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Anna’s phone rang at eight-thirty, precisely when Nikita had to get into his bed. Nikita was already there, covers pulled up to his chin, waiting. She waited with him, phone in her lap while she perched on the edge of his mattress. When the phone began to ring, he gasped, eyes wide. “Who do you think it is?” Anna teased, looking at the phone with Zhenya’s contact information. “Papa and Sid!” Nikita cried, and he abandoned all pretense of settling in for sleep in favor of bolting upright to reach for the phone.“Do you really think so?” she said, pulling the phone back and putting on a ponderous expression. “Mama!” he scolded her.She laughed as she answered and put them on speaker. “Hello, my loves,” she said to them in Russian.“Papa, Sid!” Nikita interjected before either of them could get a word out. He was up on his knees and bouncing a little with excitement. “Guess what!”“What?” Sid asked, obviously fighting a laugh at Nikita’s over-the-top enthusiasm. “Um, today at school they gave us recorders! And I already know how to play like three songs!”“Awesome, kiddo. Did you play them for Mama yet?”Sid was evil. He knew full well Nikita hadn’t mastered the art of the recorder. He just wanted her to have to listen to the whistle-honking before bed. “Mama has heard all the songs,” she assured them before Nikita could get any ideas. “But you should play for us,” Zhenya said, a smirk in his tone because he was just as bad. “It’s late,” she said. Nikita was starting to get a hopeful glint in his eye. “You will hear tomorrow when you come home.”“Aw,” Nikita whined. “That’s okay. I bet it sounds better in person anyways,” Sid said, showing some mercy. “You can show us as soon as we get back. We’ll have a concert.”“Okay!” Nikita said, buoyed by the reminder that they would be back in the morning. They were playing in Vancouver, the final stop on a four-game roadie. After they finished the game, they would sleep one more night in a hotel before they flew home early. They would get in on Saturday, which gave Nikita a whole weekend to assault their ears. “Other than recorder, what did you do today?” Zhenya asked. It was his routine. If he picked Nikita up at school, he would ask then. Otherwise, he asked over dinner. On roadies, he asked at night, but he was always keenly interested in Nikita’s day. Nikita scrunched his face up. He knew better than to try and say, “Nothing.” Zhenya would just laugh and pester him until he started giving some detail. So he thought carefully about it for a moment and said, “Well, we did some spelling.”“What did you spell?”“I spelled orange and blue and... Well, I didn’t get purple right, but that one’s hard,” Nikita said with a sudden worried frown.“You don’t need. Don’t worry about purple. That’s for Kings, and nobody likes,” Zhenya said lightly. “You can spell gold?”“Um, I think so.”“And black?”“Yeah.”“Good. That’s all you need”Nikita still looked troubled. Anna ran her hand over Nikita’s hair when he looked at her.“It’s okay, baby. You’ll get it next time,” she assured him. “I know,” he sighed dramatically. He was starting to lose the battle with sleepiness, which was making him grumpy. “Want me to help you practice over the weekend?” Sid chimed in. Nikita brightened more for Sid’s offer than Zhenya’s lighthearted forgiveness. They spoke a similar language, he and Sid: the language of hard work and practice and absolute perfectionism. If she didn’t know better, she might think she had the wrong father listed on his birth certificate. “Okay,” Nikita said as he rubbed his eye. “Maybe we can color, too. I don’t know.”Sid’s voice was all smile when he said, “Sounds like a plan, bud.”“Alright, baby bird,” Zhenya said in Russian. Even over the phone, he must have been able to tell it was time for Nikita to get to bed. “You should get some sleep.”Nikita refused to follow him into Russian. He barely spoke it anymore unless they specifically told him to. “I’m not even tired,” he said, sounding very tired indeed. “I want to watch the game.”“Not this time,” Zhenya said patiently. “Next time. When we’re at home, you can come to the game. But only if you go to bed now.”Nikita huffed out a sigh and considered for a second. “Okay, I guess,” he grumbled and turned to crawl back under the covers. “Night kiddo,” Sid said. “Goodnight, Sid.”“Sweet dreams, my boy,” Zhenya said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”“Okay, Papa.”Anna tucked the covers up to Nikita’s shoulders and bent to kiss his forehead. “I love you, baby.”“Love you, too, Mama.”She stood with a warm feeling and left the room without looking back. She didn’t want to encourage him to start asking for things to try to stay awake. With the baby tucked in, she took the call off speaker. “Hello again, my loves,” she said. “Are you excited for your last game?”“Definitely,” Sid said. “Ready to get home, for sure.”“He just doesn’t want to eat any more sushi,” Zhenya laughed. He still hadn’t switched languages, presumably because he wanted to tease Sid without his knowledge. “We’ve gone three times this trip.”“You know I can understand you,” Sid said. He tried to sound annoyed but he didn’t quite make it past the affection in his tone. “Sushi’s okay.”“Poor darling,” Anna soothed. “I will make steak tomorrow night.”“Yeah?”“Of course.”“Sounds great.”“I wish I could feed you now for the game.”“Aw, that’s okay. We ate with the team at the hotel. It was good. I think it’ll be a good night.”Sid usually let his thoughts about the team flow a little easier in the hours leading up to a game. If he was concerned about something, he would say it. Clearly, the roadie had smoothed out a few jagged edges and made the team stronger. She was relieved to hear it. “Will you be watching?” Sid asked. “Of course,” she laughed. Anna watched all the Penguins games, some more idly than others. Sometimes she attended them, if they were at home, but mostly she just watched on TV. She particularly liked when they played the Capitals because it got Zhenya hot and the Flyers because Sid came home like a man possessed. But she always watched, even when they were playing a non-rival team from the opposite conference, a team that would never make the playoffs.“Good.” Sid sounded relieved. She was beginning to worry it was a routine, her watching, that she had done it consistently enough for it to burrow into Sid’s subconscious. He asked about it a lot, she noticed, in the past few months. He almost always checked, before every game, to ensure he had her eyes. He always did. Zhenya said something low away from the phone, talking to someone in the background, then returned. “We’re going to play two-touch now.”It was time for them to start getting serious about their pregame. “Yes, okay. Have fun tonight. Score for me.”Zhenya snorted. It was an old joke between them, that he would score only for himself. “Maybe one assist for you.”She leaned against the wall and put her head down, hiding her smile behind her hair as if anyone were around to see it. “If that’s all I’m worth to you.”“Secondary assist,” he said, and she could see his big, silly grin in her mind. She had been far too long without it. She was relieved that she would soon have them both back in her arms.“Well then, it’s all up to Sid,” she said with a despondent sigh. Sid chuckled. He would never make any promises about goals or scoring. He would only say the same thing every time. “I’ll do my best.”His best tended to be one of the best in the world, the best of all time, so it wasn’t a shabby offering. “Okay, I will take that. Now go enjoy your two-touch. Get ready for your game. You can call me after.”“It’ll be kind of late,” Sid said, and she could already hear the apology forming on his tongue. “That’s okay. I will wait. Call me.”“Yeah, okay. We’ll call.”They said goodbye to her while the background voices grew more numerous, and she tucked her phone into her sweatpants. With two hours to puck drop and the baby in bed, she figured it was as good a time as any to do a little tidying up around the house. When she turned the broadcast on at nine, she had vacuumed, dusted, and had a dry load of laundry to fold on the coffee table during the first period, a cycle she would repeat for each period until the laundry was all done. The first period was predictably slow. The Canucks had already been eliminated from playoff contention, sitting at the bottom of the Western Conference, and she could see why. They couldn’t keep up with the Penguins’ skating, couldn’t do anything to control their breakaways. The Penguins scored twice in the period. She liked to see the Penguins winning, but neither goal belonged to Sid or Geno so it was hard to get overly excited. Murray didn’t let anything in and they finished the period up by two.The second period, the Canucks came out with a different approach. They looked determined, obviously sick of being dominated by the superior Penguins. They ramped up their physical play to keep the Penguins off the puck at all cost and control the breakaways, which instantly put them on firmer footing. Anna frowned at the TV when one of the Canucks, a young defender, tried to muscle Sid out on the boards and failed. He looked frustrated as hell when Sid kicked the puck out between his legs, got it on his stick, and flicked it to Jake to carry up. Sid did it again on the next shift. The same kid tried to lean on him at the back door, which was more than fine with Sid. It helped him know exactly where to move to put the defense off balance, which he did at the last second and deflected the puck in. She cheered, but couldn’t help but see the young player break his stick on the goal. She wondered what the Canucks were thinking, putting him out there to try to defend Sid, a task normally left to the veterans. Sid went a couple of shifts without matching with the kid. She figured he was yanked off the first D pair for his failure, and she sympathized. Sid was a force. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t stop the unstoppable. At the beginning of the third, she settled in with the final load of laundry on the coffee table and noticed that the Canucks had once again moved the kid up to the top D pair. He looked angry. Within the first minute, he hip-checked Jake hard against the boards, harder than necessary to get him off the puck, and Jake got up slowly. Clearly, the young d-man had something to prove. It was almost halfway through the third period before he and Sid met again. As with their first interaction, Sid pursued a puck down low, in the corner behind the Canucks net. The kid flew in hard behind him but didn’t reach the puck before Sid flicked it out.Anna wasn’t sure if it was frustration or inexperience, some combination of the two. She really didn’t care, because no matter the excuse, it wasn’t good enough. She would never know what made the kid follow through with his check. It would have been illegal even if Sid had the puck. It was always illegal to drive a player dangerously into the boards from behind, but he never slowed down. He hit Sid right in the numbers as hard as he could, which drove Sid head-first into the boards. Anna dropped the camisole in her hands and covered her mouth when Sid fell. He crumpled to the ice like a dropped doll and lay terrifyingly still while she watched helplessly from hundreds of miles away. He would get up in a second, she thought desperately. He had to draw the penalty, had to play up the boarding call so the refs would know, but he would get up. He would regain his feet, shake it off on the bench, and charge back into the next play, pissed off and hurting. He would come home the next morning sore and irritable and she would make sure he iced everything that hurt every hour while he scowled and reviewed plays on his iPad. She would have to take it away from him when his frown got too deep, force him to think about happier things. Sid didn’t move. Seconds ticked by while Anna’s thoughts became more frantic, until she could no longer think he was just trying to draw a call. The ref blew the play dead, called the penalty, and Sid still didn’t move.Anna couldn’t tear her eyes away from the screen while the Penguins trainers jumped the boards. She could see someone yank on Zhenya’s jersey to keep him from following. The trainers weren’t all the way across the ice before they signaled for the paramedics. Anna’s heart lodged in her throat. They could tell from the blue line that Sid needed help. How bad must it be?Paramedics rushed a stretcher out of the Zamboni door. Trainers mostly blocked her view of him, but she could just see Sid start to move his arm as the paramedics arrived. Then he was gone, totally blocked by the people crowded around him. It seemed to take hours before the paramedics started to move again. Several of them stood up and started to take the empty stretcher back. She let out a long, relieved breath when the trainers on either side of Sid helped him shakily to his feet. Sticks tapped against the ice and the Vancouver crowd cheered. Sid raised a hand as the trainers eased him back to the benches. The announcers talked in low, sympathetic tones. Sid was thirty-six years old. He’d suffered plenty of concussions in his tenure with the NHL. They knew this would almost certainly be his last. Sid stopped when he got through the door, and for a moment Anna thought he would divert to the bench. Surely, the team would never let him reclaim his spot. Not as woozy as he looked, the way he’d been apparently knocked out moments before. But he didn’t try. She saw Zhenya shuffle over and touch a hand to his helmet. Only then would Sid let the trainers get him moving again. Zhenya looked like he wanted to follow them when they continued down the tunnel.She watched the rest of the game with a glass of wine, chewing on her thumbnail in a way that would have her manicurist up in arms. She checked her phone even though she knew Sid wouldn’t be able to text. Zhenya played the rest of the game alternating between vicious physical play and distracted turnovers. She understood completely. His mind was elsewhere. When the third period ended, Zhenya disappeared down the tunnel, the first into the locker room, and her long wait began. She paced the living room, phone in hand, while she waited to hear something. Well after midnight, she got a text from Zhenya cryptically informing her Sid was okay enough to travel back with the team in the morning. She dialed him back and got his exhausted voice on the line. “Is he there? I need to speak with him.”“He’s talking to the doctor now,” Zhenya replied. “They’re discharging him to go back to the hotel so he can get some sleep before we fly out.”“They’re sure it’s safe for him to fly?”“They’re getting him in an MRI as soon as we get back, but for now they seem to think he’ll be... It won’t change anything.”She folded down to sit on the coffee table. Zhenya couldn’t even say Sid would be okay. “You’ll stay with him tonight?”“Of course. I won’t leave his side.”“Okay. Bring him home.”