12'den Vurmak

TOMMY

Death was not an end — it was a sentence handed down to those left behind. A verdict delivered without consent, with no possibility of escape. Not an injustice, but a pure and simple betrayal. Not to the one who died, but to those condemned to keep breathing.

The one who left simply left. Pain, regret, half-finished sentences — they abandoned all of it here. Those who remained were forced to carry these inheritances for the rest of their lives.

Diminished… Diminished…

The loss that fell to my share was a life I had been forced to live in the wake of my mother’s death. No life could be measured against such an absence; no day could be made whole without her.

I was furious with her. I couldn’t forgive her for not letting me stay that night, for driving through a torrential downpour and engineering her own death. She had walked willingly into the cold open arms of the Angel of Death.

I was furious with her — and I missed her just as much.

“Tommy!”

My father’s voice — steel-cold and smooth, conditioned by years of reverberating off the high ceilings of courtrooms — carried its usual professionalism. But this time, that voice had taken my name hostage, not some vulnerable defendant.

The emphasis that told me he was calling up from the bottom of the stairs made me close my eyes. Barely twenty-four hours had passed since we put my mother in the ground. The smell of earth still burned in my throat, and my father was summoning me on the hour like a military roll call. He must have thought I’d do something stupid, that I couldn’t bear the weight of my mother’s loss — or maybe there was something he needed to say but couldn’t find the courage to bring to his lips. The master of words seemed, for the first time, to have gone mute in his own home. Then again, when it came to John Brooks, no word could frighten him, no silence could break him.

He was a legend in the legal world, known as “the wordsmith.” The moment his cursed tongue slipped between his lips, the air in the room would shift — jurors and judges alike would be pulled into his rhythm as if tugged by an invisible string. Like a hypnotist, he would bend the truth, polish the lie, and pour justice into whatever mold he desired.

He worked so relentlessly that I couldn’t begin to count how many men he had pulled from the noose, how many cases he had turned in his favor. His name was spoken in courthouse corridors across the country as if etched in gold letters on marble. With a razor-sharp mind laced with a diabolical cunning, there was no man he couldn’t save, no case he couldn’t untangle. The cases this titan had lost at the peak of his career were few enough to count on one hand — and even those were nothing more than distant, dusty stains from the fumbling early years of his practice.

“Yeah!”

I shouted my reply toward the stairs — formal, like him, and maybe a little worn out. Soon enough, the command filled my ears:“We need to talk. Come down. Now.”Great. The moment I’d been bracing for had apparently arrived.

So it began.

I dragged myself to my feet and took the first step down a road I couldn’t yet see the end of. As I descended the stairs one by one, the dog my mother had left me as an inheritance cut across my path. Safir. For my mother, who had Turkish roots, that word carried enormous meaning. She’d said she named her that because her eyes resembled a sapphire and because she was one of a kind. To me, her eyes were just an ordinary shade of blue.

As for being one of a kind… well, that part was hard to argue with.

She was a purebred female — a shade sharper than most Samoyeds, hovering somewhere between cunning and slyness. Calling her a dog meant you’d never truly known a dog. She watched nearly everything humans did, learned it, and then applied it. In that sense, could she be called the only one of her kind? I think so. I grimaced at the trail of paw prints Safir had left behind, her snow-white fur once again paired with a fresh clump of mud.

“You’re never going to learn, are you,” I muttered. My fingers drifted absently to the soft nape of her neck, just past the edge of her stone-studded collar.

“Mom’s going to kil—”

The worn phrase couldn’t quite make it out of my mouth. A smile full of ache took the place of the remaining letters. She couldn’t kill anyone anymore. Because if there was someone in this world who was no longer breathing, it was her. In life, she had signed her name beneath every word she ever spoke with unshakable resolve — her words were law. Now, in place of those magnificent signatures, there lay only a white, speechless shroud covering everything.

Yes, because of the will she had left behind, we had buried her according to her faith. It had raised eyebrows in a Christian cemetery, but my father hadn’t allowed a single word of objection. Now my mother lay as the sole Muslim among hundreds of Christians.

“Go up to my room and wait for me in the bathroom.”

It was as if my mother, sensing she would die, had taught Safir that she owed obedience to my commands as well. For that, I was grateful. Frankly, the last thing I needed right now was an uncontrollable four-legged creature.

As Safir clicked her nails across the hardwood and climbed the stairs, I made my way with heavy steps toward the living room.“In here, son.”My feet paused, then turned toward the voice coming from the kitchen. My father was leaned against the wide island counter in the middle of the kitchen like a statue. In his hand was that strong coffee — dark as pitch, I knew it well — trailing a thin thread of steam. His gaze was locked onto a piece of paper lying in front of him. It was a familiar enough sight, so I sat in my usual place without question. He raised his head slowly. His eyes swept across my face, the way they had been doing often these past few days.

“How are you?”

I shrugged indifferently. Swallowing the knot in my throat, I said, “I’ve had better days.” The end of the sentence hung in the air. In my mind, it finished itself:Especially the days spent in this kitchen — with Mom’s bright chatter, the clinking of pots, and that warm quiet that filled the whole house.

