Summary:

“Shane had been used to being alone. He'd never thought of himself as lonely. He honestly often craved the solitude, found it grounding. But that was before he knew what it was like to have someone to call, someone to touch. He was never lonely before Rozanov, but he'd been lonely ever since.”

April 2017: Shane does not get laid out on the ice.

Ilya goes through with ending it.

Shane lets him.

What follows is eleven months of distance, denial, and a quiet kind of devastation neither of them knows how to name, let alone fix.

They learn how to live without each other.

(Or at least, how to pretend.)

And then, almost a year later, the infamous collision happens and Shane goes down cold.

And suddenly, neither of them can pretend it doesn’t matter.