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There’s a calendar in the kitchen, tacked to a cork board beside the pantry. It sits alongside a notepad where they keep a running grocery list that’s mostly just Ilya writing things down and Shane crossing them out, glaring over his shoulder each time while Ilya smirks into his mug.
Gummy worms
Pizza rolls
Not boring food
The calendar, though, is an actual joint effort — both of them scrawling in water therapy appointments for Anya’s hips, when she’s due for her flea and tick prevention, David’s next book club meeting, a weekend at the Pike’s, birthdays, practices, media obligations. Most days are filled months in advance, notes squeezed in and rewritten in the margins, arrows pointing to wherever something’s been moved.
Shane flips it at the start of the month without fanfare, a protein shake in one hand, while the other turns the page over with a soft sound. Ilya glances up out of habit more than anything else.
August.
His eyes land on the twelfth without meaning to. It’s empty in a way the rest of the month isn’t — no note, no reminder, nothing written over or crossed out, just the number sitting there on its own while everything else crowds in around it.
He looks at it a second too long before it registers.
It’s been twenty years.
He stopped counting twelve years in — when he was twenty-four, and his life had stretched on longer without her than it ever had with her. But he’d never forgotten his mother. He wouldn’t.
He told Shane about her in the time since, went through how he’d found her — how he’d lost her — in therapy more than once, made it a point to make her favorite tea on her birthday each year, tried and failed to recreate her medovik last New Year’s Eve. But he hasn’t read her note since the year he first found it, too scared to press on the bruise.
Now it sits in the bottom drawer, at the back of their closet — the once crisp pages, now softer, folded inside a manila envelope, tape pressed evenly across the flap. The last time he looked at it was two years ago, when they bought the house in Ottawa and moved in, merging their lives in a way Ilya never let himself believe could happen until it did. But he didn’t read it. He just pulled it from one drawer, put it into a box, then slid it into another.
His fingers move along the marble of the island, tracing out the approximate shape of the envelope as he stares absently at the blank square. He swears it’s staring back at him. Empty, like a trap waiting to be filled.
“Should we have my parents over for brunch soon? Once camp starts, it’s going to be a mess. It kind of already is.”
Shane has a pencil in his hand, suspended in midair in front of the page, like he’s adding the finishing touches to an oil painting that’s taken a full lifetime to create. This is his masterpiece — planning, being prepared. Ilya watches him turn the page to September, then back again, before scrawling M+D Brunch? into the only open slot.
“That works, yeah?” Shane asks, and Ilya just stares at the letters until they form anything other than she’s still dead, Shane taking his silence for confirmation. He drops the pencil onto the shelf below the cork board — the one Ilya learned to use a level to hang — and downs the rest of his shake.
“Maybe we can make the cottage cheese pancakes? Mom seemed to like those when you made them last time.”
Shane turns to drop his shaker bottle into the sink, the sound of it hitting metal echoing faintly in the quiet kitchen. The tap turns on, then off again. The dishwasher rattles as he fits the lid and cup into the top rack.
Ilya feels it a second before it happens — Shane’s eyes on him, the weight of it — but he doesn’t look away from the calendar.
“Hey,” Shane says. “You okay?”
“Fine,” Ilya says automatically.
He knows he can talk about this. Therapy made sure of that. He just doesn’t want to. Not now. There are still days before he has to admit it’s real. It’s nineteen years, until it isn’t.
“Okay, well, if you’re not, you can always—”
“I’m fine.” He makes sure his voice is even, level — practiced, like it was back when his father swore him to secrecy about his mother’s death, when he rehearsed “It was an accident” until it became the truth. He stands and sets his mug beside Shane’s cup in the dishwasher, leans over to press a kiss to his temple. Shane leans into it, but Ilya doesn’t linger. “I need a shower.”
He’s thankful when Shane just says, “okay,” like he believes him and doesn’t follow after him.
***
Ilya turns the handle, steam filling the room, but instead of pulling off his clothes and stepping beneath the spray, he moves into the adjoining closet and sits cross-legged on the floor, back pressed against the chest of drawers.
He could recite the letter word for word in that first year, but he doesn’t remember it in full — not anymore. Time and hockey plays, new memories growing over the words in his mind like flowers, not weeds. He tries to reach past them, fingers clawing at the dirt for every word she’d left him on a Tuesday much like this one years ago, but there’s only one line that sticks under his nails.
