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At some point, Svetlana and Ilya become Sveta and Ilyusha.
It doesn’t happen all at once, but slowly, invisibly, like erosion: worn smooth by time and proximity and inevitability. They begin as children orbiting the same gravity. Her father does not think much of him at first. Just another boy trailing behind his daughter, thin and intense and too serious for his age. Sergei Vetrov has spent his whole life around hockey. He knows what boys are and he knows how easily they mistake proximity for permanence. Boys come and go. Boys always come and go. He is not impressed when Svetlana tells him about Ilya. What does this boy think he is? What does he think this will make him?
And then he watches him play.
Something shifts, quietly and completely. It is not only that he is good, though he is. It’s something else, entirely—sharp and isolating, something that exists slightly outside the reach of everyone else on the ice. He carries himself like someone already set apart. Like someone already halfway gone. Like hockey is not hockey to him, but a way of living and surviving and floating. And Sergei, who has built his whole life on discipline and sacrifice and endurance, a hall-of-famer goaltender, recognizes it immediately. After that, he never says outright what he thinks, but he asks about him casually, in passing. He notices when his name appears in the news, and he lets him sit at the kitchen table a little longer than he might have otherwise. He still chases him into the stairwell if he lingers too late and watches him with the wary suspicion of most old Russian fathers who worship their daughters. But he lets him return. He lets him exist inside the spaces that matter, and there is something beneath the suspicion, beneath the protectiveness, that looks almost like approval.
Svetlana does not think of Ilya as extraordinary or above her. Maybe it's because she's always grown up around hockey legends (and what is a measly teenage boy she’s seen puke up his liquor compared to that), or maybe it's because he is simply Ilya: irritating and stubborn and impossible in ways that make her feel steadier, not smaller. He does not flatter her. He does not soften himself for her. He is not falsely polite the way boys often are, performing gentleness like it is transactional. He is blunt and honest, and he listens when she speaks. He asks for her opinion and actually waits to hear it—about hockey, about his clothes and hair, about what he should say and do, and what he shouldn’t. He does not need her to be smaller so he can feel larger. In fact, one could argue Ilya does not need her at all, not in the suffocating way other men eventually seem to, men who want women because they want a toy to stroke their ego, or a mother to marry, or a maid. And precisely because he does not need her, she stays.
They grow into each other gradually, into familiarity and inevitability. Ilya becomes the person who walks beside her at night without being asked, the person who stands slightly closer to the street without acknowledging why. The person who argues with strangers on her behalf with a calm, precise cruelty she does not possess herself (she's an angry girl, God help her). He never makes her feel delicate, but he makes her feel permanent in a casual way (and what an oxymoron, that is). You’re permanent…if you want. You’re permanent…but you can walk away. I won’t even be hurt. Svetlana becomes, in turn, the person he looks at first when something happens. The person whose reaction matters most. The person who sees him not as the world sees him, but as he has always been. Kind. Gentle. Shockingly quiet and serious, despite the farce.
For a long time, Svetlana also does not think of Ilya as someone who can break. He exists in her life like infrastructure, fixed and immovable. He is her closest friend, her accomplice in all their schemes, and sometimes her lover, when loneliness or circumstance folds them briefly into the same shape. He is home in a way nothing else is home, especially like this when they are miles and miles away from any version of it. He is also, though she does not like to admit it even to herself, something slightly unknowable. Carefully contained. Curated, almost. Ilya Rozanov belongs partly to her and partly to the cameras, and what the world makes him, and also to something distant and untouchable he’s built himself. It’s why she stayed. How could it evaporate inside him so easily just because she finally made good on it and stayed?
Ilya asks her to marry him sometimes. He doesn’t say it like a joke, but it’s not not a joke either. “Marry me,” and his voice is bland, casual, like he is asking her to pass the salt. She never laughs at the joke-not-joke and always says no. He smiles after and sighs in a very curated, joke-not-joke way, and that’s that. It’s a ritual, of sorts. He asks again months later, after sex, and again after that. It’s not frequently enough to be serious, but not rarely enough to be meaningless either. Just enough. His huff of breath is deliciously put-on, as is her answering eyeroll, her knowing smile, but beneath it is something quieter and heavier, because he is asking not out of hope but out of gravity. There is a version of their lives where nothing ever splinters, where nothing ever leaves, where they choose the simplest possible thing and stay there, together. He asks because it would be easier, and she refuses because it would not be real. She knows her father will never say it, but he would like it very much if it were Ilya. But they both know they would be unhappy, confined to versions of themselves that could not breathe and grow and change. The same people they always were. They don’t talk about it, ever.
As she grows increasingly tired of men with age, and thinks more often of how she does not want to become someone whose life is built around the maintenance of someone else’s, the way and why Ilya fit into her life so easily becomes clearer. He never asks anything of her that she does not freely give. He argues fiercely about things that do not matter and falls silent when they do. He isn’t always nice, but he is simply kind, kinder than she would ever have expected of him. Patient.
Until, slowly, with her increasing permanence, she begins to see the fractures (they were always there).
