has been afraid of for a long time and has finally run out of reasons not to say. "That is me standing outside a door that is never going to open and calling it love so I can stay there."

The kitchen is very quiet.

"Shane—"

"No." He puts both hands up. "No. I'm done. I find out from Cliff Marlow that your mother died on March 3rd because you wouldn't fucking tell me. My love is management, my fear is ego, I bring up your mother because you’re acting like a crazy person, nothing like the man I married, and you told me I weaponized her. And meanwhile you have a birthday in three weeks and I'm trying to keep you alive for it and you're telling me you didn't ask me to. I am done. You've made your choice." He picks up his plate, throws a towel onto the counter hard enough that the slap reverberates through the room. He goes to the sink and stands there with his back to the room and his shoulders are shaking. "You need to—I need you to go somewhere else for a while. Out. I don't care. Just not in here."

"This is my house too—"

"Then take your half and go stand in it!" Shane finally turns around and his face is blotched and wet and furious and something underneath the furious that is just: devastated. Completely. Ilya has never in fifteen years seen Shane's face do this. "I cannot look at you right now. I cannot—you didn't ask me to. That's what you said. Five years and a marriage and a dog and the furniture we picked out together and you didn't ask me to. Fine. Fine. Go! Get the fuck out!"

Ilya gets his keys from the hook. He can’t feel his fingers.

He opens the front door.

He looks back once—he cannot stop himself, the way you cannot stop yourself looking at a thing you have broken—and Shane is still standing in the kitchen doorway, and his face is doing the thing Ilya has never seen before and will spend the rest of his life trying to stop seeing.

Ilya walks out.

The door closes behind him.

Not a slam. He does not trust himself with a slam. He pulls it shut with a careful, deliberate click, and he stands on the front step in the May night and his hands are shaking and the city goes on around him, Ottawa, correctly, without requiring anything from him.

He sits on the step. Puts his head in his hands.

He does not go back in yet.

But he does not leave.

Outside, the night air is May-cool. Someone's car alarm goes off two streets over and stops. Ottawa goes on around him, correctly, in its Ottawa way, not requiring anything. Anya is at the door. She can't get out. She sits on the other side of the glass and watches him with the steady attention of an animal that has assessed the situation and found it deeply suboptimal and is maintaining position out of loyalty alone.

He looks at her through the glass.

"Ya obloshalsya, Anechka," he says. I fucked up.

She puts her nose against the glass. He puts two fingers to the other side of it.

He puts his hand in his jacket pocket.

The paper is still there. He takes it out.

He has been carrying it since he wrote it. It is soft at the folds now, the creases worn reliable, the kind of paper that has been handled so many times it has started to feel like fabric. He unfolds it in the porch light. He reads the calculation. The numbers are the same numbers they have always been. They add up to the same thing.

He has been adding them up since he was twelve years old in a doorway with a skate bag over his shoulder and the apartment gone cold. He has been adding them since the cross went into his pocket and he walked out of the room and kept walking. He added them in three countries and two languages. He added them the morning after Shane asked him to marry him and he said yes and meant it entirely and still, underneath, kept the arithmetic running. He has been doing it so long he does not know what kind of a person he would be without it. The subtraction of the numbers leaves a shape he cannot picture.

He looks at it.

He thinks: I wrote this.

Not the numbers. He means: he wrote this. The conclusion was not handed to him from the outside. He followed the numbers willingly. He chose to go deeper at every circle—the church, the calendar mark, the laptop at two in the morning, the hits he didn't duck, the speedometer at ninety. He chose each descent. He has been the pilgrim all along, and the guide, and the thing in the dark the guide was leading him toward.

He wrote the destination.

He holds the paper for a long time.

The porch light hums.

He does not throw the paper away. He is not there yet and he knows he is not there yet and he is not going to perform the gesture before he means it. But he folds it again, along the same creases, and he holds it in his closed hand, and he thinks:

I could write a different one.

He does not know what it looks like. He is not certain he knows how to begin it. He does not know if the arithmetic will agree to stop. But the thought is there, in the May night, tentative as something trying its first weight on new ground:

I could.

He hears the front door open after some uncertain amount of time.

Shane comes out.

His face is still wet. Shane sits down on the step beside him. Not close. Not far. But close enough that their arms are nearly touching.

They sit.

After a long moment, Shane says, very quietly: "You bought this house."

"Yes."

"And I threw you out of it."

A beat. "Yes."

Shane makes a sound. It is not quite a laugh. It is the thing next to a laugh that arrives when something is terrible and also, from a very particular angle, absurd. "That—" He stops. "That really shouldn't be funny."

"It is a little," Ilya says.

"It's not."

He pinches his fingers close together. A little.

Shane covers his face with his hands. "I don't want to live in separate halves of this house." Muffled. "You'd take the good bath salts."

"Obviously."

"And I can't split the espresso machine."

"No one is splitting the espresso machine."

"And I'd end up—" His voice has gone thick. "I'd be a lonely cat dad. Some stray would wander in and I'd let it. Then more. And eventually they'd eat me." He lifts his face. His eyes are very bright. "I don't want to be a widow, Ilya."

Ilya looks at his husband—red and blotched and wet-faced, cataloguing his hypothetical feline death on their front step at nine in the evening—and something presses behind his sternum so hard it almost doesn't fit.

"You would be a very attractive widower," he says.

"That is not—"

"You’d meet some man in a small town eventually. Very romantic. There would be a covered bridge. Baked goods."

"Stop it."

"You would find yourself again. After a period of tasteful—"

"Stop." But the corner of Shane's mouth has done something. Just the corner. Which was the whole point. "I don't want a Hallmark rebound. I want you."

"I know," Ilya says. "I know."

They sit for a while.

Then, quieter, before he loses the nerve: "Get remarried. After. If."

Shane goes completely still. "What."

"I mean it. I hate it. I would hate it from wherever I am, another sick bastard touching what is mine." He says it to the street, not to Shane's face, because Shane's face would make it impossible to finish. "But I love you more than I love being the only one. So. Get remarried. Have a good life. Put a picture of me on the mantel so I am haunting the next guy."

A long silence.

"Ilya." Shane's voice is very quiet. "Are you—are you leaving me?"

"What?" He turns to look at him. "No. What—"

"Are you—do you want a divorce, are you—"

"No, Shane. What is wrong with you—"

"Then why are you—" Shane's voice pitches up, loses its management entirely, becomes something nakedly frightened. "You're sitting here telling me to get remarried and I don't know what—I don't know how to hear that—"

"I am trying to be generous—"

"You're scaring me half to death is what you're doing—"

"I want you to have a good life! After I am—" He stops. He looks at the street. "If I am not there. I am trying to say I love you enough to want your life to be good even in the version where I am not in it. This is a loving thing to say."

Shane stares at him.

"This is," Ilya says, slightly more quietly, "a loving thing. In my opinion."

"In your—" Shane puts both hands over his mouth. He is somewhere between crying and something that is not quite crying again.

Ilya understands it. It is easy to keep crying once you’ve already begun. He feels his own nose burning.

"I want my ring in the ground with you," Shane says, through his hands, muffled and fierce. "I want to be buried next to you in the most expensive plot available because you would have wanted the best one. I want to outlive you by six minutes maximum, and I want those six minutes to be very peaceful because I will know you are waiting. That is what I want. I will not be putting a picture of you on any mantel because there will be no mantel because there will be no after without you in it. Do you understand me?"

Shane's voice does something that is not anger and not grief and is the thing underneath both of them: it is a husband telling you, very quietly, that he has already lived the version of this he is refusing, in his head, every morning when he puts the mug out, and he is refusing it again right now, to your face, as many times as it takes.

Ilya looks at him.

Shane looks back. His eyes are very bright and very serious and entirely without management.

