Chapter Text
Yuna knows, vaguely, that Hayden is in the waiting room when they arrive.
She has no time to worry about him, not when Shane is somewhere in this hospital, injured to an unknown degree and completely alone. So she lets David deal with him, blowing past his tense body and the dozen empty chairs right up to the nurse’s desk.
“Shane Hollander,” she says before the nurse can even open her mouth. “We’re his parents. Yuna and David Hollander. Where is he?”
The nurse is not so urgent. She takes her time to check both Yuna’s ID and Shane’s hospital records which clearly state his parents are his emergency contacts and can know everything. When she finally gives Yuna the room number, Yuna’s insides are trembling with pent-up fear.
Another day, she’ll be glad that the hospital is being thorough. That not just anyone can go upstairs and see Shane, who they see not as her boy but instead as a world-renowned hockey star.
Today, she is annoyed and scared and short. “Thank you so much,” she snaps, and turns to find David.
Instead of hanging back to talk to Hayden, he’s just behind her, and he catches her elbows with soft hands. Concern deepens the lines of his face when he asks, “Do you have his room number?”
She knows she should be soft. She should stay calm, because someone needs to, and it needs to be her. But it’s impossible when every time she closes her eyes, all she can see is her son, her baby, Shane on the ice—still and not moving—surrounded by fighting and paramedics—being put onto a backboard and escorted out— No. She can’t stay calm. She can’t be soft.
“Yep, let’s go.”
They make it upstairs quickly, no time to fuck around. Hayden comes with, a silent, nervous shadow. In his hand, she’ll realize later, he’s clutching Shane’s phone. He keeps looking at it, but Yuna is too busy tapping her foot and cursing out slow elevators in her head to notice.
She explodes out of the elevator the second the doors begin opening, finding the nurse’s station on this floor with ease. There, the nurse tells them that Shane is okay—he’s in surgery, surgery for what Yuna demands, and is told the doctor will be out shortly. Then she tells them where to sit, a more private waiting room for more high-profile patients, and gives them no further information.
The wait is miserable. David and Hayden sit, but Yuna spends half of it speaking to Thierault on the phone, negotiating the statement they’ll have to make, promising to keep him updated. There’s no reason to ask for Shane’s things, because Hayden has it all, his bag and keys and phone.
As soon as she’s hung up with the coach, Hayden stands, shifting nervously on his feet. It’s only now that she’s able to really think about him at all.
First comes the gratitude that he’s here, that Shane has a friend who cares enough to wait with him instead of going home. Second comes the realization of how upset he looks—his face pinched and his head ducked, his hands shaking a little as they clutch onto a phone. “Mrs. Hollander,” he says, exhausted, forgetting that she’s told him to call her Yuna a thousand times. “I, uh—”
Yuna stops pacing, moving closer to him until she’s got her arms wrapped around his shoulders. He has to hunch down the slightest bit, less than Shane but still familiar. A sigh like relief blows through him, his body sagging into her embrace.
“Thank you for being here,” she tells him, squeezing him gently.
Patting his back, she meets David’s eyes over his shoulder. There’s still fear all over his expression, but he smiles at them too. For a moment, just this one moment, they can all breathe.
After a moment, Hayden pulls back. Then he hands her the phone—Shane’s phone.
“I grabbed this when I was getting his stuff and I saw, well.”
He looks away from Yuna, briefly glances at David, then looks away from him too. There’s an oddly guilty look on his face that has Yuna suspicious at once.
“Um, has Shane told you guys about Lily?”
Yuna and David catch eyes again. There’s no recognition from David—he’s just as in the dark as she is.
“No…,” she says, guiding him to sit between her and David. “Is that a friend of his?”
“No. Or, maybe? I don’t know what they are to each other, but. Ugh.” He sighs, running a hand over the back of his neck. “Shane told me before they took him off to text her. And I think she’s texted him a few times too. I was just going to send something but I can’t get his phone open.”
While he speaks, Yuna presses the button to open the phone. Yes, there on the screen are three texts from a contact named Lily, though it doesn’t give any hint as to what the messages might say.
