2. January 15, Saturday
Chapter two
Zoey
Kira reached into the box beside her and pulled out a photo album with a cracked navy cover. “Oh, hell yes. College evidence.”
Zoey groaned. “Burn it.”
“Never.” Kira flipped it open. “This is cultural history.”
Kayla slid off the couch to sit on the floor beside her. “Please tell me the nose-pick photo is in there.”
“Oh my God,” Zoey said, covering her face. “Why are we like this?”
“Because you peaked early as an artist,” Kayla teased.
“I took one photo of a coach knuckle-deep during a ceremonial puck drop.”
“And it circulated online like an A-lister dick pic,” Kira breathed reverently. “Legendary.”
“He hated me for that.” Zoey winced. “He was such a jerk to Mitch and Ilya afterward.”
Kira made a face. “He was a jerk before that. You merely gave him more specific targets.”
At Ilya’s name, something small and inconvenient flickered in Zoey’s stomach. She ignored it. Like she always did.
Kayla, because she was apparently trying to get murdered in this beautiful apartment, looked up. “Speaking of Ilya…”
“No,” Zoey snapped.
Kira’s eyes narrowed with delight. “Interesting.”
“I simply recognized a tone.”
“A defensive tone?”
“A therapist tone,” Zoey said, pointing at Kayla. “Which should be illegal outside office hours.”
Kayla took a demure sip of wine. “I was only going to say that you’ll be working with him again.”
“Sure, you were.”
“You will though,” Kira joined in, dragging the photo album into her lap. “Every day. My brother’s big ugly captain face. Looming. Judging. Probably bossing everyone around.”
“In what world is your brother ugly?” Kayla asked.
Kira shuddered. “In the world where I am legally obligated to be grossed out by him.”
Zoey tried not to smile. Kira’s brother was many things. Ugly was not one of them. Although, Zoey had trained herself years ago not to put those thoughts into words.
Ilya Sergechev had always been filed in her brain under safe for reasons that seemed obvious at the time. He was Mitch’s best friend. Kira’s older brother. Quiet, steady, and so private that getting personal information out of him required either espionage or injury.
Their friendship had been easy once. Natural. Built on shared humor, late-night campus errands, bad coffee, and the specific connection of being the two people standing slightly outside the bright radius of Mitch’s charm.
After they both entered the NHL, Mitch had started getting weird about it.
Not explosively. Mitch rarely did anything explosively in those days.
It had been smaller than that. A joke. A tightened smile.
A hand settling at Zoey’s lower back when Ilya came too close.
A casual comment about optics, about how people talked, or how hard it was to be the guy whose wife had inside jokes with his best friend.
So, Zoey had done what she always did. She made herself easier to love.
She pulled back from Ilya. Answered fewer texts. Stopped sitting beside him at dinners. Let the friendship fade into group chats, polite hugs, and the occasional carefully neutral conversation at team events. And once she and Mitch moved away, there were fewer and fewer phone calls catching up.
A courtesy to her husband, she had told herself.
A reasonable adjustment.
A very small sacrifice.
Now, years later, the realization sat in her stomach like a stone.
God, she had gotten good at calling smallness love.
Kira flipped a page in the album and held it up. “Look at this. Debate-club fundraiser. Ilya still had terrible hair.”
Zoey leaned despite herself.
The photo showed a younger Ilya standing beside Mitch, both of them in college hoodies, sweaty from some ridiculous broomball fundraiser that ended with three minor injuries and three volunteer refs questioning their life choices.
Mitch was grinning straight at the camera, all charisma and easy light.
Not Ilya. He was looking slightly off to the side. At Zoey, probably, because she had been the one taking the picture. His expression was softer than she remembered.
Something in her chest pulled.
Nope.
Absolutely not.
She was too newly divorced to be emotionally haunted by a photograph of a friend in a hoodie who she ghosted without looking back.
“Still not ugly,” Kayla chirped.
Kira gagged. “Betrayal.”
Zoey laughed because it was safer than thinking. “Your brother is not ugly.” Zoey swallowed while looking for the right word. “He is just…very Ilya.”
“Bossy,” Kira said.
“Quiet,” Kayla added.
“Judgmental about big emotions,” Zoey said.
“Emotionally constipated,” Kira corrected.
“A load-bearing wall in hockey skates,” Kayla murmured.
Zoey looked at her, her eyebrows high at the comparison.
Kayla blinked innocently. “What? He’s really tall and the team totally depends on him.”
They all grinned.
Kira pointed at Kayla. “But for real. He was captain for all of eight seconds, and he was already seizing control of everyone’s meal schedules, dental insurance, and extracurriculars.”
