Chapter Text
The drive from Boston to the cottage took over six hours, which Sasha declared to be "very long" approximately forty-five minutes in and approximately every fifteen minutes after that.
"Are we almost there?" she asked, for what Ilya was fairly certain was the eleventh time.
"We've been driving for two hours, malyshka."
"That's a long time."
"We have four more hours."
There was a pause from the backseat, long enough that Ilya allowed himself to hope. Then:
"Are we almost there?"
Ilya caught his own eyes in the rearview mirror and exhaled slowly through his nose.
He'd downloaded three audiobooks, two playlists Sasha had approved in advance in Boston with the gravity of someone signing off on a government document, and a nature documentary about sea turtles that she'd been interested in since April. He'd packed her favorite blanket and her library book and three different kinds of snacks and made sure Fyo was buckled into the seat beside her. He had, by any objective measure, done everything right.
And yet.
"Four hours," he said. "Less now. Three hours and fifty minutes."
"That's still really long."
Ilya bit back a sigh. He’d always thought the “patience is a virtue” saying was bullshit. Apparently, when it came to parenting, it wasn’t.
"Yes," Ilya agreed evenly, trying not to add fuel to the fire. "It is."
"Can we stop?"
"We just stopped."
He’d never enjoyed roadtrips, but it turned out, road trips with an eight year old that wanted to stop every hour were worse.
"That was like an hour ago."
Ilya glanced in the mirror. Sasha was curled in her booster seat with Fyo in her lap and her chin propped on the window glass, watching the flat Ontario landscape scroll past with an expression of mild offense, as though she'd expected more of it.
"Tell me something," Ilya suggested, trying to think of some way to entertain the little girl. "About school. Tell me about Emma."
Sasha sighed. It was a very thorough sigh, the kind that communicated a great deal about the fundamental injustice of various things. "Emma's in California for the whole summer. Visiting her grandmother."
"That's nice for her."
"For her," Sasha confirmed meaningfully, making sure he understood the distinction. "She gets to go somewhere fun. We've been driving forever."
"We're going somewhere fun."
"We're going somewhere to live," Sasha argued, with the particular logical precision of almost nine-year-olds. "That's different from going somewhere fun."
Ilya couldn't immediately construct a counter-argument to this, so he turned the music back up instead. After a moment, the protests from the backseat ceased. Sasha went back to watching the highway, and Ilya watched her in the side mirror, and somewhere around the three-hour mark her head began the slow inevitable descent – dipping, jerking up, dipping again, and finally giving up entirely, listing sideways against the window with her mouth falling open. Fyo slid gradually down her stomach and off her lap, landing on the seat with a soft thump she didn't stir at.
He drove the last stretch in quiet, just the low music and the sound of Sasha's breathing and the highway noise, and tried not to think too carefully about what was waiting at the other end.
Shane was waiting at the other end.
Two months.
Ilya had never let himself have this much of Shane at once before. Had never allowed himself to imagine it too clearly or for too long, because wanting something that badly made the not-having of it worse, and Ilya had spent his whole life being very good at not-having things. He'd gotten three days at the cottage in September, which had nearly undone him. He'd gotten two weeks last July, which had changed things in ways he was still reckoning with. He'd gotten phone calls and visits and weekends stolen from schedules that didn't technically permit them.
Now he had two months, a whole summer, stretching out in front of him like something he hadn't earned.
He wasn't sure yet what to do with that. Wasn't sure he'd learned how to hold this much good without waiting for it to be taken away. Without watching the horizon for the thing that would make it make sense, that would explain why something this large and this unambiguous was being allowed to simply exist.
The trees thickened as he turned onto the dirt road, the afternoon light breaking into pieces through the canopy and scattering across the hood of the car. He heard Sasha stir.
"Are we—"
"Almost," Ilya answered, before she could finish.
She sat up, rubbing her eyes with both fists, her cheek bearing the pink impression of where it had pressed against the window. She leaned toward the glass and looked out at the trees going past, blinking slowly into alertness.
Ilya pulled into the driveway and cut the engine.
Shane was on the porch.
He was leaning against the railing with his arms crossed, wearing that linen button-down he loved so much and shorts, squinting a little against the afternoon glare. He'd been watching the driveway – Ilya could tell from the way he was already looking at the car before it stopped, from the fact that he straightened when the engine cut out. His face broke into a smile when Ilya's door swung open, and Ilya felt it somewhere in his chest, that smile, the way he always felt it – not like something that happened to him but like something that arrived in him.