“He asked you to text her?” David asks.
He nods. “Yeah, he said she was probably freaking out.”
It’s odd to think that there’s someone out there worried about Shane, maybe as much as they are, that Yuna has never met. Someone that Shane thought of first, instead of his best friend or his parents.
David says what she’s really thinking: “Wow. We’ve… we’ve never heard about her.”
There’s something a little distant about his voice. Not hurt, not the way Yuna is maybe feeling, just… confused. Shane doesn’t lie to them, or hide things. He never has, not even when he was a child.
“Maybe she’s a new friend,” Yuna suggests, though she doesn’t really believe it.
Hayden winces, shaking his head. “No, I don’t think so. They’ve been texting for years.”
“Years?” Yuna and David repeat as one, both of them shocked.
Yuna’s sure she doesn’t know the name of every friend Shane has ever had, but she does know the name of every girlfriend—Paige in middle school, Jessica in high school, and Rose Landry just a few months ago. The name Lily has never come up, she’s sure of that.
”I don’t know how long, exactly,” Hayden tells them, apologetic. “Shane never talks about her. But I’m pretty sure she lives in Boston. Every time we play there, he… uh, well, he disappears for a while. Going to see her, I think.”
“So a puck bunny,” Yuna concludes. She’s not horrified or upset—maybe there’s even a part of her that’s relieved. Most hockey players have girls in every city, it seems like, but Shane has never really said anything like that. Shane doesn’t talk to them about his sex life, which is fine, it’s not like Yuna wants to know, but… sometimes people need sex! Especially people who are as high-strung as she and Shane are. So it’s almost nice to know that he’s not totally cooped up, that he’s doing something normal for young men of his age.
“Yuna,” David reprimands gently. Like he can read her mind. But he doesn’t say anything about her thinking too much, not in front of Hayden. “Don’t call her that.”
“What? Am I wrong?”
“I don’t think it’s like that, Mrs. Hollander. I think… I think he really likes her.” Hayden pauses after speaking, watching them both carefully.
Yuna frankly does not have the mental capacity right now to react. If Lily was just a person Shane was sleeping with, then oh well, of course he didn’t tell them. But if he likes her? If they’ve been texting for years?
What is she supposed to do with that?
Thankfully, the doctor interrupts before she or David can react. She’s a no-nonsense woman who approaches them directly, saying, “Are you the Hollander family?”
Hayden looks ready to protest, but Yuna’s not having it. “Yes, we’re his parents, this is his brother. What’s going on? Is Shane okay?”
“He’s doing just fine. We just got him out of surgery, and everything went well. We had to set his collar bone, since there was a clean break there, and he’s got a concussion. Once we bring him out of sedation and he wakes up on his own, we’ll be able to bring you back to see him. Do any of you have any questions?”
Ten minutes later, once Yuna has dragged every answer she can get out of the doctor, they’re left alone again. Relief is a welcome feeling, though the worry can’t possibly be fully soothed until she has Shane in front of her. For now, though, she has things she needs to do—things she can focus on instead of the wait.
“Okay,” she says, falling into her seat, fingers already flying over her phone screen. “Hayden, you text your team and let them know. I’ll tell your coach.”
“And Lily?” David asks.
Yuna passes Shane’s phone to him. When Shane got it, he’d added his fingerprints to it for extra security, adding David’s at the last minute. “In case there’s an emergency,” Shane had emphasized, and Yuna had thought at the time that it was a very smart idea.
Shane never said it, but Yuna knows he asked David to do it because he knew David would never—and has never, up until today—breach his privacy. Yuna is secure enough to know she might not be able to do the same. Look at what she’s doing right now, after all.
Once David has pressed his thumb to the button and the screen has lit up, he hands it back to her. With ease, Yuna navigates to Shane’s messages app, finding Lily right at the top.
She doesn’t intend to read any of their conversation, she doesn’t, but it’s impossible not to read what’s right there on the screen in front of her.
