5. Sophia
SOPHIA
The thing about Marcus Kovalenko deciding to be in your life is that it's less a decision and more a weather system. You don't get a vote. You just notice the barometric pressure changing and start battening down.
My family had a great deal to say about the development, because my family has a great deal to say about everything, and they said most of it at full volume at Sunday dinner.
My mother had warned Marcus at the birthday party, I'd learn later, the cooler speech, the empty-chair speech, and she'd come away cautiously approving, which from Rosa Ricci is practically a blessing.
My brothers were another matter. Tony, the oldest, had appointed himself my protector the day my father walked out, when he was nine and I was six, and he'd spent twenty-two years in the role and was not about to relinquish it for a hockey player who'd hurt his sister once already.
He grilled me about Marcus over the rigatoni with the intensity of a prosecutor, and when I told him, honestly, that I didn't know yet what Marcus and I were, only that Marcus was going to be in Luca's life, Tony had set down his fork and said the thing big brothers say.
He left you once, Soph. Pregnant, even if he didn't know it, he still left.
A man who leaves once has it in him to leave again.
I'm not saying don't. I'm saying go slow, keep your own money, keep your own place, and if he runs again, you call me, and I'll handle it, and you'll be fine, because you've always been fine, you're the strongest person I know, you just sometimes forget it around a man.
I'd bristled at that, the around a man part, because it stung, because it was a little true, and I'd told Tony I didn't need handling and he'd said he knew, that was the whole point, I never needed handling, and that he just wanted me to remember it.
He did it carefully, I'll give him that.
He did it on my terms, technically, which is to say he found the exact edges of every rule I'd set and then stood on them, polite and immovable, until I gave ground.
He didn't meet Luca as his father. He didn't make decisions.
He didn't try to move us anywhere or buy anything, though I could feel the wanting-to coming off him like heat.
What he did instead was simply become present, in a hundred small accumulating ways, until my carefully independent life had a Marcus-shaped current running through it.
He started showing up at the community rink for Luca's lessons.
Just watching, from the stands, a hat pulled low, the most recognizable enforcer in the league trying and failing to be inconspicuous in a rink full of hockey moms who absolutely clocked him.
He never came down to the ice. He just watched my son learn to skate with an attention so total it made my throat tight, and afterward he'd nod at me, once, from a distance, and leave, and not push.
It was the not-pushing that was killing me. I'd built three years of armor against a man who takes. I had no armor at all against a man who waits.
The co-parenting started awkward and got worse before it got better, the way these things do.
We worked out a schedule, because I insisted on a schedule, because a schedule is a thing you can hold a man to, and a man who keeps a schedule is a man who's showing you something.
Saturdays at the rink. Wednesday dinners.
Marcus arrived for every single one early, which undid me a little, a man who'd never in his life been early for anything social showing up ten minutes ahead because he couldn't stand the idea of Luca waiting.
And he was careful with the boundaries, painfully careful, asking permission for things he didn't need permission for, hovering at the edges of a life he wasn't sure he was allowed into yet.
The friction was all in the things underneath.
He wanted to pay for things, and I wouldn't let him, and we had a low-grade standoff about a winter coat for Luca that I will not bore you with except to say I won it on principle and Luca wore a slightly-too-thin coat for a week out of his mother's pride, which I'm not proud of.
He wanted to know everything at once, three years of a boy's life downloaded immediately, the first words and the first steps and the ear infections and the tantrums, and I had to keep telling him he couldn't have it all in a week, that you don't get three years back in a download, you get them back slowly, in the telling, over time, and watching him try to be patient about it was like watching a glacier try to hurry.
And underneath all of that, the thing neither of us said, was the other friction, the old one, the one that had nothing to do with Luca.
Because every time he showed up early at my door, every time our hands brushed handing off a diaper bag, every time he crouched down to Luca's level and went gentle in that way that turned my insides to water, the year of slow burn came back, the coffee, the standing too close, and we both felt it, and we both pretended we didn't, two adults conducting a custody arrangement while a thing we'd buried three years ago sat in the room between us getting louder.
And then the universe, which has always had a sick sense of humor where I'm concerned, handed him the perfect Trojan horse.
I should explain how I learned the work, because it's the spine of who I became, and Marcus would later understand that the woman he fell back in love with had been built in those three years of learning it alone.
I'd been a team PA before, good at logistics, good at managing chaos, but I'd never designed anything.
And then I was a single mother in a strange city with a colicky newborn and eight hundred dollars and a refusal to ask anyone for help, and I'd taught myself design off the internet at two in the morning with Luca asleep on my chest, watching tutorials with the sound off so I wouldn't wake him, building a portfolio out of nothing, fake projects for fake clients just to have something to show, then a real client, a coffee shop that paid me in coffee and a logo I was proud of, then another, then a business, invoice by terrified invoice, every dollar earned, every skill self-taught, every win mine alone with no one's name behind it.
By the time the foundation contract came along I wasn't a PA anymore, I wasn't a player's ex, I wasn't a single mom getting by.
I was a professional, a good one, with a reputation I'd built from a card table in a one-bedroom, and that, more than anything, was the thing I would never let any man, not even Marcus, treat as a hobby or a backdrop or a thing he gave me.
I do freelance brand design now. It's the life I built from nothing in a new city, logos and campaigns and the slow unglamorous work of making small businesses look like themselves, and I'm good at it, and it's mine, every client earned on my own merit with no one's name behind me but my own.