You will see in twenty years.
It echoes in the back of his mind, something running cold up his neck and into his teeth.
He remembers that day in pieces.
How wrong her skin felt as he shook her, his fingers moving clumsily over the keypad when he dialed for help, the overwhelming quiet between the call and when the medics arrived — his breaths the only sound filling the space. The flashing blue lights of the ambulance strobing through the window. The paper — the one he’d seen only after they moved her, and hidden away as soon as he could, before anyone could tell him it wasn’t his to keep.
He can remember the shape of the page, the color of the ink, the way she looped her letters. But the words don’t come.
He doesn’t pull the drawer open to look for them. He just stands, opens the top drawer instead and lets his hands fall to one of Shane’s t-shirts — the Team Canada one, Hollander across the back, the letters cracked with wear — before going to the shower.
***
“So, you’re not okay.”
Ilya is sprawled on the couch in their living room — Anya draped across his legs in much the same shape — watching the light change against the glass of the television, not what’s actually on the screen. His eyes refocus, land on Shane in the doorway, sweat dripping from the ends of his hair, cheeks still pink from the run.
Ilya says nothing. He just holds a hand out in Shane’s direction, palm up, fingers curling.
Shane crosses the room in two quick strides, their palms fitting together, and Ilya — despite having just spent far too long in the shower — pulls him down onto him, sweat and all. He folds on top of him, legs tangling, and Anya, instead of moving, only wedges herself further between them, making it even harder to fit together. It settles Shane higher against Ilya than he would normally land — chin against the crook of his neck instead of a cheek pressed to his chest, Ilya’s hands landing along different vertebrae, the notches less familiar under his palms.
“You’re wearing my shirt.”
Ilya knows what he’s asking without asking, can feel the shape of the question where the words land at his neck. Early on in their relationship, he could get away with this — hiding behind language, nuance, translation — but it’s been so long now. Still, he uses it to buy time, unsure of how to answer.
“What’s wrong?”
“August.”
He isn’t sure if he needs to say more, or if he should. The way Shane’s breath catches tells him it’s enough.
“Ilya.”
He thinks his name sounds like an apology, like a prayer, and he can’t stop the way it gathers in the corners of his eyes and spills over. Tears run down the side of his face, over his ear, beneath where Shane’s mouth presses against his neck — just once, like it needs to.
“I’m sorry — I wasn’t thinking. We don’t have to do brunch. I can text them, say never mind. We’ll reschedule.”
“She will be dead, pancakes or no pancakes.”
Shane’s mouth opens and closes against his neck a few times, punctuated by a long breath leaving his nose — a fight abandoned. Instead, Shane traces the length of his collarbone with his thumb, back and forth, and they don’t talk. They just lie like that until the sun shifts against the house and bathes them in afternoon light.
“My mother liked those pancakes too,” Ilya says quietly against Shane’s hair. “I will make them.”
***
Ilya blinks and it’s Saturday, the fifth — a week out. Sitting on the floor of the closet, the shower running, he counts backwards from seven and tries to slow down time as all the grief he hasn’t let himself feel compresses into the space of these few short days.
He pulls open the bottom drawer, and it’s just how he left it, untouched since he washed and folded the towels they’d used for Anya after the last summer storm. He lays a hand on top, but doesn’t reach further.
You will see in twenty years.
He remembers thinking how wrong she was. He would see nothing in twenty years, because he would not survive the loss of her. Even at twelve — especially at twelve — left in the care of the man who pushed her toward this, he just knew.
But then one year turned into two, into three, five, ten, twenty and here he was, and the only thing he could see now was the empty shape of sorrow. An absence.
The door creaks open and he snaps the drawer shut, getting to his feet just as Shane’s body fills in the doorframe.
“I, um, didn’t want to rush you, but I have to brush my teeth before I go.” He points toward the sink on the other side of the wall. “Do you mind?”
Ilya, who often uses the restroom without closing the door, doesn’t mind — Shane knows that, making it clear there are eggshells Ilya hadn’t seen, and Shane is tiptoeing around them.
“Go ahead,” he says with the lift of a shoulder. He pulls open another drawer, reaches past Shane’s t-shirts for one of his own, like that proves something. “I was just waiting for water to get hot.”
