“How are you not ashamed?”
“I’m ashamed, Father.”
Does Ilya hear this in his mind when he’s a season and a half in on the Cens and he hasn’t turned them into a winning team yet? Because he’s the captain, he makes this team work, right? And he shouldn’t lean on lazy American excuses. He’s supposed to make them click, and he’s not doing his job. He’s squandering the potential he had before. That precious ‘before’ when things were better, when he had a mother, when he was still young.
And when fleece-clad gold medal hopeful Shane Hollander asks him if he’s okay, he tells him to go. Please go. We are nothing. And years later, when the Shane who loves Ilya asks if he needs to talk, Ilya says maybe you should try being quiet.
And if I walk into the woods and never return? What then?
