Chapter Text
July 2025 - Moscow
Katya found the photo by complete accident.
She was meant to be packing—preliminarily, anyway. Her clothes had exploded from her dresser and lay in disarray about her room, the fallout of an unthoughtful packing scheme that had collapsed fitfully when put to the test. Digging through her belongings always sent her stumbling into nostalgia, and the lack of immediacy in her deadline meant she could afford to dawdle, to linger over furniture and books and old toys and entertain the person who had loved them, bid them a proper farewell.
The culprit on this particular night was a photo album she had honest-to-God never touched in her life. She wasn’t really sure how it had gotten in her closet in the first place. The cover was a faded maroon color and leathery-soft, lined at the edges with gold paper. Its spine had split down the center, which meant Katya held it like a breathing baby, fingers ghosting over the pages, careful not to smudge the glossy surfaces. She was such a sucker for this stuff. She loved to see her parents’ youth laid out like a novel, catching the shape of her own face in their features.
She had been lost in family history for well over two hours now, and she heard the telltale shuffle of her father on the stairs, which meant she really ought to wrap it up soon. With a sigh, she unfolded herself from her spot on the floor and lifted the album gingerly back to its place at the top of her closet. She was running out of time to pack thoughtfully—she left in a matter of weeks. She might have gone right back to packing had the album not tipped the slightest way open on the way up. Had the photo not drifted gently to the floor.
She paused. The pictures in the album had all been fixed in place with a yellowing brand of glue, the pages crackling in a way that made Katya nervous each time she turned one over. It left an oily stain on the backs of the photos that showed through in the lighter spots. When Katya stooped to pick up the picture on the floor, the white backing of the photo was oddly clean, save for its penned inscription. She wasn’t sure it had been stuck to the pages in the first place.
It was an odd picture, anyway. Two men in suits, standing somewhere grassy. One of them was firmly not Russian. He stood with ramrod posture, and the faded coloring in the picture betrayed the hint of a freckled complexion over his cheeks. He was looking past the camera, caught in a laugh, one hand combing loosely through his dark hair. The man on his left, blond and broad-shouldered, held him by the chin, pressing a kiss to his cheek. A crowd of people milled behind them, frozen in time, all dressed for the occasion—whatever that might be.
Katya nearly didn’t recognize him. She wouldn’t have, probably, if not for the inscription on the back: Ilya’s wedding - Summer 2021, Ottawa. Her mother’s neat handwriting, scribbled in blue ballpoint ink.
She flipped the photo back over immediately. The man on the left—she remembered something of him now. Uncle Ilya. Ilyusha. The foggy memories of her grandfather’s funeral drifted into focus. She had been so little, then; the only real thing she remembered from the whole event was squirming in her seat at the long dinner table, toying with the stitching on the faded yellow tablecloth. But he had been somewhere down the table, her uncle. She had a sudden vision of his black-sleeved arm reaching for a glass.
Uncle Ilya. She hadn’t seen him since she was ten.
He was married now, apparently. To a man. Her heart beat faster in her chest.
They didn’t talk about her uncle, growing up. Her father had developed an aversion to hockey—it rarely graced their television nowadays, not even for the Olympics—which meant she had no reason to hear mention of him, no reason to read his name or come across his face out in the world. She remembered she had an uncle, and that was about it. She had looked him up exactly once. She had been twelve and bored, and flipping through old family albums with all too little care. She knew vaguely what he did for a living, enough to know he would come up in an Internet search, and so upon seeing his name scribbled under a group picture from her parents’ wedding, she took to the family computer and snooped through his Wikipedia page.
Apparently he’d caused quite the stir the year before: he had changed MLH teams suddenly, to the shock of the Western hockey world. She read about his charity, about the summer camps he newly coached. It was all very uninteresting to her, at twelve years old, and so she closed the tab and went to find her mother.
But that had been before the trust. Before the phone call in the middle of the night from a man speaking posh Canadian English, murmuring all kinds of things about documents and legal proof of identity and Ilya Rozanov leaving her a buttload of money that her father couldn’t get near with a ten-foot pole.
And she barely knew him.
Katya could see why her father had banished him to obscurity. They had never talked about matters like free marriage, but she knew the shape of her father’s opinion on the matter from how it brushed up against their other arguments, from the telltale moments where his mouth snapped shut and he decided the conversation was over. And she had known instinctively, somehow, not to tell him about the girls she’d kissed on late summer nights, the drinks she’d shared with people who would probably send him howling from this Earth with a single glance in their direction.
She inspected the inscription once more. How had her mother gotten the picture? Had she been there? Katya thought back hard to the summer of 2021. It had been her ice-skating summer—she and her friends had gotten it in their heads that they could be figure skaters and spent long hours at the rink nearby, tottering about like idiots on the ice, terminally underdressed and bruising themselves silly every time they hit the ground. Her mother had been home all summer, she was sure.
