Chapter Text
It was her job to be invisible. And she was very good at her job. So good, in fact, that when the agency got a request for a personal assistant from the extremely particular and very serious Shane Hollander, she was the first person they asked. And of course she wanted the job, It was the Olympics of personal assistants.
Shane was well known in the industry. He comes with a spreadsheet of every product, every food, every brand and store and size. The days of the week it should be delivered. The shelf on the refrigerator, in the linen closet, in the medicine cabinet. What day each room should be cleaned. The appropriate products and acceptable back ups in case of emergency. He was very organized and meticulous and stage managing on Broadway would be an easier task.
Which is why when Rebecca Cohen decided to leave theater after 15 years on Broadway, she found herself headhunted to become a personal assistant. And that is why when, two years later, Shane Hollander came looking, they chose her. Becky knew spreadsheets. She knew how to call queues and create contingency plans. She knew how to check to make sure things were properly placed and labeled and stocked. She was made for this job.
And yet, her biggest accomplishment was becoming invisible. It was important to Shane to not appear to have staff. He wasn’t embarrassed of it, perse, but it felt awkward and out of place for a professional jock to have a team. Stylist, groomer, personal assistant, personal shopper, housecleaner, interior designer. An entire team of people whose sole job it was to make him seem like he was rich. Because Shane grew up in a suburb of Ottawa and had no idea how to live like a multimillionaire.
For years he wore athleisure picked up from the sporting goods store. Once he ordered a $90 hoodie from Abercrombie and felt sick at the cost. For a hoodie! He had made $9 million that year. For years he had IKEA furniture that looked fine as long as you didn’t touch it or sit on it or look too closely. And so one day when his mom was sitting on a rickety stool at his breakfast bar she idly suggested he get a designer to come spruce up the place.
And so it began.
Becky arrived on a Tuesday and by Thursday she had an automated system set up for the spreadsheet. She outsourced food, toiletries, and cleaning. Hiring discrete, quick, and very competent people. She provided them with clear instructions and check lists and for the first month she supervised.
Becky walked behind Jaque, the personal shopper, checking each item off of her own spreadsheet as he worked from his. He took feedback well. He could stay. Becky did a walk through with Maddie, the housecleaner, and gave her clear notes. She took down the feedback and never made those mistakes again.
When it came to hiring and coordinating stylists, groomers, designers, Becky did it herself. If Shane had a charity dinner, Becky would hold a prep meeting with him and his staff for the day. They’d go over clothes, hair, makeup, arrival times, transportation. Shane would ask questions, try out clothes and sometimes veto things. If a suit was too scratchy or he hated the feel of a product on his hair. His team would adapt to him seamlessly. Becky made sure of it.
As Shane appeared more and more rich. More and more polished. No one ever asked him how it happened. No one ever took note that he suddenly clearly had the army of support that only the truly rich could afford. They assumed he had it all along or, more likely, people enjoyed pretending that the rich were somehow magic. That they did it all on their own. That there wasn’t an army of staff charging tens of thousands a month to make them appear effortless and special.
Becky ordered the equipment when the personal trainer asked. She did a daily walk through of the house while Shane was at practice. She knew everything that came in and went out of that house, of his car, of Shane’s life.
And then suddenly, she didn’t.
It started with a note from the agency “Shane has changed his door code, and would like to do walk throughs together from now on.” Weird. Very weird. But also, Becy had noticed he seemed more anxious, more distracted. So maybe this, like the diet, was just a way for him to stay in control. Shane loved control. He loved it enough to have a thirty tab spreadsheet that took a staff of 25 to manage.
Then there were entire weeks that Becky was not permitted to enter the house. Not the apartment. Not the cottage. Nothing. Shane went into the cottage one Sunday on a silent retreat and re-emerged distant and shut off and impossible to pin down.
Shane hated it. Her being so removed. Becky could tell because he was always anxious and on edge during their meetings. Nothing was stocked appropriately anymore. Staff had short and strange windows when they could. So Becky had trouble keeping good people. They needed steady work and schedules and not this week Wednesday, next week Friday, not at all the week after. It all came to a head when Shane ran out of paper towels one day at the cottage. He called Becky in a panic because he didn’t know where she got them and the ones he had picked up at the store were too big and too scratchy and not. his. towels.
Becky ran out to get them and drove the two hours to the cottage to deliver them herself. It was the least she could do for allowing this to happen. It was the least she could do. When she rang the bell, Shane stepped out of the house onto the porch. As if she were a stranger. He smiled with thin lips and hugged her with stiff arms and though she could see the tension melt off of him, he just wasn’t right. He just wasn’t Shane the way she knew him.
When it happened again, this time with toothpaste, Becky arrived at his newly bought house to find two cars in the driveway. Oh. Now she got it. She could work with this. When Becky rang the bell and Shane stepped out, she smiled at him sweetly and handed over the toothpaste. He was stammering his thank yous when she placed a hand on his shoulder.