In the backseat, Sasha unclicked her seatbelt.
She sat completely still for three full seconds, watching Shane come down off the porch steps, tracking him across the yard with the focused attention she brought to anything she was deciding about. Then the door swung open and she was running, her sneakers hitting the gravel and then the grass, Fyo still abandoned on the backseat.
"Shane!"
Shane came off the last porch step and met her in the middle of the yard, dropping into a slight crouch just in time to absorb the impact of her, getting his arms under her and scooping her up with a grunt of effort that was at least fifty percent performance.
"Hey, kiddo," he greeted warmly, settling her on his hip and looking her over with mock seriousness. “You’re growing like a weed, huh?”
"No, I'm not," Sasha replied, which Ilya had to agree with. Sasha was still a good few inches shorter than most kids her age, slighter too, despite Ilya’s best efforts. However, she’d probably grown about an inch since Shane had seen her last.
"Definitely heavier,” Shane joked, feigning a groan as he set her down. “What has your papa been feeding you?"
Sasha giggled at his theatrics, bouncing on her feet a bit, excitement at seeing Shane clearly overwhelming.
Ilya knew how that felt.
"Just normal food,” Sasha informed him, grinning a bit.
"Must be the normal food," Shane agreed gravely, and looked over her head to where Ilya was and the expression on his face did the thing it sometimes did in private moments when he forgot to manage it – open, unguarded, warm in a way that Ilya had spent a long time allow himself to believe it was directed at him specifically.
"You're late," Shane told him, although Ilya could tell he wasn’t really upset.
"We stopped six times," Ilya replied tiredly, shutting the car door. He crossed the grass toward them. "Because someone had to inspect every available bathroom in Ontario."
"I did not," Sasha retorted with a pout, crossing her arms.
"Three bathroom stops. One snack stop. One stop because you wanted to look at a horse."
"It was a really good horse!"
Shane grinned at Ilya over the top of her curls – at the specific, warm grin that was just for him, that existed in no press conference and no arena and nowhere the world could see it – and Ilya walked the last few feet across the grass and felt something in his chest loosen, click into place, settle.
The first few days arranged themselves around the cottage with an ease that surprised all three of them, or at least surprised Ilya and Shane – Sasha seemed to take to it with the practicality of a child who had decided she was happy and saw no reason to make anything complicated.
Part of it was the cottage itself. There was something about the place that resisted performance, that sat outside the jurisdiction of their regular lives and the rules those lives required. Out here there was no Rozanov and no Hollander, no rivals who had to maintain careful distance in every rink and restaurant and television broadcast across the league. No one watching for the thing that would give them away. Just the lake and the trees and the three of them, which was both simpler and more enormous than anything Ilya had let himself think about for most of the past four years.
Mornings were slow in the specific way that felt like a luxury to Ilya, who had spent most of his adult life moving at the pace the schedule demanded. Shane made coffee and Ilya made breakfast and Sasha materialized from her room in her pajamas at some indeterminate time between seven and nine, Fyo hanging loose from one hand, blinking like she'd been somewhere far away and was still finding her way back. She'd climb onto her stool at the kitchen counter and tuck her feet up underneath herself and sit there accepting whatever was put in front of her with the particular contented quiet of a child who had decided she was exactly where she was supposed to be.
Ilya watched her do it every morning. He was always watching her do things like that, cataloguing the differences between who she was now and who she'd been when he brought her home. It was the kind of thing that crept up on him in ordinary moments – the way she ate now, slowly, with genuine pleasure, instead of hunched over her plate with her arm curved around it like she was guarding it against something. The way she moved through a house like she lived in it.
On rainy afternoons, when the lake went silver and the clouds sat low in the trees, they played board games at the kitchen table. Sasha was a ferocious Snakes and Ladders opponent and had developed, over the course of the summer, an approach to Catan that was genuinely difficult to defend against, which Ilya felt strongly had to be genetic.
"She's eight," Shane commented, still somewhat in shock, staring at the board after Sasha had methodically dismantled everything he'd been building for forty minutes.
"She is Rozanov," Ilya replied with a shrug, as though that was all the explanation that was needed. "Was inevitable."
Sasha looked up at both of them. She was attempting to look modest. She was not very good at it.
"You can be impressed," she told Shane generously, a cheeky little grin on her face, one Sveta had told Ilya was scarily similar to his own. "It's okay."