So the picture had been sent to them. It must have been. Did her dad know? Was that why it had been tucked in Katya’s closet—to keep him from seeing?
A knock rattled her from her thoughts. She shoved the photo into a stack of clothes as her father’s voice came rumbling through the door. “Katyusha. It is late. Go to sleep.”
“Sorry, Papa,” she called. His footsteps shuffled down the hall, and she saw the light flicker out from beneath her door. She dropped to a squat on the floor with a heavy sigh, pressing her fingers into her temples, and picked her way back to her bed. It really was late. She resigned herself to the inevitable repercussions in the morning and fumbled for her lamp, switching it off with a clink.
~~~
She had tried to forget it, the picture. She really had. She had suitcases to pack, pieces of her life to fold into squares and shove into luggage like it was all meant to be portable. She had her new life to think about. By the end of the month, her entire self would be squeezed into a suitcase and shipped off to McGill, and she hadn’t even put thought to the person she was growing into, the adult ready to shed her childhood like a shroud and emerge someone shinier, more complete.
And yet.
The six months since the trust had been a blur. Katya’s mind pounced at the thought of her uncle now—her hockey player uncle, somewhere far across the ocean, living an entire life without her and still bothering to put money toward her future. Her uncle, married to a man. Her uncle, not in fucking Moscow. She kept the picture and hid it under her mattress, tucked into a plain white envelope. She fished it out when it got dark out, toyed with the corner with her thumbnail, traced her fingers over the frames of their shoulders. She sat on her balcony late at night and looked out over the city, fidgeting with the photograph, imagining her uncle down among the crowds, a glowing spot of gold reflecting the night. What were they like, her faraway family? Did they laugh like her? Did they play cards at the kitchen counter? If she spoke, would they listen, hang onto her words like lightning? She wanted to know them—desperately. She saw now the space created in their absence, and she wanted frantically to fill it again, to see the people her father had so meticulously hidden from her all these years.
She wasn’t sure when the idea took root. Somewhere between packing and yelling back at her father and imagining a sunny backyard wedding in Ottawa the right synapses fired, and suddenly the lightbulb flashed.
She hadn’t chosen McGill because of him, obviously. She hadn’t put the two facts together until so very recently, pitifully recently, but now that she had it was hard to let go. Her uncle and his husband lived and played hockey in Ottawa—this much she had gathered from a cursory Google search—and Katya, in her infinite wisdom and desperation, had convinced her parents to let her fly to Montreal a month before the start of term, so that she could properly “settle in.” She had planned to travel around a little, practice her English and get back in the habit of her French, but now her mind buzzed with Ottawa, Ottawa, Ottawa. Maybe they would want to see her. Maybe they could meet somewhere in the middle. Maybe, if she just wrote, or texted, or called—
But this required a phone number. An email. An address. Katya had none of these things. She knew of only one person who might.
Alexei Rozanov’s evening routine regularly saw him falling asleep on the leather recliner in front of the television, his chin tilted back, snoring like a steamboat coming to shore. He was thoughtless with his phone, usually, left it screen-up on the coffee table or on the kitchen counter when he wasn’t using it. All Katya needed to do was jab in his passcode and scribble down the number, assuming he still had it saved. Easy.
She waited for her moment and took it, a few days later. Her father sat snoring in his seat, the glow from the television dancing over his wrinkled features, and Katya crept into the kitchen to make her theft. Her heart had pounded the whole escapade through, her fingers trembling as she worked the screen, her back hunched as though someone would leap from behind the kitchen island and shriek you there! Got you!
It had been something close to harrowing. But there she was, clutching her uncle’s phone number on a sticky note, swaying like the floor had dropped out from under her.
And, of course, that brought her to now—to her phone sitting on the flat balcony railing, to the cigarette pinched between her fingers. It was nearly three in the morning. The city slumbered below, still blearily lit in some busy places, and the wind had fallen to a low breeze, nipping at her bare collarbone. She had thrown a robe on over her nightwear, a thin cotton thing that let the air through like lace. The cold of the night settled in her bones like a strong liquor—she would need it, if she were really serious about this whole thing. If she were really going to do it.
She stubbed her cigarette out on the railing and tossed it over the side. This was a stupid idea. One of her stupider ones, really. She was tired, and desperate, and the boundary between rationale and delusional thinking felt dangerously flimsy. She would regret doing it, come morning. If she did it at all. She’d done this song and dance repeatedly for the past few nights, punching the number into her phone and staring at the call button, and every time, she chickened out. What would she even say? In what possible world would he even answer, if she did call?
She glanced back toward the balcony door. In an act of terrifying rebellion, she had chosen to pin the wedding photo to the corkboard above her desk, amid the clutter of ticket stubs and Polaroids of her friends she would soon take down and stow away. Neither of her parents had ventured into her room since; neither had seen it yet. It thoroughly rattled her to think that they might—and yet.