Shane just nods and moves out of the doorway.
When Ilya emerges from the closet, a pair of boxer briefs fisted in one hand alongside the shirt, he lingers against the frame and watches as Shane brushes, one quadrant then the next in short, almost mechanical movements. When he gets to the last and starts brushing his tongue, Ilya crosses the room and begins to pull his clothes off. He takes his time, pushing the sweatpants down slower than he needs to, letting the waistband sit against his thumbs for a second before letting them drop, like that might be enough to draw Shane’s attention.
Shane looks, but not for long, hands busy with floss, with mouthwash.
“I shouldn’t be gone long,” he says around his fingers as they work the floss between his teeth, long coming out as yong. “It’s just a fitting.”
Ilya lifts himself onto the counter beside the sink, his knee knocking against Shane’s hip, shoulders curving back against the mirror. He doesn’t ask for anything, despite the way he sits like an invitation, watching Shane. He likes him like this — measured, even, dependable.
Shane finishes flossing in silence, the soft patter of the shower filling the space. When he leans down to drop the floss into the wastebasket near Ilya’s feet, he presses a quick kiss to his knee. Then the spot just below his hip, the flat of it, just before it hinges. The side of his ribs. His collarbone.
“You’re beautiful,” Shane says in a breath against his neck, then more firmly against his mouth, “but I’m going to be late.”
Ilya fits his mouth to Shane’s just to see if he’ll kiss him back, or if this is a hard line. Shane gives a little — a bottom lip, a tongue — before pulling away.
It’s enough, but it’s nowhere close.
“Is not because I’m sad?” Ilya asks quietly into the space between them.
Shane does something Ilya usually has to — hooks a finger under his chin, ducks his head to catch his eye. He lets his vision lift, catch on Shane’s eyes and how they search his. He’s never too lost with those eyes to look into.
“Are you — you’re sad?”
He tilts his head, his mouth feigning a smile — one that doesn’t reach his cheeks, let alone his eyes.
“Probably.”
“Your mom?”
“No. Not her.”
Shane rubs a circle across his palm with his thumb, and he thinks of how his mother’s thumb would make the same shape when his hands were smaller, softer. Now they’re calloused like he is, and he wonders if it’s because she stopped making circles there so many years before.
“Then about what?”
“The nothing where she should be.”
Shane doesn’t say anything. He just pulls Ilya into him. They stay that way until the steam in the room dissipates, the water no longer even lukewarm.
“You go. I am fine,” Ilya says into Shane’s hair. “Anya can watch me.”
“Do you need watching?”
There’s weight to the words, and Ilya holds them in his throat as he swallows, thick and heavy. They’ve talked about this — the genetics of depression. Shane spent the better part of a Sunday a few years ago with facts and figures, plans of attack, and Ilya has always been good at beating odds, breaking records.
He means it when he says, “No.”
Shane holds his gaze as his hands settle at Ilya’s hips, lingering there for just a minute longer before he presses his mouth to his once more and turns to go.
Ilya showers quickly. When he steps out, the room has gone cold. He swaps the shirt on the counter for one of Shane’s — telling himself it’s only for the long sleeves — and goes to find Anya, just in case.
***
The days fill, but Ilya empties, each one that takes him closer to the twelfth leaving him more hollow than the last. Still, he goes with some of the other players to the children’s hospital for a visit, moving from room to room, sitting at bedsides, letting small hands curl around his fingers, smiling, saying the right things without thinking too hard about them.
Conference rooms after, numbers and spreadsheets that blur under his gaze, budgets and totals and someone walking them through it all line by line. Checks presented to the local charities their camp benefits, cameras, hands to shake.
Skates, lifts, drills that turn competitive, sticks knocking hard enough to feel like the real thing. The crisp air of the rink, the burn in his legs, the scrape of blades on ice.
Brand partnerships, interviews, photoshoots he has to stand still through, someone adjusting his shoulders, his stance, telling him where to look, to loosen his jaw.
Dinners, drinks, glasses sweating in his hand, conversations he follows only to keep his mind from wandering. Nights that stretch longer than he wants them to.
Mornings find him showering with the bathroom door open, only entering the closet long enough to grab clothes — his own, not Shane’s.
Friday comes. Saturday will follow.
