The Shots You Take
59 pages • 1-hour read
Rachel ReidThe Shots You Take
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes cursing and discussion of antigay bias, mental illness, substance use, addiction, and suicidal ideation.
Reckoning With the Past to Earn a Second Chance
In The Shots You Take, Adam Sheppard and Riley Tuck only approach a second chance at love after they face the betrayals that originally ended their friendship. They spend 12 silent years holding a shared mix of shame, fear, and confusion; their healing only begins when they finally start to discuss what happened. Once they confront the story they built around their breakup, they break down the ideas that kept them apart and assemble a relationship grounded in honesty and forgiveness.
Adam and Riley’s old wounds appear clearly in the scenes of flashback, which depict their secret relationship in their twenties. These scenes show an uneven dynamic marked by hidden feelings that harden into lasting pain. In a 2007 moment, Riley admits he cares for Adam, and Adam replies with a laugh, scoffing at the idea that they are, in fact, gay. His belittling response and behavior leave Riley embarrassed and set a precedent for their encounters to come. The pattern repeats after the 2010 Stanley Cup win, when Adam initiates sex and then immediately calls the encounter a mistake and tells Riley to erase the night from his memory. His final rejection ends their friendship and pushes Riley to leave the team. The characters’ subsequent and protracted separation grows out of this fraught history. Before anything new can begin between them, Adam and Riley must process the hurt they caused each other throughout their years as secret lovers.
Because this hurt has shaped their lives for over a decade, Adam and Riley’s reunion is initially defined by volatility, anger, and confusion. When Adam resurfaces in Riley’s life after Harvey Tuck’s death, Riley’s old wounds erupt in frustration and evasion. Riley’s grief makes him prickly, but he also steps back from Adam because he hasn’t forgiven Adam for the past. Outside the church after the funeral, he responds to Adam’s condolences by telling him to “please fuck off” (5). When Adam brings him lunch at the sporting goods store, Riley snaps at him and says he should leave. Even when Riley walks into Adam’s motel room later, he comes to confront him, not to reconnect. These early scenes show that simply sharing space is not enough to heal the lovers’ relationship; they have to dismantle the defenses they built to survive the original break.
Adam and Riley begin to overtly pursue reconciliation and imagine a future together when they start to address their past in a series of vulnerable conversations. Such scenes of dialogue illustrate the characters actively articulating their feelings and processing them together—excavating the past turns up new soil for a healthier relationship future. This shift begins during a fierce argument when both men finally drop their defenses and explain their hurt. Over the course of their time together in Avery River, Adam and Riley engage in open-hearted yet challenging conversations that allow them to make sense of their shared and diverging relational history. When they each share their sides of the same story, they gain insight into one another’s experiences, which fosters understanding, forgiveness, and compassion. Ultimately, when Adam faces what his actions cost and admits that he was in love with Riley throughout their forbidden romance, Riley feels less alone and can see their past anew. Their honest exchanges let them see each other without the old distortions and compel them to shape a more open, reciprocal dynamic. By returning to the moment where things first went wrong, they clear a space for a second chance.
The Conflict Between Public Persona and Private Identity
The Shots You Take uses the pressure in professional hockey to project a spotless public image to show how Adam Sheppard and Riley Tuck suffer when they hide essential parts of themselves. Adam builds a closeted life to protect his career, pushing Riley away for fear of exposing their forbidden romance and jeopardizing his public reputation. Meanwhile, Riley absorbs years of grief over his unrequited love for Adam, retreating from the hockey world instead of owning his feelings and identity openly. Reid portrays the gap between public persona and private reality as a drain on the main characters’ emotional lives, and each man moves toward stability only when he begins to live more openly.
