Chapter Text
Ilya sighed. “I want it to be good. Not fine.”
Shane took his hand. “It will be good.”
“I wanted to meet her at the gate,” Ilya said, for the fifteenth time.
“They said someone will escort her here. They know how to manage this.”
Shane had been unusually calm all day. All week, even. Ilya had been unraveling for a month, but Shane had serenely worked his way through the to-do list, shopping online and coordinating calendars.
Ilya had been surprised by his own nerves. He was good with kids—good with people.
But Ekaterina Rozanova wasn’t just a child, or a person; she was one of Ilya’s only remaining blood relations and blood relations had never worked for Ilya like they did for Shane.
The sliding door nearby opened, and a petite woman in an Air France uniform appeared, pushing a luggage cart piled with duffel bags. Alongside her was a tall, slender girl with hazel eyes and dark brown hair cut in a messy, chin-length bob.
“Ekaterina,” Ilya said.
Shane squeezed his hand.
“Katya,” she said, curtly.
“Can I see your documents, please?” the escort said.
Shane handed over the bundle with their IDs and Katerina’s travel information.
“I’m your uncle, Ilya.”
Katya eyed him up and down and answered, “You look like my father.”
Ilya must have made a horrified expression, because Shane looked at him with a sympathetic little smile, and tapped Ilya’s foot with the tip of his sneaker. “Hi Katya, I’m Shane.”
She turned to Shane and said, “I know.”
“Well, everything seems to be in order here,” The escort said. “Thank you for flying Air France, enjoy your stay in Montreal.”
“Thank you,” Shane said. He turned back to Katya. “Do you want to get something to eat before we go? It’s about a two-hour drive.”
She shook her head.
Ilya took hold of the luggage cart, and they headed toward the parking lot.
*
“This is your room,” Ilya said. Katya had muttered no more than ten words on the drive from the airport, most of them yes or no.
“I don’t need a room. I’m not going to live here.”
Ilya swallowed. Don’t take it personally, Shane had whispered when they were bringing in Katya’s luggage. Girls this age are mean. Remember what Ruby said about my last Rolex campaign?
“You will be here for three weeks before you go to school. We wanted you to be comfortable.”
She didn’t answer, but she did flop down on the bed and begin to text furiously on her phone.
“Do you want to rest a while?” Ilya asked in Russian. He could remember the first time he had come to Canada, how much he had struggled to understand when people spoke to him, how long it had taken him to formulate his replies so that the words were in the right order.
“I guess,” she said, in English. She sat on the bed and scooted up so she was propped on the headboard, but she didn’t put her phone down.
“We’ll be downstairs if you need anything.”
-
“Why won’t she talk?” Ilya asked when he reached the kitchen. Shane looked up from the grain bowl he was assembling for lunch.
“She’s probably exhausted.”
“She looks miserable.”
“Well…she might be?”
“Shane!” Ilya hadn’t expected her to run off the plane and into his familial embrace, though he had daydreamed about it once or twice. He tried to remind himself what it had been like to arrive in a foreign country as a young person—despite the fanfare at the start of his career, he had still been a little shell-shocked. He had felt the distance from home acutely, no matter how eager he had been to escape.
“Ilya, we know it wasn’t her choice to come here.”
Katya was here because Alexei and his wife were getting a divorce. A big, ugly, nasty divorce in which they fought over everything down to the dust on the baseboards of their condo in Moscow. Katya’s mother wanted to move in with her boyfriend, two hours outside of Moscow, and take Katya with her, but Alexei was arguing that she should stay in her current school. This led to him calling Ilya for the first time since their father died to say he needed to pay for Katya’s school fees out of her trust fund.
Ilya said no, but that he would pay the tuition directly. This set off another battle between the parents, ostensibly about the child support agreements. But then Katya’s mother called Ilya herself one night in tears and told Ilya that she didn’t want Alexei bringing his friends around Katya without her there to supervise. Ilya suggested she could go to boarding school in Canada, as a compromise. Alexei agreed immediately, and Yuna Hollander went to work on securing Katya a spot at a very prestigious private school in Montreal.
“She is thousands of miles away from her parents and all her friends,” Shane continued. “It probably sucks.”
Ilya went to the refrigerator and pulled out a cup of greek yogurt. He wrinkled his nose at it as he pulled off the foil, but his days of junk food were over. Playing professional hockey at the age of thirty-seven required sacrifices.
“She has to eat something eventually,” Ilya grumbled.
“Give her a couple hours to recover from the trip, then she can pick what we have for dinner.”
Katya was a vegetarian, so Shane went to pick up takeout from their favorite sushi place. Ilya wanted to go to the restaurant—he liked to order enough sushi that it came on a fancy little boat platter—but Shane had talked him out of dragging Katya there on her first night.
She ate two pieces of her avocado roll, and half a cup of miso soup. Ilya had stuffed the kitchen with desserts in the run up to her arrival, going so far as to track down a bakery clear on the other side of Ottawa that made medovik, but she declined the array and went back to bed barely having spoken another word.
Ilya watched her go up the stairs. Shane dragged him to the couch, put on the latest Mission: Impossible movie, and ran his fingers through Ilya’s hair until he dozed off.