29. April 4, Early Monday #2
“No, I’m good at telling the difference between guilt and responsibility.” She leaned forward. “You are responsible for what you do next. Not for rewinding physics.”
He looked away.
That was the problem. Everyone kept wanting to make the line neat. But nothing felt neat. His words had gone into Christian’s body and sent him toward the boards. Maybe the hit would have happened anyway. Maybe not.
Either way, Ilya had been close enough to see warning signs and still chose the wrong thing.
Kira exhaled slowly. “This isn’t only Christian.”
He said nothing.
She gave him an unimpressed look. “Ilyusha.”
The childhood nickname landed soft and dangerous. His throat tightened. “What do you want me to say? That I dropped every ball at once? Fine. I did. Christian. Jason. Fido. You. Zoey. Mitch. The team.” His hand opened, then closed again. “I was supposed to be watching, and I was not.”
“You were supposed to be human.”
“I’m captain.”
“You’re still human.”
“I let everyone down.”
“Probably not.”
His jaw worked.
She studied him for another beat. “Start with me.”
He frowned. “What?”
“You said you dropped the ball with me.” She pointed at herself. “So, start there.”
“I haven’t heard your voice in weeks.”
“You texted.”
“That isn’t the same.”
“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t.”
The easy admission made him feel worse. “I knew you were busy. The nonprofit. Meetings. Grants. Whatever new chaos you decided was your life’s new purpose. Zoey said you were fine.”
“Zoey was right. And it sounds like you were spiraling for no good reason. As you can see, I’m fine.”
“I was not spiraling.”
Kira stared at him.
He looked away first.
“I should have called,” he said.
“I’m an adult, starshoy. I don’t need my big brother breathing down my neck every hour. If I was struggling, I would have called. But I’ve been buried. I’ve been running on caffeine, stubbornness, and the belief that if I stop moving for three seconds, the whole project will collapse.”
“That sounds familiar,” he muttered.
“Unfortunately, yes. We share several terrible family traits.”
He huffed despite himself.
She nudged his shoe with hers. “But I’m not slipping. I’m not disappearing. I’m not in trouble and too ashamed to tell you. I am tired, yet, fulfilled. And I know I’m bad at asking for help, which, again, genetic tragedy, but in this one rare instance, I don’t need it. Finally.”
Something in his chest loosened by one painful notch. “You promise?”
Her expression softened. “I promise.”
He believed her. Not because he had magically stopped worrying. Because she looked him in the eye and let him ask. The difference mattered. He rubbed both hands over his face.
Kira watched him, then said, “You know what you do when you don’t know how to fix something?”
“I sit in parking garages?”
“That too. But mostly, you turn yourself into the problem. Then, you can solve everything by removing yourself. You act like wanting something is the same as taking it from someone else.”
The words landed too cleanly. He stared at the concrete between his shoes. “I told Zoey I couldn’t be what she needed,” he said.
Kira’s voice gentled. “So, I heard.”
“From who?”
“Kayla. Ashley. Then Ty. Then Tommy, who somehow made it sound both worse and less coherent.” She paused. “The team gossip network is terrifyingly efficient.”
Apparently.
Shame crawled up his neck. “I did it in a hallway. After Christian. Before she even had a chance to breathe.”
“Oh,” Kira said quietly. “Yeah, that’s not your best work.”
“No.”
“But I’m guessing you weren’t trying to hurt her.”
He closed his eyes. That was the worst part. He’d been trying not to. “I thought if I stepped back, I could keep her life clean. Her job. The foster process. Mitch. The team. If I wasn’t in the middle of it, there would be less damage.”
“And how’s that theory holding up?”
He opened his eyes and gave her a flat look.
She lifted both hands. “It was rhetorical. Mostly.”
A silence stretched between them, thin and cold.
Kira’s gaze moved over his face, sharp in the way only siblings could be. “When did you decide your presence was the danger?”
He looked away. “Don’t.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“Dad?” she asked.
His whole body locked.
“Or Mitch?” she continued, quieter. “Or both?”
He laughed once, without humor. “You’ve been talking to Kayla too much.”
“No, I’ve been watching you disappear into usefulness my entire life.”
He gave her a dry look.
She shrugged. “What? I can’t talk to a therapist?”
He didn’t want to talk about this. Not in a freezing garage. Not with Christian’s injury still raw, Fido at the vet, Zoey’s face burned behind his eyelids, and Mitch’s text sitting unanswered in his phone. But Kira had always been good at aiming for the bruise.
“When Zoey and Mitch left for Chicago,” he said finally, voice low, “I was…not good.”
“I remember.”