“So have I,” my father said, his voice more unguarded than I had ever heard it. He laid his long, bony fingers on the paper in front of him. He rotated it one full turn on its axis and slid it toward me. That — that was a move I’d never seen from him before, a sign that the rules of the game had changed.

As I pulled it toward me, I realized it was a plane ticket. To Turkey.

One way.

In my name only.

I lifted my eyes and looked at my father — questioning, and with a hint of anger. He didn’t take his eyes off me, as if measuring my reaction. He was composing his words in his mind like a closing argument, drawing a long sip from his coffee as though to soften them. Fortunately, he broke the tense silence between us with a slow breath.

“You’re going to your grandparents tomorrow morning.”

I had figured that much. My mother’s family was still alive and living in Istanbul. Beyond occasional visits and phone calls on special occasions, we’d never been particularly close. They hadn’t even come to her funeral. As far as they were concerned, theycouldn’tcome — but I knew it was their pointed protest against my father for refusing to let them bury her in their homeland. Still, whatever their grievances, they should have been there. Their final duty to their daughter should have outweighed their pride, and for that, I was just as angry at them as I was at my mother.

“For how long?”

He looked as though he didn’t know what to say, or was working out how to make me accept what he did know. When he said“For a while,”I furrowed my brow and asked,“How long is a while?”It was the middle of August, and I’d had to leave the academy’s summer camp early because of my mother’s death. Even with a valid reason, I had a career I couldn’t afford to neglect, and I needed to push my training hard before my final year — I had ground to make up.

The rising star of American football.

The team captain who gave meaning to the number 12.

The young professional admitted to the academy ahead of his age, cleared to play with the seniors.

The firecracker who, thanks to his contributions to the team’s local championships and two straight seasons of outstanding performance, had been spotted by NFL talent scouts while still in high school — already on the radar of two clubs.

And the quarterback set to enter the amateur league draft next June and take one more step toward the NFL — Thomas Brooks. That was me.

“Let’s hope it’s a short while.”

My father’s words pulled me out of the self-congratulatory corner of my subconscious. I hadn’t understood what he was getting at, but I could feel the unease in the room settling into my bones.“I need you to stay with your grandparents until your mother’s case is resolved.”

“What?”

The surprised exclamation was followed by a sharp, involuntary laugh. “You’re joking, right?” I said — and within seconds I could see he wasn’t, and the smirk vanished from my face in the blink of an eye.

“It was a goddamn traffic accident, Dad!”

“For now.”

It was hard to hold your ground against the authority my father put on in front of his clients. I had overheard him telling his closest friend, Uncle Edward, that he believed my mother’s death was suspicious — that she may have been the victim of a hit, because of a case he’d recently taken on. He was never going to let this go. He was ready to sweep aside anything that got in his way.

But I was not one of those things.

“Go to hell. I’m not going anywhere.”

I shoved the plane ticket across the table at him and got to my feet. Even though his tolerance for disrespect had its limits, he hadn’t so much as twitched.“You’d do well to pack your things, son. The flight is early.”I was almost out of the kitchen when his words clamped around my ankles and stopped me cold. I turned back but didn’t move toward him. A million curses piled up on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t risk my future by letting a single one loose. When my father made a decision, there was no reversing it — and right now, I had to fight for the impossible.

“Mom wouldn’t have wanted this.”

I played my biggest card. My mother had been a force who believed a family had to stay together through every hardship — an unbreakable tie, in her damned way. No matter what we went through, she had never let us come loose and drift in separate directions. She had worn thin, had frayed at the edges, but she had held us together like steel all the same. My father nodded slowly as if agreeing with me, then said,“Your mother wouldn’t have wanted a lot of things.”

“Dying least of all.”

The fire of revenge flared in his eyes for just a moment. I could see it even across the distance between us. He hadn’t yet allowed himself to feel the grief of losing her. And it looked like he wasn’t going to let the pain take hold of him before the truth came out.

“I can’t lose you too, Tommy.”

This was the most unguarded defense that had ever left John Brooks’s lips. I tried to force down the hard lump sitting in my throat, but it was no use. When my father fused that razor-sharp logic of his with genuine emotion, it became impossible to outplay him like a chess master. Still, a voice inside me — dark and quiet — whispered that he was right. If my father’s suspicions were correct and my mother had died because of a case, then regardless of whether that case was resolved, I was an open target. An easy thing to hit, an even easier thing to use.

“You won’t,” I said, keeping my voice as steady as I could, trying to give him a guarantee and myself some courage.“But I’m not going anywhere. If I have to go somewhere, if I have to leave this house — Grandma and Grandpa would be more than happy to have me. A few states over is far enough.”

My father shook his head the way a judge shakes his head at the most ridiculous argument he’s ever heard — slowly, heavily, as if to sayYou don’t understand.When his eyes locked onto mine, I saw that the performer inside him had been completely replaced by something else: a protector.“No,”he said, in a tone that left no room for argument.

“I can’t take that risk. You’ll be safer with your grandparents.”