The grocery store is quiet in the evening, and they treat it like a date — stolen time in the sea of obligations, something as simple as pushing a shopping cart while they eat raspberries from the carton in Ilya’s palm.
“This is not dinner,” Ilya reminds Shane for what he knows is at least the third time, pinching a berry between his fingers and holding it out as Shane turns back to the cart. Shane takes it with his teeth and glares. “I want burgers. The bad kind.”
“So, not turkey.”
“Never the turkeys.”
Ilya trails after him, forearms braced against the handle of the cart, as Shane rounds the endcap and heads toward the produce section. He reads from a list while Shane piles onions, tomatoes, peppers into the cart.
“Lettuce,” he says, and something in the way Shane’s hand moves as he reaches past the microgreens for the iceberg — past his own preference, toward Ilya’s — lodges heavy in his chest.
Simple. Not simple at all.
You will see in twenty years. You will see what I was missing.
He hears the words more than he thinks them, and the carton slips from his hand, berries scattering at his feet. He bends to grab them, but his hands won’t work, and he folds at the knees into a crouch, head hanging.
There’s a hand on his back almost immediately, rubbing wide circles.
“I am okay,” he says before Shane can ask.
“Are you?”
Ilya nudges a raspberry with his thumb and sighs. “Probably not.”
He watches as Shane’s hands move across the floor, sliding berries into his palm as easily as pucks find the net, and when they’re all cupped in his hand, he reaches for Ilya with the other and pulls him to his feet.
“Is this about the burgers?” Shane asks, his mouth forming a sharp and serious line.
Half of Ilya’s mouth lifts in return.
“This is always about the burgers.”
Shane makes quick work of the rest of the list, hovering more closely to Ilya between items, and holds his hand in the checkout line. When they leave, he turns left instead of right and drives past three other restaurants before pulling up to the diner four streets over, the glow of the sign washing them in red against the night.
“Wait here,” Shane kisses the palm of his hand twice and then ducks inside. The overhead lights paint him soft and golden, like something at the edge of a dream, and Ilya closes his eyes against it.
You will see. You will see. You will see.
***
Shane stays up with him, neither of them saying they’re waiting for midnight, even though it’s clear they are. Shane looks at the clock above the stove when he thinks Ilya isn’t looking, and Ilya does the same with the one on the mantle, just far enough away to look like he’s looking at nothing at all. Ilya bakes her medovik, like it’s New Year’s Eve all over again, but the countdown is far more grim.
When the clock strikes midnight, the eleventh turning over to the twelfth, Ilya wraps the cake in plastic wrap and sets it in the refrigerator as Shane wraps his arms around him from behind. Ilya feels Shane’s nose nestle against his curls, and he drops his head back onto Shane’s shoulder, pressing closer.
“I don’t think I can sleep,” Ilya says to the ceiling.
“Then we don’t sleep,” Shane replies, the words landing soft behind his ear. “What would you want to do instead?”
“I don’t know.”
They end up in bed under the blankets, Ilya’s head on Shane’s chest, Shane’s fingers in his hair. Anya licks at her feet until Shane nudges her with his heel and she stops, rolling onto her back. Ilya watches as she settles, starts to snore, and thinks about dog years — how she found him when she was about the same age he lost his mother — and something in him aches.
“My mother—” Ilya starts then stops.
Shane’s fingers flex in his hair, nails scratching lightly before going still. He shifts to his earlobe, thumb brushing along it — a way Ilya has always self-soothed, one Shane has learned over the years. He doesn’t rush the words out of him, just holds him, thumb moving gently.
“She left a note.”
“You never told me that part,” Shane says evenly, and Ilya is glad it isn’t, What did it say? Like a reflex — the way people asked how it happened when he told them his mother had died. The way Shane did once.
He couldn’t tell him anyway.
“I don’t remember what it said. Not anymore.”
Shane presses his lips to the top of Ilya’s head in response and her words pulse in his throat.
You will see in twenty years. You will see what I was missing.
“I think I want to read it tomorrow — today. Is today.”
“You have it?”
“In closet.” There’s a small noise at the back of Shane’s throat, a piece locking into place. Ilya just nods against his chest, his stubble making a soft sound under his cheek. “Yes, is why I am there so much.”