"You are," Ilya says, after a moment, "extremely dramatic."

"I am extremely in love with you, which is the same thing."

"You are insane." He thinks of Shane yelling in his face, breaking apart. “You are the crazy person.”

"Yes." Shane drops his hands from his face. "I'm insane about you specifically. This is your fault. You have been very difficult to recover from for nearly fifteen years and I have given up trying." He exhales. Long. Shaky. "Don't. Don't tell me to get remarried. Don't plan for a version without you. Plan for the version with you. That is the only version I am interested in."

Ilya looks at his husband on their front step in the May night.

He says, very quietly: "Okay."

"Okay."

The street is quiet. Someone's porch light across the road clicks off. The May dark settles around them.

Ilya looks at his husband's profile—the jaw, the set of it, the specific furrow that has not fully released since the argument, the redness around his eyes that Shane will not acknowledge and Ilya will not mention. He has been looking at this face for nearly fifteen years. He knows every version of it. He has catalogued versions of it the way he catalogues Shane's hockey hands, the Vancouver joke, the way he folds the dish towel over the oven handle. He has a private library of this face and he has been adding to it since before he had the right to.

The face in the front pew of the dream church. Shane with nothing left to manage.

He thinks: I put that there.

He thinks: I don't want to put that there.

He has been carrying the arithmetic for twenty years and it has never cost him anything he could see. He has been carrying it inside a life that accumulated around him—teammates, cities, the dog, the house, this person sitting on a step beside him in the May dark—and he treated it as separate from those things, the arithmetic in one room and the life in another, and the wall between the rooms so familiar he stopped seeing it as a wall.

There is no wall.

There has not been a wall. Shane has been on the other side of it paying attention since before Ilya knew he was paying attention, and the cost of the arithmetic has been going somewhere, is going somewhere, has been sitting on the face beside him all spring.

He opens his mouth.

"Shane."

"Yeah."

He looks at the street. Not at Shane—not yet, not while he is finding the sentence, because Shane's face will make it impossible to finish.

"I want to tell you what's happening.” His swallows hard. "I stopped taking my medication because the logic was—" He stops. He finds the true sentence. "The logic was that the medication is for a person who believes in the days on the other side of June 15th. And I was not sure I was that person."

Shane makes a sound. Very quiet. Not a word.

Something crosses his face. The expression of waiting for a very long time in a hallway for a door that has just, quietly, opened.

His eyes go bright.

"I look like her," Ilya says. "I sound like her. I have her face and her hands and her way of going still when a room has too much in it. I cry like her. I have been carrying everything she ever was since I was twelve years old. Every single thing she was, I have it." He looks up. "She died at thirty-two. And I have been doing the math since the afternoon I came home and the apartment had gone cold. Every single day. And the math keeps pointing at June."

Shane's jaw is tight. He is listening with the whole of himself—not interrupting, not reassuring, just receiving it.

"I know is not logic," Ilya says. "I know it is the sickest kind of circular reasoning. Galina has been saying this to me in twenty different ways for three years. And I still cannot stop the math." He looks at his hands. "That is the honest thing. That is what I am afraid of."

The silence that follows is not empty.

Shane says, very rough: "That's all you had to say."

"I know."

"That's all I needed. For months. That's all."

"I know." Ilya puts his face in his hands. "I'm sorry.  For the lying. And the things I said—"

"Were some of the worst things you've ever said to me." Shane says. Plain. "And I know you know that."

"I know."

"You can't do that. You can't use that. The fact that I care about you and love you and would do anything to keep you. I don't care if it's too much, or if it makes you sick, or if you can't handle it. I can't be any different."

"I know. I know." He looks up. Shane’s face is blurrier than usual. "I'm sorry."

The porch holds what has just been confessed.

Shane reaches across the step. His hand moves toward Ilya's arm and lands on the chain instead—the cross, outside the shirt, the old gold of it in the porch lights. His hand closes around it. Just for one second. The weight of his hand on the thing Ilya has been carrying alone since he was twelve.

It feels lighter, somehow.

"At thirty-four," Shane says when they have been sitting a while, Ilya’s head on his shoulder, "you'll have known me as long as you haven't. Every year after, the scale tips further. More years with me than without." He pauses. "I've been thinking about that since March."

Ilya squeezes his waist harder, relishes the warmth where all their limbs are tangled up.

"I will sit here until you figure it out." Shane says it like something that has been decided for longer than it has been said. "I will see a future for you when you can't see it. I will hold that. But you have to tell me when it's bad. I need to know what I'm missing."

"Okay," Ilya says. "I promise."

"I'm sorry," Shane says.

Ilya looks at him, incredulously.

"What could you possibly be sorry for? You did not do anything."

"Because I should’ve pushed sooner, before it got so bad—"

"This is the North American thing." Something loosens in Ilya's chest. Not relief. Relief's smaller sibling—something adjacent, something that is not nothing. "The apologizing for things that are not your fault. I have lived here nearly fifteen years and it still makes no sense to me. You apologize when someone walks into you. You apologize to Anya when she steps on your foot."

Shane exhales through his nose.

"You did not do anything wrong," Ilya says. "I did not tell you. These are different sentences. Is difficult to see me when I won’t let you.”

Shane is quiet for a moment. Then: "She saw you. For twelve years."

"What is twelve years in a long life." He rolls his shoulders, testing the weight on them. "I wasted six of them probably just learning to say ya goloden and ya ustal and ya tebya lyublyu." He pauses. "Hungry and tired and I love you.”

"That is the whole vocabulary," Shane says. "That's all anyone needs."

Ilya looks at him.

Shane puts his forehead against Ilya's. "Galina. This week. For real this time."

"Yes."

"Good."

They sit on the step and Anya is still watching them through the glass and the street is still and the May night is still and between them is everything that was said and everything that was not said and the fragile thing that exists after a fight that went somewhere true, which is not the same as a fight that went somewhere fine, which is in some ways harder and in some ways the only kind worth having.

He is sitting on the same step as Shane. That is all that changed. That is the whole shift.

"Shane."

"Yeah."

Ilya is looking at his husband, who has just offered permanence like you offer something you have already decided and are not reopening for discussion.

Ilya thinks about the church, the empty church, the old stone, the cry without sound. He thinks about the dreams—the plane, the pills, the underground cold, all the variations on the same conclusion, the different doors to the same room. He thinks about the arm, dropping in every version of the dream, and about the dreams where he cannot tell whose arm it is. He thinks about octopuses, briefly, and immediately dismisses the thought, and then comes back to it, because the octopuses are genuinely remarkable and he is allowed to think about remarkable things even on one of the worst nights of his marriage.

I didn't ask you to.

Shane, sitting on a front step next to him at nine in the evening when he would have been entirely justified in staying inside.

Ilya doesn’t know if he’s ready yet, to examine all of it. But right now, sitting next to Shane, watching this night and these stars he didn’t see before—I know that I want to be here. That is the true thing. Whatever else is true, that is also true.

Ilya reaches over. He takes Shane's face between both hands and makes him turn. Shane lets himself be turned, lets his face be squished how Ilya likes.

He says, in Russian, because some things are still Russian: "Ya tebya lyublyu."

Shane says, in his careful over-correct Russian, the Russian of someone who learned it somewhere private because someone he loves dreams in a language he can't reach: "Ya tozhe tebya lyublyu."

The pronunciation is slightly wrong. It has always been slightly wrong. The wrongness of it has always been, somehow, the most accurate thing.

The spring before they got married, Shane came home with a fig tree.

Not a large one. A small, slightly wind-battered fig tree in a terracotta pot, which he set down in the backyard with the air of someon who has already made a decision and is now simply executing it.

Ilya looked at it from the kitchen window. He went outside. He stood next to Shane and looked at it.