I drove my hand into my hair and raked through it roughly. Those black strands — already accustomed to looking like a disaster at the best of times — were surely in a worse state than my mood.“I can’t take that risk either, Dad!”I thundered.

I was on the last straight of that glittering road to the NFL. I was this close to the touchdown of my life — I couldn’t let some nameless, shapeless fear strip it from me. Football wasn’t just a game I sweated through on Sunday evenings, some hobby. It was the blood in my veins, the air in my lungs. It was my life itself. If he was truly worried about my life, if losing me scared him this much — he needed to protect not me, but my soul. My football.

“This is complete insanity! Being exiled from my own life is complete insanity!”

My father nodded, as if he agreed. His voice was ice.“It is,”he said calmly.“But it’s a safe insanity.”

For one small, fleeting second, I thought that because he’d conceded the point, he might lower his guard — might come to his senses about this madness. But then came that familiar word.But.That word erased every good thing that came before it. More than erased — it obliterated it entirely.

“Everything I have is here, Dad!”

I wasn’t just talking anymore — I was screaming, tearing at my lungs, my voice bouncing off the high kitchen ceiling.“My school, my friends, the team I captain… That brilliant future you don’t give a damn about — it’s all here!”

“As long as you’re alive to have it.”

Those five words detonated in the middle of the kitchen like a grenade. Stripped of all mercy, built entirely from the raw and cold face of reality, that sentence froze every ounce of anger inside me in an instant. For several seconds I fought to form a logical sentence, ran through every play in my mind, and found no way out. I was speechless. Standing across from me wasn’t a father — it was an executioner with a rope already around my neck; if I kept pushing, he was merciless enough to kick the chair out from under me.

When I managed to breathe again, the anger in my voice gave way to something ragged and helpless.“I’m not going to die!”I shouted at him.

“I’m not going to die, you paranoid bastard!”

My father’s chest rose and fell quickly — the only sign that his patience was prowling the edges of its limit. His eyes made it plain that he wouldn’t tolerate another act of disrespect.“Of course you won’t,”he said, his voice sealed with an unshakeable resolve.“I won’t allow it.”I laughed — hollow, unraveling — like a man pressing a bandage over a wound that was still bleeding beneath.“And sending me away is how you plan to manage that?”I said, hoping he could hear the childish plea hidden behind the sarcasm.Please, Dad. Please don’t send me away.

He nodded. He wasn’t dropping his guard by a single millimeter.“Sending me away doesn’t guarantee I’ll live,”I said — and again, with that infuriating, pre-weighed expression of his, he agreed.

“It doesn’t.”

“And you’re still sending me.”Come on, Dad. We’re safer together. See that.

“For a while.”

I let my frustration out on the door as I turned away in fury — drove my foot hard into the wood. The door slammed into the wall behind it with a bone-rattling crash. My foot throbbed. Clinging to that physical pain as a last excuse, a last lifeline, I threw out one final argument.

“Neither my school coaches nor my academy coaches will allow this! They know I’m on the road to the NFL — they won’t just let me disappear!”

I stared into my father’s eyes with the panic of a gambler who had just pushed his last chips to the center and was about to lose everything. This time, I was praying for a miracle. But my father, with that damned composed readiness of his, shattered my hopes once more.“I’ve spoken to both of them,”he said, in a flat tone.

“They agree with me.”

A hysterical laugh, completely beyond my control, spilled from my lips. My world was collapsing, and my father had already coordinated the collapse.“They agree with you?”I asked, my voice cracking.

“Or did you force them into your way of thinking with that magnificent persuasion of yours, Dad?”

He said nothing. But at the corner of his lips, there was a movement — barely a millimeter. A victory, or a hidden sorrow. I couldn’t tell. His talent for persuasion was only infuriating when it was being used on me. Hoping to draw him out, I added,“Because they can’t possibly have lost their minds enough to keep a star out of action for a whole year — not one who has draft tryouts in June.”As I finished my sentence, my father let out a long, exhausted breath. He wrapped his fingers firmly around the empty coffee mug and walked toward the sink, his back to me — as if even that posture were part of his unshakable authority.

“You won’t be kept out of action,”he said, his voice blending into the sound of running water. He had to be messing with me. The ease of that man rinsing a glass was making my nerves scream.“You’ll continue your training in Turkey,”he added, setting the mug in the dishwasher.

“And you’ll be back in time for the June tryouts.”

He was absolutely messing with me.

“I’ll continue my training in Turkey, will I?”

I couldn’t decide whether the sarcasm in my voice was feeding off anger or dread. He dried his hands slowly with a dish towel and gave that familiar, firm downward nod.“And how exactly is that supposed to work?”I asked, genuinely curious where this absurd plan was going.

“They play American football in Turkey, son,”he said, turning to face me.

“They just call it ‘Korumalı Futbol’ — Flag Football — over there.”

He couldn’t be serious. Had he actually researched this?Korumalı Futbol.Even the name sounded clumsy and remote compared to the hard, fast, tactical warfare I knew.