Shane looked at Ilya with an expression that was equal parts exasperated and delighted. "She's yours, all right."
"I know," Ilya informed him with considerable satisfaction.
In the evenings they sat on the porch until the light was gone from the water, all three of them, Sasha usually wedged between them on the wide outdoor sofa with her feet tucked under and her head getting progressively heavier on whoever's shoulder it had found. She fell asleep out there more nights than not, and Ilya would carry her in while Shane held the screen door, and they'd tuck her in together in the room she'd claimed within the first ten minutes of arriving – the one with the view down to the dock that she'd stood in front of for a long moment before turning around and declaring: I like this one.
It felt, Ilya thought, every single one of those evenings, like the thing he'd spent most of his life not allowing himself to want. Not in a painful way. In the specific, quiet, slightly terrifying way of a person who has stopped denying that they want something and has started to accept that they might actually have it.
It was Shane who told her about the loons.
They were eating lunch on the dock – sandwiches, because the weather was perfect and the dock was warm and Sasha had asked with that specific quality of hopefulness she still occasionally deployed, the particular care with which she still sometimes requested things she expected might be refused. Neither Ilya nor Shane could tell her no when she asked like that. They both knew it and neither of them said so.
The sound came from across the water without warning – that eerie, undulating cry, somewhere between a wail and a laugh, rising up from the far end of the lake and carrying all the way across the still afternoon air.
Sasha's head came up sharply. Her sandwich stopped halfway to her mouth. "What was that?"
"Loon," Shane answered, still chewing. "They live on lakes like this one."
Sasha turned toward the water, scanning for the source with her eyes narrowed. "It sounds like something's wrong with it."
"They all sound like that. It's their call." Shane paused, and Ilya, who had gone very still, did not look at him. He could feel the specific quality of Shane's pause, the way it preceded something. "Interesting birds, actually. Your papa has some thoughts about them."
Ilya set his sandwich down with great deliberation.
Sasha looked at Ilya. Then at Shane. Then back at Ilya, with the heightened attention of a child who has detected that something entertaining is happening and is waiting to find out what kind.
"What thoughts?" she asked.
"Shane," Ilya groaned.
"What?" Shane spread his hands, the picture of innocence. "I'm just saying you have opinions. Strong ones."
"I am telling you right now—"
"Papa." Sasha put her own sandwich down. She was giving him her full attention, which was the particular undivided attention that she gave to things she had decided were important. "Are you scared of the loon?"
"They are not loons," Ilya argued, with as much dignity as the situation permitted. "They are stupid Canadian wolfbirds and they are completely insane."
"Wolfbirds," Shane murmured softly, in the reverent tone of a man who had been waiting years to hear this word again.
"They dive completely underwater," Ilya continued, because he had started and there was no graceful way to stop. "They disappear and then they come back up from nowhere. You don't see where they went. And then they scream. This is not normal bird behavior, Sashenka. Normal birds stay where you can see them."
"Papa." Sasha had both hands pressed over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking with the effort of not making noise. "It's a bird."
"It's a wolfbird."
"That's not—" She couldn't finish. The laugh got out despite everything, bright and surprised, and she tipped sideways on the dock, and Shane caught her by the shoulder before she could roll into the water, his own face completely creased, no longer making any effort to contain himself.
"I hate this country," Ilya announced, standing. "I hate this lake. I'm going inside."
"You're absolutely not going inside," Shane managed to say through his laughter.
Ilya walked to the far end of the dock with his hands in his pockets and stood there looking at the water with great dignity while behind him his daughter laughed until she was wheezing and Shane wasn't doing much better.
He pressed his lips together very firmly.
He was not smiling. That was not what his face was doing.
Swimming happened in the afternoons, when the sun had gotten properly into the sky and the water had had time to lose the morning chill.
Sasha was a strong swimmer – had been since her first winter in Boston, when Ilya had put her in lessons at the pool near their house and watched from the viewing window while the instructor had expressed surprise at how quickly she'd taken to it. Ilya wasn't surprised. Sasha approached most things she'd decided to conquer with a focused, methodical persistence that he recognized because it was his, and the water had never frightened her the way other things had. She moved through it easily, confidently, in a way that was one of the things he liked most to watch.
What she wanted to do in it, however, was a separate negotiation.
"Papa," she pleaded, standing on the end of the dock in her swimsuit with her hands on her hips. "Can you toss me?"