Svetlana learns first in fragments: the injuries he does not mention, the way his hand fails him once, briefly, from a hit, like it no longer belongs to him, and the way he dismisses it, brushes it aside, refuses to give it weight. She is furious with him for that. Furious at the carelessness, furious at the arrogance of believing himself immune to consequence, furious too at the unfamiliar and unwelcome realization that his pain frightens her. Two days his hand’s been broken (“Last game?” “What else?”), and like a stubborn mule he hasn’t gone to the hospital or told her or anyone at all. She drives him herself, threatens to tie him to the hood if he refuses.
A year later, Boston faces Toronto, and the minutes count down without apology, the way time does when it has already decided something. Ilya is slammed into the boards with a viciousness that pulls his shoulder right out of its socket. Normally, he would pop it back in and knock his opponent flat. Normally, he would dismiss it without complaint, scowl, and move on. He's Russian in a way that's proud, and he's a man in a way that's stupid, and he's a hockey player. This time, he does not get up for several minutes. Dizzy. Disoriented. And pulled off the ice for the rest of the final period. Then the hospital calls her, his “emergency contact.”
Two words like that are enough to rearrange something inside her instantly and permanently. She goes to him without thinking. There is no version of herself that does not go. It’s a little different after that.
Sveta sees things she has never been meant to see, things that (with a little guilt and shame) she probably never wanted to (because that's why she stayed, remember, remember, remember): the quiet, humiliating logistics of his vulnerability. The way pain strips him down to something smaller and quieter. The way he endures without complaint or performance, as though suffering is simply another obligation he has accepted (for this small injury, and also probably for his life). She measures time in doses and intervals, with the pills he asks her to keep for him, instead (which, well. Fuck). She listens carefully when others speak because he will not. She steadies him without acknowledging she is doing it, knowing it would infuriate him to be helped with opening “a damn jar of olives, Sveta” while he cannot. It’s only a few weeks on the bench, a handful of days really, where she loans him her right arm while his heals, but. It's really not about the shoulder, after all. She becomes, without either of them naming it, essential.
It unsettles her, how much it means. Because before this, he has never needed her. He has never belonged to her in that fragile, human way. Now, he is simply a person. A person who can be hurt. A person who can be exhausted. Worst of all, a person who can break.
After Ilyusha’s father’s funeral, he stands beside her in the cold, silent, hollowed out by something invisible. He does not cry. He does not speak for a long time. When he finally does, his voice is quieter than she has ever heard it.
“I do not deserve you,” he says. Andrei has long fled the room, properly shamed into his dismissal, hopefully forever, and it's just the two of them behind the beaded curtain. She reaches up and cups his face in both her hands, forcing him to look at her. His face is heavy with grief he feels, and guilt over grief he does not. And this insistence on deserving is such a strange thing to her, as if love is something earned, as if it’s something granted only to the worthy.
That is not how it works. It has never been how it works. But, well. Svetlana knew Grigori too. You do not have to know why someone loves you, she thinks furiously. You should simply accept it, like the gift it is. "Yes, you do." He looks at her like he doesn't believe her. but. "But you don't want me." He says he loves her. "Yes, but it's not like...Jane, is it?" I love you, too. I will be there for you forever. I hope Jane knows how lucky he is.
A person who can break, will. These are the inevitabilities and laws that hold this universe together. It is worse than any injury, any phone call, maybe, and secretly horribly perhaps also...at least a dead mother can be grieved. There is no grave for a man Ilyusha even refuses to acknowledge exists aloud. It’s worse than pills asked to be held from him in the day. Now, she knows what he looks like when he weeps himself weak in the middle of the night, and the emptiness that settles over him when there is nothing left to cry or give. He usually turns away, perched on the end of the bed, or leaves for a quiet smoke on the balcony. She hears him anyway, doesn’t mean to, but. She thinks she has never quite heard a man cry properly ever, before now, because she didn't know it was possible for every bit of his insides to come wretchedly out. She doesn't mention it, doesn't want to step on the crack and make it real. Doesn't want to humiliate him or hurt him further.
The next night, he wants to go clubbing, the way he did in the first years, when Jane was still just some Jane, plain and one of many, and he and Svetlana would sleep with each other when they were in the same city. Surely, this is some kind of regression. A full circle never intended to happen. She knows, with dark certainty, this is about Jane, even though he does not say it. She almost hates Jane for it, for existing. It is the first time she considers asking him to marry her, instead.
He does not ask her to marry him again, not after the funeral. Marry me. No. Not because she does not love him, but because she does. Because she will not let him choose her simply because she is there. Because she loves him too much to become his bunker instead of his sanctuary. She pulls him closer anyway, when he returns from his smoke-not-cry. Memorizes the familiar weight of him beside her. Ilyusha sighs like she is inconveniencing him with her affection, her touch, like she is being unreasonable. They laugh about it, together.
There is something sacred in that, something terrible and beautiful and incomplete that belongs only to them. Next weekend…next weekend, Ilyusha will go to the All-Stars. He will see Jane again (and she will pretend she doesn’t know). She’ll help him pack, will smooth down his nervous, bouncing knee before he departs. He won't know she knows, but. Next weekend, she thinks fervently. She prays Jane keels over on the ice and never speaks another word again. She prays Jane asks Ilya to marry him, and they live together forever happily with a giant brood of nauseatingly adorable hockey babies. If she could, she would build Ilyusha that sanctuary from the ground up. But. Maybe Jane will finally have enough sense to start, next weekend.