So when the Chicago Reapers Foundation, the team's charity arm that runs the youth programs, put out a call for a designer to overhaul their kids' hockey initiative, the program my own son skated in, I did the professional thing.
I applied. Because it was good work and good money and exactly my wheelhouse, and because I was not going to let the existence of Marcus Kovalenko cost me a job I'd be perfect for. That's the principle I'd lived on for three years. He doesn't get to take things from me. Not even by accident.
I want to be precise about how I got the foundation contract, because the precision was the whole point and I fought for it like my life depended on it, which in a way it did.
When the Reapers Foundation put out the call for a designer, I almost didn't apply, because applying meant walking into Marcus's world, and I'd spent three years keeping my world and his as far apart as the city would allow.
And then I got angry at myself, because the principle I'd lived on for three years was that he doesn't get to take things from me, not even by accident, not even by existing, and refusing to apply for a job I'd be perfect for, a job in my exact wheelhouse, just because he happened to be near it, would be letting him take something.
So I applied, and I made the foundation director, Denise, understand in no uncertain terms that I wanted to be evaluated on the work alone, that I didn't want any consideration I hadn't earned, and she'd looked at me strangely, because of course she didn't know there was anything to consider, nobody knew, and I'd taken the work knowing it was clean.
I got the contract. On merit. I made them put that in writing, practically, made the foundation director, a brisk kind woman named Denise, swear up and down that the hire had nothing to do with anything, and she'd looked at me like I was being strange, because of course she didn't know, nobody knew, and I'd taken the work and walked straight into the lion's den with my portfolio under my arm.
Which is how I ended up in a conference room at the Reapers facility on a gray afternoon, presenting mood boards to the foundation, when Marcus Kovalenko walked past the glass wall, stopped, and came in.
"This is a closed meeting," I said.
"I'm on the foundation board." He said it mildly, pulling out a chair. "Players rotate through. It's my month. Denise can confirm."
Denise confirmed. Of course she did. I shot Marcus a look that promised violence and he met it with the bland innocence of a man who had absolutely engineered this and would never admit it, and I understood that the lion's den had a lion in it, and the lion was on the board.
So I did the only thing a professional can do.
I presented anyway, and I presented well, because I am good at my job and I will not be small in a room just because a man I used to love is sitting in it pretending to read a mood board.
And somewhere around the third slide, something happened that I did not expect.
He got it. He got the work.
He asked a question, a real one, about whether the new branding would read to a five-year-old or just to the five-year-old's parents, and it was a good question, the kind that showed he'd actually been thinking about the kids the program served, and I answered it, and he asked another, and for about ten minutes the two of us forgot to be a war and just talked, designer to board member, about how you make a thing that a child will love, and it was easy, it was so easy, the way it had always been easy, the year of coffee and slow burn rushing back, two people who fit the way puzzle pieces fit, and I caught myself smiling at him before I remembered I wasn't allowed to anymore.
Denise noticed. Denise, bless her, noticed nothing romantic, but she noticed the work, and at the end she said, "Well.
The two of you should partner on the kids' clinic piece, you clearly think the same way," and assigned us, professionally, formally, to work together on the youth program, and I watched Marcus not smile in the specific way that means a Kovalenko is extremely pleased with himself, and I thought, he didn't even have to do anything.
The universe just hands him things. It always has.
The meeting broke up. He waited for me by the elevators, the way he used to wait for me three years ago, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets, too big, too still, watching me come.
"You didn't have to do that," I said. "The board thing. The partnering thing."
"I didn't do the partnering thing. That was Denise."
"You did the board thing."
"I've been on the board for two years, Sophia.
Check the records. The one thing I'm not doing is lying to you, ever again, about anything, even the small stuff, because I did enough lying with my silence.
" He pushed off the wall. "I'm not going to manufacture reasons to be near you.
I told you, I'm doing this slow, on your terms. But I'm also not going to pretend I'm sorry we'll be working together, because I'm not, because watching you in that room just now was the best ten minutes I've had in three years.
You were..." He stopped, like he'd said more than he meant to.
"You were good. You were really good. You built that whole life I missed and you're good at it and I...
" Another stop. "I'm proud of you. Which I have no right to be. But I am."
And there it was. The thing I had no armor against.
Because a man who takes, I can fight. A man who tries to control me, I have a whole arsenal for, three years of it, sharpened daily.
But a man who looks at the independent life I built without him, the life I built specifically to prove I didn't need him, and says I'm proud of you, which I have no right to be, but I am, that man walks straight through every wall I have, because he's not trying to take the life I built.
He's admiring it.
The elevator opened. I stepped in. He didn't follow, just stood there in the hall watching me go, and right before the doors closed I did the stupidest thing I'd done in three years.
I held the door.
"Luca's birthday is in two weeks," I heard myself say.
"He's turning four. There's going to be a party.
Loud, terrible, my whole family, sixty cousins, a bounce house I'm already regretting.
" My heart was going like I'd sprinted up the stairs.
"You could come. Not as his dad. We're not there yet.
As. I don't know what. The man who skates like the TV men. But you could come. If you wanted."
Marcus Kovalenko, the most feared man in professional hockey, looked at me like I'd handed him something he'd been afraid to want, and his voice when it came was rough enough to sand wood.
"I want," he said.
The doors closed on his face, and I rode down four floors with my hand pressed over my hammering heart, and I thought, Sophia Ricci, you absolute disaster, you just invited the lion to the bounce house, and the worst part, the part I couldn't lie to myself about even then, was how much of me had wanted to.