"Da," Ilya agreed easily enough, already getting up from where he'd been sitting on the dock edge.
Behind him, Shane put down his book.
"Wait—" Shane sat up straighter. "Toss her?"
"She's a strong swimmer," Ilya assured him, moving toward Sasha.
"It's a pretty significant drop from the dock, Ilya—"
"It's fine, solnyshko."
"How deep is it right there? Do we know how deep it is—"
"It's deep enough," Ilya told him, having swam in the lake plenty of times last summer and well aware of how deep it was.
Ilya scooped Sasha up by the waist and walked toward the end of the dock while she grabbed his shoulders and laughed at the indignity of being transported.
"Ilya—" Shane had gotten to his feet. He was watching this with the expression he got when his risk assessment was in direct conflict with his knowledge that he'd already lost the argument. "What if she—"
"It’s fun, Shane!” Sasha told him, sounding absolutely delighted the way all small children did at the idea of being tossed into water.
"You can watch from the dock,” Ilya called to Shane over his shoulder. “Very safe. Like a lifeguard."
"I don't want to be the lifeguard, I want someone to have a– a plan–"
"The plan is I throw her and then she swims back to the ladder," Ilya informed him patiently. "This is the plan."
Shane made a sound that wasn't words.
Ilya held Sasha at the edge of the dock, her feet dangling over the water, and felt the coiled readiness in her – the bouncing, barely-contained anticipation of a child about to do something delightful. He looked down at her face, at the pure simple happiness in it, the brightness of it, and felt the thing in his chest that never entirely went away anymore when he looked at her.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Yeah," she answered immediately, like the word had been there since before he asked.
He swung her out and let go.
She dropped into the lake with a sound like a small explosion, water erupting upward, and Ilya watched the surface close over her, and then she came up gasping and grinning, her curls plastered flat to her face and both arms already moving toward the ladder.
"Again!" she announced, with the absolute authority of someone who had just confirmed a hypothesis.
From the dock, Shane said: "That was– okay, that wasn't as bad as– I mean she came up fine, obviously she came up fine–"
"She came up fine," Ilya confirmed.
They did it four more times. By the third, Sasha was making a noise that wasn't quite a scream and wasn't quite a laugh before she hit the water. By the fourth she had opinions about trajectory that Ilya did not honor but filed away as evidence of things. Shane watched all of it from the dock with the tight-shouldered energy of someone who had committed to a position and was seeing it through even as his nervous system filed a formal objection, muttering things like she went under for a second there and that's quite a splash to no one in particular and no one in particular paying attention.
After the fifth time, Sasha climbed the ladder dripping and stood on the dock catching her breath, and looked at Shane.
"It's really fun," she told him, very sincerely.
“I’m sure it is,” Shane replied, sighing a bit. “Fun, but maybe not safe.”
“Papa thinks it’s safe,” Sasha replied, sounding a bit confused.
“Your papa has poor risk assessment,” Shane said pointedly, looking at Ilya who feigned hurt, but seemed to know better than to argue with that statement.
It was on an afternoon in the second week that the clouds came in while they were all still on the dock – moving fast across the sky the way Ontario clouds did in June, stacking up and darkening with a speed that seemed implausible until you'd seen it a few times. The temperature dropped with them, the warmth sucked out of the air in the space of ten minutes, and the lake went from gold to a flat, pewter gray.
Sasha, who ran cold even in June heat and who had been in the water for nearly an hour, didn't seem to notice at first. She was swimming parallel to the dock, working on the distance she'd been adding to each day, her strokes even and efficient, and if her lips had gone a particular shade of blue it was Shane who saw it first, sitting up straighter on the dock and watching her with the focused concern he reserved for things he was trying not to make a production of.
"Hey, Sash," he called, keeping his voice easy. "I think that's enough for today."
"I'm okay," she called back, not stopping.
"You're the same color as a blueberry."
A pause. She stopped swimming and trod water and looked at him. "I'm not cold."
"Your lips are blue, malyshka," Ilya pointed out, since the little girl clearly hadn’t noticed.
She looked down at herself as though consulting her own body might provide a counterargument. Her teeth, barely audible from the dock, were chattering.
"Come on," Shane insisted, going to the ladder. "Out."
She came without further argument, which told Ilya she was colder than she'd admitted, because Sasha always came without argument when she was too cold or too tired or too scared to maintain the fiction that she was fine. One hand on the ladder and then up, water streaming off her curls, goosebumps raised on every inch of visible skin, her whole small frame shivering in the sharp earnest way of someone who had been cold for longer than they'd realized.
