His words hit a nerve, and I feel a shiver of thrill run through me. But even as my body reacts, my mind won’t let me forget the truth, or the questions. “It’s…hard to trust you,” I admit, pulling back just enough to catch my breath. “I don’t even know your face. Don’t know your full name. Don’t know anything about you. How am I supposed to…feel anything real for someone I can’t see, can’t know?”
“It is safer if you do not know who I really am.”
“It’s safer foryouif you don’t know whoIreally am,” I argue. “This anonymity works for me. I’ve been okay with it. It’s just that tonight you were…different. Why?”
He sighs. “Life.”
“That’s…evasive.”
He lifts a shoulder.
Okay. Time for a change of tactic. “Tell me something true about you. Where are you from?”
“What is it they call that kind of question? A short ball?” Nik asks.
“A softball. Answer.”
“You know the answer. Russia.”
“Okay. When did you come to the United States?”
“Ten years ago.”
“How old were you then?”
“Eighteen.”
I think about this for a moment. “Did you come with family?”
“Yes,” he says. “My sister.”
“Is your sister younger or older?”
“Younger.”
Interesting. “So just you and your sister, who was a teenager?”
He nods but gives no other details.
“Why did you come?”
“To play my sport.”
“Which is?”
He shakes his head, then pauses, like he’s deciding how much truth to give me.
“I play hockey,” he says finally. “NHL. Got drafted when I was eighteen. My adoptive father thought it’d be good for my sister to have a taste of normal teenage life in the States, so he made me her legal guardian until she came of age.”
“Was that weird? Being, like, a parent when you were still just a teenager yourself? A teenager who was moving to a new country to play a professional sport. That seems like a lot of pressure.”
Nik sucks in his bottom lip, holding it between his teeth. “I would not have wanted to be so far away from my sister anyway.Our parents died when we were young. She was all I had, by blood.”
His voice lowers on the last words, and something flickers across his face—grief, maybe. Or guilt. It's hard to tell with him. Everything about Nik is tightly controlled, like he's lived too long knowing the cost of saying too much.
I wait, hoping he’ll say more. He doesn’t.
So I ask gently, “Have you always lived in Chicago?”