“Yes, my love.” She felt hollow when the phone call ended, unsatisfied. The image of Sid lying so still on the ice haunted her memory, playing in a loop. She had so hoped to speak with him, to push that memory away with his voice. She couldn’t help but think Zhenya was shielding her from something, keeping the worst of Sid’s injury from her. Anna looked around the unsettlingly silent room. The laundry still sat, half folded, beside her. She reached with hands that didn’t feel like her own to finish the job, then stacked the folded clothes into the laundry basket on the floor. She picked the basket up and carried it upstairs with her, put the clothes away, and stood, wrong-footed, in their bedroom. Nothing felt right. She looked at their bed for a long time before she turned away from it to pad down the hall to Nikita’s room.The door stood slightly open, and she pushed it quietly to widen the crack and peek in. Her son was sprawled on his little bed with the covers half pushed off. His face looked peaceful, slack and deeply resting. She watched him sleep and felt a little more settled. She didn’t feel as alone when she stepped back and returned to their bedroom. It was nearly three in the morning. She needed to catch as much sleep as possible to prepare for Zhenya and Sid’s return. ******************* After a fitful few hours of sleep, Anna prepared breakfast for Nikita only. She wasn’t sure she could stomach anything while her mind was occupied on the undoubtedly rough trip Sid was taking on the plane back to Pittsburgh. She couldn’t imagine getting on a plane with so much as a headache, so a full-blown concussion must be hell. She wiped at her eyes before Nikita could see her tears. She had to be strong. When Sid got home, he would need help, not sympathy. Luckily, Nikita was still drowsy and unobservant from sleep. “Go sit down, please,” she said while she stirred blueberries into his oatmeal, then carried it after him to the table. While he took up his spoon, she pulled out her phone. She knew she wouldn’t have any messages from Zhenya, not while he was traveling, but she could continue reading up on concussion best practices. She googled what foods might help alleviate symptoms.Zhenya dragged in when Nikita was halfway through with his breakfast. She perked up when she heard the door and turned at the sound of footsteps. He appeared in the dining room with a weary smile for Anna and a kiss to Nikita’s head. “Good morning.”Anna looked behind him briefly but not briefly enough. Zhenya shook his head. His eyes were very serious. Sid wasn’t with him. She swallowed down the urge to ask a million questions. Had something gone wrong on the plane? Was he back in the hospital? Zhenya squeezed her shoulder when he passed her, reassuring her without saying a word. He took a seat at her side and threaded their fingers together. She let herself be drawn to him until she was leaning against him, resting on his strength while he chatted with the child he hadn’t seen in a week. Nikita kept looking toward the door while they talked, obviously expecting Sid to follow Zhenya in. He didn’t know about the hit. Anna hadn’t wanted to scare him by telling him Sid was hurt. She had wanted to wait until he could see Sid himself. He was a sensitive boy, and telling him about the injury without offering some mitigating evidence would certainly make him cry. He was done with his oatmeal and merely pushing the last quarter of it around the bowl when he finally asked, “Is Sid still at the plane?”It was a cute question, childish and simplistic. Another day, under different circumstances, Anna could imagine laughing. Zhenya’s hand tightened on hers, a signal to let him handle it. “No, baby bird. He’s working on something. He’s busy.”“Oh,” Nikita said, disappointed. “But what about the concert?”“Concert?” Zhenya asked blankly before he thought about it, and Anna watched the hurt bloom in Nikita’s face. “Don’t worry, baby,” she soothed. She reached across the table to grasp Nikita’s hand. “It’s just a rain delay. You can still show Sid all your songs. And maybe you can even learn new ones.”Nikita looked disappointed but mollified. “I guess.”“You should give me a preview,” Zhenya said, obviously feeling bad for forgetting about their planned recorder concert. “Play all the songs for me, and then Sid will be the only one out of the loop.”“No. I want to wait for Sid,” Nikita said stubbornly.“You won’t show me? Your own father?”Nikita shook his head emphatically. A wicked grin played on his mouth. “Sid wants to see.”Zhenya hesitated. He obviously wasn’t sure what to say or how to tell Nikita that they might be waiting a long time. Anna swooped into the silence. “Baby, would you like to play your game for a little while?”Nikita brightened up. He wasn’t normally allowed to play Nintendo in the morning before chores. “Yeah!”“Go on, then. I’ll tell you when we need to stop and get ready for the day.”Nikita clambered down and sprinted off before she could change her mind. When he was out of sight, Zhenya pulled his hand away from her and slumped over the table. Without his son to play up for, he suddenly looked a million years old.“Zhenya?” she asked, even though she was no longer sure she wanted to know. Zhenya wasn’t prone to despair. He usually had an optimistic spin to put on things. But his posture and expression... He looked like he’d given up. Zhenya pulled in a breath and nodded. “I know. Sid... He’s probably going to be okay.”“Probably?”Zhenya licked his lips. “It’s complicated. The first few days... It’s hard to say for sure. He’s upset. The doctors said in 2011 if he ever got another hit like this, it was over. So, it’s hard to say what’s him being emotional because he’s losing hockey and what’s him being emotional because his brain is out of whack.”Emotional was not a word Anna frequently associated with Sid. She tried to imagine him crying. Tears sprung to her eyes at the idea. “Where is he?”“Home.”Anna felt a wash of anger at that. She’d been increasingly hurt that Sid felt the need to keep his house even though he was never there anymore. Now, he was retreating there at a moment when they should be together, and Zhenya was calling it his home? “This is home. Where is he? Why isn’t he here?”“Anya,” Zhenya soothed, but there was an impatience behind the tone, something that said she would never understand. “We’re a house with a rambunctious six-year-old. Sid’s on sensory limitation. This isn’t the place for him right now.”She wanted to argue, to insist that their home was always their home. Nikita would be quiet if they explained. But Zhenya looked dead tired. Clearly, he was just as worried. She bit down on her lip and her anger while she considered, then said, “Does he want to be alone?”Zhenya grimaced. “I don’t really know,” he said softly, eyes on his hands folded in front of him. “Maybe one of us should be there for him. In case he needs anything.”Zhenya shook his head. “He said no. He said he needed to do it on his own.”“That’s the concussion talking. He needs us. I’ll go once Nikita is down for a nap. You can both nap.”Zhenya reached for her and wrapped his hand around her wrist. “Give him time,” he pleaded. “Concussions are really hard to deal with. You can’t trust your own brain. He needs time to sort his own thoughts out before he starts dealing with ours.”Anna caved even though she didn’t like it. “Fine. But you tell me the minute he’s up again. I want to see him.” She wanted to see him standing, whole and alive, and not lying still on the ice. She didn’t like that being the last image of him in her head, being carted away to the hospital.“Of course, my love,” he promised, and she felt a little better. She could wait a few days for Sid if he needed that time to get his brain sorted out. ****************** Anna managed to wait a week before she couldn’t take it anymore. It was the longest week of her life. Every time the house creaked, she hoped it was the sound of the door opening, of Sid coming home. Every time Zhenya went to practice or to the store or to a game, she hoped he would swing by and pick up Sid on the way back. Every time he came home alone, she felt a little more desperate. Worse was when they finally had to fess up to Nikita and watch him melt down. They tried to do it carefully, to reassure him that Sid was going to be okay, but without seeing him in front of his eyes, Nikita started to cry before they could finish. He wouldn’t let Zhenya anywhere near him to hug him, apparently resolving to blame him for not bringing Sid home. “I hate your guts!” Nikita had hiccupped after half an hour when the screaming had devolved into deep, heaving sobs. “I want Sid!”Afterward, when Nikita had cried himself to sleep in his bed, Anna sat with Zhenya on the couch. The TV was on, but Zhenya’s eyes weren’t focused on it. She eased up close to him and ran her fingers through his hair. “He didn’t mean it,” she soothed. “He adores you. He’s just scared.”Zhenya nodded solemnly. He’d been quiet since Sid’s injury. He’d barely laughed, the opposite of normal. “I’m scared, too,” Anna offered, hoping to show him her heart and get a piece of his in return. “But I know we’ll be fine.”It wasn’t quite true. She didn’t like knowing how easily things could fall apart, how abruptly and completely Sid could just walk out without so much as a call. Their life together suddenly seemed so fragile. It made her uneasy, even though she tried to remind herself that the circumstances were unusual, extreme. But she had hope, and her positive words made Zhenya look at her with a strained smile. It was something. By the end of the week, her hope had worn thin, and she thought a little action might have to intervene. She’d spent enough time reading up on concussions to know that the worst had likely passed. Sid would be settling into post-concussive symptoms now, instead of the active concussion. They could be just as bad, worse sometimes, but the damage was done. It was time to start down the road to recovery, and for that he would need his family.Anna waited until she was alone in the house, when Nikita was on a playdate with friends and Zhenya was at practice, and she drove to Sid’s house in her Mercedes with the top down. She swung the car into the driveway and entered the code for the gate. It beeped at her harshly and rejected the code. She frowned at the keypad, then entered it again. Again, it rejected her. She wasn’t sure if Sid could answer if she buzzed, so she parked the car and texted Zhenya. Did Sid change his gate code?Her phone began to ring in seconds. “Why are you at Sid’s house?” Zhenya demanded.“Because he’s our partner and I love him. I miss him,” she said. She refused to feel bad for this. Zhenya may be willing to wait around for the rest of his life, but she couldn’t. And she didn’t think Sid would appreciate it, either. Not really. No matter what he told Zhenya when he was concussed. “Tell me what’s going on with the gate.”“Nothing. He hasn’t changed it. I mean, it’s Sid. When does he change anything? You probably just missed a button.”She tried again. “No, it’s still not working.”“Okay, enough. Go home. Go shopping. Go anywhere. He needs peace.”“I want to see him, Zhenya. Why shouldn’t I?”“Because he asked to be left alone. Anya, please. He knows what he needs by now.”Anna turned back to the pad. Her focus caught on the camera, the red light in the corner. Had it always been there, glowing? “Sid?” she asked cautiously.“Yes, Sid. He’s asking us to help him heal, and we have to do it.”She was certain that the light hadn’t been there when she drove up. That meant someone was watching, right? “Okay,” she said distantly, looking up toward the house. She switched to English. “But maybe if Sid want, I come back. He says and I come.”The light glared and then blinked off. Zhenya sighed in her ear. “Yes, alright,” she said in Russian. “I’m going.”She put the car in reverse and sat with her foot on the brake pedal for a long beat before she slowly released it and backed out onto the street. A text came in before she got home and she ignored it. She thought it was probably Zhenya attempting to verify that she’d left Sid’s house. She kept ignoring it at home. She dropped her phone on the counter and shuffled around the empty house trying to find things to occupy her time. By the time she got bored and retrieved her phone, half an hour had passed since the text came in. It was from Sid. Hey. Sorry I missed you. Was napping.Her heart pounded in her ears. She damn near ran back to the car and made the journey again. Her fingers hovered over the phone for a second before she found the words to reply. Don’t say sorry. You should sleep. It’s good for you.She bit her lip and thought for a second, then typed a second message. I want to see you.She held her breath for the first few minutes after she sent it, waiting and hoping for a reply. When nothing happened, she deflated. After ten minutes, she let the phone drop to the counter and stepped away from it. He wasn’t getting back to her. She was cooking lunch in anticipation of Zhenya’s return with Nikita when the phone buzzed again and she practically dove to get it. I want that, too. Maybe soon.She frowned at the phone. Sid’s message echoed what Zhenya had relayed to her. Sid intended to do this alone. Okay. I love you.Sid never responded to that one.*********** A month after the hit, Sid’s face was on every sports news channel, even the ones that never cared about hockey. Zhenya went to practice in the morning as usual. He never said a thing, which meant Sid must not have warned him. She wondered, when the alerts started blowing up her phone and she turned on the TV, if it was possible Sid had forgotten about them completely. Any other explanation fell drastically short for why he was sitting in the conference room at the UPMC, in the same building where Zhenya went to skate with the team, announcing his retirement. Only, she knew he hadn’t. They’d texted enough to know he remembered. It wasn’t always, not even every day, but just when she was starting to worry, he would send a meme or a bad joke, something he undoubtedly got from his sister, to make her laugh. If she texted a picture of Nikita, he would shoot back a smiley face. He was there, distantly, on the periphery of her life. Like a ghost. He looked like a ghost in front of the cameras, too, subdued and pale from a month of limited exposure to light and activity. Anna didn’t like the bags under his eyes or the frown lines around his mouth. The press conference was small. The lights were dimmed. Sid spoke softly, eyes sliding away from reporters like he couldn’t concentrate on their faces. Toward the end, he looked so heartbreakingly defeated she couldn’t be mad at him for forgetting to announce his retirement plan to them. She texted Zhenya to bring him home. He can travel now.She got no response, and Zhenya came home alone.They got into a huge fight about it that night, and she was still feeling frosty in the morning. She left Zhenya to deal with Nikita when he woke up and went for a jog in the early mist, following familiar streets to Sid’s house. Anna had every intention of pressing the damn call button until Sid answered her, but when she arrived, she stopped in shock. A “For Sale” sign was posted out front, pounded into the ground next to the mailbox, with information to contact a real estate agent. She stood there, staring and not understanding, eyes glued on the cheerful, matronly face of “Gladys Jones,” the real estate agent apparently offering Sid’s house up for sale. “Hi,” Sid said behind her and made her jump out of her thoughts. She spun around to see him. He was just coming back from a walk, dressed in track pants and a hoodie, a typical black cap pulled down low over his brow. “Light exercise,” he explained with a grim smile. She wanted to ask why there was a for sale sign by his mailbox. She wanted to hound him about it. She wanted to yell at him for not warning her about the retirement and for making their son cry so often. But for a month, Sid’s still body was all she could see of him. She closed her eyes at night and he fell to the ice, motionless. She woke from nightmares she couldn’t remember reaching for her phone to call him before she remembered he wouldn’t answer. Instead of asking or hounding or yelling, she ended up striding into his arms with a breathless sob. He was as warm and welcoming as ever when he closed his arms around her and allowed her to bury her face in his shoulder. “Shh, it’s okay,” he soothed, petting a hand down her back. “Shut up,” she said, pressed as close to him as she could get. She wasn’t interested in what he had to say. That would come later when she demanded explanations from him. Now, she just wanted to hold him and feel him, breathing and alive. “Anna,” he tried again. “Hey, don’t cry. This was always going to happen. I knew. It’s okay.”