"This will not survive the winter," he said.

"It might."

"Shane. This is Ottawa. This is—" He searched for the right frame of reference. "This is one of the coldest capital cities in the world. This is a fact. You were born here. You can look this up."

"I know." Shane crouched down to adjust the position of the pot. He turned it slightly, apparently finding a better angle.

"Figs are a Mediterranean fruit."

"I'm aware of that."

"They do not want to be here."

"Well." Shane stood up. Put his hands on his hips (unjustly sexy). Looked at the tree. "They're here."

This was not a response to Ilya's point. Shane knows this. He had simply stopped engaging with the argument and was now looking at his tree with that satisfaction that Shane Hollander carried everywhere.

"It will die in November," Ilya told him. "And then you will be sad about it. And I will have to hear about the tree."

"You won't have to hear about the tree."

"I will hear about the tree. This is what happens when you plan things that do not work. You speak them out loud. Very—thoroughly. With a lot of detail. You are incapable of graciously failing."

Shane looked at him. There was something happening in his face, the corner of his mouth doing the thing it does when he is about to win an argument and is trying to decide how much to enjoy it. He looked back at the tree. He said nothing.

The argument ended there, which should have been a signal.

In October, Shane wrapped it. Burlap and twine, a careful, methodical wrap of someone who had clearly looked this up, probably multiple times, probably with reference to Ottawa climate zones. He staked it. He mulched the base with the seriousness of preparing a thing for something difficult. He stood back and looked at it.

Ilya watched this from the kitchen window and felt something that was partly fond and partly exasperated and, underneath both, a small and unreasonable warmth he was not going to inspect.

November came. December. The tree stood in its wrapping in the back lot through the kind of Ottawa winter that Ottawa produces with the cheerful indifference of somewhere that has stopped apologizing for itself. Ilya did not look at it much. He assumed certain things.

In April, Shane unwrapped it.

Ilya was on the couch when Shane came back inside. Shane did not say anything. He went to the kitchen and made coffee. He moved around in there with the energy of containing something, which was a detectable trait, because Shane is actually not very good at containing things he finds funny and does not know this about himself.

"What," Ilya said.

"Nothing."

"You are doing a face."

"I'm not doing a face."

"You are," Ilya said, "doing a very specific face."

Shane turned around with both coffees. His expression was the one. The one that means he has been waiting, patiently, for the exact right moment, and the moment has arrived and he is savoring it.

"It's fine," Shane said. "The tree. It's fine. It came through."

Ilya looked at him.

"All the leaves. New growth on the branches. It's completely fine." Shane set Ilya's coffee in front of him with gentleness that performs great restraint. He sat down. He picked up his own mug. He said, pleasantly, "You were saying? About the Mediterranean?"

Ilya said nothing.

"About how it would die in November?"

"I said," Ilya said, with dignity, "that it would most likely not survive."

"Hm." Shane drank his coffee. "Interesting. Because it survived."

"This is one year—"

"It survived the winter, Ilya."

"Statistically—"

"The tree," Shane said, "that you said would die, did not die. I would like to note this for the record." He was smiling now, which he had been trying not to do and had clearly given up on. "I would like it entered into evidence."

"You are insufferable," Ilya told him, but he felt himself smiling. There were few things better than a Shane who had won and was loud about it.

"I'm right."

"These are not mutually exclusive."

Shane laughed. The real one, unguarded, the one Ilya has been cataloguing for years and has never gotten used to. He put his mug down and laughed and Ilya watched him and felt, with the completeness of something that had been accumulating for a long time, the absolute specific certainty that he was going to marry this person and that nothing about it would ever feel like a reasonable decision and that this was, in the end, entirely correct.

They got married in July.

The sapling leafed out properly that summer. Dark leaves, thin and young still but stubborn, exactly as certain of themselves as the person who planted them. Ilya has walked past it for two years now and has not mentioned it again. He has looked at it sometimes from the kitchen window, going about whatever it does—he does not know much about fig trees and has not researched them, on principle. It continues regardless. It is apparently not waiting for his acknowledgment.

Neither is Shane.

This is the thing Ilya has been trying to find language for, across five years and two languages: the feeling of being loved by someone who plants things in hostile ground without consulting you and then waits, without requiring anything from the waiting, to be proven right. Who puts the mug out every morning without marking it as a thing he has done. Who has decided on a future and is not revisiting the decision.

Ilya stands in the kitchen sometimes and looks at the tree through the window and thinks: he was right about the tree.

He does not say this to Shane.

Shane already knows.

xi. the climb

They don't bring any of it back up the next day, or the day after, or the one after that.

This is not avoidance. It is the silence of people who have said everything that needs saying and are now letting it settle into its actual shape.

Ilya calls Galina in the morning. She answers on the second ring.

"Ya rada, chto ty pozvonil." I'm glad you called. Not: where have you been. Just: glad.

He has an appointment Friday. He puts the phone down and feels, for the first time in months, like a person making a decision rather than a person being made by decisions.

He takes the medication. He holds the pill in his palm for a moment before swallowing it—not dramatic, just marking it. The weight of a small white thing that is choosing to be here when he cannot always access the choosing for himself.

He closes the cupboard. Shane is already in the kitchen.

He has always been in the kitchen first. What is new is the way Ilya sees it—Shane turning before Ilya has made enough noise to announce himself, the way he always turns, the way that says I knew you were coming before you got there because I know exactly what you sound like moving through our house.

Shane hands him the mug. Already out. Already waiting.

"Good morning, malysh," Ilya says.

"Morning," Shane says and kisses the corner of his mouth. His voice is deliciously raspy the way it is in mornings.

Anya sits on both their feet simultaneously, a feat of positioning she accomplishes with the authority of a creature who has decided that the household is in a delicate condition and she is the appropriate stabilizing force.

They drink their coffee side by side, shoulders touching.

The protein bar appears on the top of his gear bag on a Friday.

Ilya notices it when he's changing out after practice. He picks the bar up. He looks at it. He looks around.

Troy is at his cubby with his back to the room, pulling his sweatshirt on with the focused attention of a man who has just put something on top of someone's gear bag and is now very interested in the logistics of his own clothing.

Ilya looks at the bar.

He thinks about the equipment room, and the dinner on Elgin, and the half-block walk in the March air, and the sentences Troy said avoiding his eye. He thinks about the game day sticks, which he did not know Troy had seen, which it turns out Troy saw, which Troy then apparently walked across a parking lot to tell Shane about, because Ilya had found out about this in the way he finds out about things he was not supposed to find out—from Troy’s face, on the ice, laser-focused on the puck passed from Ilya rather than any of Ilya’s signals, and from Shane’s face, in a kitchen, on a morning when Shane was performing normalcy with slightly too much attention to it.

He has been quietly furious about this for eleven days.

He has also, in a part of himself he doesn't examine directly, felt something about it that is not fury.

He looks at the protein bar.

Troy has not turned around. He is now apparently very interested in his own shoes.

Ilya unwraps the bar. He takes a bite. He does this deliberately, standing where Troy can hear the wrapper, making a statement that is also a concession that is also a thank you that is also I know what you did and I am not done being annoyed about it.

Troy doesn't say anything. He puts his shoes on. Drops one in the process.

Ilya takes another bite.

Troy stands up, picks up his bag, and turns around. He looks at the bar in Ilya's hand. He looks at Ilya's face. Something in his face does a thing that is not quite a smile—it's the Troy version, the one Harris says is his resting asshole face when he's satisfied about something.

"See you tomorrow," Troy says.

"Yes," Ilya says. "You will."

Troy walks out.

He finishes the bar.

He puts the wrapper in his pocket, not the trash, which is irrational and he knows it and he does it anyway.