Ilya was already off the lounger, already reaching for the large towel he'd left there, the specific one he'd put at the top of the stack before they came down today because Sasha always came out cold and he'd learned to be ready for it.
"Here," he said, and she shuffled over and he wrapped the towel around her with the efficiency of someone who had done this many times, tucking the ends tight. Then the second towel over that. Then his own, pulled off his shoulders without looking and layered over the first two, until Sasha was a compact bundle from shoulders to knees with her wet curls sticking up above the topmost edge of the terrycloth.
"Can't move," she reported, pouting slightly as she wiggled a bit.
"You don't need to move," Ilya told her, satisfied once she was a little burrito of towel. "You need to warm up."
"My arms are stuck."
"Good."
Ilya scooped Sasha up, sitting down on the lounger with the little girl curled up in his arms, settling down with the certainty of a small creature that had identified the warmest available surface. She wriggled into position, her head tucking up under his chin, and he felt her exhale – the long, slow exhale she did when she was done holding something and was putting it down.
He pulled the edges of the outermost towel more firmly around her back and felt her shivering begin, gradually, to subside.
The sun came back out from behind the clouds. Slowly at first, then with intention, warm and direct, falling across the boards of the porch deck and the loungers and the top of Sasha's head where her curls were starting to dry into their usual chaotic spirals. Ilya tilted his face up toward it and felt it on his closed eyelids, and listened to the lake, and felt Sasha's weight settle heavier against his chest as the warmth reached her.
He didn't fall asleep so much as stop being awake. There was the sun and the water sounds and Sasha breathing against his collarbone, and then there was just the sun and the water sounds, and then there was nothing for a while – a warm, undemanding nothing, the best kind, the kind that only came when he wasn't bracing for anything.
When he surfaced again it happened slowly, layers of awareness returning without urgency. The lake first. Then Sasha, still asleep on his chest, her breathing deep and even, her small hand curled loosely against his sternum where it had settled sometime while he slept. His own hand was on her back, resting there.
He lay still and let the waking complete itself.
Then he became aware, without quite knowing what had alerted him, that he was being watched.
Shane was on the lounger beside him. He hadn't picked his book back up. He wasn't looking at his phone or at the lake. He was looking at Ilya and Sasha with an expression that was very quiet and very still, the expression of someone who has been looking at something for a while without meaning to and has only just realized it.
Ilya recognized the look. Not because he'd seen it on Shane's face specifically, though he'd seen it there too, in glimpses, in moments when Shane didn't know he was watching. He recognized it because he knew what it felt like from the inside. That particular quality of wanting something so much that you were barely letting yourself look directly at it, like the looking itself might use up some part of whatever made it possible, or might reveal that you had no business being here at all.
Ilya stayed still. He watched Shane watching them.
After a moment Shane's eyes moved from Sasha to Ilya, and whatever had been open in his expression caught itself and folded partly back, the way it always did when Shane noticed himself wanting too visibly. He looked slightly caught. Slightly rueful.
"Hey," he greeted, quiet enough not to wake Sasha.
"Hey," Ilya murmured back.
The lake moved against the dock. Somewhere in the treeline a bird made a sound Ilya had been specifically pretending not to know the name of.
Shane looked back at Sasha. At the way she was wrapped in the towels like something packaged carefully for transport, her form rising and falling with Ilya's breathing, one small fist still lightly closed against his chest. His jaw shifted, a motion Ilya recognized as swallowing something down.
"You okay?" Ilya asked.
Shane glanced back at him. The rueful quality in his expression deepened slightly, like he'd been caught at something and had decided there was no point pretending otherwise. "Yeah," he answered. Then: "Yeah. I just—" He stopped. Started over. "I keep thinking I should want less than this. Like it's too much. Like wanting all of this—" He made a small gesture that encompassed the dock and the cottage and, Ilya understood, the three of them. "Like I should be grateful for what we have and stop needing it to be—" He shook his head. "More real than it already is."
The afternoon held the words for a moment.
Sasha shifted slightly against Ilya's chest, some small adjustment of sleep, and settled again. He felt her hand flex once and then relax.
"Is real," Ilya promised softly, the softness he only ever used with Shane and Sasha. "This is real, Shane."