“Coach McCarty and Coach Gronkowski have looked into every option available to you over there,”he continued, his professional composure intact.“They were a little disappointed to find it’s only played at the university level, I’ll grant you that. But your coaches are confident that a talent like you will be welcomed with open arms and raise the standard of play wherever you land. They’ve already sent reference letters to a few well-established programs.”

The fact that my school and academy coaches thought this highly of me puffed up my chest despite myself. Even so, their flattering words didn’t change the fact that they had gone behind my back — and I was more than furious at them for it.

“Please,”I said, feeling every last ounce of strength drain from my voice.“Please let all of this be some godawful joke.”

“You can think of it that way until the case is closed,”my father said, picking up the damned paper — which I now knew for certain was a plane ticket — and pressing it into my hand.

“When that day comes, we’ll all laugh about it. Now go upstairs. You have five hours to pack.”

He walked out of the kitchen on his last word. The paper in my hand felt like a bomb counting down every second, set to reduce my entire life to ash the moment it went off. I stood frozen. When I heard the heavy footsteps climbing the stairs, the wave of shock cresting in my mind gave way to a sharp, furious reflex. I ran after him.

“I didn’t even get to say goodbye to my friends!”I shouted into the stairwell.

My father stopped when he reached the upper floor and cast one of his short, feeling-stripped glances down at me.“You saw them at the funeral.”Had I heard that right? I stared after him as if to sayThat’s the same thing?I think he caught that look.

“You’re not leaving forever, Tommy.”

“A date with no end must have something to do with forever.”

To catch him before he disappeared from view, I took the stairs three and four at a time, the opposite of his measured pace.“At least let me see Rob.”Robert… The person who had been at my side since we were five years old — through muddy fields and the ache of first love and everything in between. My best friend, my confidant, my brother in all but name. I loved him enough to place him above my family, to call him the closest thing to a sibling I’d never had. I couldn’t imagine school, home, or the team without him. Given that we barely did anything separately — ate, drank, breathed — this news was going to bring his world crashing down around him too.

“You can call him.”

My father stepped into his bedroom and shut the door in my face. If he thought that was how this conversation was going to end, he was very wrong. I shoved the door open and pushed inside. The room met me with the melancholy air of my mother’s faint perfume. Refusing to dwell on the ache, I walked toward the man sitting on the edge of the bed, working the buttons of his shirt.

“No, Dad. I’m not saying goodbye to him over the phone.”

My father stopped undressing. The rigid set of his posture made it clear he was uncomfortable with me barging into his private space uninvited. But rather than address that, he said, “It’s too late to meet up, Tommy. And you only have five hours to pack.” Then he checked the expensive watch on his wrist. “Four and a half, actually. You’d better get moving.” His hands returned to his buttons as if nothing had happened. The mechanical indifference of a man who divided my life into minutes was driving me insane.

“Great!” I cried, throwing my arms out to either side. “The restrictions have already started.”

My mother’s family wasn’t conservative or narrow-minded. But they were people of principle, and they had an authority that wouldn’t tolerate those principles being crossed. My mother had once told me she’d funded her own Erasmus participation, that after university her family had never warmed to the idea of her living abroad, and so she had married my father without even collecting her diploma — and told her family about it only much later. She’d cried when she described how they hadn’t spoken for a while, and then after I was born gave each other one more chance to leave it all behind; I remembered that crying as if it were yesterday. I liked principles. As long as they didn’t cut against my own interests, of course.

“Nobody is restricting you.”

My father pulled my attention back from my thoughts. I hadn’t even noticed when he’d taken off his shirt and pulled on that relaxed but sharp-looking black t-shirt. “But yes — there are things you’ll need to be careful about while you’re there. In Turkey.” That pressure in the sentence was something I didn’t appreciate. I already lived a careful, disciplined, controlled life. My grades were more than good. I didn’t need a university degree or a diploma to get to the NFL. I was certain I’d earn my way into the professional league by the end of the first round, starting from the amateur draft.

The fact that I’d been invited — regardless of age — to a week-long February scouting combine, where college players undergo physical and mental evaluations before NFL coaches, general managers, and scouts, was proof enough of that.

Still, my father was fixated on that famous “Plan B” every lawyer kept in his briefcase. In case something went wrong in the amateur draft, he was pushing me toward a slower but safer route: getting onto a Division I college team and making the jump to the pros through a national championship. Maybe it was an escape plan he’d constructed for me just to quiet the fears that came from his own past.

I had only one objective: just stay in the game.

Sport consumed every second, every breath of my life outside school. Aside from my mother’s occasional fond but pointed remark —“We never see your face”— I’d never heard anyone complain about my pace. After all, a healthy mind lived in a healthy body. This life was infinitely better than drifting through the streets, wasting my time. Alcohol and cigarettes were forbidden fruit from another planet entirely; I’d have to go all the way back to childhood to remember the last time I’d eaten what they called “fast food.” I was, in every sense, a model individual — in the shape of a flawless athlete.

Living my life with this much precision, what exactly was there left to be careful about?

“Girls.”

