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Chapter 20

The conversation with the lawyer the next morning was disheartening in a way neither man had expected.

“She could go to jail for this?” Shane asked.

The lawyer nodded.

“Yes,” he said and explained the legal jargon and what it meant.

The boys looked at their father, David, who simply nodded.

“She always tells us all our actions have consequences. I guess it’s time for her to experience the same,” he said.

“Where will we stay?” Evan questioned.

David bit his lower lip.

“I have to admit something,” he said.

Both boys tilted their heads.

“One of the reasons I haven’t been around much lately, is because I took on a second project to earn enough money to keep our home,” he said.

“We can go home?” Shane asked. “Back to our beds? And everything?”

David nodded.

“We just have to go and get our essentials from the new house,” he said.

And just like that, their lives changed in ways they hadn’t expected.

—-

Yuna Hollander hadn’t expected someone from court to deliver legal paperwork to her. She wasn’t terribly surprised by the legal separation paperwork from David, what did surprise her was the fact that both her sons were suing her for the money they had made doing advertisements and other stuff.

Money she had spent on their careers, care and well-being.

She sat at the kitchen counter and stared at the paperwork she had spread out in front of her. It took her quite a while to realize that these things had consequences that could see her in jail.

With a frustrated sigh, she grabbed her phone and called the law firm she and David had been using for years. It took a moment for her call to go through, and when she said her name, the secretary told her something she hadn’t expected to ever hear.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hollander. Since our firm is representing both your husband and your sons in their individual lawsuits against you, we legally can’t represent you due to a conflict of interest. This information should have been provided to you in the legal packages delivered to you today,” the woman told her firmly before hanging up on her.

Yuna blinked and stared at her phone in disbelief. She hadn’t even managed to get a word in edge-wise to protest that the firm dropped her as a client and kept her husband and sons.

It didn’t even register with her that it was simply a matter of them getting to the firm first to secure its services.

She silently raged for quite a while in the quiet of the house she had bought because she thought it would bring her and the boys a prestige they would need to go far in the hockey world.

Since she couldn’t have the best law firm around, she grabbed her laptop and started to research which firm was the second best. She wasn’t happy about having to do it and cursed herself for not doing it earlier, just to have a backup plan in case it was ever needed.

Back in the day, she had dismissed the thought of ever needing a different lawyer because she had never expected either her husband or her sons to push back against her orders.

That thought brought her up short for a few seconds.

Was she really giving her family orders?”

As abruptly as it had come, she dismissed it, because there was no way that what she was doing wasn’t the best thing to be done for her family. These men just didn’t see that she was right.

After hours of research, she finally found a law firm she liked and called them to make an appointment. To her surprise, they had an open appointment that same afternoon, and she happily took it.

She grabbed all the paperwork she had been sent, and drove back to Ottawa proper, and cursed the traffic as well as the length of her travel while driving, though it didn’t occur to her that her husband and sons were going through this twice every day.

She parked as close as she could manage, grabbed her briefcase and made her way into the building with her head held high and the arrogance of a woman who thought she was right on display.

Three hours later, she left the offices of the law firm subdued as the lawyer explained that David, Shane, and Evan all had cause to sue her and that the judges that would eventually be assigned to the cases would quite likely side with them due to the way the contracts they had signed were worded.

It was quite explicitly stated what the purpose of the money they were given by the league could and could not be used for according to the wishes of the boys themselves, and neither had even hinted at wanting to move away from the house they had grown up in.

They also pointed out that Yuna had quite obviously treated her husband and sons like clients instead of her family, causing a conflict of interest, that her former law firm had repeatedly pointed out, but which she had dismissed, citing that she was good at compartmentalizing.

Yuna had also been informed that her husband and sons had contacted child protective services to ensure that their children had someone with an outside perspective by their side, and that it wasn’t likely that they would side with her either.

The thought that she might lose in court and that her children would stop interacting with her was mind-boggling, and she had no idea what to do to make things right, because she still couldn’t believe that what she had done wasn’t right for her children.

Before she left, the lawyer had told her that she should go and submit to a psychological evaluation because he seriously thought something was wrong with her.

Yuna was tempted to call the man delusional but decided not to, because she felt that would risk them representing her, and it wasn’t something she was willing to risk.

Chapter 21

Living without Yuna directing their lives and keeping them all on a very strict schedule took some adjustment, but given that Evan liked planning things, he quickly figured out how the three of them could handle their home life on top of work/school.

He made schedules for all their household chores and set up rotations so no one got permanently stuck with anything.