Shane looked at him. His eyes were a little too bright in the afternoon light, the specific brightness that came when Shane was feeling something he hadn't cleared enough room for.
"I know," he replied, swallowing heavily. "I know it is. It just—" He exhaled, a slow careful breath. "It doesn't feel like something I'm supposed to get to have. Still. Even now. Even after everything."
Ilya understood that. He expected he would understand it for a long time, maybe always. The particular difficulty of having something your whole history had taught you wasn't for you. Of holding it without waiting for the explanation of why it had been a mistake to let you have it.
"Well," he said, after a moment. "You have it anyway. Whether it feels like you're supposed to or not."
Something moved across Shane's face. Not a smile yet, but the shape of one beginning. He looked at his own hands, then at Sasha, then at Ilya, with the expression of someone doing an accounting and finding the numbers strange.
"Yeah," he murmured, very quietly. "I do."
They stayed like that while the afternoon went on around them, the lake doing its slow golden business, the birds in the trees working through their repertoire, Sasha warm and asleep on Ilya's chest and Shane on the lounger beside them with the look of someone who was learning, slowly and against some resistance, to let a good thing simply be a good thing.
Until Sasha woke up disoriented and immediately asked if there was lemonade in the fridge, which there was, and Shane laughed, and Ilya felt the specific uncomplicated happiness of a person who has stopped waiting for the catch.
_____________
The trade was confirmed on July 1st.
The notification from his agent arrived at nine in the morning and his phone buzzed three more times in the following two minutes. He picked it up from the kitchen counter and read the message, and then read it again, and when he looked up Shane was already looking at him from across the table with his coffee mug held in both hands, and his phone was lit up on the table in front of him.
"It went through?" Shane asked, voice tinged with a hope that was almost painful.
Ilya nodded. He didn't trust his voice.
"Yep," he answered after a moment. Which wasn't much, but it was what he had.
Sasha, who had been eating toast at the counter with the focused attention she gave to morning food, looked between them. "Did something happen?"
"Something very good, miska" Ilya confirmed, not wanting to worry her.
She nodded, satisfied, and went back to her toast. Then, thirty seconds later, without looking up: "Are loons scared of anything?"
Ilya closed his eyes.
Shane made the sound he made when he was very pleased about something and trying not to show it, which was not a very effective sound. He proceeded to spend the next several minutes detailing the loon's natural predators in loving and comprehensive detail while Ilya sat across the table and looked at the kitchen ceiling and felt, despite everything, deeply and unreasonably happy.
They took Sasha kayaking in the afternoon. She asked sixty questions about the local bird population and Shane answered approximately half of them with genuine accuracy and invented the answers to the other half with a confidence that was genuinely impressive, and Sasha caught him fabricating twice and was extremely unimpressed both times, and Ilya hadn't been so happy in his entire life. He thought that probably, if pressed, he could say that out loud and mean it completely.
He was working up to it.
It was well past midnight when Shane woke up.
He lay still for a moment, doing the work of remembering where he was. The ceiling came first, unfamiliar and then familiar. The curtains at the window, the particular offshore-wind sound the lake made at night, low and ongoing. Ilya breathing deep and slow on the far side of the bed with that specific quality of someone completely under, the way Ilya slept when he was actually resting and not just waiting out the dark hours.
Shane didn't know what had woken him. Some small sound, or no sound, or simply one of those random surfacings that happened sometimes in the middle of unfamiliar quiet. He let his eyes adjust and looked at the ceiling and didn't think about anything in particular.
And then he registered, without immediately understanding how, that the doorway was occupied.
He turned his head.
Sasha was standing at the threshold. She was in her pajamas with the little cartoon bears, Fyo clutched against the center of her chest with both arms, her dark curls loose and chaotic around her face. She was perfectly still in the specific way she went still when she was uncertain about something – not frozen, not frightened, but that quality of careful suspension, of holding herself in place while she assessed whether she was going to be welcome before she committed to being there.
She'd been standing there for a little while. Shane had the impression of it even though he hadn't been awake to see it. Long enough to have decided once to come in and then talked herself back out of it, probably. Long enough to have looked at the distance between the doorway and the bed and done the calculation several times.
"Hey," Shane mumbled, still a bit asleep. He kept his voice low, below the threshold that would carry to the other side of the bed. "Hey, Sash."
She didn't come in. She didn't leave, either. "I didn’t mean to wake you up" she told him apologetically, little face looking worried at the idea, her voice barely above a whisper.