“What’s happen?” she asked, sniffling. He wasn’t making any sense.She expected him to brush it off, but he answered her. “This. The end.”The end of hockey. She held him close and nodded in sympathy. “You will be okay,” she assured him. He would be. He would see, in time, when the symptoms passed. He would be happy again, learn how life worked without constant training and working and being gone from his family. Maybe he would even travel with her, while he got used to it. Maybe they would go to Miami together and soak in the sun, let the waves wash away their stress while Zhenya whined jealously at them in their phones. Sid huffed like he wasn’t sure, like he wanted to believe. “I hope you’re right.” “You come over,” she said firmly, pulling back to look him in the face. She was ready to start showing him immediately how good things could be without his sport. They would spend the day together while Zhenya did hockey things. They would go pick up Nikita from school and maybe stop for ice cream. Sid adored this place not far from Nikita’s school that did dark chocolate soft serve, but he almost never indulged. It could be their celebration, the first step into a life without worrying about protein intake and intense workouts. Sid was quiet for a long time, long enough that she started to worry, and then he pulled away from her arms. He dropped his eyes to the pavement and the most expressive parts of him were covered by the bill of his hat. “Not today,” Sid said regretfully. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”“Sid,” she chided very gently, like when she was trying to assure Nikita about something that scared him. New situations worried him because he was a child. Everything was new to him. It was the same for Sid without hockey. His world was changing, turning into something he didn’t know anything about, but that didn’t make it bad. She reached her hands toward his cheeks to lift his face. Sid’s hands wrapped around her wrists. Her fingertips barely brushed his cheeks. “Anna...”“Sid, come. I will drive your car for us, make fish and kale for lunch. Is good for brain.”His grip tightened around her wrists, though nothing close to painful. It was more like he was worried she might disappear if he let go. She took it as a good sign until he took a shaky breath and shook his head. “When will you come?” she demanded, because if he was just waiting to move back in until after the house sold, that wasn’t fair. A house in that price range might take a while. There was no benefit to him staying while it sat on the market. If anything, it just meant it had to be cleaned more. He would serve the cause better by staying back at their house.“Soon,” he said with a voice flat as ice. He let go of her wrists slowly and stepped back. “I’ll come by soon. I promise.”Sid didn’t talk about promises. He didn’t have to. His words were promises, every single one. If he said he would do something, it didn’t take any extra assurances to convince someone he would follow through. It was the first thing that made her heart sink with the conviction that maybe he didn’t want to come home. Maybe that was what Zhenya knew that she didn’t, and he wasn’t telling her because he was afraid to hurt her. “I probably better get inside. Too long in the sun...” he trailed off with a shrug. His face looked miserable.“Sid,” she called after him when he stepped toward the house. He stopped and turned back, squinting against the light. She wanted to yell, to demand things. She wanted to shake him and make him wake up. What was the damn difference to them if he played hockey or not? Their relationship wouldn’t change. How could he do this to her, to their whole family?But he was looking paler, a little sick, like maybe he had overdone it. She wanted more than anything to follow him into his house and take care of him for the day, but he obviously didn’t want that. He wanted to hide from her, alone in his sad house, echoing in the empty halls. He wanted so badly to keep his concussion away from his family that he would imprison himself, too.She realized Zhenya was right. She had to accept it. Whether she liked it or not, whatever Sid was working through, it was something he had to do alone. She closed the distance between them again, getting close to him one last time before she let him go. “I miss you,” she said earnestly because it was true. She loved him and she wanted him to have the space to help himself, but she needed him to know it. Sid’s face made an expression that wanted so badly to be a smile. “I miss you, too. You have no idea...”She had some fucking idea, she wanted to say, but she settled for grasping his hand. “Sid,” she said, tearing up as he obviously was. “We will wait for you to come. Okay?”He nodded. “Soon. I will.”“You can take a long time, if you need,” she lied because she couldn’t trust herself not to start hounding him again if his ‘soon’ took too long. “We will wait.”For some reason, that made him look worse. He squeezed her hand and then walked away, leaving her standing there. She watched him disappear around the bend and then turned to start a long, empty jog back.She returned home to a plate of eggs and bacon, the only thing Zhenya ever made for breakfast. He presented it to her like a shield when she came in, as if food might keep her from attacking. She took the plate to set it down, wrapped her arms around his neck, and hugged him tightly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled.”When Zhenya hugged her, he was so tall she had to bend her back to adjust. “Why the change of heart?” he asked cautiously.She tugged herself out of his arms and gave him her very best shot at a genuine smile. “I just realized you’re right. These things take time. And for this, I have all the time in the world.”Zhenya’s face relaxed out of that awful hangdog expression, morphing into relief and then on into mischief. “Did you just say I was right?”Anna grabbed her plate again and spun away from him to flee to the dining room. “What, are you going to outrun me?” he scoffed, on her heels. She took a seat at the table and he crashed in beside her. “Say it again for me.”Anna took a bite of bacon and shrugged helplessly. Obviously, she couldn’t talk with a full mouth. Zhenya’s laugh filled and brightened the room, and for the first time in a long time, the house didn’t feel empty.************ Soon turned out to be two weeks later. Sid texted at night, when the sun was already down, past Nikita’s bedtime and long past dinner. They were on the couch watching television when Zhenya frowned at his phone. “Is it okay if Sid comes over?”“Okay?” she laughed, because her heart felt freed from its bindings. She could breathe again, knowing the separation was finally ending. “Of course it’s okay. Tell him to come and never leave again.”Zhenya’s frown relaxed while he tapped out a message. “He says it’s just for the night.”“No,” Anna said, because once she had him back she wasn’t letting go again. “He will stay. We’ll tie him to the bed, send movers to get his things.”“Movers?” Zhenya asked, eyebrows up. “Yes. Isn’t he moving in?”Zhenya looked blankly at her. “Since he’s selling his house,” she clarified. Zhenya sometimes needed help connecting the dots. “He’s selling his house?” Zhenya asked, shocked. Her light heart began to sink. Maybe it wasn’t quite as over as she thought. “Yes. Aren’t you talking to him?”Zhenya’s brow knitted, worry lines reappearing at an alarming rate. “Not so much,” he muttered as he returned to texting Sid. When he was done, he looked up with a quick smile for her. “Don’t worry, we’ll get it worked out with him. I’m sure he just forgot to tell me.”She watched Zhenya rise with a nervous flutter in her stomach. She wasn’t sure how this would go. Sid had been gone so long it almost felt like the first time again. Zhenya bent over and kissed her forehead. “I’m going to grab a shower,” he said, innocent as a lamb even though they both knew what he was up to. He would shower because he wanted to be edible everywhere, so Sid could lick and fuck him wherever. It was the only real indication he gave that he was just as eager to have Sid back. She drummed her fingers on her thigh when Zhenya left. The plot of the television show raced ahead of her attention until it was nothing more than moving colors. Her entire focus narrowed on the door. The lock clicked and she nearly jumped off the couch. She forced herself to stay, listening to Sid drop his keys into the bowl by the door. When he took off his shoes, she couldn’t track his footsteps. They were too quiet. “What are you watching?” Sid asked from the doorway when he arrived. She lost any remaining grip on her excitement. She turned around to kneel on the couch and face him, gave him a long look down and up. “Some hot guy,” she replied with a shrug, then blushed. He looked pretty delighted, though, and that got her smiling again. “Come here,” she ordered, and he, thank god, obeyed. She reached for him the moment he was in striking distance and hauled him in to kiss him. They were on the couch with Sid’s hand up her shirt, making out hot and heavy when Zhenya reappeared in a towel and froze at the sight of them. He barked a laugh and smacked Sid on the ass. “Move. There’s whole room for that.”He said it like he was so grown up and restrained, but they didn’t make it out of the room before Zhenya pulled Sid into his arms and licked into his mouth. Sid went with it easily, almost desperately. It had been a while, she supposed. It wasn’t like Sid had someone, the way she and Zhenya had. He’d been totally alone. As much as she liked to watch them, she figured the quickest way to get them to the bedroom was to go there herself. She sauntered off and left them making out in the den. Sure enough, she was barely stripped down to her underwear before Zhenya led the way through the bedroom door and Sid shut it behind them. She sat on the edge of the bed and smiled when Sid grabbed Zhenya to forcefully pull him flush against his body. That was more like it, less desperate, bossier. That was her Sid,their Sid. Things would be okay, in the end. He would be okay. Zhenya played coy about his towel for half a second when Sid tried to untie it. He pushed Sid’s hand away once. Sid threaded the fingers of his other hand into Zhenya’s hair and pulled. Zhenya gasped against his mouth and didn’t protest again when Sid pulled the towel loose. He was totally naked against Sid’s clothed body. Sid touched him all over before he pushed him toward the bed, wrapping a hand briefly around his cock and running his fingertips down between Zhenya’s ass cheeks. He kissed down Zhenya’s sensitive neck and nipped at his jawline, then thumbed at his nipples. Zhenya seemed to be happily drowning in the attention. “Go get in bed,” Sid ordered, and Zhenya happily obeyed. He half-tackled Anna back against the mattress to kiss her while Sid shucked off his shirt and unbuttoned his jeans. Sid joined them in bed but didn’t disturb them making out. He seemed content to recline in his boxers and watch them. “Are you going to fuck her?” he finally asked. Zhenya pulled back. He looked a little dazed. “Maybe. You want?”Sid nodded. “Yeah. I want to watch. But let me eat you out first.”That put a flush in Zhenya’s cheeks and a shy smile on his lips. He kissed her once more before he pushed her up toward the pillows. She settled against the headboard and Zhenya crawled up beside her on his knees. Sid pushed down between Zhenya’s shoulder blades and put his face down in the pillows. His fingers trailed down Zhenya’s back, slow and curious, like he was memorizing it. When his hands got to Zhenya’s ass, he spent a while just massaging it, pulling the cheeks apart and kneading the muscle like dough. She could feel Zhenya’s anticipation mounting long before Sid bent down and licked him. “Ugh, fuck me,” Zhenya groaned. “If you want,” Sid teased. He didn’t even come out from between Zhenya’s cheeks to say it. Zhenya could probably feel his words as much as hear them. Anna dipped her fingers into her panties while Sid got to work. God, she felt like she could get off to the sounds Zhenya was making alone, moaning and cursing in both languages. When Sid added a finger or two and Zhenya devolved into begging, she had to stop touching herself or she really might have gone over. Sid palmed himself through his boxers a few times while he licked Zhenya into a moaning mess, but when he finally reared back to observe his work and rendered his job satisfactorily done, he didn’t try to fuck Zhenya. He smacked him hard on the ass to get him moving again. “C’mon, G. You gotta fuck Anna for me.”“You can do Zhenya at the same time,” she suggested because Zhenya seemed more than ready to have a dick inside him. They had done it before. It wasn’t the best for her because the rhythm was off, but Zhenya liked it so much he usually cried. “No. I want to see,” Sid said, which was a little strange. He was usually really active during sex, always touching one or both of them. He didn’t like to be left out, didn’t particularly like to watch without being able to do something. But this time, he seemed very content to push himself back against the headboard and stretch his legs out in front of him. He didn’t even have his boxers off yet. Zhenya yanked her panties down her legs, nudged her knees apart and climbed between them. He felt where she was soaking wet, more than ready for him, and guided his dick inside. It was so easy. “You should go slow,” Sid said. “Let her feel you.”Zhenya obeyed. His hips worked in a slow, smooth pump. The head of his cock dragged over her most sensitive internal spots. At the end of each thrust, he ground his hips against hers and sent a jolt up her spine. “Touch yourself,” Sid said, and she took a second to realize he was speaking to her. “Get yourself off on his dick.”She didn’t like following orders as much as Zhenya, but this one she could get behind. She pushed a hand down between them and resumed massaging her clit. With the added stimulus of Zhenya fucking her, she didn’t need much. Sid reached down to help her at the last second. His fingers replaced hers, rubbing in a slower, firmer motion than the one she’d used. He matched the rhythm set by Zhenya’s thrusts, the two of them working in harmony together to make her crazy. She arched her back when Zhenya pulled almost all the way out and moaned when she came on his next thrust. “Pull out,” Sid said, and Zhenya whined. Sid pulled his boxers off and reached for the lube. “G, c’mere.”Zhenya pulled out. He was rock-hard and glistening from fucking her. He crawled up between Sid’s legs instead and crushed their mouths together. Sid clumsily poured lube into his hand and reached down to take both of them in hand, slathering them both, then wiggled his hand out. Zhenya groaned when he rolled his hips down and thrust his cock next to Sid’s.“There you go. Just like that.” Sid scraped his fingernails down Zhenya’s back. “Come on me. Make a mess.”“Sid, god,” Zhenya gasped, hips working frantically. “You’re close,” Sid said. His fingers worked down between Zhenya’s ass cheeks. He rubbed a finger on his hole. “If you come on me, give me everything, I’ll give you mine. Right here.”Zhenya’s breath hitched. He slammed his hand into the mattress and gripped the comforter hard when he came with a curse. Sid let him come down for a couple of minutes, satisfied to rub his back and murmur to him. When Zhenya started to stir, he pushed Zhenya over and got him lying on his stomach, then knelt between his thighs. Anna nearly protested. Zhenya didn’t love getting fucked after he came. But Zhenya looked happy with what Sid was doing. He was going along with it. She petted a hand down his back and he smiled with his eyes closed and his face half-smashed into a pillow.In the end, she didn’t need to worry. Sid didn’t fuck Zhenya. He took his cock in hand and touched himself until he was just riding the edge, then kissed the head of his dick against Zhenya’s hole to finish. He pushed just the tip inside and jerked off the rest of the way, teeth clenched as he pumped his load into Zhenya.They fell into stillness in the afterward, three post-coital statues, until Sid could get up the energy to move. He wiped the remainder of Zhenya’s come off his stomach with a corner of the sheets. They would have to be changed anyway, so it didn’t matter. Then he collapsed between them on the pillows. Sid lay quietly with Zhenya’s fingers tracing his shoulder and Anna’s head on his chest, and he waited for the sweat to cool before he said, “I’m moving.”Anna smiled into his skin, hiding. “I think I know,” she said. “Oh. Okay. Good. I’m glad... I’m not looking to hurt anybody, here. I just need to go home.”Her smile fell away as he talked. She didn’t like the way he said it, like he was going somewhere. He was already home.