Ilya shifts then — less atop Shane, more beside him — their eyes meeting in the dark.
“I think maybe now,” he says quietly, and slips out from under the blankets. The floor is cool under his feet as he crosses the room and into the en suite, the closet, the space dim but familiar. He opens the drawer without hesitation, hand moving past the towels and sheets, and finds the envelope where he left it.
He turns it over once in his hands, remembering the shape more exactly, then brings it back with him to bed, sliding in close again.
The bedside lamp clicks on, and they shift to accommodate the light, each other — backs against the headboard, Shane’s head falling to his shoulder. There’s a breath, and then another, in the shape of a box like Galina once taught him, and then his finger slides under the tape, beneath the flap.
“Do you want me to—”
“No, stay.”
The paper feels lighter than it had in his hands when they were half the size, and the scent of their home, once warm and thick on the page, is gone completely. He unfolds it, hands trembling with care, the way they had when he’d held Bood’s son, Milo, for the first time. He’d never been one for fragile things — hit harder, shoot faster. He thinks too long about how to hold the paper before letting it settle against his thighs, not holding it at all.
He lets it rest there for a second before his eyes drop to the page, the handwriting the same — the loops of it, the slant — familiar in a way that makes something in his chest pull tight as his gaze skims the top, the parts meant for others, not him, before it catches.
My sweet Ilyushenka.
He exhales, sharp, like he’s been hit, and his hand finds Shane’s automatically. When he looks over, Shane’s eyes search his. For a second, he thinks about the way Shane’s Russian has improved — the way he understands more than he used to — but the letters are still his. This could still be only his, but he doesn’t want it to be.
“Can I read to you?”
Shane nods, his cheek brushing Ilya’s shoulder.
“Please.”
Ilya gets through two lines before he’s sobbing, the words thick in his throat, choking him. He keeps going.
I won’t tell you how hard this was for me. That won’t matter now.
The words come out quick, sloppy, thick with saliva and tears. He reads a few more lines before he has to stop, sniff, clear his throat, then goes on, his fingers trailing over the side of the page.
I know we will see each other again.
He feels Shane’s tears slip onto his shoulder, trail down his arm, and he turns to him, taking his mouth softly. Neither of them cares when Ilya’s nose runs against Shane’s lip. He stays there a moment, shoulders heavy with sobs, before pressing his forehead against Shane’s and nodding, his vision blurring over the page.
“And you will see in time. You will see in twenty years. You will see what I was missing,” the words he knows, coming together slowly in a voice that breaks him open.
Shane shifts and takes the paper, and Ilya folds into him, not even trying to hold back the whimper as he watches Shane’s finger trail across the page, the words worked out under his breath.
“You will be loved.” Shane pauses, frowns slightly at the page. “No, it’s— you will be so loved. And I want you to tell me all about the people who love you when you get here.”
They both cry openly as Shane reads on, his voice barely a whisper when he gets to, “I will still be one of them. I love you always.”
Shane sets the letter on the end table and turns off the light. Then he turns to him, repeats the words into the dark — “I love you always, Ilya” — and holds him as he cries himself to sleep.
***
Yuna and David are in the kitchen by the time Ilya wakes — he can hear her laugh, bright and easy through the wall.
He stays there for a moment before pushing himself up and going to find them, Anya close at his heels.
The kitchen smells like coffee, something sweet under it; ingredients are spread across the counter for the cottage cheese pancakes, a vase of yellow daisies set near the window. David asks where his “granddog” is, and Ilya answers from the doorway.
“She had late night.”
Yuna sees him first, and her smile warms. “Good morning, Ilya.”
He crosses the room without thinking, folding into her, pressing his face into her shoulder. “Morning, Mom.”
David makes a soft sound behind her, and when Ilya pulls back, he reaches for him too, pulling him into something just as close. “Dad.”
They don’t question it, just hold him there a second longer than usual before letting him go.
Shane is at the stove, watching him, something quiet and soft in his expression. Ilya moves to him next, presses his mouth to his cheek, lingers there.
“Okay?”
“Yes, okay.”
Ilya leans back against the counter, a hand at Shane’s back as he begins to measure flour into a bowl, and thinks of his mother — of what she was missing — and of everything here.
And he hopes, with everything in him, that it’s a long time before he can tell her about them.
Much longer than twenty years.