Adam’s arc shows how hiding his sexual identity to meet the NHL’s standards distorts his life. He creates an image of himself as a straight family man to guard his reputation—concealing his relationship with Riley, and marrying Maggie and starting a family after Riley pushes him away. When he speaks to Riley, he calls his marriage to Maggie a safe choice, which he made to appear settled to the outside world. Over time, however, he realizes that this choice comes with a cost. The narrative describes Adam’s award‑filled career as something he achieved while feeling “empty every day” (113). Retirement leaves him alone in a large house that feels cold, and his teenagers describe his home life as depressing. Adam’s story reveals a life that looks successful on the outside but drains him on the inside because it grows out of secrecy.
Riley’s path shows a different kind of damage from limiting his true self. Years spent hiding his love for Adam strain his sense of self. Adam’s last rejection pushes him into a collapse that takes shape in Dallas, far from home. His pain appears through “undiagnosed depression, alcohol, sleeping pills, and weighing the pros and cons of ending it all” (42). His retirement from the NHL at 29 becomes an attempt to save himself rather than a sign of defeat, since the league had become a place where his inner and outer lives lived in constant tension. Riley only begins to recover when he returns to Avery River and builds a quieter but more genuine life.
As the novel follows Adam and Riley forward, authenticity becomes the route toward connection. Riley’s steady life in Avery River, shaped by friends and family, contrasts with Adam’s isolated existence in Toronto. Adam begins to feel grounded only when he starts to break down his old persona. He first comes out to Riley, then to Riley’s friends, and later makes that truth public. In the epilogue, five years later, Adam has written a candid autobiography and lives openly with Riley in Avery River. He has finally brought his public and private identities into alignment, which has allowed him to build a life that finally feels whole.
Grief as a Catalyst for Connection and Change
In The Shots You Take, Harvey Tuck’s sudden death disturbs the distance Riley and Adam have kept for 12 years and sets their reunion and journeys toward growth in motion. Via Riley’s healing journey, Reid shows how grief might disrupt old patterns and create moments of vulnerability that neither man would have allowed in ordinary circumstances. Riley and Adam have avoided each other for over a decade, yet losing Harvey draws them back into the unresolved parts of their shared past and opens a path toward a new beginning. Beyond repairing their relationship, Harvey’s death helps the characters understand what is important in life, including genuine connection, moments of quiet, and meaningful work grounded in self-declared values. Harvey’s death brings Adam across the country and back into Riley’s world, organically facilitating their reconnection and challenging Riley toward forgiveness. Adam shows up unannounced at Harvey’s funeral both because of his concern for Riley’s sorrow and because of his own appreciation for Harvey as a person. He shows Riley support by grieving alongside him, even before Riley is ready to accept it. The funeral setting forces them into a space where they must either rebuild something or let the distance harden further. The event acts as the inciting incident of the novel, spurring the plot points that follow.
Riley’s intense grief makes him volatile, while also weakening the emotional walls he has used for self-protection. Riley’s raw, vulnerable state gives Adam organic chances to help him in both tangible and unseen ways. For example, after Riley’s grief inspires him to tear apart his father’s sporting goods store, Adam responds by helping him reorganize it. Adam later takes on the work of hosting the minor hockey banquet Harvey was meant to run. These tasks create a shared purpose and let Adam show steady commitment to his friend, while honoring his father’s life. Adam’s investment in him, regardless of his emotional fragility, softens Riley’s resistance. The most exposed moment arrives when Riley breaks down in his bedroom while Adam holds him. That scene marks the point where their old antagonism gives way to genuine, patient care.
As Riley keeps grieving, he begins to reconsider what his life could look like. His father’s memory gradually becomes something that guides him instead of something that traps him in sorrow. This shift appears when he visits the grave and finds the moon snail shell Adam left there. The shell connects his past with Harvey to his future with Adam. Riley senses his father’s blessing in that moment, which lets him accept the possibility of happiness. Through that sequence, grief becomes the event that reopens his life and clears space for lasting love. The epilogue reinforces this notion by depicting Riley’s sustained investment in his late father’s store. Instead of dismantling the space again or giving up the business to stave off sorrow, Riley invests in the store, giving it a future that honors Harvey’s memory.
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