He texts Troy: next week I buy dinner.

Ilya goes to Galina on Friday. She asks how was last week. He tells her all of it—the fight, the front step, the remarriage speech that backfired, the paper with the calculation. She listens. He cries once, briefly, at a point he does not anticipate. She hands him tissues with the patience of someone who is accustomed to grown men bursting into tears before her.

He has an appointment the following Friday. He goes to that one too.

Troy calls on a Saturday.

Not texts. Calls. Ilya stares at the name for two rings before he answers, because Troy Barrett calling instead of texting means something has happened and he cannot tell yet if it is a bad something or a Troy something, which is a different category.

"You got Anya right now?"

"Yes."

"Come walk her. I got Chiron."

Chiron is Harris's dog, theoretically, except that Chiron has been Troy’s running buddy and lunch partner and carry-on luggage on flights for eleven months now under a set of circumstances that have been explained to Ilya twice and that he does not fully understand and has decided are not his business. Chiron is enormous now. He and Anya have a relationship that Ilya would describe as Chiron being deeply in love and Anya being deeply aware of this and considering it a structural feature of the universe, everyone in love with her, that she is under no obligation to reciprocate.

They meet at the park two blocks from the rink. Chiron is pulling the lead so hard Troy's arm is at an entirely incorrect angle and Troy’s face has the expression of a man who has been doing this for eleven months and has made peace with the arm.

Anya and Chiron do their greeting. The involves Chiron putting his whole face on Anya. Anya permits this with the composure of a queen granting an audience.

They walk.

After maybe half a block Troy says: "You and Hollander good?"

"Yes."

"Good." He says it not looking at Ilya, looking at wherever Chiron is trying to go. "Because I told him about the sticks and I figured you knew that by now."

"I knew."

Troy nods. “Yeah. You kept giving me those bitchy eyes.”

“I do not have bitchy eyes.”

“Okay,” Troy says. “Then explain why your face always looks like you’re expecting me to say something dumb.”

“Pattern recognition.”

Troy points at him. “Bitchy.”

Chiron lurches sideways at a pigeon. Troy goes with it, which is the only option with Chiron. "Was it bad? The fight?"

"Yes."                                   

"Yeah." He nods again. "Harris and me had a bad one in February. It was—" He makes a sound. "Yeah. It was bad."

Ilya waits.

"We're fine now," Troy says. "Just. Takes a while after. Like a bruise."

They walk another half block. Anya is monitoring a squirrel with the professional interest of a creature that has never successfully caught one and has not updated her confidence about future attempts.

"The sticks," Ilya says.

"Yeah."

"I didn't know you saw."

"I know you didn't." Troy glances at him sideways. Just briefly. "I wasn't trying to—I wasn't going around you. I just." He looks back at the path. "I know what it looks like. I know you remember, when I came here, too."

Ilya says nothing.

"You're not gonna yell at me about it?"

"I already thought about yelling at you about it," Ilya says. "For about eleven days. Then I ate the protein bar."

Troy's mouth does the thing. The satisfied thing. He looks back at Chiron.

"Okay," he says.

They walk. The park is doing what parks do on late-spring mornings—ducks on the water, a family with a stroller, someone's elderly golden retriever moving at its own pace and entirely at peace with it. Chiron wants to meet the golden retriever. Troy redirects him with the patient authority of long practice.

"You doing better?" Troy asks. Not like Hayes would ask it, or even Marlow, not brash, not contained, not measuring, not filing. Just asking and accepting any answer.

"I think so," Ilya says. Which is true. Which he knows is true today in a way he was not certain of a few weeks ago. "I have Galina again next week."

"Good."

"Da."

Another stretch. Anya has given up on the squirrel and is now participating in a walk of shame.

"Harris wants to do the Elgin place again," Troy says. "Next week. If you're up for it."

"Yes," Ilya says. "I'm up for it."

Troy nods. That's it. That's the whole thing. He doesn't make it more than it is. He just nods and lets Chiron drag him sideways toward the duck pond and calls back over his shoulder: "He's going to order the wrong thing again."

"He always orders the wrong thing."

"Every single time." Troy sounds genuinely baffled by this. "There is literally a perfect option and he does not take it."

"This is Harris," Ilya says.

"This is Harris," Troy agrees, resigned and fond.

They do the full loop. They part ways at the park entrance, Chiron pulling hard toward home now, ready to be done. Anya watches him go with regal indifference.

Ilya walks home with her. He opens the front door.

Shane is in the kitchen, humming to himself, peering at a recipe.

Ilya sneaks up from behind and pinches his butt, making him shriek and then laugh.

It is a Sunday in June and Ilya does nothing.

This requires more effort than it sounds. He is a man who has spent his adult life treating stillness as a failure of momentum, for whom rest has always arrived as exhaustion rather than choice, the body simply refusing to continue rather than the self deciding to stop. He has rested when he had to. He has never rested on purpose.

Shane is at his parents' for lunch. Ilya was invited. He said: go, I will come next time, I want to stay home.

Shane looked at him for a moment with the look that is now taking measurements of a different kind—not the worried kind, the other kind, the one that is recalibrating toward something that might be okay—and said: okay. And kissed him for a moment too long, smiled shyly, and left.

Ilya takes off the cross.

Not dramatically. He lifts the chain over his head and sets it on the kitchen table, on the wood beside his coffee cup, and looks at it for a moment. He has never taken it off from the moment he put it on. Not in the shower, not during games, not during sex. The chain pools against itself. The cross lies flat.

He goes outside and sits under the fig tree.

On the seventh day he rested. Ilya has never been sure whether that was a choice or a necessity, and has decided lately that the distinction doesn't matter—that the stopping is the point, regardless. That you can only see what you've made from the outside of it. That rest is not the absence of the work but proof that the work was real.

He is outside his work. He is looking at it.

Anya is in the grass. She has found a patch of sun and is lying in it with the absolute commitment of a creature who has no ambivalence about warmth, who does not wonder if she deserves it. She simply is in it.

He does not think about June 15th.

He checks for it the way he checks for the cross—and finds it simply not there. Not suppressed. Absent. The way pain is absent from a place that has been hurting long enough that the absence is its own kind of information. Does this hurt.

He thinks: she had Sundays too.

One hour of them. The room that was hers. One hour a week to set something down, and then it was over, and she picked it up again and carried it home. He understood at seven that her face in church was the face of the thing underneath. He did not understand, at seven, that she also had to put that face back on when the hour was over.

He has been counting Tuesdays for twenty years.

The tree does not require his acknowledgment. It is dark-leaved, certain, doing what it does with or without him. He told it once that it would not survive. It has made its position on this clear.

He stretches his legs out in the grass, strokes Anya's warm fur, and nothing makes him afraid.

When Shane comes home, he pokes his nose outside. The sun is setting over the trees, the sky gone orange and salmon pink.

"Baby?" The cross that was on the table is in his hands. He tilts his head to one side in the way that always reminds Ilya of Anya—same brown eyes, same angle.

"Rodnoy," Ilya says, smiling. He can feel his eyes crinkling, the warmth on his face. "Good lunch, milyy moy?"

"I brought leftovers." Shane steps outside, bends down, and kisses the warm spot over Ilya's heart where the cross usually rests. "Lots of potatoes. Some cake too."

Ilya bows his head.

Shane puts the cross back on.

It is a Wednesday in June and Ilya is making dinner.

Not David's recipe. Something simpler, something that belongs to him rather than to the archive of things he has been following on autopilot. He is making it from memory, from the body-knowledge of someone who learned to cook in a sequence of temporary kitchens in three different countries, adapting to what was available, building a vocabulary of dishes that are his and no one else's.

He is not following a recipe. He is just cooking.

