i write tragedies not sins

Yuna Hollander will look back on this moment later—her first time meeting her son in 25 years—with a mixture of fondness and spine-crushing guilt. This is not the moment it should have been. This is a series of perfectly composed photographs with engineered-to-look-natural smiles plastered on their faces. Here, Marc Delacroix handing over a gift basket of signed Metros merch for the Project Home Charity Auction. Here, Marc Delacroix shaking her hand. Here, Yuna sandwiched between him and Hayden Pike, all of them grinning at the camera.

She doesn’t even grin as hard as she wants to. Part of her is giddy as a schoolgirl at the fact that she’s here, in the Bell Centre, meeting the man who singlehandedly led her favorite team to two Stanley Cups. But right now she’s not Yuna Hollander, hockey fan. She’s Yuna Hollander, charity director of an anti-human-trafficking organization, and that Yuna Hollander does not get to smile big enough to make her cheeks hurt. That Yuna Hollander has to be perfectly calm, and composed, and sympathetic at all times.

It’s her best chance. She figured that out a long time ago. If she’s not too angry, or too wild with grief, or God forbid too happy, then she sticks in people’s minds. Shane sticks in people’s minds. They stay the perfect tragedy, and maybe someone will remember them at just the right moment, and then maybe she will get her son back.

It hasn’t worked so far. But that doesn’t mean that she can stop trying. She could forgive herself, she thinks, if she died without knowing what happened to Shane. She could not forgive herself if she died knowing she could’ve done more.

Marc Delacroix is nice. That’s her first impression of him. He’s a polite young man who gives her the same sad smile that most people give her, and tells her how important her work is, and privately offers her rinkside tickets of her own to match the two nestled in the gift basket.

“My husband and I have season tickets,” she says. “But thank you for the offer.”

“Oh, we have a real fan!” Hayden Pike says, slinging an arm over Delacroix’s shoulders. “That’s a nice change of pace. Most of the time the charity orgs barely recognize me, and only know DC from his Tim’s ads. You looking forward to watching us stomp Boston tomorrow?”

“Of course,” Yuna says, relaxing a little. The camera crews have retreated, having gotten all the promotional material they need for both Project Home and the Metros’ Instagrams. She can be herself, maybe, if only for a moment. “That new rookie of theirs is awful, I’ve been watching their second line crumble with delight.”

“Rozanov sees potential in him, I’ve heard,” Delacroix says, relaxing alongside her. Some of the sadness trickles out of his smile. Hockey-Fan Yuna is easier to talk to than Missing-Child Yuna. She’s known that for a long time, too. She knows that Shane is a wall between her and the world. “We’ll see if it’s warranted.”

“Let’s get you some signed jerseys, at least,” Pike says. “We have a ton of extras laying around, you have no idea—”

In the end, she does accept the gift of two signed jerseys, wondering if she’ll have to disclose them in Project Home’s year-end financial report. She’ll wonder the same thing six months from now, huddled around a campfire with her husband and her son, watching the Delacroix jersey burn.

People will ask her about this day. They’ll ask her if she had known, shaking Delacroix’s hand. If she had felt some deep, enduring connection, something that the years and miles hadn’t stolen from them.

“I thought that he was a very kind young man,” she’ll say diplomatically. “And that his parents must be very proud of him.”

Of course I didn’t know, she’ll want to scream. They wouldn’t have been able to publish a single photo from that day, if I’d have known. It’d be like publishing a photo of a trainwreck, showing the dead bodies piled up on the tracks. My heart would’ve been a pile of blood on the ground. He would’ve had to hold me upright to keep me from collapsing.