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.

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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.