The kitchen smells like something he cannot name. Not the spice without a name—that is hers, that will always be hers, and he has made peace with the not-remembering. This is something else. This is something else. His kitchen. His Wednesday.

Shane is at the table doing something on his laptop with focused energy. He has been pointedly not offering to help because Ilya said specifically, twice, that he did not need help, and Shane is respecting this with attentiveness of watching without watching.

"You're humming," Shane says, without looking up.

Ilya stops. He had not known he was humming.

"What is it?"

He thinks about it. He does not know. Something from the radio in a different kitchen, in a different city, a Wednesday in March in Boston in his first year here, before Shane was his Shane, before he knew what Ottawa would become to him. A song that has been in his body since without being in his mind.

"I don't know," he says.

"It's nice," Shane says, and goes back to his laptop.

Ilya turns back to the stove.

He hums it again, quietly, all the way through to the end of the phrase.

He sets two plates on the table. Shane closes the laptop. Anya takes up her position. The evening begins.

On the third day. Not with thunder, not with the stone rolled back and the guards falling senseless. Just: a Wednesday. Dinner. A song he didn't know he still had.

One evening, almost two weeks after the fight, they are in bed and it is not late and neither of them is asleep.

Ilya says, "I need to tell you something."

Shane goes still.

"There is a spider," Ilya says. "On the bedroom ceiling. Southeast corner, above the closet."

A beat. "Okay."

"I have been checking it every morning. First thing. Before the coffee."

A longer beat. "How long?"

"Nine weeks." He looks at the ceiling. At the corner. The spider is there, continuing whatever route it has decided to take across the southeast quadrant. "I think I started doing it around the time I put the medication back in the bottle. I don't know if those things are connected. But I started checking it every morning to confirm it was still there. Something in the same place it was the day before. Something still present, still continuing."

Shane is very quiet.

"I have not named it," Ilya says.

"That sounds right."

"I didn't want to name it."

"Yeah." Shane adjusts so his shoulder is more fully against Ilya's. "I think that's correct."

They sit with this. The spider, unnamed, nine weeks of mornings, the small specific attachment that Ilya has been carrying alone and which now exists in the room between them.

Ilya says, "I think the checking of it was the part of me that still knew it was worth checking. Even when the rest of me didn't."

Shane is very still.

"I wanted to tell you that," Ilya says.

"Thank you for telling me that," Shane says quietly. "I am very glad you told me."

They lie there and hold hands on the sliver of mattress between them. Anya is at the foot of the bed, breathing in the quick light way of a dog doing something vivid in a dream. The room is warm. The curtain moves.

Ilya closes his eyes.

He is still here. He will be here tomorrow. He will check the spider in the morning, or possibly let it out through a cracked window, its route complete.

He will check.

The next evening, he and Shane are on the couch and Anya has been sent to her bed and the room is dark except for the streetlight and it begins, as it usually begins, with Ilya watching Shane's face in the television light—the stillness of him when he is focused on tape, how his jaw sets when something bothers him, the unconscious movement of his mouth when he is about to say something he decides against.

Ilya has an entire private library of these. He adds to it constantly.

He moves Anya, gently. She protests. He ignores her.

He puts his mouth on the side of Shane's neck, below the ear, in the place that makes Shane's whole body rearrange itself—not dramatically, just: the body making a different set of priorities.

"I'm watching—"

"You are watching," Ilya says, tipping him back into the cushions. "I will also watch."

What follows is not entirely about tenderness and not entirely about the other thing. It is about both simultaneously, as it always is with them, which Ilya has learned is only possible when you have been paying attention to a person for long enough to know where the line is between the two and how to stand on both sides of it.

"I have something," Ilya says, once he has successfully bullied Shane into the bedroom.

Shane turns his head on the pillow. Hickeys line his long neck. "What kind of something."

"A treat."

A pause. "Should I be concerned."

"You should be interested." Ilya reaches past him to the nightstand. "You mentioned, in passing—"

Shane makes the noise of remembering what he mentioned in passing and recalibrating. "I didn't think you were—I didn't know if you—"

"I thought about it."

"Clearly."

"I thought about it for three weeks."

"You are very thorough."

"I am a professional." Ilya holds it up. In the dark it is not dramatic—just a shape, ordinary in the way objects are ordinary when they are removed from context. "And I thought: my husband mentioned this. In passing. Over pasta. And then turned the color of a stop sign."

"I was not—"

"You were exactly that color, pomidor."

The noise Shane makes is something between mortified and something else entirely—the something else winning by a significant margin by the time Ilya has arranged things to his satisfaction.

The toy is, Ilya thinks, slightly larger than him, and with an absurd amount of bells and whistles. It owes no blood to a brain or other corporeal limits. This is, he decides, as he gets to work, a feature rather than a flaw.

"I know it aches, sweetheart," he coos, in Russian first and then in English because Shane deserves the English. He circles the fluttering rim with a curious light touch, making Shane cry out. "Don't worry. I'll take care of you."

"Would you please," Shane says, with great dignity, "please, stop talking to my asshole—"

"You're doing so well," Ilya tells his hole with complete sincerity, ignoring Shane entirely, "you're perfect for me, made for me, just look at you," and Shane makes a noise that suggests he has lost the thread of whatever argument he was mounting.

This goes on for some time.

His wrist hurts from how hard and fast he is working—he takes both of Shane's legs in one hand, folding them up against Shane's chest, and watches Shane's eyes go glassy, watches his mouth fall open, watches the precise moment when the animal brain takes over and Shane stops being Shane Hollander who manages everything and becomes something simpler and more fundamental: a person being taken apart in the very best way, in the specific way he has decided only Ilya is allowed to do.

Shane whines. A genuinely undignified sound. "I want—Ilya—I want the real—"

"I know what you want."

Ilya feels lightheaded suddenly, watching it go in and out, Shane's greedy hole fluttering around it and accepting it as easy as breathing. He can practically feel it around his own cock, and is dizzy thinking about how it was always his cock, and would always ever only be his cock, and how Shane belongs to him. Fuck the Hallmark man. His hole, his husband, his, his, his.

"Then give it to me—"

Ilya yanks the silicone free, which has Shane making a noise like something dying of the emptiness, and the noise of it sends lightning down Ilya's spine because of what it means—because Shane makes that noise specifically, Shane Hollander who manages everything, who has never in his life been anything less than self-possessed in any room other than this one, makes that specific bereft sound when Ilya takes something away.

He is not, he has concluded, entirely sane about this.

He finds this fact about himself acceptable.

He fills what was empty.

And then he does not stop. He gives Shane no time to adjust, no pause, no breath—just deep and certain and devastating, the full weight of him, fifteen years of wanting distilled into something that has no language, and Shane's mouth falls open and stays open and nothing comes out. Not a word. Not a sound. Just the shape of one, lips parted around a noise that cannot find itself.

Ilya watches this happen. He does not look away.

Shane's eyes go. His whole body is covered in goosebumps despite the warmth of the room, and there's drool at the corner of his mouth that he cannot do anything about because he is not currently in possession of his higher functions, and Ilya keeps going, deep and relentless, holding Shane's hips firm against the mattress with both hands like something that must be kept from floating away.

"I know," Ilya says softly, in Russian. Almost gently. The condescension underneath it is a structural feature, not an add-on—it is load-bearing, it is part of what makes Shane's eyes flutter. "Is so much for you, huh? I know, baby. I know."

Shane turns his face into the pillow.

A noise comes out of him—finally, after all that silence—breathless and wrecked and half a sob, muffled by cotton.

Ilya pounds him harder.

He is not, he has concluded, entirely sane about this either.

Shane comes without warning, keening loud and recklessly, knuckles white against the pillow, moaning Ilya’s name over and over again.