“I just wanted to, uh... You know. There’s a couple of things I thought we might need to tie up first. Like... I don’t know. Do you need any help explaining all this to Niki?”Anna seriously did not like the direction this was headed. Nikita was accustomed to Sid being around. His presence would not require any explanation. “Help?” she asked, hoping to clarify.“It’s just... He might not get it.”Zhenya propped himself up on an elbow. He looked confused, too. “Get what?”“C’mon, don’t pretend,” Sid groaned, and he passed a frustrated hand over his eyes. “I don’t want the talk. I just need to know if you want me to say goodbye. If not, it’s fine. It’s not like I’m his father.”Zhenya jerked like Sid hit him, too shocked to say anything.“Sid!” Anna hissed, eyes darting toward the door like Niki would be there. “Christ,” Sid groaned and he pressed his hands to his eyes. “Are we really doing this?”“Do what? You say you not... That’s hurt too much. You can’t say!”“He calls me Sid, Anna. I’m just another Pittsburgh friend of the family. I’m nothing to him, just like Flower and Tanger and-”She covered his mouth with her hand because she hated the words coming out. “No! You don’t say that.”Sid shoved her hand away and sat up, though he clearly did it too fast. He sat, eyes glazed while the world spun in his perception. Anna stayed still, not sure how to react.Zhenya moved, slow and gentle, and cupped a hand on Sid’s cheek. “Hey.”Sid focused on him for a beat before his eyes slid away. “Hi.”“Feel sick?”“No. Just dizzy.”“Sometimes dizzy can make sick.”“I’ll be fine.”Zhenya scooted in close and hugged him. “It’s okay,” he soothed. It was absolutely not okay. Nothing was okay, but Zhenya rocked Sid and kissed his hair, and to her surprise Sid let him continue. “You just a little bit confuse. Concussion-”“I don’t need you to baby me,” Sid said, his voice hard and immovable. “You don’t have to lie. This was always going to happen. After hockey. You said from the beginning.”Anna turned accusing, pleading eyes on Zhenya, begging him to make it make sense. He didn’t look like he got it either. “What I say? Probably I say wrong.”“You’re married, G. You have a kid. You’re a family. I’m... I mean, we’re friends, but I’m not part of your family.”“I never say that,” Zhenya insisted. “No. You said you and Anna would have a baby together, your baby. He would call you Papa and her Mama so he could grow up like everybody else, with two parents. I could be his friend, Uncle Sid. I could play with him, but in the end, I would go home, because who I am to you doesn’t have anything to do with Niki.”Zhenya pulled back, subdued, and she knew it was true. Zhenya had said those things. “That was long time ago,” he said very softly.“That was the ground rules of this relationship. But it’s over now. I can’t stay in Pittsburgh. I’m too close to everything I...” Sid grimaced and wiped at his eyes. He looked like he might start really crying, which was something Anna wasn’t sure she could handle, not the way her own eyes were filling up. Zhenya looked stunned, knocked out by his own words thrown back at him who knows how many years after he said them. It was up to her. She had to try.“Sid,” Anna said. “Please, stay.”“Stay for how long? Until Geno stops, too? He’s a year older than me, and that knee isn’t getting any better. I’m not staying just to watch you move to Moscow. It’s delaying the inevitable.”Were they moving to Moscow when Zhenya stopped? She hadn’t thought about it. “Look, I’m sorry. I know this was good for a while. But I can’t do it now. I’m going home. I’m not coming back. Ripping the band aid off, you know?”She didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about band aids for. “You just decide this on your own? You get to leave us?”“What do you want me to do, Anna?” He asked it like he really wanted her to have an alternative, but she floundered. She hesitated, and she lost him. “This isn’t real,” he said, soft and low, like he was talking to himself. “People don’t do this.”“We do,” Anna insisted. “Sid-”“No, we don’t. Not really.”“Why are you talking like this?” Zhenya asked, and Sid’s ire turned his way again.“When Team Malkin came to town this season, I went home. For a week. We pretended like we were just friends. We’ve been together six years. And your oldest friends have no idea, do they?”Zhenya’s expression flickered. He looked ashamed. “You want?”“No,” Sid said, backing off. “No, I get it. Why should we spend time defending something that was always going to be temporary?”Anna felt shell shocked by the revelation. How long had he felt this way and not told them? How long had he planned to leave? “I’m sorry,” Sid said again, low and sincere. He pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes for a second. “Staying here now would be too hard. I have to go.”Sid got up, and Zhenya went after him. By the hard line of Zhenya’s shoulders, she could see that they were heading for a big fight. With Sid still getting dizzy from sitting up too fast, it didn’t seem like a good idea, but one of them slammed the ensuite door and Zhenya tore in. Sid gave it back just as hard, snapping harsh words at Zhenya about six years of acting like they were just friends, separating for summers, lying to their families. But nothing could compare to Zhenya when he said, “Fine! You want to leave, you go! We don’t miss you. You be happy, be alone. Is what you like.”Sid was the one who reopened the door and stormed out fully dressed. He had a hoodie over his arm, a Penguins sweater with his number on the sleeve. It had been hanging in the closet for as long as she could remember, and he was taking it away. Because he was leaving. Sid faltered for a second just outside the bathroom door. He looked like he might say something to her. “Sid...” she tried, feeling desperate to find any words to make him stay. She could feel fresh tears dripping down her cheeks when she reached for him. He dropped his gaze away from her and kept walking until he was out the door, out of her sight, and potentially out of her life. When Zhenya reappeared moments later, it was in a rush. He regretted it. “Sid, wait,” he called, practically running after him. But he didn’t catch him. Sid got out the front door before Zhenya’s anger could subside. God, he got in a car. Should he be driving? He was still so sick. Anna wanted to be taking care of him, wanted to make sure he was okay. Zhenya didn’t return to the bedroom and she didn’t go after him. She wasn’t sure what she would say to him, and she didn’t want them to fight, too. ************** For weeks, Anna drifted. She lived in the same house as Zhenya and Nikita. She took care of her son and cooked and cleaned. She attended the Penguins playoff games when they started. She made all the right noises and faces and motions. At night, when Zhenya came home, she locked herself in the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bathtub with a book in her hand. She never read a word. She just sat there in the silence waiting for him to go to sleep so she could slide into bed with him without talking. Distantly, she was aware Zhenya was struggling just as badly, if not worse. She noticed it most on the ice, where he heaved his body around like the C on his chest weighed a million pounds, like he could hardly carry it. When she could muster the energy, she cyberstalked Sid just to see him. He hadn’t blocked her from his private Instagram. She hoped he never would, even if it hurt her heart to see the one lonely picture of his bare feet in the water, a fishing pole by his side. She wondered if it was a message, something to tell her he was doing alright. The idea made her furious and she closed the app, then set the phone down. How dare he be alright?A quick Google told her he’d sold the house. He had accepted an offer the day he’d come over to ruin their lives. Taylor’s Facebook account had a blurry video of Sid playing street hockey with some kids. Like bigfoot. She couldn’t even make out his face. Twitter only told her what she didn’t need to hear: crybaby Sidney Crosby finally threw in the towel over a single, mild concussion. She nearly threw the computer. In May, three weeks after the last time she’d seen Sid, the Penguins succumbed in the second round to the Flyers. She was sure it meant something to someone somewhere, but not to her. Not even to Zhenya, who dragged into the house the same way he had for weeks, bone-tired and miserable.She looked him up and down when he came into the bedroom and set her book on the nightstand instead of picking it up to go into the bathroom, an offer. Zhenya breathed out and his shoulders relaxed. He gave her the smallest, grateful smile, went to brush his teeth, and then joined her in bed. “It’s going to be okay,” she whispered in the dark with his head on her shoulder. She ran her fingers through his hair. “We will be okay.”She wasn’t sure if he believed her. She wasn’t sure she believed herself. June kicked off with Nikita’s birthday party. A house full of kids and people, laughter and color, and Anna still felt alone. Her eyes jumped to the door every time someone arrived, not really thinking Sid might just stop by. That wouldn’t even be fair, to show up out of the blue, and it wouldn’t be like him. But maybe she hoped. Kris Letang and his family arrived. Alex was carefully carrying a present with a solemn sense of duty, but Tanger also had something, a cardboard box. He kissed Anna’s cheek and passed it to her. “UPS dropped this off by the mailbox. They’re getting worse.”“The gate is open,” she said, only mildly annoyed. She looked at the package. It didn’t look like anything. It didn’t even have a return address. Alex looked up at his parents and said something in French with an inflection like a question. “English, child,” Tanger replied. “Don’t be rude. And yes, you may go find Niki.”She put the package down to join them on the walk to the backyard, where the kids were chasing each other around like squirrels. Alex was a little older than most of the children, but he joined right in. He was always a good sport.The party kept her so busy, she forgot all about the package until late, when everyone was gone and Nikita was about to go to bed. “What’s this?” Zhenya asked when he saw it. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe another present,” Anna replied.“Present?” Nikita asked curiously. “Let’s see, hmm?” Zhenya said, and he grabbed a letter opener to slice through the tape. “Yep, looks like a present. Surprise, baby bird.”He handed Nikita a neatly-wrapped box with blue ribbons tied around it. “Who is it from?” Anna asked. Zhenya looked in the box and shrugged. “No clue. They must have forgotten to include a card. I’m sure we’ll find out eventually.”Nikita sat down on the floor and tore into the wrapping paper, then the box. Then he lit up. “Oh!”“What?”Nikita reached into the box and held up a beautiful, leather baseball glove, and Anna’s heart sank. She suddenly knew exactly who it was from. She remembered the summer before, Sid playing catch out front with Nikita using Sid’s old, ratty glove from when he was a kid. “You need one of your own, eh?” he’d chuckled afterward when they were rubbing oil into the leather to preserve the gloves. “That one’s on its last leg.”Nikita didn’t look like he planned to take the glove off anytime soon. He ran around the house fielding invisible balls, sprinting the bases on an imagined field. Thankfully, he wasn’t paying any attention to them because Zhenya looked just as gutted as she felt. “Should we call him?” she asked when they finally got Nikita to go to bed. He insisted on taking the glove with him, though he reluctantly agreed to leave it on his nightstand. “No,” Zhenya said, voice hard. “He didn’t label it. He obviously didn’t want anyone to know it was from him.”“Yeah, but... C’mon, it’s a custom baseball glove. Who the fuck else could it be?”“Jake.”“Right, I’m sure. I’m just saying we should thank him.”“Thank him?” Zhenya said, incredulous. “Thank him for turning Nikita’s attention to a sport we know nothing about and abandoning us with it? If he was always planning to bail, he should have left American sports out of it.”“Nikita is American, Zhenya,” she reminded him tersely. “Only on paper,” Zhenya grumbled half-heartedly, and they left it at that. Two days later, she took a video of Nikita playing catch outside with a few of the neighborhood kids and put it on her private Instagram with a note in English: he loves his new glove!Sid never liked it. She wasn’t sure what she had hoped for. She would have assumed he never even saw it except for the fact that his Instagram picked up around the same time. He started posting almost every day, different mundane things, never with any filters or captions. He took pictures of the lake and trees and a couple of dogs. Once, he shared a pic of a donut with rainbow sprinkles she couldn’t believe he was planning to eat. Predictably, he didn’t share any picture of himself, until one day he posted a selfie of him and Nate in the gym, grinning away like it was just a normal summer. She froze at the sight of him. Did he look sad at all? Did he look like he missed them, there, just in the crinkled corners of his eyes?It was a dangerous path to walk down. She closed out the app and opened her favorite airline’s website instead. They needed to get out of the house they’d shared together. Sid never went with them to Miami, so it was safe there. He never went to Moscow, either, but that was different. Miami had been his choice, something he’d resisted because he didn’t like the heat or sand or sun or anything fun about summer. Moscow...She’d thought about inviting Sid to Moscow. She’d thought about it every year since they’d gotten serious. She’d imagined bringing Sid to her mother’s house for dinner, their little family all together. Her mother would like him. She might even like him more than Zhenya, who had always been a little too boisterous to keep up with. But no matter how much she liked him, Anna knew her mother would be concerned. She would worry for Anna, and even more for Nikita. In the end, thinking about that worry always stayed her from inviting Sid to Russia. It was something she figured she would probably regret for the rest of her life. They went to Florida and soaked in the sun. Zhenya still cried at night, but less during the day. He still wouldn’t talk much, but he chased Nikita around the beach and clowned off and generally acted like himself. She still tracked Sid’s Instas during weaker moments, when she’d had half a bottle of wine with dinner and couldn’t help it. He posted a pic of his sweaty arm, a paper clutched in his hand showing his routine for the day in his hasty scrawl. That many box jumps had to mean his head felt better, she thought. He posted pictures of a lake, then a short video of his sister wakeboarding behind a boat. It looked like he was having a lot of fun. Anna washed the bitter taste out of her mouth with the last of her wine and didn’t look at his pictures again for a few days. They stayed in Miami the rest of June, entertaining family there and inviting friends, both looking for an excuse not to go home. It was the first week of July when Nikita accidentally opened the floodgates on everything she was trying not to feel. “Hey Mama?” he asked over breakfast. “Yes, my love?”