Shane and David figured out how to meal prep healthy but tasty meals for the three of them with the help of a nutritionist, which caused them all to enjoy mealtimes because they weren’t forced to just eat salmon and brown rice.

They finally had variety in their meals, and on top of it, they had built-in cheat meals which were still healthy but tasted like the junk food they could buy.

The three men quietly organized their lives, allowed Miss Sophie Bouchard, who had been Evan’s social worker when he was a little boy, to observe them figure out life as a single-parent household, and the visits with Yuna, who was still trying to force them to do as she told them.

It quickly became clear to Miss Bouchard that forcing the boys to visit with their mother would be detrimental to their mental health, as Evan returned from every visit with her incredibly angry, while Shane became more depressed.

When asked why he was so angry at his mother, Evan replied calmly but firmly, “Every time I see her, she tries to talk me into letting the money stuff go. Like it doesn’t matter that I planned to use it for college, driving lessons and a car because she thinks that her idea of prestige is more important than my plans for the future after hockey … because I sure as hell can’t play it forever.”

“She does the same to me,” Shane said. “She also keeps questioning me about Dad, what he’s doing, if he found someone else to be intimate with. As if Evan and I would spy on either of them for the other. We just want peace, but while Dad is willing to give it to us, she most certainly isn’t.”

Miss Bouchard took careful notes for a couple of minutes while mulling over what the boys had told her.

“Would you want the judge to allow your father to make choices regarding visits with your mother? Or do you want them to forbid contact outright?” she asked.

Evan leaned back in his seat and turned his head to look at his older brother. They had a silent conversation, involving eyebrow movements, and quirks of their mouth.

“Personally, I don’t want her to be able to contact me until I am a legal adult,” Evan admitted. “She stresses me out in ways that aren’t conducive to my hockey career or my life in general. My therapist recommended that I keep contact to a minimum if the courts force it, but otherwise just stop for my own wellbeing.”

Miss Bouchard looked surprised.

“Would your therapist be willing to testify in court?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” David spoke up from where he had been quietly sitting. “It’s still the same one Evan has been using since he was a toddler.”

“Really?” Miss Bouchard asked.

“Evan didn’t like the thought of changing his therapist and they were continuing to work with him until he is eighteen, before transitioning him to another therapist if required,” David explained.

“Well, that’s certainly fortunate for you guys, because they are used to being in court,” she said before looking at Shane.

“What about you?” she questioned.

“I’d like to have the option to see her, given that I am just shy of eighteen anyway, I don’t think I could get away with a restraining order or something, unless the court things it is necessary to protect both Evan and myself,” Shane said after a moment of silence.

Miss Bouchard took another couple of notes and nodded.

“The judge will likely have a conversation with you guys about this,” she explained.

“So like back when they asked me if I wanted to stay with Mom and Dad?” Evan asked.

Everyone stared at the sixteen-year-old.

“You remember that?” David asked.

Evan nodded slowly and ticked off the questions the nice judge had asked him while in the side-room of the court had been doing.

Shane looked at his brother, walked over to him, and hugged him. It had been a very stressing time for little Evan, who feared he would be taken back to his biological family until the judge had assured him that whatever happened, he would never go back there.

“I’m glad we don’t have to go through crap like that again,” he murmured and held his brother.

Evan leaned into Shane and nodded against his shoulder.

Miss Bouchard left a while later as it became clear that both Evan and Shane were overwhelmed.

David quietly sat with them, not asking any questions. He learned long ago not to push, but to let the boys come to him when it came to their worries, while Yuna always pushed and pushed and pushed.

—-

Evan and Shane were both unhappy with the fact that court took them away from both school and the ice for quite some time because their mother just didn’t know how to give in gracefully despite her lawyer advising her to do so.

In the end, things got settled, though. The house she had bought in her name got sold for quite a bit more money than she had bought it for, and all the money was put into a trust only the boys could access with the help of a court-appointed trustee—their father—who had veto rights but could not make any purchases with their money without consent.

Yuna’s sentencing wasn’t something either boy attended because they felt they weren’t ready to see or hear how their mother got punished for what she had been doing.

They also silently supported their father as the divorce paperwork got signed, because it was quite clear that divorcing the love of his life hurt David way more than he was prepared to admit.

Life had changed quite a lot for the Hollander men when the time for their draft finally came, but Evan and Shane were still looking forward to it. Especially because it meant they would see the Russian hockey prodigy, Ilya Rozanov, again, whom they had met in the summer during a hockey camp.