Ilya holds him through it. He is, in this moment, not thinking about June 15th. He is not thinking about the pill on the bathroom shelf or the calendar mark or the corridor that does not end. He is thinking about Shane's hands gripping his arms and Shane's voice saying his name in the register that belongs to no one else and the absolute rightness of this, of being exactly here, in this bed, in this body, in this life.

He presses his forehead against Shane's shoulder after. Breathes.

Shane, eventually: "That was so fucking hot."

"Da."

A long pause. The room settles. Shane's hand finds the back of Ilya's neck, runs up into his damp hair—and there it is, the Pavlov thing, the same stupid thing it always is, utterly involuntary—and Ilya laughs into his shoulder.

"What," Shane says.

"Nothing," Ilya says. "Go to sleep."

"What."

"Nothing, malysh. Sleep."

Shane makes the noise of someone who suspects he is missing something and has decided to let it go.

Ya tebya lyublyu, Ilya thinks, in Russian, not out loud. Every life I get. Every one.

He closes his eyes.

He is going to be here in the morning. He decides this deliberately, with effort—choosing the tomorrow the way you choose to believe something you cannot fully prove.

He is in the corridor.

He does not need to orient himself. He has been here enough times now that the corridor has become familiar—the institutional light, the photographs, the floor that is not quite carpet and not quite tile. He walks without hesitation.

The photographs show only the future now. All the past ones have been replaced. He walks past himself at thirty-three, at forty, at ages he has never let himself imagine, wearing the face he will apparently have when he gets there—more worn in some ways, softer in others, recognizably his. Hard-earned. He walks past Shane's face at these ages, too. He walks past a child whose face is turned away, then turns toward him at the next frame, a face that has some of both in it.

He does not stop to look. He doesn't need to. He already knows the face.

He starts to run, filled with urgency he can’t explain. Time ticking somewhere beneath him.

At the corridor's end: the door. He reaches for the handle.

The corridor lengthens.

Not dramatically. Not with any theatrical announcement of wrongness. Just the quiet, implacable geometry of bad dreams: the door exactly where it was, the distance to it now exactly doubled. He walks. The door stays where it is. He walks faster. The corridor breathes, slightly, and the door recedes another measure, unhurried, without malice, with the absolute patience of a thing that does not need to hurry because it has all the time there is.

He stops walking.

He understands. This is the last pull. The corridor has been here since he was twelve—not this corridor specifically, but this, the architecture of the arithmetic, the tunnel that promises an ending and moves the ending back exactly as fast as you move toward it. He knows this structure. He built it himself.

He stands in the middle of it and breathes.

The door does not move.

He does not move toward it.

For a long moment there is only the institutional light and the photographs of the future and his own breathing. Then: something else. The smell. The beeswax. The old stone and accumulated breath. Coming from behind him, not from the door at all.

He turns.

The room full of clocks is behind him. It has always been behind him. He was facing the wrong direction.

He opens it.

All of them running.

He stands in the doorway and listens to the room full of time—tick, tick, tick, not synchronized, not performing anything, just each clock running its own rhythm, the sum of them being simply time continuing, time doing what time does when it has not been stopped. He breathes. The smell of beeswax moves through the room like something that has been waiting for a window to be opened.

She is there.

His mother. Her last appearance. He knows it, the way you know things here, knowing before you know. This is the last time the corridor will show him this room, the last time she will be standing in it. He is not sad about this. He understands it as correct—not because she is leaving, but because the leaving has already happened, and what he has been doing in these nights is simply the long work of accepting the fact of it.

She is standing in the room of running clocks and she is looking at him.

Her face is rested.

Not tired. Rested. The face of someone who has set something down. He has never seen this face. He did not know this face existed. It is hers and it is the version of hers that was not available to her in the house that Grigori built—the face of what she might have been if someone had shown her the door existed.

She looks at him.

She says: Nu vot.

There you are.

He crosses the room.

He stands in front of her.

She reaches up—and this time she reaches him, this time the hand arrives, this time the not-quite-solid of her manages to make contact, and he feels the distinct weight of it: the flat full warm weight of a palm on the top of his head. Resting there. Not long. Not performing anything. Just here, briefly, this weight on this head, this acknowledgment.

He is seven or nine or twelve or thirty-two.

He is all of them at once.

Are you hungry, she says, in the voice he has been trying to reconstruct for twenty years. Ilyusha. Are you hungry.

He is.

He says: Ya budu.

I will be.

She smiles. He has never seen her smile in a dream before—the grief, the bad biographer, kept editing it out. But here it is, her smile, the actual one, the one that requires no performance and contains everything.

She removes her hand from his head. She looks at him one more time.

She says: Togda idi poyesh'. Idi.

Then go eat. Go.

He goes.

He wakes.

Ottawa. Shane is awake. His hand flat on Ilya's chest, over the cross, over the chain. The familiar weight. The practiced placement.

For one second—just one—Ilya does not know whose hand it is.

Then he does.

He covers Shane's hand with his and kisses the fingers, one by one.

He says, in Russian first—because some things are still Russian, because some things belong to the language she gave him, the language his dreams run in, where the real things live before they get translated:

"Ona ne znala, chto est drugoy vyhod."

Then in English, because Shane deserves the English, because this belongs in both rooms:

"She didn't know there was another way out."

Shane doesn't ask where he was. He already knows the flavor of the thing.

"No," Shane says. "She didn't."

Long pause.

"Ya dumayu—ya znayu. Chto on est." I think I know. That it exists. He feels the sentence in his chest as he says it, the strangeness of saying it out loud. "I have had it the whole time. I have been standing next to it and looking the other way."

"And now?"

"Now I know where it is."

"Okay."

"I'm not promising it will be easy."

"I know."

"I will need help."

"I know."

This is not a speech. It is not a declaration. It is the ordinary language of two people establishing that they will be in the same room tomorrow. The tomorrow. The room. That is the whole thing. That is enough.

He opens his hand. The mark—the red line, the twenty-year mark. He looks at it in the dark. He closes his hand around it. Not the white-knuckle grip of sleep. Just holding. Deliberate. Chosen.

xii. тридцать два—thirty-two

June 2nd is not June 15th.

He knows this. Shane knows this. But June 2nd is the morning Shane sets the card beside Ilya's coffee, because June 2nd is the morning Shane decides that some things shouldn't wait for the official occasion, that waiting for the official occasion is a luxury not everyone can afford, and that if Ilya is going to make it to June 15th, he should maybe know now what June 15th is for.

Shane goes back to making eggs. His back is to the room. He has understood, over five years, that ceremony is the mechanism by which Ilya escapes whatever the ceremony is for.

Ilya opens it.

The English first. A paragraph in Shane’s handwriting, the careful, deliberate script of a man who believes all written things will eventually be entered into evidence.

Ilya reads it once—wonderful, sweet, mildly insulting, loving things—then again. He can feel his mouth curving up and tries to stop it before Shane somehow holds him accountable for it.

Below the English: two words in Cyrillic.

Илья. С днём рождения.

Ilya looks at it.

The letters are right. Completely right—practiced somewhere private, worked at with the same focus Shane brings to anything he decides matters. The Й is correct. The soft sign is correct. The spacing has the slight over-correctness of careful love rather than native habit, the handwriting of someone who has looked at this word many times and learned it as a whole thing rather than its parts.

He stares at it until the letters stop being letters and become shapes.

He thinks he has not seen his name written properly in the language it was chosen in—his actual, real name—since he left Russia for good, which is to say he has not been Илья since he buried his father.

The last time he saw his name in this alphabet was Irina's handwriting on the backs of photographs in his apartment in Moscow as he was cleaning it out for his brother. She had a distinct thing she did with the Й—a tiny hesitation before lifting the pen, a pause in the stroke. He never knew if this meant something or was just a feature of her hand, her arm. He never asked. She would have told him.

