He did one interview. One. He chose it carefully, a long-form piece with a reporter he respected, and the interview was measured and honest and precisely calibrated in the way that everything Mik did was precisely calibrated. He talked about growing up in Chelyabinsk. About hockey. About the cost of hiding and the greater cost of continuing to hide. He did not talk about his father. Some things were his to keep.
The headline of the piece was "I Stopped Surviving and Started Living," which was a quote he had given at the end of the interview, and which was also, without him knowing it, almost exactly what Katya had told him to do on a phone call from Moscow months earlier when he was sitting on his kitchen floor at midnight deciding whether to be a monument or a man.
I was proud of him. I told him this approximately forty times a day, which he found excessive and I found insufficient.
The apartment was different now. His apartment, the one with the single plates and the bare walls and the icon of Saint Nicholas on the nightstand, had been absorbed into mine. Not because we made a decision. Because objects migrated. The Dostoevsky moved to my bookshelf. The icon moved to my nightstand. His steel-cut oats colonized my pantry and his running shoes took permanent positions by my door and his mug, the plain white one, sat in the cabinet next to my blue one with the handles facing the same direction, because some things needed to match.
There were photos on the walls now. Katya, dark-haired and fierce-eyed, in a picture his mother had mailed from Moscow in a padded envelope with a handwritten note that said, in Russian, "feed him." The team photo from the playoff run, everyone grinning and drenched. A photo of Mik and me at Ponce City Market that Jonah had taken on his phone, a candid shot where I was laughing at something and Mik was looking at me instead of the camera, and the expression on his face was the kind of thing you couldn't fake. The expression of a man watching the person he loved be happy and finding that the happiness was contagious.
The photo was slightly blurry. Jonah was not a talented photographer. It was the best picture I had ever seen.
On a Thursday evening in late May, with the Atlanta summer settling in like a guest who intended to stay until October, we went to The Crease.
The Crease was, objectively, not a good bar. The floors were sticky. The pool table listed slightly to the left. The wings were incredible in the specific way that bar food is incredible when you've been eating team-catered chicken and rice for eight months. The bartender, a woman named Donna who had been pouring drinks since the Thrashers era, knew every player by name and by order and had a strict policy against autograph seekers that she enforced with the authority of a small-town sheriff.
It was our place. The team's place. The place where hockey stopped and personhood started, where you could sit in a booth with your teammates and be a person who happened to play hockey instead of a hockey player who happened to be a person.
Mik and I took our usual booth. The corner one, near the pool table, where the light was dim and the bench was cracked and someone had carved "GO REAPERS" into the wood with a key at some point in the franchise's short history.
Jonah slid in across from us. He had a beer in each hand, which was standard, and a look on his face that was slightly more complicated than standard.
"Hey," he said. "So I need to tell you guys something."
"You're pregnant," I said.
"Hilarious. No. It's about your brother."
"What about my brother?"
Jonah took a long drink of his beer. A stalling drink. The kind of drink a man takes when he's about to say something he's been holding in his chest for a long time and the release of it requires lubrication.
"Never mind," he said. "Different conversation. Different day."
I looked at Mik. Mik looked at me. We looked at Jonah, who was suddenly very interested in the label on his bottle.
"Park," Mik said. "Are you blushing?"
"I don't blush. It's warm in here."
"It is sixty-eight degrees. The air conditioning is on."
"Drop it, Volkov."
Mik dropped it. I did not drop it, but I filed it away, because Jonah Park blushing at the mention of my brother was a piece of information that I would be revisiting at a later date with considerable interest.
Wes and Luca arrived twenty minutes later. Wes was carrying a container of something that turned out to be homemade brownies, because of course it was, and Luca was telling a story about his nonna that involved a raccoon and a garden hose and was getting progressively more animated as the details escalated.
They sat in the booth across the aisle and Wes nodded at us and Luca waved and the bar filled with the noise of people who liked each other, and it struck me, not for the first time, that this was the thing I had been looking for my whole lifewithout knowing it. Not a team. Not a roster. A family. The kind you build by accident out of shared suffering and bad bar food and the specific intimacy of knowing someone's worst game and loving them anyway.
Mik's hand was on my thigh under the table. Not hidden. Just private. The gesture of a man who no longer needed to hide but chose, occasionally, to keep certain things for himself. The difference between secrecy and privacy was something he'd explained to me once, late at night, in the language of a man who had finally learned to distinguish between the two. Secrecy was fear. Privacy was choice. His hand on my thigh was a choice.
"I want to tell you something," he said.
"Okay."
"I called my mother yesterday. She has invited us to Moscow for the summer."
"Both of us?"