My father looked at me as if he’d read my thoughts. “You can’t behave as freely as you do here,” he added, feeling the need to explain himself. His eyes dropped to the grey shorts I was wearing. “You’d be better off keeping that inside your underwear, son,” he said.

This had to be a goddamn joke. I’d had an active sex life since I was fifteen. A devastatingly good one — one that kept my anger in check. Maybe that was the single most important reason my career had shifted from the defensive line to the offensive unit. When I wasn’t having sex, I turned into a walking powder keg, and that was only useful when I was grinding the opposing team into the dirt during a game. Back when I was a cornerback —

For the past three seasons I’d been the brain of the team. When I took the field as the starting quarterback, it wasn’t just the ball I controlled — it was the pulse of the thousands of people in those stands. To shoulder that enormous pressure on the field, I needed to be more controlled, more clear-headed. Sex was my only refuge inside that wild adrenaline cycle; my most effective medicine. It was the only way to empty my mind, to set down the weight on my shoulders for a moment. And now my father was standing in front of me, telling me to shut that valve. It was too late to ask me to give this up — it wasn’t a choice anymore, it was my mechanism for staying in the game.

“Don’t make this harder than it needs to be. You don’t even know if you’ll like it there.”

He was right. I had no idea about that country, those people, those streets. I hadn’t spent enough time there to know. But I was certain I wouldn’t like it more than my life here, and for me that was enough.

“You’re taking my future from me.”

My father straightened his shorts and sank onto the bench at the foot of the bed. He patted the empty space beside him with his hand — calling me to sit next to him, the way he used to when I was a child. But I didn’t move. The few meters between us was in reality a chasm that had opened across miles. Seeing I wasn’t budging, he gave a deep sigh, conceded, and looked at my face.

“I’m not taking anything from you, Tommy. On the contrary — I’m working to give you a better future, and for that, you first need to be breathing, son.”

I said nothing. When I folded my arms tight across my chest, I felt the fabric of my t-shirt wrap itself around my arms and torso so firmly it was nearly at the point of tearing. This was how my body had chosen to display the reward for every drop of sweat I’d spent in the gym all summer, every hundred kilograms I’d pressed.

But what good was any of it? If I wasn’t playing real football, on my own field, with my own team, this pile of muscle was nothing more than a glamorous prison.

“Besides — would your coaches actually allow something like this? Believe me, in the professional world, nobody wants to lose their best man right before the tryouts.”

Not a single word had left my mouth yet. My father took my silence as an opening and kept working on me with that silver tongue of his. “Come on, Tommy. Didn’t you just say yourself that they wouldn’t allow something like this?” My eyes narrowed. He was trying to back me into a corner with my own logic. I needed to break up his monologue before this chess move landed.

“And yet they have,” I said, my voice cold as ice.

My father relaxed at this small crack I’d let open in my walls. “They have,” he said, his tone returning to its usual gravity. “They have, because they had their own conditions. They agreed to manage you — on the condition that all control remains with them.”

The sharp, clear world inside my head blurred all at once. Control? With thousands of kilometers and an entire ocean between us, what control was he talking about? How could they manage me like a puppet from that distance? What exactly did they mean bymanagingme?

“I’m only financing this trip, son. They’re planning everything — just like they do here. When you get there, nothing will change. Your school, your sport, your diet — even your position on the team…”

What I was hearing strained the limits of logic. It ran against the nature of sport itself. Nobody let someone come down from the mountain and push out the person already in the field; being a quarterback meant earning that jersey with your sweat and your blood. It was naïve to believe that coaches wherever I was going would roll out a red carpet for a kid arriving from across the ocean. My accomplishments here would be nothing over there but statistics on a page.

“Your coach included your full development file when he sent the reference letter,” my father continued, smothering my objections before they were even born. “Wherever you go, they’ll know you led a state-champion team, that you became a force in the academy league, and that professional clubs have you on their radar. You won’t be starting from zero, Tommy — you’re being transferred there as aprospect.”

The only thought in my mind at that moment made me say: “But the team is going to hit rock bottom!” My voice bounced off the walls of the room. “Without me, making it to the championship match is impossible. We’re leaving those kids at the halfway point.”

My father raised one eyebrow. “That’s your ego talking,” he said. I shook my head in protest. “It’s not my ego talking, Dad — it’s the team’s starting quarterback. The person who knows them better than they know themselves, who has their every breath on the field memorized.”

My father said nothing. Which gave me time to underline everything I was saying in thicker and thicker lines. “Do you have any idea how many people’s futures I’ll be setting back? Those kids’ scholarships, their whole futures — they’re tied to this championship,” I pressed. “They need me.” My father looked as though my words were going in one ear and out the other.

“Your backup won’t let the gap show.”

At those words, I let out a bitter, scoffing laugh. My backup was talented, yes — but his leadership qualities were as fragile as paper. My father knew that at least as well as I did, but it didn’t suit him to admit it.

“What about school? It’s my final year.”

I thought this was my last remaining card. For someone who constantly reminded me to think about a future beyond football, my grades carried a significance he couldn’t ignore — and he would want to preserve my record.