She was so tired. So painfully hopeful. The number of days until she departed had continued to tick down, and something inside her had started to give. She bit down on the soft flesh of her cheek, staring hard at the city below, then scooped up her phone and hit call.
Fuck. Fuck. Here we go.
The line rang. She stood, clutching her phone in a death grip, listening to her own breath. He wouldn’t pick up, she knew. She had convinced herself as much every night for the past week, every time her finger had hovered over the button. He was a busy man. A famous one. A man unlikely to keep his evenings free. He certainly didn’t have her number saved in his phone, which (if her own behaviors were any indication) meant he probably wouldn’t pick up even if he were free.
She sighed. Let the disappointment settle in her chest. And then—
“What is it?”
~~~
English. He answered in English.
Katya’s breath caught. She held the phone to her ear a moment, breath clouding in front of her, listening to the quiet crackle of the line. Of course he would answer in English—who would be calling from anywhere else? But the area code would have been Russian. He would have seen it before picking up. A hot ball of anxiety began to toil in her gut.
His voice came again. “Hello?”
Katya fell backwards into her memories, scrambling, clinging to the tinny sound like a buoy. Did she remember that voice? She had no real picture of him in her mind—only a collection of sharp, smiling features. She saw the wide set of his shoulders from above, a thatch of gold curls she put her tiny fingers in for balance. A mole on the middle of his cheek that she had liked to poke. Her eyes darted to the photo, half-obscured in the blunt balcony light.
“Hello,” she said softly, in English. Her English was clunky in speaking.
The line hung quiet for a moment. She could hear the low hum of chatter somewhere in the background—he was somewhere busy. A party, maybe.
“Who is this?” he asked. Katya took a steadying breath, gripping the railing with ice-cold fingers.
“Katya,” she said. A siren wailed in the distance, and she amended, “Katerina. Rozanova.”
Silence. The wind picked up with a low whistle, and Katya cupped her hand over the receiver to protect it. Her heart pounded heavily in her chest, her underarms wet with sweat while the rest of her shivered, seized completely by the chill. She ought to go inside. She ought to hang up, first of all, and then she ought to throw herself into bed and sleep this whole thing into oblivion, like a horrid nightmare. She would certainly have done so, if she could move a singular inch from where she was.
There was some shuffling on the other end of the line. The background chatter receded. “Katya?” her uncle murmured, his voice fuzzy through the speaker. Katya felt something loosen in her chest at the sound.
“How are you?” she asked in her clumsy English. She was better writing it—her accent was so thick when she spoke.
“How did you get this number?” he asked instead, in Russian. Katya worried her lip between her teeth.
“It was in Papa’s phone,” she said. “I just had to search.”
It had been hilariously easy, really. She had punched in his name and there it was, a neat line of numbers, complete with a Canadian area code. It set something painful alight in her chest, knowing he had been so close for so long—knowing it had been her fear, her stupidity keeping her from hearing his voice and nothing else.
She felt somehow caught, now. Like she’d done wrong anyway.
“And how is he?” her uncle asked, stiffly. “Your father?”
Katya thought of where he currently slept, his patchy head tilted back on the chair, jaw hanging open. “He is, ah, not good,” she said with a tight laugh. “Like usual.” Her uncle would not know this—she wasn’t sure why she said it. She cleared her throat. “I, um. I wanted to tell you. I am coming to Canada next month.”
A beat. “Here?”
“To Montreal,” Katya added. “I am starting university there soon.” She let go of the railing, brought her fingers to her lips to gnaw on her thumbnail. “I was thinking we could…talk, when I am there. Get dinner.”
The words were not enough for the rapid beat of her heart, the nerves pressing up against her skin from the inside. I want to see you, she wanted to say. I want to know who you are. I don’t think I ever did, before. Her eyes strayed back to the photo, to the angle between their heads. I want to know you both.
The line sat quiet for a moment. Katya’s hope trembled like a taut thread, fit to snap. Finally, in a dubious tone, he said, “You know you will need to speak English at university.”
A laugh pitched from her throat. “My English is not so bad!” she exclaimed, and she heard him laughing too. “I speak French too,” she added. “My French is excellent. They will hear me speaking and they will never ask me to speak English again.” Her French really was good—she had studied in Paris for several months.
Her uncle’s laughter over the phone warmed her from head to toe. “Of course.” There was a softness to his accent, a roundedness at the consonants. She wondered how often he spoke Russian, over in Canada. If ever.
The creak of stairs sent a jolt of panic through her. She registered the telltale shuffle—her father had roused himself and was making his way to bed. Shit. She pressed her phone to her chest and lunged for the porch light, snuffing it with a click. The light from the hallway streamed in under the door to her room.
“I have to go,” she said quickly, pressing her phone back to her ear. “It is late.” She slipped back inside and slid the balcony door shut.
“Wait,” said her uncle.
“Thank you for picking up,” Katya said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Thank you. So much. I’m sorry, I cannot call again.”
“Katyusha—”
The line beeped, and he was gone.