“Where’s Sid?”Her easy smile dropped away. They hadn’t told him. At first, maybe it was a little bit out of hope Sid would come back, that his leaving would turn out to be a symptom of his concussion. But as time dragged on, she knew it was simpler than that. Neither of them wanted to be the one to break their son’s heart. Explaining Sid’s injury and temporary absence had been hard enough. Explaining that it was turning permanent would be unbearable. Maybe she should have made Sid do it, when he offered, made him explain to Nikita’s innocent face that he was leaving and never coming back. Maybe that, more than Zhenya’s anger and her tears, might have stayed him. “Mama? Is he visiting his parents?”She focused on him again and nodded. “Yes, sweetheart. He’s visiting his parents.” It wasn’t untrue. She had seen them in a few of the pictures Sid shared, happy, smiling people with their newly-retired son, soaking in the long days of summer. “It’s been forever,” Nikita groaned. “Are we going home before camp starts?”“Camp?”“Uh huh. Sid said I could go to his camp this year. Papa said it was fine.”Anna’s stomach twisted with upset. “They both said you could go?”“Yeah. They said. I can, right? I’m old enough now.”Anna swallowed. Sid had been gone well over two months, and suddenly it was all crashing into her again, an avalanche of emotion that she tried to keep off her face. She looked at her son and smiled tightly. She couldn’t believe she was so desperate. She felt like a monster for even thinking it, but this could be a way to make Sid see reason. She nodded. “Sure, baby. If Sid says you’re old enough, I’m sure you are.”“And I can go?”“Let me make sure. Sid has been hurt. I’m not sure he still plans to do the camp.”She excused herself to the bedroom and called him with shaking hands. He answered on the third ring, and she was surprised. “Hey,” he said warmly, only a hint of the desperation she felt in his voice. “Hi Sid,” she said, feeling gut-checked. “Is everything okay? You sound upset.”A flash of hot anger went through her at that. Of course, she was upset. She was always upset since he left. But that would make him shut down, and she wanted to keep him engaged. “Nikita want to ask when the camp start.”A long pause and then, “Anna... There are hockey camps everywhere.”“Well, he want to come to you.”“Mario is doing Little Penguins around the same time. Ovechkin is involved in one in Moscow-”“That’s not what he says. He don’t want just to play hockey. He want to play with you.” She paused, and then stuck the knife in a little deeper. “He say you already tell him yes.”She listened to him take a deep breath. He could say anything. He could deny Nikita all over again and break her heart. “Yeah, I did,” he said, and then he swore low. “I shouldn’t have told him that.”“Why? Why can’t he come?”“Anna c’mon,” he said. He sounded pained. “You know why.”“He loves you, Sid. You don’t want to see him?”“It’s not that I don’t want-”“You are always here for him. Like his Papa-”“That’s not fair.”“He don’t understand why you go. We try to tell him, but he’s confuse. You’re with him his whole life and then you just go away.”“He’s a kid. He’ll learn-”“Even I don’t understand why you go. Because talk long time ago? Zhenya say one thing one time. Not know then how it work for us. I don’t understand why you don’t talk to us first, say you’re not happy. Let us try to fix.”Sid was quiet for a long time. She practically held her breath in the silence.“I thought it would be easier,” he admitted, his voice very soft. “Easier if it was my choice to go instead of... I mean, I knew it would suck, but I guess I didn’t think it would be this bad,” he said, and he let every ounce of pain flood into the words, so much that she felt drowned in it. It was a shameful relief to hear how much he was hurting, to know that it matched her heartache. “It don’t have to be, Sid. Let Nikita come. Let me and Zhenya come. We will come and talk. Fix things.”“Geno wants that?”“He’s cry every day. I cry. We try hard to keep away from Nikita, but he’s see. He’s worry.”She could hear Sid sniff like he might be crying. “Yeah, I... I’m a fucking mess, Anna. Between bad head days and missing you guys. Every little blond kid I see, I nearly lose it. I hate this.”“We all hate, Sid. We can all fix. We’re come to camp, okay?”Sid took an audibly shaky breath while her heart pounded so hard in her ears she worried she might miss his answer. “Camp starts on July 12, but uh... Yeah. Come whenever.”She whooshed out a huge sigh and felt the worried tension in her shoulders release. “Thank you. I know we will work this out.”“I’ll, Uh... I’ll text my address. If you guys want to stay here. I can get some toys. Games. For Niki.”“Of course we want.”She could hear the relief in his voice, the weak but hopeful smile. “Okay. I can’t wait to see you.”“Me too,” she said, clutching the phone tightly. She wanted to jump on a plane right away and go to him. They hung up with sweet, tearful goodbyes and within ten minutes she was texting him, asking which airport they should fly into. She knew it was probably Halifax, but it gave her a thrill to get a quick text back from Sid giving her the rundown of the flight options. It felt like she could breathe again, knowing that he was there. All she had to do was reach out and he would answer her. She bought the plane tickets for all three of them and texted the flight info to Sid. He responded with a smiley emoji and she knew everything was going to be okay. ***************** Anna knew she had to be careful about when she brought the trip up to Zhenya. She thought he might be stubborn about things. He got bull-headed sometimes, prideful, and she worried he might let it interfere with their reunion. She knew she had to do it just right to get him on her side, so she cooked his favorite meal that night, put on his favorite strappy dress, and sent Nikita to his room early so she could take him to bed. She rode him with the dress hiked up around her hips like they were doing something scandalous and whispered dirty things in his ear. She ran her fingernails down his chest and left marks that wouldn’t fade for days. When he tried to touch her, she slapped his hand away and told him he had to earn that, then circled her fingers around her own clit until she came. Then she climbed off him and flipped him over to massage his asshole until he cried and begged her to let him come. She obliged, eventually, but not until he was babbling nonsense into the comforter. Zhenya collapsed on the bed, sweaty and panting. “My god, woman. Is it my birthday?”“Not quite yet,” she said, feeling pretty satisfied with herself. Normally, she left the harder touch to Sid, who slid into the role more naturally. Zhenya got a certain kind of itch, and Sid always knew how to scratch it, but she was no slouch, not if she could judge by his sleepy, satisfied smile. Zhenya looked over at her and opened his arm, and she took the invitation to rest her head on his chest. “That was really nice,” he murmured.“Hmm, it was okay?”“Perfect.”“Good,” she said, smiling at his closed eyes. They laid there long enough that she began to worry he might be asleep before she dared bring it up.“I called Sid today.”Zhenya tensed noticeably, but his voice was neutral. “What did he have to say?”“He wants Nikita to come to his camp.”“The strange child he barely knows?”“Stop. It’s not like that. It wasn’t what he meant.”“I don’t care what he meant. It’s what he said. Imagine if Nikita had heard that.”“It will be different this summer.”“How? There are things you can’t take back after you say them.”It was turning the way she’d dreaded, with Zhenya building walls faster than she could knock them down. “Sid didn’t know any better,” she tried. She propped herself up on an elbow to arch an eyebrow at his obstinate expression. “He didn’t know better because we didn’t tell him. That’s our fault, not communicating. So we’re going to Canada to fix things.”She watched Zhenya’s face soften from stubbornness to surprise. “We?”There, she had him hooked. “Yes, my love. All of us. We’re going as a family.”His surprise morphed again into something even softer, something downright vulnerable. “Sid’s okay with that? All of us?”She had tears filling her eyes again. She was turning into a fountain. She hadn’t even cried this much when she was pregnant, for god’s sake. She swiped at her cheeks and nodded. “Yes. He wants us. He wants everything.”Zhenya’s breath sounded sharp, like he was in pain. He looked like it, too, like she’d reopened a wound that wasn’t done healing. He reached to pull her in without another word and held her close. “So we can go?” she asked after a while. “Yes. Of course. If we can get him back, I want that more than anything.”******************* They flew into Halifax three days before camp started. They’d made a quick stop back in Pittsburgh to pick up Nikita’s hockey gear. Anna noticed Zhenya’s skates and gloves made it into the bag as well. He shrugged at her amused look. “In case he needs help with camp.”She took a picture of him carefully taping his sticks together with Nikita’s for the trip and sent it to Sid. Maybe he’s excited.Sid responded right away, Me too! I can’t wait to show you everything. She thought about it the next day when they were landing. Her phone had a message as soon as she turned it off airplane mode, a text from Sid saying he was in the terminal just past security. He really was excited. She showed Zhenya the text, and he shook his head with an easy grin. “Nerd. He knows it’ll take time to get through customs.”“I’m surprised he’s willing to stay in a public place for that long. In Canada. He’ll be swarmed.”“Oh please, he loves it,” Zhenya teased with all the affection in the world. “He can talk hockey with all the kids until we get through the gate.”She spotted Sid as soon as they were through customs, before they’d even made it out of the security exit. He wasn’t surrounded by people, mostly because there weren’t that many people around. The ones who were looked more interested in seeing their arriving loved ones than meeting a famous hockey player. Sid was leaning, half sitting on the back of a bench while he drummed his fingers anxiously against the wood. The Canadian summer had done him some good. He looked tan, a little fuller, like he’d been working out outside. His eyes flicked over and caught them. His hands stilled. He looked stunned, like maybe he’d thought they wouldn’t actually be there. She smiled and lifted a hand to wave. They were almost through the exit.“Sid!” Nikita cried as soon as they got through, and he took off. Sid brightened and knelt to let the child run into his arms. A stranger indeed. She pinched Zhenya’s side and he gave her a rueful look. Sid stood up when they drew near. He looked almost afraid, like he had when he’d first started coming over, when he wasn’t sure what they were going to be to each other and hadn’t wanted to mess anything up. He had Nikita’s hand in his, the only part of him that looked sure of something. “Hey,” Sid offered with a strained smile and an even more uneasy glance at Zhenya. “Hi, Sid. It’s so good to see you,” Anna answered, feeling weirdly formal about this person she was used to being one hundred percent comfortable with.Zhenya crossed his arms and frowned. “You lie to me.”Sid looked as panicked as she felt. Surely, he hadn’t flown all this way to break everything apart again. “What?” “You say in Canada, is all Robins everywhere. I come out of the gate, what do I see? Starbucks.”Sid’s face changed entirely when he huffed out a surprised laugh, abject misery replaced by the crooked, crinkly-eyed smile she’d missed so much. Zhenya broke, too, revealing a mischievous grin under the mask of fake anger. He closed the gap between them to grab Sid in a big hug. “Hilarious,” Sid groaned into his shoulder. “It’s not funny,” Zhenya clowned. “I’m want some real Canada coffee.”“You don’t even drink coffee,” Sid said, shaking his head when he drew back. “What do you care?”Zhenya looked so satisfied with himself, and Anna couldn’t really be mad at him. After all, he’d taken the unease out of Sid, drained it like poison from a wound. He felt warm and relaxed when he hugged Anna. He spoke with no stress in his tone when he asked about the flight. “It was good,” she said as they parted and began to walk toward baggage claim. “The lady gave me cookies,” Nikita declared. “Well, that’s the best kind of flight,” Sid said fondly.Nikita nodded his agreement and tugged on his sleeve.Anna pulled out her phone to open the pictures Nikita had taken on the trip. There was one blurry, accidental selfie. The rest were clouds. She held one out to Sid. “Nikita takes a picture for you. You see this one?” she asked, pointing at a tall, fluffy looking cloud.Sid looked keenly interested. “Uh huh.”“Niki, what is this?” she asked him, though she knew the answer. It had been explained to her multiple times on the flight before he got occupied in his Nintendo. “Cumulus,” he proclaimed proudly. “Wow,” Sid said. “You learned that in school?”“Myth Busters,” Anna said with a fond roll of her eyes. “You know, the one for kids.”“What else did you learn about clouds?” Sid asked, and Nikita swerved over to reach for his hand again. “Well, they said it’s good to see cumulus clouds when you’re flying because they only happen when there’s good weather. So you won’t get blown up by lightning!” Nikita made an explosion sound with his mouth and jumped to give it that much more emphasis. Sid laughed. “What are the dangerous clouds called?”“Um...” Nikita scrunched up his face for a moment, thinking hard. “Thunderclouds? I don’t remember.”“Did they say cumulonimbus?”Anna swung a surprised look at him and Sid offered a secretive grin. “Yes! You know that?” Nikita said in awe. “Sid knows all smart things,” Zhenya proclaimed. “You can talk to him now, little professor, give my brain a rest.”And that did it. Nikita quizzed Sid the rest of the walk through the airport, thinking of increasingly difficult questions, at least in his six-year-old mind. Sid answered him about the weather until they moved on to the actual aerodynamics of airplanes, then how the conveyer belt worked at baggage claim. Sid simply and articulately explained everything Nikita asked about until they got to the car and, obviously running out of things to ask, he asked how cars work. “The internal combustion engine might be a little beyond my scope, kiddo,” Sid chuckled as he opened the door to let Nikita clamber up into the back seat, where he already had a booster ready for him. “Tell you what. We’ll ask my dad when we see him. He knows everything about cars.”“He does?”“Yep. He’s even rebuilt some.”Nikita’s eyes got big at the idea and he looked around the interior of Sid’s SUV, obviously trying to imagine building something so large and impressive. “Seatbelt, baby,” Anna said to Nikita. She trailed a hand down Sid’s arm as she stepped away to go to the other side of the car and get in beside her son. He ducked his head with a private smile when her fingers traced over his knuckles and fell away.Not to be outdone, Zhenya grabbed Sid’s hand as soon as they were out of the parking garage and held it on the center console with their fingers laced together. Anna knew she wasn’t imagining how Sid’s smile never fully faded after that, tugging at the corners of his mouth while he drove and pointed things out along the route. Zhenya stayed bright-eyed and interested in everything.“There’s the rink,” Sid said when they’d been driving for ten minutes. Nikita nearly dropped his handheld game trying to crane and see. “That’s where camp is?”“Yep. That’s where we’ll go do all the fun stuff. Bag skate. Herbies. Passing drills.”“Scrimmage?”