Page 93 of Wicked Serve

“You were a child,” she repeats. She presses her lips together, shaking her head. “You weren’t responsible for any of it.”

I blink, looking away. “I could have said something, Isabelle.”

My teachers, my other coaches, even the couple that lived in the apartment next door. I could have said something, but I didn’t. I acted like everything was fine, even though I heard the shouting, the crying, the slammed doors and breaking glass. I convinced myself that the charismatic version of my father—someone who bought my mother extravagant gifts and surprised her with date nights and told me how proud he was of how I played—was the real version. Maybe that’s what Mom did, too.

“Nik, did he ever... hurt you like that?” The question hangs in the air like our breath.

I sit up, the blanket slipping away. I’ve hardly felt the cold, but now I shiver. “Not like that. He could be mean, and he pushed me too hard in training too often, but he took out his drunken anger on her.”

“But something did happen.” She hesitates. “On New Year’s Eve?”

I ease away from her, swallowing as I focus again on the surf. I know I have to keep going—I can’t tell half the story, not with her—but each sentence feels heavy. The exhaustion from the panic attack earlier hasn’t gone away. I sift through the memory to find the words to describe it.

“They were getting ready for a party,” I say eventually. “The team was having an event for the holiday. I don’t know why they started arguing, and Mom’s never said, but I think it had something to do with me. Dad had been talking about maybe sending me to a hockey training program—a boarding school in Chelyabinsk. But whatever it was, it was bad. Both of them had been drinking, and I remember Mom shouting back at him, which she didn’t always do.”

“You were thirteen?”

I nod. Thirteen. Old enough to push back on Dad, just a little. I remember our own arguments from back then. My devotion to hockey never wavered, but I wanted more privacy. More time with my friends. I’d started to understand that not everyone lived the way we lived, and that while not everyone’s father was a hockey star, they weren’t all bad-tempered alcoholics, either.

“Usually, I tried to stay out of their way.” I ball my hands into fists, my nails digging into my palms. Coward. “But I had a bad feeling. I... I made it to their room in time to see him throw her to the floor.”

A tear runs down Isabelle’s cheek.

“She worked hard to learn Russian, you know. And it’s not an easy language to get the hang of if you’re not a native speaker.” I shake my head slightly, remembering how she’d read the newspaper out loud for practice. “She wasn’t that great at it, but she lived there for years and didn’t want to be left out when Dad and I spoke to each other. All the same, I never really heard her try. Until then. She was pleading with him, utterly terrified, and there was something about the way he stood over her, like she was nothing, that made me just... I was afraid he’d kill her.”

My voice cracks on the last sentence. If he’d done it, it would have been just me and him, alone. Utterly alone.

“Nik,” Isabelle whispers.

I shake my head again, rougher this time. “I started getting into it with him, finally, but I wasn’t that big at thirteen. He slammed me against the wall, broke my arm. And threw his drink at my face.”

“Is that how you—”

“Yeah.”

She sniffles, wiping her eyes. “Fuck.”

I huff out a ghost of laughter. “Yeah. Fuck.”

“But you left after, right?”

“Neighbors heard us and called the police. I guess that night, at the hospital, Mom finally got in touch with her father. They were estranged for most of her marriage, but in the end, he helped us leave. I haven’t been back since.”

Isabelle leans in, slowly and carefully. I’m expecting a kiss on the lips, but she presses a chaste one to my scar instead. I blink. This time, when she puts her arms around me, I hug back.

“I’m sorry, Nikolai,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not like you had anything to do with it.”

“You know I don’t mean it like that.” She squeezes me tightly. “None of it was your fault.”

“It’s complicated.”

“It’s really not,” she says, a firm note in her voice. “You deserved better.”

I’m too tired to argue the point right now. It’s a nice thought, anyway.

“It’s okay.”

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