Summary:

Ilya is…he’s Shane’s entire heart. The air that he breathes, the reason for everything he does. None of it would matter without Ilya. This is the closest he’s ever come to losing him, and the thought of it - the possibility that everything they’ve been fighting for could just be lost - had struck Shane so acutely, so agonisingly.

He’d once thought that losing hockey was the worst thing that could ever happen to him. He knows, now, that isn’t true.