"I know. I was already awake."
She relaxed a little, baby blue eyes not quite as anxious.
He'd learned, over the course of this summer and the visits before it, that there was a specific kind of waiting Sasha did. Not the patient waiting of a child who expected to be answered in a moment, but the braced waiting of a child checking whether the door was going to open or close before committing to wanting what was on the other side. He'd seen it at kitchen counters and on docks and once, memorably, in front of the kayak shed, where she'd stood and looked at the kayaks for three solid minutes before asking if she could try one. The wanting was visible – she hadn't yet learned to fully conceal it – and so was the simultaneous preparation for the wanting to not be worth it.
He thought about what Ilya had told him, carefully and in pieces over months of late-night phone calls and quiet cottage evenings. About the years before. About what need had gotten Sasha in the past.
"You can come in," Shane invited her. Easy, unhurried, not loading it with anything. Just: you can, if you want. The door is open.
She looked at the floor. Then at the bed. Then at the floor again, and Shane watched her doing the calculation – how much trouble would this be, how much was she allowed to need, what happened to people who needed things from him – and felt the familiar pull of sadness for it, for all the people and situations that had taught her to do that math in the first place.
"Sash." He waited until her eyes came up to his. "You're not going to bother me. I promise, kiddo."
She held his gaze for a long moment, checking it the way she checked everything, looking for the asterisk. Looking for the condition.
She didn't find one, apparently. She gave a very small nod.
Shane pulled the covers back.
She crossed the room on quiet feet and stopped at the edge of the bed, at Shane's side, and looked at him from about eighteen inches away with those pale eyes that were Ilya's eyes in a smaller, more uncertain face.
"You won't be grumpy?" she asked, very seriously, sounding painfully concerned about the idea.
“Not a bit,” Shane promised. He quite frankly wasn’t sure this child could ever do anything that would make him grumpy.
She was holding Fyo so tightly the dog's ears were bent nearly flat. Shane watched her make the last calculation – the one about how much space she was allowed to take up in someone else's life, how much need was too much need, whether the welcome would hold against the reality of her actually being in it – and felt the familiar ache of it, the specific helplessness of watching someone you cared about brace themselves against something they couldn't be talked out of all at once.
He sat up slightly and got his hands under her arms and lifted her, easy and unhurried, the same way Ilya did it, before she'd finished deciding. Felt her go briefly rigid – the instinctive, reflexive tension of someone who'd learned that being picked up by adults was not always a neutral event – and then the release of it as she registered that nothing alarming was happening, that she was just being moved gently from one place to another by someone who meant it to be gentle.
He set her down in the middle of the bed, between himself and Ilya, and tucked the covers up around her shoulders.
She weighed almost nothing. Even after a year and a half of Ilya's cooking, of deliberate snacks and second helpings pressed on her with the casual insistence of a man who'd noticed she was underweight and had decided to do something about it without making it into a thing – even after all of that, she was still smaller than she should have been. It caught Shane sometimes, how small she was. He'd think he'd adjusted for it and then he'd pick her up and remember all over again.
Ilya breathed slow and steady on the far side of her, undisturbed. The moonlight came in at an angle through the curtains and lay in pale strips across the ceiling.
Sasha lay still for a moment with the covers up to her chin and Fyo gripped against her chest, doing the thing she did when she was waiting to find out what happened next.
Nothing happened next. Shane settled back on his side, close enough to be present. The cottage made its small nighttime sounds. The lake made its lake sounds.
After a while, Sasha shifted Fyo, tucking him more securely under her arm.
"Shane?" Very quiet.
"Yeah."
A pause. In the pause he could feel her weighing something. Deciding whether to say it.
"Do loons come out at night?"
Shane stared at the ceiling. He was aware of a very specific quality of effort being required to maintain composure. "Some of them do, yeah."
The pause that followed was contemplative.
"Don't tell Papa," she said.
"Deal," Shane agreed, and his voice only came out slightly uneven.
After that, quiet. Real quiet, the settling kind. Shane lay on his back and looked at the ceiling and listened to the lake and to Ilya breathing on the other side of the bed, that deep even rhythm, and to Sasha's breathing gradually finding its own evening-out beside him.
She was asleep in about ten minutes. He could tell by the way her whole body went gradual and soft, the grip on Fyo loosening by degrees until the dog was cradled rather than clutched, and the slight part of her lips, and the quality of the stillness that was sleep rather than waiting.