“Scrimmage? Oh, I don’t know about that. Wouldn’t you rather work on fundies?”Zhenya chuckled and Nikita laughed along, relieved to realize it was a joke. Past the rink, the houses started to thin out significantly. Trees took over the skyline, rich greens dominating the landscape as they made their way out of the city. Anna peered out, barely listening to Zhenya and Sid talking while she took in the scenery. She almost missed it when Sid swung the car off the road and onto a long driveway.Sid parked in front of a wooden, A-frame house with huge windows all along the front. “This is it. Home sweet home.”Anna couldn’t be mad about his egregious use of the word home again. The house was beautiful, somewhere she could envision living with their little family. She stepped out of the car to the fresh smell of pine from the trees all around them. It was like a fairy tale, this green little world Sid retreated to far away from their life in Pittsburgh. “How many bears are here?” Zhenya asked ponderously. Anna and Nikita shared a concerned look. Nikita obviously wanted it to be a joke as much as she did. “Oh, I don’t know. At least a dozen, I’d say,” Sid replied blandly, without a hint of teasing. Nikita went wide-eyed and sidled up to Anna to grab her hand. Unfortunately, Zhenya caught him and turned with a mischievous grin. “You think Mama will protect you?” Zhenya said. He put his arms out and lumbered toward Nikita. “No one can save you from the big, mean bear!”Nikita screamed, delighted, and took off with Zhenya behind him for the tree line. “Don’t worry,” Sid said when they’d disappeared. “There’s not really any bears this close in the daytime. They’ll be okay.”She tore her eyes away from the tree line to find Sid pulling their bags out of the trunk. His short sleeve pulled up when he reached into the car and gave her a long look at his flexing bicep when he pulled a suitcase out. She admired the lines of his broad back down to his ass before he caught her with a quick, knowing grin. “You want to get the door?”“Sure.” She snagged the keys out of his front pocket and took the opportunity to peck him on the cheek.Nikita came racing in moments after Sid put the last suitcase down in the house with Zhenya panting behind him. Nikita took cover behind Sid, giggling.“Okay, okay. I give up. You’re too fast for me,” Zhenya said. He walked up to Sid and Nikita peeked out from behind him suspiciously. “I’m just going for a kiss. Nothing even to do with you.”Sid grinned up at him knowingly. “Am I actually getting a kiss out of this?’Zhenya shuffled in close and gave him a very chaste kiss on the lips. He lingered there, easing his hands around Sid’s hips until he could grab Nikita’s shoulder. “Ha! Got you.”Nikita wrenched away and took off again, running through the house while Zhenya lumbered after him. They left Sid smiling fondly at Anna.“Want me to show you around?”“Sure. Maybe start with the bedroom?”His eyebrows shot up and she laughed at him.“For bags. Dirty mind.”He didn’t look ashamed at all, but lifted two bags and grinned. “Follow me.”She did and he led her up a flight of wooden stairs to the second story. They walked down a long hall with many doors. She opened a few out of curiosity. The first was a closet with a few coats and a vacuum cleaner. The second was a guest bedroom with bright pink sheets, which she hoped to god was Taylor’s choice or she would start to worry Sid’s concussion had fundamentally changed him. She didn’t have to open the third door. It was already ajar. The light was on. She stopped completely in the doorway and stared. It was a child’s room, with a small bed like the one Nikita had at home and a trainset in the corner. The walls were painted a gentle blue with an accent border of cartoon bears along the top. There was a bookshelf with two rows of Little Golden Books and Dr. Seuss. Sid reappeared beside her sans bags. He must have dropped them off in the bedroom and circled back. He leaned on the doorframe to look inside, then turned his unreadable expression on her. “You do this just now?” she asked, knowing the answer was no. He shook his head slowly.“Mom helped me out with it a couple of summers ago. She’d kept all the books from me and Taylor up in her attic, so we figured...” He shrugged and looked sheepishly down. “In case you guys ever wanted to visit.”She reached for his hand and he dragged his eyes up from the carpet to her face. “We’re here.”He cracked a smile. “Yeah. I can’t believe it.”She stepped closer and kissed him, savoring the fact that she didn’t have to let go. Thundering, tiny footsteps broke them apart when Nikita came racing up the stairs and shot past them into the room. He froze, looking around. “Whoa. Is this my room?”“Yeah, bud,” Sid answered. “It’s all yours.”“Is that a train?”Nikita raced over to the trainset to fawn over it. Anna could hear Zhenya coming up the steps while Sid followed Nikita. She stepped back to make a shushing gesture at Zhenya, then dragged him over to see the room. He froze at the sight.“Holy shit,” Zhenya said, ever the crude hockey player. Thankfully, as a boy who’d grown up in locker rooms, Nikita hardly even noticed anymore and knew better than to emulate. Anna hid a laugh and Sid looked up amusedly, but Nikita kept looking at the little train. “Does it run?” Nikita asked. “Sure does. That switch right there,” Sid said and pointed to the corner of the table. Nikita flipped the switch up and the train jumped to life. Not surprisingly, Zhenya was just as enthralled as Nikita by the working model and she lost him, too. She leaned in the doorway to watch all three of her boys play with the train, unable to get the smile off her face.She coaxed them out after a while, and Nikita spent the rest of the day following Sid around the house like he was afraid he would disappear again if Nikita let him out of his sight. In the evening, even though he was obviously fighting some jet lag, he helped Sid cook dinner and they talked the whole time, catching up. After dinner, Nikita raced upstairs to get his baseball glove to show Sid. “It was a surprise present for my birthday!”“Oh yeah? Was it from Santa?” Sid asked so innocently. “Santa doesn’t come on my birthday, silly,” Nikita said. “It was a surprise present.”“From nobody?”“I don’t know. But it’s the best glove ever. Can we play catch?”Sid looked so pleased with a pink flush spreading across his cheeks. “Sure, I can dig a glove out.”Nikita pumped his fist. “Yes!”Zhenya followed them out back, but lost interest in catch and joined her on the porch instead. It overlooked a long, grassy back yard surrounded by evergreen trees and sloped down to meet the lake. The only sounds other than Nikita’s laughter and Sid’s encouragement was the wind in the trees and the lap of water against the shore. Zhenya wrapped his arms around her from behind and bent close to her ear to whisper, “This was your best idea yet.”“Hmm,” she replied with a smile. “What would you boys do without me?”Zhenya rested his chin on her shoulder to watch Sid and Nikita playing in the dusky light. She could see his peaceful smile out of the corner of her eye. Distantly, she was aware that they hadn’t even started to work through their problems, that things hadn’t changed much. But in the moment, with her little family all around her, happy and peaceful, she felt overwhelmingly optimistic about where they were headed. **********************Nikita continued keeping a close eye on Sid into the next day when he and Zhenya made plans to go to the gym in the morning. “We’ll be back in a few hours,” Sid promised, but Nikita could be just as stubborn as Zhenya sometimes. In the end, Sid caved and agreed to take him along. Zhenya sent her a cute pic of Nikita benching an unweighted bar while Sid spotted him.She wasn’t sure what she expected, but she found herself a little surprised that Sid seemed so normal. Back in Pittsburgh, he’d seemed so affected by the lasting symptoms of his head injury. But he’d gotten up that morning, bright and cheerful as always, a sharp contrast to Zhenya’s pre-caffeine annoyance. It wasn’t until the boys came home from the gym that Anna got a glimpse of Sid’s new reality, the one he’d tried to keep so tightly hidden away. Nikita burst through the front door skipping and singing, but Zhenya and Sid trailed far behind. She went to the door to look for them and found them standing very close together. Sid had his head down. He was rubbing his eye like there was something wrong with it. “Everything okay?” she asked.“Yes, it’s fine. Go inside,” Zhenya said. It was a tone he’d rarely used on her, commanding and unquestionable. “Sid?”He looked up with a weak smile. “Overdid it a little, maybe. Don’t worry. It might be nothing.”She worried about what it might be if it wasn’t nothing, but Zhenya gave her an exasperated look and she retreated into the house to wait with Nikita. When they finally came inside, Sid looked fine. A little unsteady, but nothing worse than a hard leg day might cause. Only, Zhenya stayed close behind him, like he was worried Sid might fall. “I’m going to watch a movie, relax for a bit,” Sid said, and Nikita jumped up to follow him. “No, baby bird,” Zhenya said.“He’s okay,” Sid said. He reached a hand back for Nikita. “You can help me pick, eh?”Nikita grasped his hand and off they went, leaving Zhenya and Anna alone. “Is he really okay?”Zhenya nodded. “He’s dizzy. His eyes are blurry. He said it was pretty mild, compared to some of what he’s been dealing with.”She didn’t like the sound of that. “From the workout?”“From everything, I think. He doesn’t want to say it, but the excitement... Us being here. His routine is off.”“Maybe you should go make sure Nikita doesn’t aggravate things more while I make lunch.”Zhenya agreed and went after them toward the den.Anna found them all in there when she finished in the kitchen, Zhenya and Nikita each passed out in an armchair while the TV played Aladdin. Sid was awake and sitting on a plush couch with his socked feet up on a coffee table. He smiled when he spotted her and didn’t look any worse for wear. She went to perch on the arm of the couch beside him and he pulled her close with a hand on her hip. “The boy makes you watch cartoon then leaves you alone?” “It’s a good movie. I hadn’t seen it in a long time.”She bent down to kiss him. “How do you feel?”“Better now,” he said, but something troubling passed over his face. For a second, he looked lost. “You want to eat?” she asked. “Soup is ready.”He tightened his arm around her hip and held her when she tried to move. “Can it sit a few more minutes?”“It’s soup. It can sit forever.”“I just want to let them sleep a little more.”Anna looked over at her sleeping child. He was curled like a puppy in the seat of the chair. “He miss you,” she said, petting Sid’s hair. “Which one?” Sid asked with a delighted little smile. He kissed her palm. “C’mere.”She moved around him and sat on the couch on his other side, tucked up under his arm, and put her head on his shoulder to watch the movie.“My parents are getting antsy about seeing us. It’s been almost a full 24 hours. I’m surprised my mom isn’t over here already.”Anna reached for his hand to play with his fingers while she considered. She’d met Sid’s parents, of course. The first time was in 2016 during the cup run. They were there in the stands together before Nikita was born. Sid’s mom had worried about her, pregnant as she was, fussed and cared for her and told her not to get too excited. Then afterward, before Sid went away for the summer, they were around for the parties. Trina had gotten to hold the infant she’d been so protective of in Mario Lemieux’s back yard while the team partied. “He’s beautiful, Anna,” she’d cooed down at the baby. They’d hung out again in 2017, the Malkin and Crosby families coming together to hold their breaths while the team fought for a repeat. And there had been a few times a year since then when Sid’s parents came to town, but they mostly stayed at Sid’s house.“What will we say to them?” Anna asked carefully. “About what?”Anna looked up at him significantly and cut a look over at Zhenya and Nikita.“Oh, uh... Yeah, they’ve known for a long time.” He shrugged. “I don’t really not tell them things, ya know?”She didn’t know. She knew he was a naturally honest person, but she hadn’t realized his openness extended to telling his parents about a relationship he hadn’t even considered permanent.“They always know?”“Yeah, pretty much. I think we really started talking about it after that first cup run. Honestly, I had to say something. My mom was really worried I was heartbroken about G marrying you.” He laughed at the memory. “She sent my dad on a mission to console me.”Anna chuckled along with him then sobered. “What do they think?” she asked. “Well... They don’t understand, I guess, but they know they don’t have to. It’s not their thing. They can respect the choices I make for myself, even if they don’t get it. Obviously, they don’t want to see me get hurt, but...” he shrugged. “Honestly, I think they’re just happy you’re here. “I’m happy, too,” Anna said. “And... you won’t get hurt.”Sid’s easy smile returned. “I know.”She adjusted on his shoulder and curled her legs under her. “Tell them we will cook dinner.” “Tonight?”“Yes. You can grill.”“Oh, I can, huh?”“You like to grill. Don’t complain.”Sid rested his cheek on her head. “Okay. I’ll go grab some steaks this afternoon and let them know.”“You want to drive?”“I told you, I’m fine. It just happens sometimes. It passes.” She really hoped he was telling the whole story. “Okay,” she sighed. “Get things for salad, too.”“Of course.” **************** Zhenya perched on the bed and laughed at her when she came out of the bathroom in her third outfit of the evening, a white summer dress. “For grilling?” he asked. “I don’t think it’s a dress-up occasion. It’s not church.”“It’s not a fancy dress,” she said, but she saw his point. Maybe the first outfit had been best, after all, a loose tee shirt and jeans with holes in the knees. “Besides, I want to look nice.”“For Sid’s parents? Why?”She gave him a hard look. “Why do you think?”He shrugged. “I can’t imagine.”“I want them to be impressed. To know that he’s not missing out on anything not marrying a nice Canadian girl.”“Oh, well, if you want the nice Canadian girl look, I’m sure Sid’s got some flannel around here.”She put her hands on her hips and sighed at him. He laughed at her and stood up. Without her heels on, she had to crane her head back to glare up at him when he approached. “You look fabulous. Sexy. Beautiful. Stunning. Always. They’ll be extremely impressed with you. Everybody always is. And it has nothing to do with how you dress.”He said it like she hadn’t watched him ponder through his shirts and eventually steal a plain black one from Sid’s dresser because he was worried his choices were too bold. “Just dress normal. They’ll love you.”She accepted a kiss from him, stretching up on her toes to ease the height difference. “You’re pretty smooth sometimes.”“Yes, I know,” he said, straight-faced, before his silly grin broke through and he pushed on her hips to get her moving. “Now go get dressed. Again. They’ll be here any minute.”She changed back into her jeans and tee shirt, then spent a while picking at her hair, wondering whether to put it up. She brushed it again. It looked okay, softly flowing, but they were grilling outside and it would soon become a mess in the wind. She decided on a loose ponytail to keep it corralled at her back instead of going all over the place.By the time she exited the bathroom, Zhenya had given up on her and gone downstairs. She joined him in the kitchen, where Sid was seasoning steaks. “Oh hey, you look nice,” Sid said, and she cut a look at Zhenya to see if he’d prompted it. He looked innocently away from her and she decided it was easiest to simply accept the compliment. “Thank you,” she said and kissed Sid on the cheek. “What can I do?”“There’s not much left. You can cut up some cucumbers for the salad if you want.”She did and was putting the last of the veggies on the salad when she heard the front door open.“Sid!” Taylor’s voice called. “In the kitchen,” he said back, and Anna hurried to dry her hands. Zhenya stayed leaned back against the counters like it was no big deal while Taylor and Sid’s parents filed in. “Anna!” Taylor cried at the sight of her, and she bypassed Sid’s hug to beeline over to her. Taylor hugged like a hockey player, hard and enthusiastic, but Anna didn’t mind. It made the hug seem real, genuine. “How have you been? I feel like it’s been a hundred years.”“Hi little sister,” Sid said pointedly, but with a forgiving grin. “Psh, I talk to you all the time,” Taylor waved him off and moved to hug Zhenya just as hard as Anna.Sid shook his head and bent to kiss his mom on the cheek. “Where’s the little one?” Trina asked immediately. “Jeez, nobody came here to see me?” Sid teased. “He’s drawing in his room if you want to go grab him, tell him it’s about time to wash up for dinner.”Trina went, but Troy stayed and hugged Sid briefly. “What needs doing?”