Chapter Text
Everyone who attended the University of Toronto knew about the existence of Shane Hollander’s husband.
And every single one of them was absolutely convinced that his husband was not real.
It wasn’t exactly doubt. Shane Hollander far too attractive not to inspire stories, and the most convenient one of all was this: the invisible husband, always mentioned, never seen.
It all started when Shane transferred in his second year.
Before that, he had spent a year at McGill University, where no one cared enough to question his personal life.
The University of Toronto was closer to his parents’ house, carried more weight for the career Shane wanted to build, and offered opportunities McGill simply didn’t. Shane had always been good at practical decisions.
What he hadn’t anticipated was the social side effect.
From the very first week, Shane became a topic of conversation. Not in an aggressive or malicious way, but inevitably.
He was the kind of person who drew attention without seeming to want it, answering questions in class with ease, making friends naturally, smiling as if he had no idea of the effect he had on people.
The kind of person who seemed far too comfortable in his own skin. Which, for an entire university full of insecure people, was practically an invitation to collective fascination.
The first time Shane mentioned the husband happened without any ceremony at all.
Hayden and Kip, newly acquired classmates, were sitting in the cafeteria at one of those tables far too long for private conversations, and Shane was there too. They had just gotten their food when Hayden noticed Shane carefully pushing all the peas to the edge of his plate, as if performing a small, personal ritual.
“Shane, you don’t like them?” Hayden asked, amused. “Then why did you take them?”
Shane didn’t even look up.
“Force of habit,” he replied. “My husband always eats them for me.”
The cafeteria, collectively, seemed to forget how to speak.
Cutlery froze midair. A conversation died halfway through a sentence, someone dropped a fork.
“Husband?” Hayden repeated, blinking a few times.
“Shane, you’re only twenty-two,” Kip added, genuinely confused.
“You like men?” they asked at the same time.
Shane finally looked up, surprised by the reaction.
“Yes,” he said, as if stating something perfectly banal. “And yes.”
Then he went back to eating, as if he’d just commented on the weather.
A messy chain of reactions followed. Hayden let out an overly long “oh.” Kip seemed to mentally recalculate everything he thought he knew about Shane. Someone at the next table assumed it was a joke, someone else whispered that it must have been a forced marriage, a third person decided, silently, that this explained a lot.
“He doesn’t study here?” someone asked.
“No,” Shane replied.
“Then… where is he?”
“Traveling for work.”
That answer was the beginning of the end.
Because work was far too vague, and husband far too specific. And to make things worse, Shane said everything with a calmness so practiced it felt fake to people unaccustomed to emotionally well-adjusted adults.
In the days that followed, the comment spread.
Shane Hollander had a husband.
Shane Hollander was married at twenty-two.
Shane Hollander talked about his husband as if he were far too real, far too perfect, far too functional for that kind of environment.
And the most important detail of all: no one had ever seen him.
The story gained small variations as it passed from mouth to mouth. Sometimes the husband lived in another city, sometimes in another country, sometimes he was much older, sometimes he worked too much.
Always distant enough to justify his absence, always convenient enough to explain why Shane never seemed available.
The second time happened even more casually than the first.
It was an advanced linguistics class, a mandatory course in the psychology program that Hayden considered, without guilt, a sophisticated waste of time. The professor had been talking for nearly forty minutes about a Russian writer whose name no one in the room seemed willing to remember.
Somewhere between Dostoevsky and who cares.
Most of the students were mentally elsewhere, phones hidden under desks, eyes unfocused. Kip was drawing small geometric shapes in the corner of his notebook, and Hayden was counting down the minutes until the break.
Everyone was distracted.
Except Shane.
Shane looked dangerously attentive. Leaning forward, pen moving with intent, eyes following every word the professor said as if this lecture were a privilege rather than a requirement.
When the professor projected a passage in Russian onto the board and asked, almost provocatively, what it said, the silence was immediate and absolute.
No one even pretended to know.
That was when Shane raised his hand, almost at the exact moment the question ended.
The professor blinked, surprised.
“You… can read Russian?”
“Yes,” Shane answered, far too polite to sound like he was showing off.
He read it out loud, his pronunciation steady, unhesitating.
“Zhizn dayotsya cheloveku odin raz, i prozhit yeyo nado tak, chtoby ne bylo muchitelno bolno za bestselno prozhityye gody.”
The entire classroom froze.
“‘Life is given to a person only once, and it must be lived in such a way that it won’t be painfully hard to suffer for years lived without purpose,’” Shane translated right after, without even realizing what he had done.
Hayden turned far too slowly toward Kip, whose mouth was hanging open. Some students looked to the professor, waiting for some kind of prearranged performance or social experiment.
The professor himself took a few seconds to react, clearly recalculating everything he knew about the student sitting in the third row.
“Impressive,” he said at last. “Very impressive.”
Shane felt the weight of everyone’s gaze settle on him like something physical. For the first time since arriving at the University of Toronto, he looked slightly uncomfortable. His cheeks warmed as he ran a hand through his hair, an automatic, almost shy gesture.
Hayden spoke before he realized he was speaking.
“You speak Russian?”
Shane turned to him, confused by the astonishment.
“I do.”
“Since when?”
“For a few years.”
“Why?”
The question hung in the air, heavy with expectation.
Shane thought for half a second, then answered with his usual ease.
“My husband is Russian,” he said. “He taught me a lot.”
Hayden blinked, Kip closed his notebook slowly, as if it required extra concentration and somewhere in the back of the room, someone let out a short, incredulous laugh.
“Of course,” someone murmured. “The husband.”
And that was the moment the theory stopped being curiosity and became collective certainty.
Shane Hollander’s husband wasn’t just invisible anymore.
Now he was also Russian, fluent in languages, culturally sophisticated, and far too convenient to be real.
And for the University of Toronto, that settled everything.