Zoey smiled, but the warmth behind it was complicated. Ilya always carried things that way. Kira. Mitch. The team. Whole rooms, somehow, without making a performance of it.
Even in college, he seemed older than the rest of them. Quieter. Watchful. The kind of man who noticed which person at a party was too drunk, which friend had gone quiet, which door didn’t lock properly.
Safe.
That was the word she had always used for him.
Which was probably exactly why she needed to be careful. Safe men were dangerous when a person had been lonely too long.
Kayla set the photo album aside. “How do you think Mitch will handle you working for the Cyclones?”
The question dragged the room back to earth.
Zoey took a long drink of wine. “If he already knows, he’s showing impressive restraint.”
As if summoned by pettiness, her phone buzzed on the entry table.
All three women looked at it.
Zoey closed her eyes. “No.”
Kira crawled dramatically across the floor, stretched one arm up to the table, and squinted at the screen. “Mitch.”
“Of course.” Zoey ground her teeth together.
Kira read aloud, “Hey, saw the mover charge hit the joint account by mistake. I handled it. Also, did you make it in okay?”
Kayla’s face did something complicated.
Zoey stood and took the phone from Kira before she could add commentary in a Ukrainian accent. She stared at the message.
It was nice.
That was the worst part.
Mitch could be nice. Funny. Thoughtful in bursts. He could remember exactly how she took her coffee when he wanted to, charm a room into orbit, and make her laugh until she snorted when he was truly present.
Their marriage hadn’t been a battlefield.
Sometimes she wished it had been.
Battlefields were easier to leave.
Their marriage had been a beautiful house where all the rooms slowly emptied out until she was living alone in the dark.
Another buzz.
Mitch: Did you leave the utility passwords somewhere? I can’t find the folder.
Zoey’s thumb moved automatically. Kitchen drawer, left side, under the takeout menus.
The words appeared in the text box before she even thought about them.
Kayla’s voice cut gently through the room. “Zo.”
Zoey froze.
Kira said nothing.
That was worse.
Zoey stared at the unsent text.
Then she deleted it, one letter at a time.
Her chest hurt.
Not because Mitch couldn’t find his own utility passwords. Because some part of her still believed love meant making sure he never had to feel inconveniently helpless.
“He’s a grown man,” Zoey said quietly.
Kayla nodded. “He is. And if he needs the folder, he can look in the places folders go.”
“Revolutionary,” Kira mocked.
Zoey placed the phone facedown on the table.
It buzzed again.
She did not pick it up.
The silence that followed felt like holding a plank.
Terrible.
Impressive.
Probably good for her.
“I still feel bad,” Zoey admitted.
“About the utility passwords?” Kira asked.
“About all of it.” Zoey turned back to them, wrapping her arms around herself.
“About leaving. About wanting kids when he didn’t.
About taking this job when it puts me back in his world.
About becoming another celebrity divorce statistic when the romantic in me still wants to believe people can love each other enough to figure it out. ”
Kayla’s expression softened. “Love was not the only variable.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Zoey gave her a look.
“Fine.” Kayla lifted both hands. “As your friend, then. You did not abandon Mitch. You left a marriage that could not hold both of you.”
Kira pointed at her with her wine glass. “And, for the record, if a man needs his wife to remind him where the extra toilet paper is stored, perhaps the man needs to open his own closet and use his own eyes.”
“It was one time!” Zoey laughed, then immediately felt guilty for laughing.
Exhausting.
Being emotionally mature was exhausting.
“I loved him,” she whispered.
“We know,” Kayla said.
Zoey looked at the phone again. “He was one of the greatest friends of my life. I think that’s what made leaving so hard. It wasn’t all bad. It just…faded into something neither of us knew how to name.”
Kira’s mouth pulled into a sad little smile. “Friend-zoned.”
Zoey looked at her.
“It never adds up.” Kira’s bright blue eyes looked wrong with such a solemn expression.
No. It didn’t.
Kayla picked at the label on her wine glass. “Did he ever understand how much you wanted kids?”
Zoey let out a humorless laugh. “He knew. I said it a thousand ways without saying, ‘I will leave you if this never changes.’ Which is probably the one way I should have said it.”
“You were scared,” Kayla said.
“I was comfortable,” Zoey corrected softly. “And I confused comfort with happiness for a really long time.”
Kira’s eyes were sad.
“I planned the team barbecues,” Zoey said.
“The charity brunches. The holidays. The travel. The house. His parents’ visits.
My own damn loneliness, apparently. I made everything so easy for him that I disappeared from the center of my own life.
” She swallowed. “And then I resented him for not noticing.”