“Nothing,” Sid said. “We’re all set. All we have to do now is drink beer and watch the meat cook.”“Hell of a plan, kid,” Troy said and made for the fridge. Zhenya got there first and handed him a cold bottle of beer. “Thanks, bud,” he said with a casual sort of friendliness, grown over nearly two decades of meetings. “How’ve you been?”“Good, good. Like the weather here. Nice.”“Yeah, I’m surprised Sid took so long to get you all up here. Glad you finally made it.”“Me too. Probably come here lots now.”“I like to hear that.” He clapped a hand on Zhenya’s elbow and put his beer down to hug Anna. “Last but not least, I promise,” he joked, and his arms were big and welcoming around her shoulders. “These boys been talking about anything but hockey?”“No, nothing,” she said with a mischievous grin. She could see Zhenya’s comically outraged expression over Troy’s shoulder.“You poor thing. You should come over while they’re at camp, hang out with Tri. I think she gets kind of bored with no one in the house.”“Yes, that sounds fun.”“Or,” Taylor teased, “you could come to camp with us. You can skate, right?”“Hmm,” she shook her hand back and forth in a so-so motion. “Little bit. I don’t fall down much, but not enough to play hockey.”“Oh, you don’t have to play. You can just stand there and help the kiddos with things. It’s really fun.”Anna loved hockey. She loved Sid and Zhenya and her son more than anything in the world. But the idea of spending an entire day on an ice rink made her feet ache in sympathy. She made a hesitant expression. “Not everybody has hockey on the brain twenty-four-seven, Nugget,” Troy said with a chuckle. “Dad,” Taylor whined at the nickname, but she was laughing, too.Trina and Nikita joined them after they had relocated to the back porch. Sid and Troy manned the grill while everyone else gathered around the wooden picnic table Sid had set up under the overhang. It made for a serene and picturesque setting for an outdoor summer meal. The sun started to set while they ate and Sid got up to flick the porch lights on. Trina and Anna shared a bottle of wine, chatting idly about this and that while the boys and Taylor talked sports. They made plans to go shopping in Halifax on a camp day, just the two of them. It wasn’t until Anna got up to gather the dishes that it really hit her. She looked around the table at their little group. Nikita was telling a story to Taylor, who looked enchanted by it. Troy was leaned back laughing at something Zhenya said. Sid had his arm casually hooked over the back of Zhenya’s chair, a low-key possessiveness in the gesture that reminded everybody that they weren’t just friends. And it was okay. They were happy and laughing, all of them together. “You okay, honey?” Trina asked, and her question drew Sid’s eyes over, full of concern. Her voice sounded wrong, choked with emotion when she answered, “Yes.” She cleared her throat and tried to laugh. “Yes, of course. I’m fine. I’m just... I need to get dishes.”Trina put a comforting hand on her arm. “Here. Let me help.”Anna nodded gratefully and brushed an overwhelmed tear off her eyelashes. She shook her head subtly at Sid, who looked worried about her, and set about helping Trina gather the plates to take them inside.Sid came in after them before the dishwasher was full. She figured it was coming. A tiny gesture couldn’t stop him from worrying. “Hey, need help?” he asked.“No, we’re fine. Go away,” Anna scolded him.Instead of obeying, he leaned on the sink next to her and put a hand on her hip, searching her face for something. When he didn’t find it, he leaned in and kissed her right in front of his mom. “Okay, okay, I’m going,” he said with a chuckle, and he grabbed three more beers on his way out. “He comes from a good place,” Trina sighed when he was gone. “I know he hovers. He did the same thing to Taylor when she was a kid, drove her crazy.”“It’s fine. I don’t care. But if I let him stay-”“He’ll take over the dishes and somehow you’ll end up sitting down?” Trina asked, eyes shining with laughter. “Sounds familiar.”They worked together in silence for a few minutes, Anna scrubbing the dishes while Trina rinsed and loaded the drying rack. “I’m sure you’re not here looking for our approval,” Trina said when the dishes were mostly done. “But I’m also sure he’ll never tell you how much it meant to him that you decided to come. I just want you to know, we’re so happy to have you here.”Anna hoped she managed to convey her gratitude with whatever English words she could scrape together after that. When Sid’s parents and Taylor were gone for the night and Zhenya was putting Nikita in bed, Anna led Sid back outside, flipped off the porch lights, wiggled out of her jeans, and climbed into his lap. He swallowed hard but didn’t protest when she unbuttoned his pants and pulled his cock out. His dick certainly didn’t object, growing firm in her hand while they kissed. She felt exposed, straddling his thighs naked from the waist down, but there was no one around to see. She didn’t feel strange enough to stop and move into the house when he got hard enough to fuck her. She shifted her hips and took him inside her. Sid made a breathy noise into her mouth. “Anna.”“Shh,” she whispered, shushing him against the prying ears of no one at all while she started to ride him.After a while, the door opened and Zhenya laughed. “So this is why you wanted the dress, hmm?” They’d been at it for a few minutes. Her thighs were starting to ache, like a good workout. “Maybe,” she responded, not super interested in his teasing when she was trying to come. She propped her hands on Sid’s shoulders and rolled her hips like a dance. “I’ll leave you to it,” Zhenya chuckled, and he pulled away like he might actually leave.“No, G,” Sid said. He reached a hand out and Zhenya adjusted his dick in his jeans on the way over. Sid accepted a filthy kiss from Zhenya and then guided his hand down between her legs. “Need help?” Zhenya gasped innocently when his smile was anything but. His fingers drew a circle around her clit and she choked on an inhale. He settled in behind her on the bench for a better angle.“If you get her off before I come, I’ll take you upstairs and fuck you, too.”God, she could never believe the shit Sid said during sex. She certainly couldn’t complain, though, because Zhenya stopped teasing and got down to business. In no time, he had her cresting through her orgasm, muffling her cries in Sid’s shoulder. Sid’s hands tightened on her hips, encouraging her to be still. “Easy, easy,” he begged. God, he sounded close. “You gotta stop.”He was really determined to fuck them both, apparently. She nodded lazily with her head down on his shoulder, not anxious to move just yet. Zhenya clapped Sid on the thigh. “Come, deal is deal.”She eased off Sid’s lap while he clenched his jaw and looked skyward. He stayed there for a few breaths before he eased his dick back into his pants and got up. Anna put her jeans back on and paused in the kitchen for a glass of water. By the time she got upstairs, Sid already had Zhenya spread out on the bed with a couple of fingers in him. It seemed like she barely got undressed and joined them in the bed before Sid was lubing up and sliding in. Sid fucked Zhenya slow and deep. He didn’t talk at all, which was pretty unusual for him. He didn’t have anything dirty or bossy to say. He just furrowed his brow and put his back into it and took Zhenya apart at the seams until he had to bury his face in a pillow to muffle himself.The only time Sid said anything was when he started to lose his rhythm, when Anna could tell he was close to coming. “G, c’mon,” he said, his voice strained and raspy. Zhenya obediently put a hand around his cock and started jerking off. Anna scraped her nails over Zhenya’s nipples while he did it, which got him cursing and his hips moving helplessly until he spilled over his own fist. Sid put his head down and came with a relieved groan right after that.Lying together in the quiet aftermath only felt nice for a few seconds before the memory of the last time they’d laid in bed together after sex came crashing back into her. She went from dozing peacefully to wide awake. Sid was lying on his back beside her, still breathing a little hard. His eyes were fixed up at the ceiling. He opened his mouth to speak and Anna braced against the flashbacks of last time. “You’re a bad influence,” he said in a tone that indicated he approved. “Screwing around outside. My neighbors are going to complain.”“What neighbors? The owls?” she said. Her twisted up insides relaxed when he smiled over at her. “Hey, owls are very sensitive. Have to keep it PG around here.”Zhenya laughed. She propped herself up on her elbows to look at him. He didn’t look worried about anything. His eyes were mostly closed and a smile played across his mouth. “What are you thinking about?” Sid asked her when she hadn’t said anything for a long stretch.She turned her attention back to him. He looked sweet and a little concerned, and she wasn’t about to bring up her paranoia and break the mood. “I think we should take a bath,” she said. “Who’s we?” Zhenya asked in mumbled Russian, a sure sign he was barely awake anymore.“Me and Sid, not you.”“Good. Have fun.”“You don’t want to clean up a little?” Sid asked. Apparently, he’d caught enough to understand. Zhenya didn’t answer. After a second, he started to snore. “Faker,” Sid said. She saw Zhenya fight a laugh, but he kept pretending to be asleep until they gave up on him and left him in bed. *********Camp started on the third day of their visit. They’d settled back in together by then, fitting like puzzle pieces, like always, but Anna knew the problems weren’t resolved. In most of the ways that counted, they’d only gotten back to the status quo. Sure, it was nice to hang out with Sid’s family, but Sid’s family had known about them. There was still the bigger issue of breaking the news to those back in Russia. It was strange, when she thought about it, that they’d gone so long without having to face these issues. She thought, now that she could see the cracks in their relationship, maybe their comfort together had been a problem. Maybe it had kept them from fixing things that needed to be dealt with. Anna didn’t have to think too hard about what to do about it on her end. She knew her parents, particularly her mother, and could weave her like a basket. On the first day of camp, she sent three pictures: one of Sid tying Nikita’s skates in the locker room, one of Nikita, Sid, and Zhenya posing in their camp jerseys, and one of Sid carrying Nikita into the house, fast asleep on his shoulder after his big first day.Sure enough, her mother called five minutes after the last one, despite it being almost midnight in Moscow. “What are you doing with that boy?”“He’s attending hockey camp.”“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. What’s going on?”Anna’s heart thumped hard. It felt like it was slamming against her ribs. “Mama, don’t be like that. It’s not a big deal.”“You’re going to confuse the baby, letting Sid teach him things, carry him around. That’s a job for his father.”“Yes,” Anna said, and her eyes started to prickle. Fear turned her stomach. Her mother wasn’t stupid. She would get it immediately. “Yes, it’s a job for his fathers.”Her mother was silent for a long beat before she sighed. “Well... I can’t say I’m surprised.”Anna closed her eyes, bracing for the worst. “At least you’re admitting it now. It’s been this way for a while, hmm?”“Yeah. A while. How did you-”“Zhenya is in love with him, that much is obvious to anyone, and you’re not blind. I wondered why you would keep him so close if he could take your husband.” She was smiling. Anna could hear it in her voice. “Then you snuck him into the house after you thought I was asleep last summer.” “You knew that? Why didn’t you say something?”“It was none of my business if you wanted to have a threesome.”“Mother!” Anna laughed and covered her eyes. “God.”“Will he join you in Moscow this summer?”“Maybe. I hope so. If he’s up for it.”“Up for it?”“His head. He may not be able to travel that much.”“Nonsense. Give him ginger and honey on the plane. I’ll darken your windows before you arrive, in case it does go bad. But if he can play hockey with children, he can fly.”Anna suddenly felt even more like she might cry. “Mama...”“Don’t blubber, child,” she teased, but it was a soft kind of teasing. The best kind. “Everything will be alright.”That night, after Nikita was in bed, she curled in Zhenya’s arms on the couch and let herself cry just a little bit while Sid was in the shower. Zhenya would understand better than Sid, who would worry that she was sad. Zhenya got it. She needed to decompress, to let everything out for a while. He just ran a hand over her hair and murmured sweet things until she felt like her emotions had evened out enough for them to go to bed.********************* On the third day of camp, Anna woke up to a groan from Sid, something terribly close to a whimper. She opened her eyes in time to see him push himself up with a pained breath. Zhenya was between them, still fast asleep, and she shook him awake. “Sid?” she asked while Zhenya struggled to gain consciousness. “Are you okay?”He winced at the sound of her voice. “Yeah. Go back to sleep,” he said flatly. “You’re sick?” she asked.“No, it’s...” He grimaced, then he pushed back the covers and moved to hang his legs over the side of the bed like he was getting up. Zhenya hit the right level of conscious thought then and reached out. He touched Sid on the elbow and asked very softly, “Headache?”“Yeah,” Sid said in that same flat tone. Anna felt suddenly foolish for not knowing what was going on. She probably should have realized. After all her research on post-concussive symptoms, she should have known. But other than the occasional short dizzy spell, Sid had seemed fine, just like he was pre-concussion. She had watched him on the ice with the kids. He joked and laughed and never seemed to get tired. She’d stopped looking for symptoms, stopped thinking the worst was yet to come.“Let me get for you,” Zhenya said, and he eased around Sid out of the bed. “Where?” “Medicine cabinet. It’s a blue bottle.” Zhenya nodded and shuffled off to the bathroom. He returned with a bottle of pills and a glass of water, and Sid took two with shaking hands. “It’s bad, hmm?” Zhenya asked. He reached out to pet Sid’s hair like he could soothe his headache away. “Yeah,” Sid said. “The pills help. After a while.”Zhenya leaned over and kissed his forehead. “I’m sorry, baby.”“I don’t think I’ll be up in time for camp. I can’t...” “Shh, don’t worry, Sid. I will go.”Sid relaxed a little and eased himself back into bed like his whole body hurt. Anna watched him with a heavy heart and scooted closer when he settled. She wasn’t sure where or how to touch him now, when he looked so miserable. She took his hand and he squeezed it gratefully. Anna stayed with him while Zhenya showered to get ready for the day. She listened as his breathing went from shallow and pained to the deep, steady breaths of sleep when the medicine gave him enough relief.When she was sure he was asleep, Anna got up. She took a shower and joined Zhenya downstairs to make breakfast, which Zhenya strictly ordered her not to try to offer to Sid when he woke up. “It was like this in 2011, too. He gets sick easy. He needs simple things. Oranges, crackers. But for now, let him sleep.”Zhenya went and got Nikita up, and the three of them ate breakfast together. It was like they were back in time, back in Pittsburgh, where Sid was so close but untouchable.“Where’s Sid?” Nikita asked, and the question was sharply familiar. She saw Zhenya flinch. “He’s sleeping,” Zhenya said. It wasn’t a lie.“Sleeping?” Nikita asked incredulously. “Yes, he’s very tired. Leave him be.”“But it’s almost time for camp. Is he going to wake up?”