35. Epilogue A Year Later #2
He didn’t have to be perfect or there all the time. He just had to care and make the time count when he was there.
Deke finally seemed to remember she had her own family in the building. She paused mid-herding, ears pricking, and glanced toward the glass.
Nika slammed both hands against the plexi again. “DEKE DEKE DEKE!”
Deke’s entire back end wagged. She bounded over and jumped up, front paws thumping against the boards. Nika squealed, flattening herself against the glass so they were nose to nose, separated by inches of tempered glass and a lifetime of luck.
Zoey’s face softened as she watched them.
When she looked up and met his eyes, the rest of the arena blurred.
A year ago, he nearly let that go. Had told himself it was for her own good. That losing her was the price of being the kind of captain, brother, and friend he thought he needed to be.
Turned out, what he’d needed to be most was honest.
Jason once said, in a quieter moment than most people got to see, that love wasn’t a reward for good behavior. It was a choice. A daily one.
Ilya hadn’t believed that fully until Zoey had given him a second chance and had simply asked for something terrifyingly reasonable. Show up. And stay when it’s scary.
He’d messed it up plenty in the last year.
There had been rough games and rougher nights.
Therapy appointments he’d gone to with a scowl and left feeling like someone had put his brain in a blender.
Debates with Zoey about schedules, about who needed to say yes to which charity request, about whether it was fair to keep all of Deke’s puppies, or whether they tell the foster agency that they wanted more than just respite cases yet.
Nobody died from it.
He learned to say, “I’m scared,” instead of making decisions in the dark. “I need help,” instead of tackling every problem alone.
And Zoey… His exquisite wife.
His wife, who still forgot coffees on every flat surface in their house.
His wife, who made him read three books on trauma-informed parenting and then quizzed him like he was going into the Bar.
His wife, who stood beside him in their small backyard wedding with Nika asleep against Babs’s shoulder, Madison pretending not to cry, Kira sobbing loudly enough to wake the dead, and Deke wearing a floral collar she immediately tried to eat.
His wife, who had chosen him with her eyes open.
Every time he remembered that, it hit him hard.
The ice crew skated out, buckets and squeegees in hand, corralling the last of the dogs toward their potential new families. Applause swelled as a little boy hugged a squirming mutt to his chest like the world had just gotten reordered in all the right ways.
“And give it up one more time,” the announcer boomed, “for our friends at Flea Flicker Rescue Center and for all of tonight’s adoptable pups and their future families!”
Sticks banged along both benches, a loud, irregular salute. Ilya joined in, the vibrations humming up his arms.
Duke elbowed him. “Look at Deke playing hall monitor.”
Down on the ice, Deke trotted alongside a teen volunteer, leash finally clipped back on, tail wagging, jersey askew. She glanced up at the bench as they passed and barked once, sharply, like she was telling him not to get cocky just because he had opposable thumbs.
He shook his head.
Jayden had been right. She really was just a dog version of him.
Jayden was home with his mom now, where he belonged.
The sentence had taken Zoey a while to say without breaking a little.
Ilya too, though he’d been quieter about it.
But watching Jayden’s mother work her plan, watching her show up tired and scared and determined, watching Jayden slowly start to believe that home could mean her again…
that had been one of the strangest, hardest, best kinds of healing.
It hadn’t made Jayden any less present in their lives.
If tradition held, Ilya and Zoey would wake up tomorrow to a flood of texts from his mom’s phone.
Attached would be an onslaught of drawings from Jayden: Deke on the ice, Jayden and one of Deke’s puppies wearing matching Cyclones jerseys.
And there would be at least one video of Jayden narrating his favorite parts of the game in great, urgent detail. His cadence almost a perfect mirror to Thea’s.
Deke’s puppies scattered into the community like tiny, furry miracles.
One lived with Jayden and his mom. One with Babs.
One with Ty, who insisted he had not adopted the puppy but had been ‘emotionally selected’ by him.
And one with Bobby, despite Thea’s repeated claims that she was, “More of a cat person…”
A position the puppy disproved nightly by sleeping directly on her chest.
At the jingle of dog tags, Ilya turned around and found Deke now behind the bench, ecstatic, tail flapping wildly as it battered the coaches and equipment managers stationed there.