“I found a few schools with foreign exchange programs. I’m in talks with them.”

This was the diplomatic way of sayingI’ll pick the most prestigious one for you.My GPA had never dropped below an A-minus, so it was impossible for them to reject me.

My shoulders dropped, inches away from giving up entirely. I had no more counterproposals left to keep me here. I could run away. But that stunt would get me nowhere. Everything from my school fees to my sports academy funding ran through my father’s wallet. A significant inheritance would eventually come to me from my mother, but her parents were still alive. I wasn’t allowed to touch any of the savings she’d built on her own and left to me before I turned eighteen. Nor the fund she and my father had been building together for me over the years.

In short: my freedom was held at the end of the checks my father signed. I was at his mercy just to survive. I lifted my eyes from the floor and looked straight into my father’s.

It wasn’t ideals speaking anymore. It was the survival instinct.

“Will I have to compromise on my comfort?”

My question — close enough to a concession that it lit up his face — was met with him getting to his feet. “No,” he said. “Your routine won’t be disrupted. Your room at your grandparents’ has already been arranged to resemble yours here.” For God’s sake! It had only been a few days since my mother died. I hadn’t even peeled back the first layer of my grief, couldn’t see past the smoke of mourning right in front of my face — and yet my father had already spoken to my grandparents, already bought my ticket, already arranged for a room thousands of kilometers away to be redecorated.

Just then, a deep, gut-wrenching howl rose from my room, and I startled. Responsibility shouldered its way past grief. “What about Safir?” I asked, my voice wavering.

“Can I take her with me?”

Safir, as if she’d been waiting for her name to be spoken, burst into the room. The mud in her fur had dried; that snow-white noble coat was matted and clumped. She wedged herself between my father’s legs and kept on howling — that sharp sound was less a farewell than a resistance. Safir didn’t want to go either. She was clinging to this soil, to this house’s smell, and most of all to the traces of the woman who was no longer here. Just like me.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. That country might be far too hot for her.”

He was right. Samoyeds were cold-climate animals. In their genes lived the freezing winds of Siberia, the ice-locked lakes, the proud stoicism of sled-pulling ancestors. Minnesota’s brutal winters sometimes barely felt like enough for her — throwing her under a southern sun would be the same as tossing a snowflake into a fire. Still, she was the only living memory my mother had left me. My mother had entrusted her to me in her will; and now I was being asked to turn my back on that trust and leave.

“I can’t leave her here. She’s all I have left of my mother.”

My father stroked Safir’s head gently. “She’ll be fine here,” he said in a reassuring voice. He hadn’t seen me shake my head in refusal. “I can’t leave her here, Dad. That would be nothing short of a betrayal of what was left in my care.” He stopped petting the dog, who was pressed against his legs, and stood up quickly, closing the distance between us. His hands came down onto my shoulders like clamps; his eyes drilled straight through me. “If you cause her death,thatwill be the real betrayal, Tommy,” he said, giving me a slight shake.

“That dog won’t survive the Turkish heat.”

This was ridiculous. Minnesota was sweltering for stretches too, but we’d always found a way for Safir. We could find a way there too. The treacherous part of my brain was telling me the real reason my father didn’t want to send Safir with me was that she was my mother’s dog. He wanted her here, in this house, so he could still believe my mother was somewhere nearby. And clearly Safir, held captive by the scent of her, was fighting not to leave this house either. So tell me — who was the one getting burned in this story?

Me.

Me, who couldn’t even manage to be as much as a damn dog.

I exhaled a surrendering breath. I felt like I’d used up my argument quota for the night. “I’m going to go call Rob,” I said, pulling free from my father’s grip. I bent down and stroked the dog, who was pressing her wet nose into my bare leg.

“Starting tonight, your baths are on Papa Vanga. Don’t forget to give him hell, okay?”

Safir let out a powerful howl. As a half-formed smile crossed my face, I whispered, “Good girl. That’s my girl.” I could feel my father’s eyes on me, but rather than meet them I simply turned my back and walked away.

“If you need anything while you’re packing—”

I slammed the door behind me before he could finish the sentence. In the midnight silence, the sound rose like an avalanche. As I strode hard toward my room, I dialed Rob’s number. He was God-knows-how-many-sleeps-deep by now, and I’d already started praying he’d hear his phone. I went into my room and pulled the door shut behind me. With the ringtone sounding in my ear, I swept a quick glance around the room. I had no idea where to begin.

“I hope you’re dying. It’s too late to be a murderer.”

“Rob,” I said to the sleep-thickened voice. “We need to talk. It’s urgent.” The tone I delivered those words in gave away the seriousness of the situation as clearly as the words themselves. Fortunately it didn’t take my friend long to notice — though, as always, he turned it into a joke first.

“You’re going to be a dad.”