“Eat your breakfast, baby bird,” Zhenya said as he got up from the table and disappeared, leaving her to field the remaining questions. Nikita picked at his breakfast until she excused him, then dashed away. She was so relieved to be out from under his inquisition, she let him go without a fuss. When it came time to leave for camp, Zhenya gathered his skates and a stick, but when he went to find Nikita, he was missing from his room. Anna found Nikita by following the murmur of voices down the hall. She flushed with anger when she realized Nikita had stolen into Sid’s room. She found Sid sitting up in the dim room and drawing on a paper for Nikita, who was perched next to him on the bed. “You have to remember to get open here, and take either the high slot or the corner. Keep moving your feet if you go low. It’s no contact here, but-”“Nikita,” Anna said sternly but quietly.“He’s okay,” Sid said immediately. “We were just covering plays for today. Since I can’t go.”“Papa is waiting,” she said. “Go to camp.”He scampered out and she closed the door. She walked up to the bed and reached for the pad of paper with a stern frown. “Why do I feel like I’m the one in trouble?” Sid asked sheepishly.She pursed her lips and shook her head, but she kissed him after. “You need rest. Maybe orange. Not hockey.”Sid gave her a weak smile. “I, Uh... I missed him. It’s worth a headache, you know?”She leaned in and kissed him softly. “You don’t miss again. None of us. So you rest. Talk hockey when you feel good.”“Yes ma’am,” he said in a teasing tone. “You hungry?”Sid grimaced a little and shook his head. The bad day raged on, turning his stomach like Zhenya said. He grasped onto her wrist and smiled weakly. “Will you stay for a few minutes? I might be able to sleep more if you do. It’s best to just sleep it off.”Anna kissed him slow and sweet before she arranged them on the bed. She put her head on his chest and petted his stomach, his arm, down to his hip. “How long you feel sick?” She asked, because Zhenya knew but he wouldn’t tell her. “Uh, I don’t know. Maybe a day. Maybe less. I hope less.”She soothed a hand across his skin, helpless to do anything but hope, too. “Sometimes...” he started, but he stopped. “Sometimes what?”“I’m worried this is as good as it’s going to get. I’m afraid I’ll always have a couple bad days a week. Forever. I don’t know how I’ll deal with that.”“You don’t deal,” Anna said. “We deal. We do. Together. Like today. You stay home, Zhenya go teach kids.”“I don’t want you to feel like you have to take care of me.”“When I’m pregnant, when I feel sick, you feel bad to bring me tea?”“No, of course not.”“We take care. All of us. You sick three, four, five days. Always. I hope not, but I still take care and Zhenya take care. Forever.”Sid’s sniffle at that sounded suspiciously wet. She propped herself up to kiss him. “Love you, Sid.”“I love you. So much. I can’t believe how stupid... I could have lost you.”She snorted and tossed her hair. “You would never lose me. I run too fast for you.”He laughed for real and kissed her again, smiling against her mouth. “Now go to sleep,” she said sternly, the same tone she used to get Nikita to bed when he got wound up. “It will be good for you.”“Hmm, you’re the boss,” he said.She liked the sound of that. ***************** The worst of the bad day passed while Zhenya and Nikita were out at camp. By the time they returned in the evening, Sid was up and showering. He insisted his head didn’t hurt, that he could do it on his own, but Anna peeked in a couple of times. She did it enough that he smirked in the mirror while he was shaving, wearing nothing but a towel around his waist. “You’re not nervous I’m going to pass out, are you?”“I don’t know what you mean,” she said innocently, then she went to pull the curtains and dim the lights in the house in case his eyes were still sensitive. Nikita looked a little scared when Sid came downstairs. He was sitting at the coffee table in the den coloring while Anna scrolled through Instagram on the couch behind him. He looked up at the sound of footsteps and froze at the sight of Sid. “You okay, bud?” Sid asked. Nikita looked around until he found Anna. “Hey,” Sid tried again and walked up to Nikita at the table. He sat down on the floor on the other side of it and peeked at what Nikita was drawing, a male figure playing hockey. “That’s really good. Is it Gretzky?”Nikita shook his head. “No, it’s me.”“Nice.” Sid leaned back on his hands and generally looked unassuming and non-threatening. “Did you get a little scared this morning?”Nikita nodded. “That’s okay. It’s okay to be scared.”Nikita shrugged. “Was it because Mama said you were in trouble or because I was feeling sick?”Nikita shrugged again and breathed in deep. “I don’t know. I guess... I didn’t know you were sick because I wouldn’t come talk to you. Dad said your head hurt and shouldn’t go talk to you, and Mama got mad but I didn’t know, okay?”“It’s okay. Mama’s not mad anymore, right?” he asked, looking up at Anna. “Of course not, sweetheart,” she said. She leaned forward to pet his hair.Sid offered him a grin. “And I’m not sick anymore, so we’re all good.”That didn’t quite do the trick. Nikita frowned down at the table. “Will you get sick again?”Anna nearly jumped in when she saw a flicker of anxiety pass over Sid’s face. “Yeah, bud. Probably.”Nikita looked deeply troubled by the idea. “Maybe you can help me, eh? Do you want to draw a sign for the door so everyone knows when I’m not feeling well? That way Mama never has to get onto anyone about it. You think that might help?”Nikita paused, then reached for a blank sheet of paper and his colored pencils. “Okay, but what color do you want?”“How about red? Like a stop sign.”“Smart,” Nikita said solemnly as he drew a red pencil out. “Thanks, bud,” Sid chuckled. “What’d you do at camp today? Was Papa mean?”“Um, we skated around a lot and then we tried to do what you said, but he said he your notes were hard to read. Then we did scrimmage.”“Hard to read, eh?” Sid said, sounding very suspicious. Anna figured it must mean Zhenya was just not into whatever drills they’d scheduled and ran a drop in instead. “Well, you had fun, right?”Nikita nodded his head. “I have like six friends now.”“Oh yeah? Are they from around here?”“Like, two of them.”“Well, great. Maybe you can hang out with them when camp is over. Whenever we’re back in town.”“We’re coming back?” Nikita asked. “Sure, sometimes. When there’s no school or hockey.”“Good. I like it here.”“Me too, kiddo.” *************** The rest of the week passed without incident. Sid never had to miss another day of camp, which made him happy. He came home every day with a smile and plenty of stories about the kiddos to tell her. Anna and Trina went to Halifax on the second to last day of camp, then made plans to carpool to the rink the next day for Nikita’s “graduation.” They took lots of pictures of the ceremony, and Anna posted one of their entire family one of the other parents took for them. Her mother liked it minutes after it was posted and her heart swelled. The approval from her mom bolstered her courage to ask Sid to join them in Russia. “Do you think you can fly with your head?” she asked cautiously that night in bed with her laptop on her thighs.Sid grinned. “Better than without it.”“Haha, funny guy. I mean fly for long time.”He stopped grinning because Pittsburgh and Miami were not long flights. He was cottoning on.“Um... Yeah. I think so. Why do you ask?”She turned the laptop toward him to see the flight to Moscow she wanted to book, all four of their names listed on the tickets. Sid looked a little sick at the thought. “Are you serious?”She shrugged. “Of course I am serious.”Sid looked to Zhenya for help, but only got a hopeful smile in return. “Maybe... It’s not so much more far than France. You go there one time.”“Yeah, I... But if we travel together, people might think-”“What?” she asked with an arched eyebrow. “We are family? One, this is no one’s business. Two, they will think right. We are a family.”Sid looked stunned. “Uh... Wow. Yeah. Of course. I’ll come. I would love to.”Anna bit her lip to tamp down her excitement, but Zhenya would not be contained. He surged up to tackle Sid to the bed and kiss him all over until he was a giggling mess, and she had to smack Zhenya’s ass to get him to stop shaking the bed. “I can’t order the tickets like this,” she complained.************ They went fishing with Sid’s parents the day before they started the long trip to Moscow. After the constant planning and bustle of camp and before the travel days, it was a perfect contrast of calm and quiet. Troy and Trina met them at the dock, where they were getting the boat ready to go. Nikita held tight to Sid’s hand, as instructed until he could get a life preserver on, but he waved enthusiastically to them in lieu of sprinting toward them. “Hey there, Niki,” Troy called. He smiled like Sid, uncomplicated and kind. He bent down to rustle around under a seat as they approached, then stepped confidently out of the boat onto the dock with a child-sized life preserver in hand. “I’ve got you something.” Nikita looked up at Sid, who nodded that it was okay to let go of his hand. He looked a little nervous when he let go, but Troy knelt to hold out the flotation vest for him and Nikita slid into it. “There you go, safe and sound,” Troy exclaimed. Nikita looked down to examine the vest. It was very yellow, like a highlighter. “This thing floats?” he asked suspiciously. “It sure does.”Sid kissed his mom on the cheek and took a cooler away from her before she could lift it more than a couple of inches off the ground. “We’ll load up the rest, Mom.”“Thanks, honey,” she said. Instead of stepping into the boat, she bee-lined for Anna and linked their arms with a conspiratorial look. “I’ve got something for us stashed away. Do you like mimosas?” she said, bent in close so no one else could hear.Anna nodded, biting down on a smile, and leaned in to whisper. “Yes, I like. More than fishing.”“Me too, dear. Me too.”“Telling secrets?” Zhenya teased while he handed Sid the last tackle box off the dock.“Girl talk, Geno,” Trina responded with a mischievous smile. She was feisty, and Anna liked her tremendously. “Ah, talking about boys, huh?” “You think we don’t have anything better to say?” Anna said, smirking, and Zhenya looked scandalized.“You hear this?” he said to Sid. “Anya don’t care so much for boys, now.”“Jeez, that’s a shame. I guess we’re on our own.” Sid sounded insultingly un-heartbroken, beaming at Zhenya. Anna and Trina carved out a no-fishing zone in the back of the boat before the boys had even settled on a spot to fish. Sid was at the wheel fighting back laughter while Troy and Zhenya argued about whether the best spot was in the shade or in the sun. Nikita knelt at the bow of the boat, enjoying the spray of the water on his face. They settled eventually, probably in the spot Sid had scoped out before the negotiation ever took place, a nice little cove where the water wouldn’t rock the boat too hard. Anna thought it probably had something to do with the fish, not wanting them to get suspicious of the movement, but it worked out for pouring mimosas as well. Neither Anna nor Trina touched a fishing pole the entire afternoon.*************** That night after they’d cooked their day’s catch of fish at Sid’s house and his parents had departed, Sid and Nikita took their final opportunity to play catch before they had to pack up the gloves for the trip. Next time they tossed a ball, it would be in a city where baseball was a foreign concept. Zhenya took dishes duty and insisted she stay and relax on the porch, an offer she gratefully accepted. Anna was sitting and looking out over the water on the lake when she overheard Nikita ask, “Sid? Do you have a papa?” She jerked her eyes back to the boys playing ball. Sid grinning curiously with the ball in his glove and tossed it before he answered. “Of course. You know Troy. The guy we went fishing with today. The one who didn’t catch anything.”“No, I know Troy,” Nikita sighed heavily, obviously not amused by the gentle teasing. He tossed the ball back. Sid stepped forward to catch it. “But you call him Dad.”“Oh, sure,” Sid said, sounding relieved to be on footing he understood. He returned to his position and tossed the ball again. “That’s just another name for a papa. Papa is more common in Russia. Dad is more common in Canada.”Nikita looked incredulous. He took a second to adjust his grip in his glove. “So... Why don’t I call you Dad?” he asked, and tossed the ball. It bounced on the ground, uncaught, when Sid froze. Anna nearly dropped the wine glass in her hand. She jumped up with a scold ready on her tongue for something Nikita couldn’t understand. Sid caught her and stopped her with a subtle shake of his head. He cleared his throat and went to retrieve the ball. “Why do you ask that?” Sid asked carefully when he’d returned, ball in hand. It was a fraught subject. Too many turns could result in a catastrophic meltdown of Nikita’s world. “Well, you’re like Papa,” Nikita said thoughtfully, glove out. Sid lobbed one right into the netting. “You’re like Papa, only he’s Russian. You’re Canadian,” he said, tongue out while he retrieved the ball from his glove and held it like Sid had shown him. It wobbled a little but found Sid’s glove without much detour.“You know just because I’m Canadian that doesn’t mean you have to call me anything special,” Sid offered. Anna held her breath and leaned on the railing. “It just doesn’t make sense,” Nikita muttered, clearly dissatisfied with the answer. He caught the ball and threw it back. Sid put his glove down, rested it against his thigh and looked like he was thinking hard for a long beat before he said, “Would you like to call me Dad?”Nikita sighed and nodded a little petulantly, like he’d been waiting for this revelation for a very long time. “Yeah, I guess,” he said. “If you want.”Anna couldn’t take Sid’s expression. He was choking up, but trying to hide it from Nikita. She stepped the rest of the way off the porch and into the back yard. The cool grass tickled her bare feet when she walked up to kiss Nikita on the head. “I think that sounds like a perfect idea,” she said. “Don’t you agree?” “Yeah,” Sid replied with a strained voice. “Um, yeah. That would be...” he hastily wiped his free hand over his eyes. “You can definitely call me Dad.”“Are you crying?” Nikita asked, face scrunched up with confusion. “No,” Sid lied, but he was laughing again, shakily. “I have allergies.”“Allergies?” Nikita said, voice full of doubt. “Yep. Definitely not crying. There’s no crying in baseball.”Anna shook her head at him and hugged Nikita, who accepted it for a second before he said, “Mama, you’re in the way.”She rolled her eyes. “I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to interrupt this important game,” she said as she returned to the porch to retrieve her wine.When they’d gone back to tossing the ball, Anna subtly texted Zhenya the news. He appeared out the sliding back door, whistling merrily. First, he kissed her, slow and sweet. Then he trotted down the steps into the yard and went straight for Sid to kiss him. “Hi, Dad.”Sid blushed and laughed, but he looked immensely proud at the same time. Behind them, Nikita threw up his hands about the amount of adult affection interrupting their game.Anna knew they were in for a rough summer in some ways. She didn’t think Zhenya’s parents would be as understanding as Sid’s, or even her own. They were old fashioned in some ways. They probably wouldn’t approve, and that would be hard on all of them. The things they’d tried to avoid for a long time would suddenly be in front of them, demanding their attention. But those things they worried about were avoided at the expense of moments like this, with Sid looking so thrilled about his new title when the reality was he’d been Nikita’s father all along. His smile was worth every uncomfortable conversation and awkward silence, every bit of difficulty they faced in Russia. Because no matter what happened there, they would go home a family and never be torn apart again.