Page 15 of One Last Shot

“She said I need to help you adopt her.”

The sound that leaves his mouth is half sigh, half groan. “I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t really need you.”

That stings a bit. I wish he’d come to me as a friend, not out of desperation because I was his last resort “You going to be honest with me now?” I ask, without letting go.

“I was always going to be honest with you. I was just going to get a couple drinks in you to take the edge off first.”

I laugh into that space between his neck and his shoulder, and for a second I think maybe things will be okay.

CHAPTER5

ALEKSANDR

Why does she have to be so fucking beautiful?

She should come with a warning: Nearness may cause distractibility and lapses in judgment. Proceed with Caution.

We settle back into the sitting room and she takes me up on the drink offer when I tell her I have some cans of premixed cocktails, thus there’s no need to drink until we’re stupid. But as the first drinks go down and we move on to the second, it occurs to me that if there’s one person in this world who I want to get drunk with, it’s Petra. She’s both easy to talk to and incredibly guarded. I’ve only ever seen her drink one time, and I am curious if she’s the same happy, bubbly drunk who will tell you anything like she was back then.

After two drinks, she’s not even a little tipsy. Instead, she drills into me like I’m on trial and she’s leading the prosecution.

“You damn well should have told me everything upfront,” she says. “Niko’schild, Aleksandr? How could you not mention that he’ddied, and he left behind a child you were responsible for?Whywould you not mention that?” She emphasizes a different word in each sentence and slaps her hand against the metal arm of the chair she’s sitting in with each one.

She’s shed her coat and sits there in a sleeveless black turtleneck that does way too much to emphasize the curve of her breasts above her tiny waist.Do not look at her boobs, I have to remind myself. I’d forgotten about these internal dialogues I require when I’m around Petra. I’d thought that fourteen years of distance and aging would have dulled the inappropriate attraction I’d felt toward her back then. Instead, it’s not only still there, but my reasons for keeping her at a distance back then seem less important now that we’re both adults.Except you know a truth about her family that even she doesn’t know—and it’s one she could never forgive you for.

It’s a hurdle in our relationship I’ll never be able to get around.

“Honestly, almost no one knows about Stella. Somehow, Tom managed to keep the news of Niko and Colette’s death and my application for guardianship out of the papers.”

“Why are you trying to keep her a secret?” she asks, her brows raised as she fiddles with the metal tab on top of the can and awaits my answer.

“I’m not trying to keep her a secret. I just don’t want to flaunt her in the face of Colette’s sister and her husband,” I say. “They filed for guardianship of Stella at the same time I did, even though the will named me as guardian and Colette’s best friend Sofia as backup guardian. Colette’s sister, CeCe, was not onlynotmentioned in the will, but Niko and Colette met with both me and Sofia separately when they created their will a couple years ago to emphasize how imperative it was that CeCe and her husband never get custody of Stella.”

She leans forward in the chair, sizing me up. “So the court gave you guardianship in accordance with the will, and now you need citizenship because you’re afraid ...?” She trails off, but I don’t jump in with a response. Instead, I wait to see if she’ll come to the same conclusion I have. “You’re afraid that if something happens to you, they’ll give guardianship to Stella’s aunt because she’s next of kin?”

“Exactly. Even though the will named Sofia as the backup guardian in case I wasn’t able, I’m worried that keeping Stella with family will override her dead parents’ wishes. I can’t adopt her unless I’m a US citizen, but if I was able to adopt her, I could create a new will that echoes her parents’ wishes of naming Sofia as Stella’s guardian if anything should happen to me. With two wills saying the same thing, I imagine the court would side with Sofia, no matter how much money Stella’s aunt and uncle were willing to spend to litigate this.”

“Why are you worried that something will happen to you?”

“Accidents happen. I travel a lot for hockey. What if something happened to me while I was gone? What if I hit my head so hard in a game that I was incapacitated as a result? Failing to prepare for these possibilities is the epitome of bad parenting,” I say, as if I have any idea what good parenting looks like. Luckily, I have Sofia to guide me, and I can take everything I experienced from my own father and flip it, doing the opposite as he would have done.

“Okay, so it makes sense to prepare. But I still can’t believe you brought me to New York just to lie to me. That you’ve known we were married for months and you didn’t tell me sooner. That you were just trying to use me to get what you wanted.”

The hurt in her voice twists the guilt into a knot in my stomach, especially since I still haven’t told her a crucial piece of information—that I found out about the marriage contract right after we signed it. I thought I’d taken care of the issue back then, only to find out that my father lied to me when he said he would make sure it didn’t go through. But I can’t tell her that—ever. There are too many family secrets locked into that story, and knowing any of them would inevitably cause her more pain, with nothing to gain from the knowledge.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you, but I am very protective of Stella. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her safe, happy, and healthy.”

“But how in the world did you think that I wouldn’t find out about her?”

“I didn’t think. I listened to Tom’s advice even when I didn’t agree with it,” I shrug. I understand why Tom thinks the less Petra knows, the better. But I don’t know why I thought for a second that she’d show up and sign the paperwork, going along with his plan without knowing everything, then just head back to her life in Park City.

“I guess I still don’t understand why you can’t just apply for citizenship the normal way. Why do you need to be fake married to me to make it happen?”

“Because I haven’t been a permanent resident for five years.”

“How’s that possible? You’ve lived here for eight, right?”

“Yes, but for tax reasons, I didn’t apply for permanent residency until last year, when I bought this place. If I could go back and trade a few years of higher taxes for permanent resident status so I could apply for citizenship now, I’d pay it tenfold. But I can’t. So I’d have to wait four more years before I could apply.” I paused, letting her absorb this. “But if I can prove we’re already married and that we’ve lived together, even off and on, for three years, I’d be free to apply for citizenship immediately.”

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