Shane's Й has no hesitation. It is more technically correct than hers. He wrote it with the certainty of someone who learned the thing and then did it.

Both versions in his mind at once—hers, remembered, and Shane's, present. One written by someone who knew the person the name belonged to. One written by someone trying very hard to know.

"Your Cyrillic," he says, "is very good."

Shane, from the stove: "I practiced. I wanted to get it right."

"You did."

"Is it okay?"

"Is very good, dorogoy," Ilya says. "Thank you."

Shane watches him. He doesn't push.

Ilya looks at the card for a long time.

Илья. She named him. He has been wearing her name and her cross and her way of going still in bad rooms, and he has been doing it for so long that he cannot find the line between himself and her, cannot see where the inheritance ends and the person begins. This is what the arithmetic does. It erases the distinction between who she was and who he is, until he is not a separate person but a continuation, a chapter of a story that already has an ending written.

He puts the card in the drawer where he keeps things he isn't finished with.

Ilya wakes on June 15th.

He knows what day it is before anything resolves—before the ceiling, before the light, before his body has finished determining where it ends and the bed begins. He knows the way you know things your body has been tracking: completely, before thought.

He is thirty-two.

He lies perfectly still and waits.

He waits for the thing. The confirmation. The arrival of whatever this number has been pointing toward for twenty years. The prophecy proving itself.

The ceiling is the ceiling. Different, a little at the cottage, but still a ceiling.

Lightning does not strike the house, and he does not fall headfirst. He does not hang upside down in their bedroom with a serene expression on his face. The stars in the sky do not explode.

Shane is already up—he can hear the coffee machine. The light through the east window is June light, committed and slightly too warm. Ilya has always found it exactly right: it shows everything, doesn't negotiate.

Nothing happens.

He waits longer, in case the prophecy is running slightly behind.

Anya has raised her head from the foot of the bed and is looking at him with the morning expression that means: I know you're awake. I've been monitoring. Let's begin. She thumps her tail twice.

He has thought about this day for twenty years. In his imagination it had the weight of a verdict—not a specific image, not a method or a plan, just the weight.

He is inside it.

From the inside: the ceiling. June light. The coffee machine. Anya waiting for the day to be acknowledged and to be served. From the inside the number is just a number, just a Tuesday in June—the shocking ordinary texture of a day that has contained, in his imagination, the whole weight of fate, and which is just: here. Light. A dog. The coffee machine.

He gets up.

He goes to the kitchen barefoot. Shane at the coffee machine, back to him—Shane turns before Ilya has made enough noise to announce himself, because Shane knows the exact sound of his early-morning movement in this house the way you know anything you have been paying close attention to for five years.

"Morning." Not a question. Just: morning. Here it is. Here you are in it. Still.

Ilya wraps both hands around the mug. The mug was already out—he can tell from the temperature of it, the warmth of a mug that has been waiting.

He is thirty-two. He is still here. He doesn't know yet what to do with that.

He lets it be something he doesn't know what to do with. He thinks that is probably the honest place to start.

He touches the chain at his throat. Notes it. Takes his hand away.

He drinks his coffee.

“Happy Birthday, baby,” Shane says, and presses a warm kiss to the corner of his mouth.

He lifts the tinfoil from a plate, revealing cooling fried cottage cheese pancakes with sour cream and jam. Syrniki—like Irina’s mother made for Irina, and Irina made for Ilya. In the center, a brand-new red candle, slightly bent from the pressure of the foil.

Shane rummages in the drawer for a lighter.

Ilya feels something stirring within him that is softly happy, quietly, and far more overwhelming than what is appropriate for such a soft exchange, really.

“Lyubimyy moy,” he whispers, grabs Shane’s wrist, and pulls him down for a proper kiss.

By noon the kitchen has been colonized.

David arrives first with a container of something that immediately reorganizes the entire olfactory atmosphere of the room. Shane's face transforms. He takes it with both hands. Sets it on the counter with care. David squeezes Ilya's shoulder and wishes him a happy birthday.

Yuna arrives twenty minutes later. She surveys the kitchen with the expression of assessing a situation and finding the situation manageable, and then she begins.

Marlow calls at noon—the exact moment of his birth, he once told Cliff as part of a joke, and Cliff remembered, and now he calls at noon every year, even though it’s not accurate and Ilya doesn’t have the heart to correct him.

"Rozy," he says. "You made it."

"I made it."

"Good." Cliff's voice has the texture of waiting for this call for three months. "That's real good, man."

"Yes," Ilya says. He is watching David and Yuna negotiate the kitchen. "Marley. You should come visit."

"Yeah?"

"Yes. Shane wants you here. And I want you here. Come in the fall, when the city is good."

"Ottawa in the fall, huh."

"You will find it surprisingly tolerable."

"High praise." But Ilya can hear him smiling. "I'll come in October."

"Good."

"You doing okay? Actually okay?"

He thinks about the Galina appointment Thursday. He thinks about the medication he took this morning. He thinks about Shane's Й, practiced in private.

"I'm doing actually okay," he says. "I think."

"That's enough," Cliff says. "That's all I need."

He texted Sveta earlier that morning: Tridtsat dva. Vsyo yeshche zdes. Thirty-two. Still here.

Her voice memo arrived in forty seconds. Forty-five seconds of her laughing and ya znayu, ya znayu, ya znayu and then, at the end, one line he replays twice: Ya vsegda znala, chto ty burvak. I always knew you were a tough bastard.

Yuna sets food in front of him. He eats all of it.

At the end she brings out one more thing. She sets it in front of him. A single bowl, Japanese, something that takes time, something that is hers and her mother's before her. She doesn't explain it.

He looks at it. He looks at her.

"You asked me about it," she says. "Year one. At Christmas."

He barely remembers asking. A casual question, genuine curiosity over a table full of food, still new to the family, trying to make a good impression. He had not expected her to answer with anything other than a polite deflection—he was new, he was careful, he was performing his best version of someone who belonged at this table and was not yet sure he did. He asked and she told him, briefly, the name of it, the origin of it, the holiday it was for, and he had listened and nodded and thought: I will remember this. And had not thought about it again until now, until a bowl of it is in front of him on his thirty-second birthday and the weight of what it took to get here is enormous and peculiar and pressing in from all sides.

She remembered. She filed it for five years and then she brought it.

He does not say anything.

Yuna sits down across from him. She does not ask if it is right. She does not ask if he likes it. She does not perform the offering or require him to perform the receiving. She simply sits. Presence is the whole of what is needed. Explanation would only make it smaller.

Ilya looks at the bowl.

He thinks about his mother at the stove. Ilyusha. The diminutive. The version of his name that existed only in her mouth, in those mornings before the light decided to commit. Are you hungry. The bowl of something hot. The hand on his head—the flat full warm weight of it, resting for a moment, the whole world in a gesture that took three seconds and left no visible mark.

He thinks: she asked if he was hungry and she fed him and she put her hand on his head and that was the whole of it, that was the love available to her, and she gave it fully and it was not enough to save her and it was not nothing.

He thinks: this woman across from me asked a casual question five years ago at a table where I was a guest and she kept it like a promise and then she kept it like a fact about me, about what I might someday need, and she brought it out on the right day in the right bowl without being asked and is sitting here not requiring anything from me at all.

He is quiet for a long time.

Yuna does not fill the silence. This is, he understands, the precise skill of her—she learned to leave room. She raised a son who leaves room. She has been leaving room for Ilya for five years and he has not always known what to do with the space but it has been there, quietly, accumulating.

"Spasibo," he says finally. Thank you. His voice is not entirely steady. He does not try to make it steady. “Is very good.”