“You know that it’s my job to be discrete, yes?” She leaned into his space in a way she hoped was comforting.
Shane realized what she was saying and therefore what she knew and his eyes went wide. Then glassy. It took a moment for him to nod, carefully, and another before he spoke.
“Could you do it? The inside stuff?”
And that was how Becky let go of her other clients to manage Shane Hollander’s life.
It was another month of so before she realized who the owner of the second car was. She didn’t see him, Shane was still very careful about that. Providing a new color coded calendar with safe and unsafe days to be in the house. But she pieced it together from doing laundry with Boston Raiders tshirts strangely mixed in. Or a scrap of paper with a handwritten note in Cyrillic. Oh, she thought. Ooooooh.
And because Becky was discrete. And because she didn’t just love her job, she loved her client, she told no one. She kept her secrets, no, his secret tucked in her chest and she waited to see what happened. And now that she knew where to look, she saw.
She saw new products appear on the spreadsheets. Suddenly two kinds of toothpaste, two different shampoos. Potato chips and nutella. The unmistakable progression of two lives becoming one. Of a together that was painted in the refrigerator, medicine cabinet, and laundry baskets.
When preparing the cottage that next summer, Becky got a news alert on her phone. Ilya Rozanov signed with Ottawa. And if there was any doubt left in her. If there was any part that thought no, no, that’s crazy. It was gone.
So, a month later when she was restocking and cleaning the cottage, and there was only one car in the driveway, and Shane was sitting at the breakfast bar chatting with her, Becky stopped and turned to him.
“I know who he is.” Before Shane could respond she held up a hand. “Wait. Let me talk. I know who he is. Let me help you. Let me help him. It will be easier with help.” What she meant was it would be easier with her help. She could manage the calendars and make sure both houses were stocked. There was gas in the cars. They only had to worry about hockey and each other. It was her job. It was also how she cared for Shane.
Because over the years she had come to love him. Not in a romantic way, or even a familial way. But in a deep platonic soulmate kind of way. Because she knew everything about him. And she knew how without the staff and the help and her he would be anxious and out of sorts and closed. Because she couldn’t help but think that he gained the freedom to find someone to move into his life when she took away all the little annoyances and decisions of the world.
And strangely, surprisingly Shane agreed. And so she started her work over at Ilya’s Ottawa house. And now he added to the spreadsheet. Becky got new buyers in Ottawa, as to not connect the two households and these knew where to get Russian foods and Russian imports. The good vodka. The right sweets.
Becky learned Ilya as well as she had learned Shane. Even though they hadn’t met. Even though both he and Shane seemed wary to confirm what she knew by being in the same place together. But when she knew them both, she could help them blend their lives and their spaces. She made room where it was needed, and she rearranged where it would ease a conflict.
And so in some small way it was Becky that helped ease the transition over those three years of secrecy. She made it possible for two lives to stretch over three homes. For no argument to ever start because the wrong toothbrush or the wrong towel was in the wrong place. She put thousands of miles on her car, driving ahead of Shane, ahead of Ilya. Refilling tiny boxes of lube (she never asked, they never asked), making sure laundry was ready for roadies and later even packing the bags.
When Shane proposed, it was Becky who helped set up the candles while he was flying home and it was Becky that cleared them after Shane left and Ilya went to practice. It was Becky who packed them in a box that said “for our anniversary" and tucked it away in Ilya’s attic. As a surprise.
And when the fanmail video leaked and everything changed, it was Becky who sat down with both Shane and Ilya for the first time and plotted out their move. It was Becky who negotiated how their three homes would become two. How Shane would meld into the Ottawa house and how it wouldn’t feel like he was in Ilya’s house. Not if she could help it. Because it had been ten years now since Becky had arrived in Shane’s life and she was invested. In his happiness, in their happiness, in all of it.
It took them months of weekly meetings to meld the spreadsheets, to negotiate the drawers and the shelves and the closets. To make the calendar into one cohesive thing. To push together two lives that were being held so forcefully apart (but not by Becky, never by Becky). And so as she stood in the yard on their wedding day. A day she was not consulted on and did not plan (yes, there were no chairs, but no she didn’t wish they’d handed it over to her), Becky couldn’t help but feel a deep sense of pride.
The world had fought against these men and their love. Had clawed and tore and pulled at them trying to make this thing impossible. And she didn’t let it. She wouldn’t let it. She eased the friction and tried to make home feel safe. Feel comforting and theirs. A sanctuary in a world of cruelty.
And Becky knew she would stay. She would stay when the pill bottle appeared on Ilya’s nightstand and she would stay when a basinet appeared in their bedroom. She would schedule daycare visits and preschool interviews and vet appointments. She would manage the calendar as more colors appeared. And she would help ease the pain through loss. Becky would stay with them as long as they’d have her and they would ask her to stay because she was family, really. In the end.
Becky made herself invisible to everyone, but never to the Rozanov-Hollanders. No, never to them.