25. April 2, Saturday
Chapter twenty-five
Zoey
The arena hummed with the kind of chaos Zoey thrived in.
The rink had been carved into little worlds; three cross-ice “rinks” split by dividers, each with its own set of mini goals. Laughter, skates scraping over ice, the clack of sticks, and the occasional shriek of joy ricocheted off the concrete and glass.
The seats closest to the ice were full. Foster parents in winter coats balanced phones and coffee cups.
Little siblings bounced in place at the glass, smearing it with their lips and drawing foggy breath pictures.
Group home staff clustered near the team benches with emergency backpacks, snack bags, and the haunted expressions of adults who knew at least one child would lose something before the day ended.
A teacher Zoey knew was from Jayden’s school sat beside his social worker, both of them leaning in to hear each other over the din. At the far end, a man in a battered hoodie and a woman in a too-thin cardigan sat with a worker between them; parents on a supervised visit, by the look of it.
This was it.
The last Little Cyclones clinic with this group.
Not a learning day.
A showing-off day.
The day Zoey could point to when management asked if the program met its goals. The day she could show Nina the photos, the surveys, the sponsor feedback, the kids’ faces, and say, “Yes. This mattered. We should do it again.”
And somewhere beneath the professional satisfaction, in that stubborn, personal layer she tried not to examine too closely, was something far more dangerous.
The last few weeks with Ilya had changed the temperature of her whole life.
Being with him morphed from one reckless night in a San Jose hotel room into a pattern.
A rhythm. Locked doors, stifled laughter, coffee cups left on his counter, an extra hair tie looped around his truck’s turn signal lever.
He was still Captain Sergechev in public.
In private, he was hands and mouth and that low, almost-shocked chuckle when she did something that delighted him.
Secret, yes.
But also, steady.
It was starting to feel less like something wild and temporary and more like a piece of her actual life.
Like the way he rolled his eyes when she gave him the wrong directions to a new restaurant, then banged the U-ey she insisted was, “Basically expected.” Or the way he grinned when he found his clothes forgotten in the washer because she’d meant to switch the laundry and instead wandered off to doomscroll.
It felt easy.
Like home.
Natural.
Zoey blew out a breath, fogging the glass in front of her, and pressed her clipboard against her chest harder than necessary. Absolutely not the time to emotionally combust near minors.
“Zoey!” Babs shouted from the stairs, waving a stack of completed questionnaires from the kids. “Do you have the extra wristbands? I’ve got three kids whose social workers swear they never got them.”
“On it,” Zoey called back, patting the front pocket of her vest and jogging over. “Blue for the littles, purple for the middles, green for ones who can get penalty-box time.”
Babs snorted, hair already frizzing loose. “Ah, my favorites.”
They did a quick wristband triage. As Babs moved off to intercept a new arrival, Zoey’s phone buzzed in her pocket.
Kayla: Client’s in crisis. Will likely be home late. Hope it’s great today. Don’t wait up.
Second late night in a week. Third text like that in ten days.
Zoey’s fingers hovered over the screen, thumb itching to send an ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ back. But a kid shrieked, a volunteer waved for her attention, and she shoved the worry aside.
Kayla was a therapist. Sometimes a crisis was part of the job. They’d talk later.
Next to that half-thought sat another: she hadn’t heard Kira’s voice in more than a week either. Just texts. All caps, no punctuation.
WORK IS A CHAOTIC BEAST BUT I LOVE HER.
SORRY BUSY LOVE YOU BYE.
STARTUP LIFE BABY!!!
Ilya had been fretting about Kira since the day she was born, so Zoey had tried not to absorb his big-brother anxiety as fact. When he stared at his messages, debating whether to call again, Zoey usually laughed and reminded him that Kira wasn’t a teenager sneaking out anymore.
Still, this was the first stretch of time where Kira had been so hard to pin down.
Zoey really should poke her friend and force her to slow down long enough for dinner. Kira was going to lose her shit if she found out Zoey and Ilya had started…whatever this was, and she wasn’t the first to know.
Later.
All of it could be later.
Right now, there were kids to wrangle.
“Okay, troops!” Zoey called, clapping once as another group spilled down the stairs toward the ice. “Gear on in Locker Room A, name tags at the table here. Jerseys go over coats unless you want Coach Ty yelling at you about hypothermia.”