“No, you remember the version I let you see.”
“I remember more than you think.”
His mouth tightened. He stared at the dark, glossy hood of his truck and saw another kitchen, another decade, another version of himself standing barefoot on sticky linoleum with blood in his mouth and Mitch’s hand fisted in his shirt.
“After they got married, I got bad. Smoking. Drinking too much. Missing lifts. Showing up to practice, but not really there.” He scraped a hand over his jaw. “Mitch flew back between games. Came to my place unannounced. I thought he was going to hug me or drag me out for food.”
Kira went still.
“He hit me,” Ilya said. The words came out flat. “More than once. Yelled at me for wasting everything. Said I was acting like the losers back home who never left the corner bar. Said I was spitting on every chance I’d been given. That I disappointed him.”
Kira’s face had gone pale under the fluorescent lights.
Ilya touched the faint scar through his eyebrow. “Got this when I hit the counter. He patched me up later.”
“Jesus, Ilyusha.”
“He was right.”
“No.”
“I was a mess.”
“That doesn’t make him right to hurt you.” The words came fast enough that his head turned. Kira’s eyes were wet and furious.
He frowned. “It worked.”
“Did it?”
“Yes. I stopped.”
“You stopped drinking. You stopped smoking. You got your focus back. You played better.” Her voice thinned with anger. “And then you decided the lesson was that pain is what you deserve when you fall apart?”
Shit. He looked away.
“You decided love is someone shoving you back into line because you’re too much trouble when you’re struggling. You decided needing help makes you worthless. And every time you think you’ve disappointed someone, you beat the shit out of yourself before anyone else can.”
The words hit harder than he wanted. He had no defense ready. Not one that didn’t sound pathetic.
Kira stood and paced two steps, then came back, too full of emotion to sit still.
“I’m not saying Mitch didn’t care about you.
I’m not even saying he didn’t think he was saving you.
But caring doesn’t magically make the damage noble.
” She paused, breathing hard. “Can you imagine if that’s how you treated me when I started…
struggling?” Even now, she had a hard time saying the words.
Ilya stared at his hands. His knuckles carried old scars, some earned on ice, some earned in uglier ways. Hands made for sticks, checks, lifting Kira onto his shoulders when she was little, fixing jammed doors in apartments he could barely afford.
Hands that had cupped Zoey’s face before he walked away from her.
“I guess, in a way,” Kira said, quieter now, “you did do it with me.”
His head snapped up. “I never hit you.”
“No. God, no. That’s not what I meant.” Her expression softened. “I mean, you turned every hard thing in my life into evidence against yourself.”
His throat closed. “Kira—”
“No, listen.” She crouched in front of him now, elbows on her knees, forcing him to meet her eyes.
“You think I started spiraling because you didn’t give me a perfect home.
Because you had roommates and parties nearby and too many road trips.
Because you were nineteen and tired and sometimes angry and sometimes gone. ”
He couldn’t speak. Because yes. He did think that. Not always in the front of his mind, not every day, but in the deep, punishing place where old beliefs lived and waited.
“You’re wrong,” she said simply.
His chest pulled tight.
“Some shit happened before I ever followed you to your college apartment,” she said, jaw tense. “I’m not discussing it in a parking garage next to your truck like this is some very depressing TED Talk. But the cracks you blame yourself for? They were already there.”
The garage seemed to tilt around the edges.
“You taking me in didn’t create my problems. It interrupted them.”
His vision blurred. He blinked hard.
“You gave me food,” she continued. “And a bed. And once we were able to leave and move in with Mom, you were someone who noticed if I didn’t come home. You were not perfect. You were a dumbass kid pretending to be a parent, and you made mistakes. A lot of them. So did I.”
A wet, broken laugh escaped him.
“But you were there,” she emphasized, voice softening. “I knew you cared. That mattered more than you know.”
He looked away, but there was nowhere safe for his eyes to land. The garage. His truck. Her car. The empty rows where they still hadn’t found Fido’s puppies.
“If you had stayed away because you were scared you’d hurt me, I would have been alone in that awful place with Mom and nobody waiting up. You think that would’ve ended better?”
“No,” he cut in immediately. The word tore out of him.
She nodded like he’d finally gotten one answer right.
“So why is leaving Zoey alone with her mess better now?” she asked. “Why does your fear get to make that call for her?”
His breathing hitched. Because if he stayed and failed, they would have proof. If he left early enough, it would give them time to heal around the absence. A clean break. The thought had lived in him so long he had mistaken it for mercy.
Kira’s face shifted, reading him too clearly. “You keep saying you’ll never be Dad.”