I rolled my eyes with great theatrical effort and dropped onto the bed. More accurately, I collapsed onto it like a sack. At that moment my eyes landed on the drawer I’d left hanging open in search of a charging cable just before my father had called me down. Or rather — on the box of condoms inside it. Active sex life or not, a baby was the absolute last thing I wanted. Maybe going to Turkey wouldn’t kill my future, but a clueless baby would most certainly be the assassin of every dream I had. That’s why I took extra precautions every single time, without exception. Condoms and morning-after pills were my most trusted companions on that road. Though, remembering my father’s warning, it seemed I wouldn’t be needing them much longer.

Farewell, Tommy the sex god. Hello, Saint Thomas.

“Wait — are you actually going to be a dad?!”

A silence fell between us, thick with unspoken words, and it spooked him out of his own joke. “It’s way too late for nonsense, Rob.” A relieved breath came from the other end of the line. I could have sworn his hand was on his own chest.

“Since we agree on the hour and we’ve established you’re not becoming a father — what’s so urgent?”

I took a troubled breath and stretched out on my back. “I’m going to Turkey.” The tone of my voice — heavy with gloom — was met with the breezySo what?of someone only half awake. “You woke me up from a dream where I was sleeping with three girls for this?” he asked. I’d known him long enough to know that unlike me, he’d always argued that sex was a pleasure best enjoyed collectively. He said one-on-one increased the risk of emotional attachment. You could call it fear, too. He had a trailblazing history in the field of group encounters and apparently it was carrying over into his dreams.

“I’m leaving in a few hours.”

A small silence fell on his end of the line. “Nothing major, right,” he said — and the alarm in his voice had become audible. He probably thought something had happened to someone else over there. “My dad’s sending me to my grandparents for a while,” I said, and the penny dropped. “How long is a while?” Rob asked, the panic gone from his voice now. Panic had its own Rob. He hadn’t questioned the reason — we’d both overheard my father talking to Uncle Edward, so he knew the why. For him, only the outcome mattered. When would I be back. The moment I said I didn’t know, another silence fell. The kind of silence that was pregnant with difficult days to come.

“That’s really bad, man.”

Instead of sayingI know,I drew a slow, shuddering breath — as if trying to soothe my lungs, quiet the tightening pressing against my ribcage.

“What about the tryouts?”

We’d started football together. The reason I’d pulled ahead was that my father had a professional rugby background. Unlike Rob, I’d felt the rough texture of leather in my hands from the very first moment I could remember. My childhood had been shaped by that oval ball pressed into my hands during every free hour, and by training sessions that never seemed to end.

When I got a little older, I began to understand why my father had trained me like a soldier: I was the only cure for the half-swallowed ambition he’d never gotten to finish, the hunger he’d never fed.

When my grandfather suffered that serious heart attack at a young age, it wasn’t just the shadow of illness that descended on our family — it was an obligation. When the doctors banned stress from my grandfather’s life, he transferred the entire enormous weight of the law firm to his only son, my father. That meant trading training grounds for dusty case files, trading victory cries for client negotiations. My father had been forced to turn his back on those glittering offers from the professional league. And from that day on, so that he wouldn’t be crushed beneath the weight of that decision, we had dedicated every second of our father-and-son time to rugby.

Until the wild fire of adolescence dropped into my gut. Rugby was noble, disciplined — but I was looking for something else. The sport I was looking for was American football. Because inside me there was an aggression I couldn’t rein in, a desire to destroy, a willingness to do harm when the moment called for it. American football was the only arena where I could drive those dark impulses outward through a legal channel — hiding behind a jersey and a helmet.

When I said I was going to try out for the school team, Rob, with his characteristic loyalty, had followed me into that savage wolves’ den rather than leave me there alone. His enormous height and his immovable, broad frame had captivated the coach at first glance. Rob had found himself in the toughest, most critical position on the offensive line almost instantly: Tight End. Robert Michael Tucker.

We were a duo. While I brought my intelligence and my hunger to the field as quarterback, Rob became my wall of flesh, my unshakeable protector. The brilliant future we’d constructed in our minds was far beyond a childish enthusiasm. One day — one day, under the blazing lights of the professional league, we’d keep sweating into the same jersey. While the stadium roar echoed in our ears, the commentators would talk about how we found each other blindfolded. We’d carve our names into the dusty history of the NFL not as ordinary players, but as a legendary pair who completed each other.

From Brooks to Tucker.

This sentence would rise like an anthem in front of thousands of people — but right now, that dream felt very far away.

“He said I’d be back by then. Or at least that’s how I chose to hear it.”

From the other end of the phone, I laid out the exile plan my father had constructed, down to its last detail. As I talked, Rob’s always-noisy breathing grew heavier, more sparse. That quieting of his was worth more than a thousand words of grief. Rob’s silence was the loudest protest in the world to me — and rather than lighten the weight on my shoulders, it made it heavier.

“Let’s hope my dad gets satisfied easily.”

All at once, that heavy curtain of sorrow tore apart. Rob’s signature tone — the one that announced a thousand foxes were turning wheels in his mind — flooded into my ears.

“I really don’t think so,” he said, pressing down on every syllable.