Yuna looks at him across the table. Her eyes are very brown and exactly like her son’s and she does not look away. "I have been paying attention for a long time," she says.

He thinks about the mug already out. He thinks about care that doesn't need to be witnessed.

"I know," he says. "I know you have."

He eats it carefully, sitting down, surrounded by people he loves. He does not rush. He finishes all of it.

Late afternoon, Ilya holds Anya's face in both hands. She looks at him with the complete devotion of a creature who requires nothing from him except his presence.

"My sdelali eto," he tells her. We made it. "Ty i ya."

She licks his nose.

He thinks: she didn't have this.

He lets it be full this time. He doesn't cut it off at the edges the way he usually does. He lets it move through him the way he moved through the church—one by one, in order, without looking away.

She didn’t have Hayes, standing near the back of the rink with his hands in his coat pockets and his face holding the quiet of someone who learned early to keep himself very still, and who uses that stillness now to say small statistics that are never about statistics at all.

She didn’t have Troy Barrett, looking at her with the expression of a man who recognizes something before it has a name, and later eating a protein bar in a doorway like it is a kind of confession, telling Ilya things without asking for anything in return.

She didn’t have Marlow, calling at noon, saying you’re a fucking disaster, man, in a voice that is approximately an expression of love, and meaning call me anyway.

She didn’t have Sveta, angry instead of sad, sending a voice memo of forty-five seconds of laughter and calling him a tough bastard like it is both insult and blessing and verdict.

She didn’t have Galina on Thursday.

She didn’t have Shane.

Not the mug already out in the morning, the years of it, the evidence of someone paying attention and acting on it in private. Not the alphabet of her name learned in private, the slow repetition of the Й until it stops being a mistake and becomes a fact.

She didn't have the door.

She stood in the one room that was hers, every Sunday, and got one hour of the face. The face of the thing underneath. One hour a week of being allowed to put something down.

He got more than one hour.

He has been given years of hours and he is going to use them. He is going to be inside them.

Shane catches his eye from across the kitchen, in the middle of an argument with Yuna about the oven temperature, and the look across the room is: I see you. Are you here. Stay. And Ilya looks back and the answer—for the first time in months, the first time since the flatness closed in, since the pill went back in the bottle, since the arm kept dropping in the dreams—is:

Ya zdes. Yes. Here.

He lets go of her face. She shakes herself, rearranges her ears, looks at him once more with the flat complete attention of a creature who has assessed and found him satisfactory, and trots back toward the kitchen where the people and the food are.

He stands in the doorway and watches her go.

He thinks: I have three hundred and sixty-four days left in thirty-two. Then thirty-three. Then the years after, stacking, each one further from the number, tipping the scale. At thirty-four he will have known Shane as long as he hasn't. Every year after, the balance shifts. More years with Shane than without. More years here than gone.

He has been doing a different kind of math lately.

He is going to be very bad at stopping.

Later, when the afternoon light is making its commitments, and they are still in the same bed, Anya sent outside the door by Shane, Ilya is rocking into his husband slowly, softly, whispering that he loves him with every caress of his skin.

Shane moves toward him. He is warm, the late-afternoon-warm of a body that has been lying in the same place for a long time, and his face when he looks at Ilya has the expression it gets when he is not maintaining anything. His hands find the cross like they always find it now—not by accident, not incidentally, but with the knowledge of something learned. He has traced this route before. His fingers know it.

He lifts the chain, where it knocks gently against his chin with each of Ilya's movements. He looks at Ilya, not asking permission but checking—the small quiet check of wanting to be certain about the thing before he does it. Ilya is still. He does not pull away.

Shane puts his mouth around the cross. Holds it on his tongue gently. Wraps his lips to protect it from his canines.

Not ceremony. Not the formal gesture of performing something significant. Just: this is part of you, and I want the whole of you, the grief included. The twelve-year-old on the floor included. The stolen cross and the cold room and the twenty years of walking out of that room and all of it. He puts his mouth on the cross and holds it there, and Ilya understands, in a way that has no language even in Russian, that what is happening is:

I will carry some of this. You do not have to carry all of this alone.

He closes his eyes.

She didn't have this.

Not as grief. As the variable. The thing she didn't have. The difference in conditions. She was thirty-two and she ran out of room and nobody showed her the door and there was no one to take some of the weight without removing the weight entirely.

He feels the chain tug between them, linking them, binding them, firm between Shane's teeth, stretching the world wider and forcing space for the things Ilya took too long to say.

He thinks: I will never love anyone the way I love Shane.

He reaches down and pulls Shane's mouth toward his. And he tells him.

Irina Rozanova died at thirty-two.

She was born Soviet and died Russian and was buried in ground that had been renamed twice since her childhood. He wonders sometimes if she noticed. If the renaming felt like anything. If the country dying six months after her son was born struck her as omen or coincidence or neither—just: one more thing that stopped being what it was called.

She is buried in ground that was frozen when they put her in it, like it didn’t want her. March. The end of a long winter. She never saw the spring that followed. The flowers opened after. The ground thawed after. The city went on after. She was already inside the earth when the earth decided to accept the season.

Ilya Rozanov is thirty-two.

He is watching the spring turn into summer through his kitchen window. It is June in Ottawa and outside the window the season has finished arriving—real green now, committed, the kind that has decided and is not going back. Shane is at the coffee machine. His back is to the room. He will turn around in a moment and the mug will already be out.

It is always already out.

Anya is under the table waiting for what falls, which is her position on mornings and on life: beneath the level of human activity, patient, operating on the absolute certainty that things will descend from up there to down here, that this is how the world works, that her job is simply to be in position when it does.

He is thirty-two.

He has been thirty-two for one day. In one day: the ceiling has been the ceiling, the coffee has been coffee, Shane has had the mug out before he arrived, Anya has been under the table waiting, Galina will see him Thursday. The spider is gone. He helped it out this morning, tissue paper and a cracked window, watched it find the ledge and keep going. He stood there for a moment after, hand still on the windowsill, watching the empty corner.

Something still present. Just somewhere else now.

She was thirty-two and the ground was frozen and nobody showed her the door and she didn't see the spring.

He is thirty-two and the ground is warm and the summer is through the kitchen window. Next year, he will be thirty-three.

This is all. This is the whole difference.

The cross at his throat has been there for twenty years. He took it from a cold room when he was twelve. He has been carrying it since, under every jersey, pressed into every palm, through seven teams and three countries and two languages and one marriage and twenty springs he did not expect to see.

The cross was hers. Now it is his.

Not a relic. Not a warning. Not a prophecy. Just: something that was passed, in grief, between two people who loved each other in the vocabulary available to them at the time. A bowl of soup. A hand on a head. A cross taken from a cold room. A mug already out. A Й practiced in private until it was right.

The full vocabulary. Hungry and tired and I love you. The whole grammar of being alive alongside another person.

He opens his hand. The mark—red, thin, the twenty-year mark. He looks at it. He closes his hand around it.

He stands at the kitchen window.

In the backyard, the fig tree has leaves—dark and full, the same offensive certainty it had last summer and the summer before, stronger and thicker and taller each time, the tree that was not supposed to survive and did, the tree Shane planted without consulting anyone and wrapped carefully in October and waited on without saying a word. It is simply there. It has decided it belongs.

The cross is warm against his sternum. It has been warm since he woke up. It has been warm, he realizes, since he stopped waking up at five in the morning in the cold—since the mornings started arriving differently, less like verdicts, more like mornings.

It was cold for twenty years.

He stands at the kitchen window and does not do any arithmetic.

Shane turns around.

Ya zdes', Ilya thinks. In Russian, because some things are still Russian. Because some things live in the language she gave him and he has decided, lately, to stop mistaking inheritance for fate.

He is still here.

He is going to be here tomorrow.

He picks up the mug.