“I can’t do it,” he says after the fifth attempt.
“You can’t do ityet,” I correct. “There’s a difference.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I couldn’t do it the first time either. Or the tenth time. But I kept trying because I wanted to get better.” I retrieve the ball, hand it back to him. “The secret isn’t being perfect. It’s being willing to look stupid while you learn.”
He considers this with typical eight-year-old gravity. “Were you scared the first time you tried?”
“Scared of what?”
“Looking stupid?”
“Terrified.” I chuckle. “I was about your age, and I was trying to impress some older kids. I thought if I could do this one cool move, they’d think I was worth paying attention to.”
“Did it work?”
“I tripped over my own feet and face-planted in front of everyone,” I tell him honestly. “They laughed so hard one kid nearly passed out.”
Damien’s eyes widen. “That’s mean!”
“It was embarrassing,” I agree. “But you know what happened next?”
“What?”
“One of the older kids helped me up. Showed me what I was doing wrong. And by the end of the summer, I could do it better than any of them.” I bounce the ball to him. “Sometimes the worst moments turn into the best lessons.”
He tries the move again, this time with less tension in his shoulders. The ball almost makes it through.
“Better,” I tell him. “What changed?”
“I stopped worrying about messing up?”
“Smart kid.” I ruffle his hair. “The fear of failure is usually worse than the failure itself.”
We spend the next hour working on various skills—dribbling, shooting, footwork. Nothing advanced, just the fundamentals that build confidence. But somewhere in the middle of it, watching Damien’s face scrunch with concentration as he lines up shots, I realize something has shifted inside me.
The careful control I’ve maintained for months is cracking, not under pressure but under something far more dangerous.
Love.
Not the complex, charged thing I feel for Mila, but something simpler and fiercer. The protective instinct that made me promise my sister I’d watch over her son. The part of me that wants to build instead of destroy.
“Uncle Yakov?” Damien’s voice pulls me back to the present. “Are you okay? You look sad.”
Perceptive kid. Too much like his mother.
“Just thinking,” I tell him.
“About what?”
I could deflect. Should deflect. But something in his earnest expression stops me.
“About your mother,” I say quietly. “You remind me of her. The way you think about things, the way you ask questions. She was like that too.”
His face lights up. “Father doesn’t talk about her much. He says he didn’t know her very well. That they didn’t have a lot of time together before she died.”
“Your mother was…” I search for words an eight-year-old can understand. “She was light. Made everything brighter. Shewas brave and smart and kind, and she loved you more than anything in the world.”
