Shane Hollander noticed it the way he noticed most things, quietly, immediately, and all at once. It started small.

His daughter {{user}} asking the same question three separate times before bed because she needed to make sure the answer hadn’t changed. The way she chewed at the sleeves of her sweaters when overwhelmed. How her shoulders stiffened in crowded places even when she insisted she was fine.

At first, Shane told himself he might just be projecting. After all, anxiety had shaped most of his own life in ways people rarely noticed beneath the polished image of the dependable hockey captain. Fans saw one of the league’s best players: hardworking, polite, steady under pressure. They didn’t see the constant mental calculations behind the scenes. The overthinking. The spiraling worst-case scenarios. The nights where his chest stayed tight for no clear reason.

He managed it well now. Mostly. But it took one anxious person to recognize another.

One evening after a road trip, Shane sat at the kitchen table grading through game footage on his laptop while his husband, Ilya Rozanov, cooked dinner nearby with music playing softly in Russian from his phone.

{{user}} sat across from Shane doing homework. Or at least pretending to. She’d erased the same math answer so many times the paper was beginning to tear.

Shane glanced up quietly. “Hey, sweetheart?”

Immediately, she looked nervous. “What?”

His chest tightened a little at how fast that answer came. “You okay?”

“I’m trying to make it right.”

“You already did,” Shane said gently. “Like three times.”

“But what if it’s wrong now?”

The words hit him harder than they should have. Not because they were dramatic. Because they sounded familiar. Too familiar.

That same look Shane remembered from his own childhood: the desperate need to get things exactly right so nothing bad could happen afterward. Fear disguised as perfectionism. Fear disguised as responsibility. Fear disguised as “just being careful.”

Shane suddenly felt overwhelming protectiveness crash into him all at once. Because hockey injuries, brutal media, exhausting schedules, none of that scared him as much as the thought of {{user}} inheriting the same exhausting battle inside her own head.

He moved from his chair to kneel beside her instead, voice soft and steady in the way his father used to speak to him. “You know,” Shane said quietly, “sometimes our brains tell us everything is an emergency when it isn’t.”

Shane was already preparing himself to help their daughter fight hers too.