“Hey!” Ty yelled from the ice behind her, where he was struggling to tie two pairs of skates at once. “I yell about hydration, thank you very much!”
The kids grinned and got in line for tags and wristbands.
Zoey moved to the side, checking that each mini-rink had a coach, a whistle, and at least one other certified adult who could tie a double knot that wouldn’t untie after the first shift.
From her vantage point, her gaze snagged on a bright blotch of color down by the Zamboni tunnel.
Mitch.
He leaned lazily against the boards, one skate propped behind him, half turned toward an ice girl in Cyclones burgundy who was laughing at something he’d just said.
His profile always looked built for cameras; strong jaw, easy smile, the kind of dimple a person could see from space.
As he talked, his hand brushed lightly against the girl’s elbow, punctuating a punchline.
Familiar.
Effortless.
Flirtatious.
It hit Zoey in two distinct waves. The first was a small, sharp ache. The echo of the woman who’d once stood where that girl was standing, convinced she was special because that smile was pointed at her. A sting for the years she spent trying to keep that smile turned her way.
The second was relief so profound she could have sat down from it.
Thank the Lord.
Good.
Let him flirt. Let him be charming and easy and adored by someone new.
As long as he wasn’t sitting in his room alone, pining. Planning. Deciding nostalgia was the same thing as love.
The guilt she’d still been carrying about wanting someone else went quiet.
Please, oh please, let this woman distract him enough that he forgets to come looking for the familiar comfort of Zoey’s presence.
A whistle blew shrilly from the far mini rink, jolting her back to the surface. She turned and saw Tommy wrestling with Ian for control of it.
Absolute children.
Unable to help herself, she looked for Ilya.
He stood near Rink Two, one hand on the boards, watching the chaos with narrowed eyes and a smile he was failing to hide. When he caught her looking, his expression warmed instantly.
He shook his head at her.
She grinned back.
“All right, Little Cyclones, first games!” she yelled, fighting a smile as a tide of kids surged from the benches toward their assigned colored rinks. “Remember: fun first, points second, mutiny never.”
“Mutiny sometimes!” Ty hollered from the corner, already skating backward as a cluster of eight-year-olds chased him with murder in their eyes.
Zoey chuckled and took her spot behind the glass of Rink Two, where Jayden’s team was gliding into place like a flock of lost ducklings.
Ilya was there, hunched at the boards, stick in one hand, his other glove resting on the dasher.
“Okay, Little Cyclones,” he said, voice calm and carrying just enough. “Like Ms. Zoey said: we are going to have fun. We are going to remember what we learned in practice. And we are going to try not to accidentally bodycheck anyone into next week, yes?”
“Yes!” shouted a girl with pink tape on her stick.
Jayden, right in front, bobbed along so hard his helmet slipped over his eyebrows.
Ilya stopped mid-sentence, inspected Jayden’s helmet, flipped two latches on the sides, and tightened it.
Zoey could hear Jayden’s complaints even above the chatter.
She could also hear Ilya’s nonnegotiable, “No, I don’t care that my helmet doesn’t look that tight. You guys have brains that are still growing. Your helmet needs to fit properly to keep you safe. Not flop around like fish out of water.”
And just like that, Jayden stopped protesting.
Zoey’s heart did an undignified little swoop.
Across the ice, the teams lined up, coaches stationed at “center ice” for each of the three mini rinks. At a whistle blast from Tommy, they all dropped their respective pucks.
And the games began.
It wasn’t hockey, exactly.
More like watching bees all choose to swarm the same flower. With the occasional kid off to the side making snow angels. Or Zoey’s favorite: trying to eat ice off their sticks.
But compared to the first week? It looked like a completely different set of kids.
Some were even passing.
Sort of.
Jayden shuffled through his first shift with grim determination, blades scraping, stick held out like he was balancing on a high wire.
A minute later, an errant puck squirted out to a kid in yellow at the top of the tiny imaginary circle.
He wound up with all the solemnity of a player in a shootout and sent the puck dribbling past the goalie—who was busy counting the championship banners hanging from the arena ceiling—and into the net.
The kid shrieked like he’d just scored the Stanley Cup winner and dropped his stick, arms in the air.
His teammates did not share the same jubilation. They just waited for Ilya to shovel the puck back out from behind the still-distracted goalie.
Without missing a beat, Ilya scooped the puck out of the net with his almost impossibly long stick, flicked it toward the boards, and off they went.
Ready for another round.