The guys leaned in for quick pats of their favorite team mascot, then turned to watch the ice crew finish their speedy cleanup of the doggy ice-capades.
They moved in a quick, efficient flurry, scraping up paw prints and erasing puddles. A small blue carpet was rolled out from the Zamboni doors.
“Next up,” the announcer said, “please rise and remove your hats for the performance of our national anthem, sung tonight by Springfield’s own…Madison Sergechev.”
The roar that went up this time was different. Not just polite appreciation. Not just hometown pride.
Madison stepped out onto the carpet from the tunnel, uniform crisp, boots polished, hair pulled back tight. The Army greens and the confidence with which she wore them still knocked Ilya a little sideways, but the way she carried herself—chin lifted, eyes bright—was all Madison.
He tried to slow her down when she insisted she needed to enlist as soon as she turned eighteen.
Zoey agreed. Madison needed rest after pregnancy and childbirth. Time for her body to heal. Time for her hormones to settle. Time to decide whether enlistment was truly what she wanted or just the fastest available exit from feeling too many things at once.
Then Ilya and Zoey had gotten their first real taste of parenting a teenager and had been told, in no uncertain terms, that Madison would do it with their support or without it.
So, like countless parents before them, they had gone through tears and paperwork, meetings and medical forms, and watched their daughter choose a future they could not control.
He listened as a recruiter talked about discipline, service, grit, adjusted timelines, postpartum clearance, and the standards Madison would have to meet.
He watched her eyes sharpen with determination.
He had not magically become her father the day the adoption papers were signed. That had been a process. Slow. Prickly. Full of seventeen-year-old side-eyes and one million tests.
She called him Serge for months after the judge banged the gavel.
But right after she gave her oath of enlistment, she turned and asked the recruiter to take a picture of her and her dad.
Ilya had not said a word.
The picture sat on the mantel at home, and no one ever mentioned how bright his eyes were in it.
Now, as Madison stepped onto the carpet, she looked toward the bench. Her gaze landed on him.
He couldn’t help the grin that spread across his face. He lifted his hand, thumb and forefinger brushing the brim of his helmet in a little fake salute. Then he wiggled his fingers at her in the dorkiest wave he could manage.
She rolled her eyes. Big. Dramatic.
Boot camp had taught her to stand at attention in front of a drill sergeant without flinching. It had not broken her of giving him that look.
Good.
The announcer’s voice faded. The arena quieted. For a moment, twenty thousand people were just…still.
Madison took her place at the center of the carpet. The mic stand looked absurdly tall from this angle. She adjusted it down two notches with competent hands.
Usually, they all stood on the ice for the Anthem, but Ilya wanted Madison to have the ice to herself. To be the center of attention.
Kayla leaned toward Zoey in the front row and checked Nika’s headphones again, settling them more firmly.
Nika, the spitting image of Madison, was completely unfazed by the sudden hush.
Nika yelled, slapping both palms flat to the glass. A shriek of various babble sounds erupting from her tiny mouth.
Madison’s mouth quirked before she smoothed it out.
She took a deep breath, shoulders steadying, and opened her mouth.
The first notes slipped out, a little thin with nerves, then stronger. Her voice wasn’t perfect. It wobbled on a high note, steadied when she spotted Babs near the Zamboni entrance grinning like a proud aunt, then lifted when the crowd started singing with her.
To Ilya, it sounded like the most beautiful thing he’d ever heard. Because every syllable was threaded with things that couldn’t be measured on any scoreboard.
The girl who once stood at the edge of the group home’s kitchen asking, “You sure you want a kid this old?” now stood in front of a city and sang without shaking.
He watched her hash out panic in therapy, run laps around the track when she felt like her skin was too tight, and sit at their dining table with Zoey’s hand over hers the day she opened the packing list for basic training.
He listened when she told him she was scared to leave and scared to stay.
He told her he would love her either way.
He watched her choose herself. Now she sang into a stadium full of people, and his chest felt too big.
Beside him, Mitch leaned in slightly. “Did you ever think, in that shitty college dorm, that this would be your life? A kid singing the anthem. A dog in a jersey. A wife who threatens to hide your skates if you don’t go to therapy?”
“Yes,” Ilya answered automatically, then grinned. “Obviously, I planned all of this.”