And then, later—
“Oh!” She says, her cheeks heating up at once, and slams the phone down into her lap as if that can erase the things she just saw.
It feels like there’s no space in her brain to comprehend the texts, much less react to them. She knows Shane so well, or she thought she did, but this is a side of him that’s completely foreign. Flirting. Wanting someone. This girl in general, speaking to her son in a way she’s not sure she approves of, yet also fearing for his safety.
Shane asked Hayden to text her, she reminds herself. He wants her to know he’s okay.
I need to respect that, no matter how embarrassing it is. Take a breath and deal with it, Yuna.
When she’s able to look up again, she finds David and Hayden staring at her with wide eyes. “What’d she say?” Hayden asks, sounding almost like he doesn’t want the answer.
That she wants to fuck my son, is Yuna’s first, horrified thought.
“Shane was right, she’s very worried,” is what she settles on actually saying. Glancing at Hayden, and sharing a more meaningful look with David, she continues, “I… I don’t know if I should keep using Shane’s phone, though. I don’t think he would want us to.”
It’s the most polite way she can think of to say, I don’t want to find anything else.
Hayden winces again. “He definitely wouldn’t. Um, maybe you could just text her on your phone. That way, you’ll have her number if this ever happens again.”
Yuna manages to hold in her immediate reaction, which is to shout at Hayden for potentially jinxing Shane with another injury in the future, and nods. Yes, that’s what she’ll do. Then she won’t be able to see any more flirting, or god forbid, nudes.
While she carefully looks for Lily’s number, Hayden runs a hand through his hair. “Why don’t I go get us some drinks or something? I can’t keep sitting here.”
“Good idea. Thanks, Hayden. We’ll text you if they let us back there,” David tells him, patting his back as he stands. “Water is fine.”
“Got it, Mr. Hollander.”
So Hayden goes, and Yuna stares at the new contact in her phone, doing something she rarely does: second guessing herself.
Shane will not be happy about this, and she knows it. Clearly this is not something he wanted them to know about.
But what options does she have? Is it worse to potentially read his conversations with this girl? See more than she already has? Or is it worse to take this phone number and add it to her own phone, speak to her without Shane okaying it first?
No, none of them are great choices. But someone has to tell her. If this was Yuna, waiting on news about David, and her in-laws decided not to tell her because of an awkward situation… it would be terrible. She would never be able to forgive them. And despite herself, there is a part of Yuna that doesn’t want this girl to hate them—that knows if she doesn’t do this now, Shane might hate her for it.
That’s what cinches it for her. Taking a breath, she does what she does best, and goes for it.
She curses not having a last name, but oh well. No use lingering on that.
Once the messages are sent, she begins to lower the phone, expecting it’ll be a little while before she gets a response. But before she can even set it in her lap again, it’s buzzing, once, twice, three times.
And, okay. Maybe Yuna is in a state of limbo right now, too worried about Shane to be upset he hid something so big—so serious—from them. Maybe she should hate this girl for keeping this secret with Shane, or the way she spoke to him, or for not being here right now. (Yes, that last one is unfair. Hayden said she’s from Boston, why would she go to a game in Montreal? But still. And didn’t Shane say he was going to see her tonight?)
But… she just can’t. Lily, whoever she is, obviously feels concerned about him. That’s enough for her.
“What is she saying?” David asks, watching her face.
Yuna tries three times to get the words out, but in the end, she pushes the phone in his direction. Let him read it and see for himself how much this girl they’ve never met cares.
It buzzes again in his hands, and they both peer at the screen as Lily continues,
This is what finally breaks the dam she’s been holding onto since she saw Shane fall, limp, onto the ice. It’s what finally puts tears in Yuna’s eyes. A hand comes up to her mouth, a wet gasp falling from her lips.
“David,” she asks, even though she knows the answer. She just needs him to confirm it, confirm she’s not having crazy thoughts. “He’s hiding his girlfriend from us, isn’t he?”
“Yes, honey,” David replies, sounding exhausted. “I think he is.”