If someone unfamiliar with us had been listening in on this conversation, they might have thought Rob was referring to my father’s professional ambitions or his relentless thoroughness as a lawyer. But if you knew Rob, you knew the dark and shameless corridors his mind was capable of wandering. What Rob meant by that sentence was my father’s performance in the bedroom — or his threshold for satisfaction.

For God’s sake. My father’s sex life couldn’t be a footnote in this night or any night of my life. It was a stomach-turning truth whose mere thought felt like acid being poured into my brain. But that was Rob — right in the middle of my most tragic moment, he’d dropped that disgusting but wonderfully distracting joke bomb.

“Shut up, Rob,” I grumbled. The anger in my voice was fake, but the crooked, bittersweet smile on my face was entirely real. “For making me picture that, I’m going to leave you here to rot instead of taking you to Turkey with me.”

The deep exhale that came from the other end of the line cut through the brief lightness like a knife. Rob set aside his usual irreverent cheerfulness and answered in the most stripped-down version of his voice.

“You can be sure I’ll be rotting here without you too, Captain.”

That sentence told me my father hadn’t only taken my future — he’d taken Rob’s too. Rob was my shadow on the field; something like the physical projection of my soul. The instant I called that famous hike, he knew exactly who he was going to avalanche down on; when I was squeezed under pressure, he knew to the millimeter which tiny gap I’d escape through. The bond between us wasn’t a play drilled into us in training — it was an instinct repeated thousands of times over. All that unshakeable protection of his only made sense combined with my football intelligence. Now he’d stand on that field with that enormous frame of his and not know who to shield, who to clear a path for.

Maybe he’d adapt in time, yes — but this was our final year. The year when college scouts were taking notes in the stands, when our futures were being shaped with every single pass. Every second Rob spentadaptingwas another second of that scholarship from an elite program slipping through his fingers. Without me, he’d be left in the middle of the field like a suit of armor with nothing left to protect.

“That’s your ego talking.”

My father’s voice rang in my ear again.Go to hell.It wasn’t my ego talking. It was a man worried about his brother’s future.

To push down that guilt, trying to hide the tremor in my voice, I told my biggest lie. “James is a good kid,” I said, as if I believed it myself.

“He’ll find his footing after a few practices. High potential.”

James Matt. My backup, and an absolute headache. Technically flawless — every move by the book, as if he’d stepped out of a manual — but no different from a robot with no soul. He didn’t have the spark that would look into Rob’s eyes and read the chaos of the moment, make a split-second decision and change the game. Talking about James was like replacing a conductor who could bring a massive stadium to its feet with a metronome that had nothing to say.

Rob let out a laugh on the other end of the line so hard the phone speaker crackled. It wasn’t a joyful laugh — it was that infuriating, mocking sound that comes from beneath the rubble of a collapse.

“James?” he said, sounding like he was running out of breath. “For God’s sake, Tommy — when James picks up the ball, he looks like he’s holding a bomb about to go off in his lap. That kid can’t even find his own helmet, and he’s going to see the corridor I’m blocking?”

I said nothing. Because he was right. James was disciplined, never missed a practice — but he didn’t have the dark instinct needed to keep pace with that wild, unpredictable rhythm of the field. He only memorized. We felt.

“Listen to me,” Rob continued — and in an instant his voice shed its joking tone and became cold, dead serious. “James throws the ball, Tommy. But you’re the one who builds the play. James just watches the scoreboard. You play to lift that trophy. I’m not going to find my rhythm with him. I’m just going to try to survive on that field and wait for you to come back.”

The enormous lump in my throat grew bigger, cutting off my breath. “You can’t waste your final year waiting for me, Rob. The scouts will be in the stands. You need to show what you’ve got, earn that scholarship. I can’t let you burn your future because of me.”

“You’re really going, man…”

The pure pain in his voice as he said it crossed the phone line and dissolved into the cold air of the room. Stretching this conversation out any further would do nothing but make the invisible shackles around my ankles heavier.

“I have to hang up now, Rob,” I said, trying to keep my voice firm. “I think I’ve got about three hours left to pack.”

“Okay,” he said — his voice barely above a whisper now.

To break up the heavy air, to keep Rob from being swallowed by that dark empty space, I made one last move. “While I’m gone, try not to make me an uncle too soon, alright? Keep your head out of trouble.”

Hearing that familiar laugh from the other end of the line — even colored with something bitter — was medicine for my soul. “Please make me an uncle,” he said, and I twisted my face in disgust.

“Get lost, Rob. I’m too young to be a dad.” It was the first time in the past few hours that I felt myself actually laugh.

“I’ll miss you.”

Rob made a sound of exaggerated revulsion. “Please hold onto your manhood until you’ve at least crossed the border. I’ll have plenty of time to talk to someone who’s been castrated.” My father’s words seemed to have cut deep wounds in him too. Without bothering to hold back the laughter: “Seriously, get lost,” I said, and hung up. A stupid grin was still sitting on my face. How was I going to get through my days without this kid around.

I swept my eyes around the room again and drew a deep breath. I supposed there was a more pressing problem I needed to deal with before worrying about Rob. Where on earth was I even going to start?