“A couple have called, but obviously we’re not responding. Anyway, what the hell are they going to do? There’s no story. Kevin was cleared. Surely not even journalists can set themselves above the law?”

“Haven’t you got a bit of influence with the local paper?”

“The editor-in-chief and I play golf in the summer. I suppose I ought to let him win next time.”

They laugh. Stub out their cigarettes, and Tails asks:

“What’s going to happen to Beartown Ice Hockey, do you suppose?”

The men look at him quizzically. Not because it’s a strange question. But because none of them but Tails cares about the answer.

*

Maggan Lyt is sitting in her car, waiting. William is sitting in the passenger seat, wearing a tracksuit top with the words “Hed Ice Hockey” on it. Filip steps out into the street with his bag in his hand, and hesitates for what feels like ages. Then he looks at his mom, lets go of her hand, and opens the trunk of the Lyt family’s car. Filip gets in the backseat; his mom opens the front door and looks William in the eye.

“You’re sitting in my place.”

William protests but Maggan pushes him out at once. The boys sit in the back and look at each other. The women in the front do the same. Maggan swallows hard.

“I know I push too hard sometimes, but everything I do . . . it’s all for our kids.”

Filip’s mom nods. She’s spent all night trying to persuade both herself and Filip that he ought to stay at Beartown Ice Hockey. But her son just wants to play, just wants the chance to be as good as he can, and what’s a mother’s job? To give her child the best possible chances. She keeps repeating that to herself, because she knows what it took for her to be really good at skiing. Sometimes she had to train with assholes, and remember that life outside had nothing to do with sports. Filip and William have played together since they were at preschool, and she and Maggan have known each other all their lives. So they drive toward Hed. Because friendship is both complicated and not complicated at all.

*

Tails gets home. He hears his son’s voice; he’s twelve years old now and loves hockey, but Tails can remember how the boy hated practicing when he was six. He used to beg and plead not to have to go. Tails took him anyway, explaining time and time again that this is a hockey town. Even when his wife, Elisabeth, mumbled, “But if he doesn’t want to play, darling, are we really going to force him?” over dinner, Tails kept taking him to training, because he dearly wanted the boy to understand his love for it. Hockey may not have saved Tails’s life, but it certainly gave him one. It gave him self-confidence and a sense of belonging. Without it he would just have been a fat kid diagnosed with a “hyperactive personality,” but it taught him to focus his energy. It speaks a language he understands in a world he finds comprehensible.

He was worried his son wouldn’t want to play hockey, because that would have left him excluded. Tails was terrified at the thought of the boy taking up a sport that Tails didn’t know anything about, so he’d end up being the lost dad in the stands who kept getting the rules wrong and couldn’t take part in discussions. He didn’t want his son to be ashamed of him.

“Give me the charger, then!” his son is yelling at his big sister.

He’s almost a teenager. You used to have to drag him to training, and now you can barely get him away, and he begs and pleads about other things now. In the past few days, about being allowed to play hockey in Hed instead. Like all the best players are going to start doing.

“It’s not YOUR charger, you stupid asshat, it’s MINE!” the boy shouts at his sister as she goes into her room and slams the door.

Tails reaches out his arm to touch him and say something, but the boy hasn’t seen his dad yet, and has time to kick the door and yell: “Give me that charger, you fucking BITCH, you haven’t got any guys to talk to on the phone anyway! Everyone knows you WISH you’d been raped but there’s no one who WANTS to do it!”

Tails doesn’t remember exactly what happened after that. He remembers Elisabeth desperately tugging at his arms from behind, trying to make him let go. His son is dangling, horrified, in the grip of his father’s huge hands, and Tails hits him against the wall time and time again, shouting at him. His daughter opens her door, numb with shock. Elisabeth finally manages to wrestle her almost 220-pound husband to the floor, and he lies there hugging his son. They’re both crying, one out of fear and the other out of shame.

“You can’t become that sort of man. I won’t let you . . . I love you, I love you so much . . . you need to be better than me . . . ,” Tails repeats, over and over again, in his son’s ear, without letting go of him.

*

Fatima rather hesitantly puts the little car in reverse. She’s borrowed it from Bobo’s parents; they had to nag her to agree to take it. She saw Bobo’s battered face, just like Amat’s, but she said nothing. Still says nothing. She just drives her son past Hed, through the forest, all the way to a city that has the kind of store her son is looking for. She asks if he “needs any hockey things” as they pass a sports store. He shakes his head, and says nothing about the fact that he may not even have a team to play on by the autumn. His mom may not have a job then, either. Neither of them points out to the other what they might be able to do with five thousand kronor. She waits outside the store while he goes in. The clerk takes the time to help him get the best value for his money, and eventually he emerges with it, carrying it awkwardly to stop his rib feeling like it’s puncturing his lung with each step he takes.

They drive home, turn off a short way before they reach the Hollow, in among the houses in the center of town. Fatima waits in the car as Amat leaves it on the steps.

*

Maya isn’t home. The guitar will be waiting for her when she gets back. “You won’t get a better instrument than this for five thousand. She’ll still love it in ten years’ time!” the store clerk promised.

*

Tails steps inside the Bearskin. Stands in front of the bar, cap in hand, hair messed up. Ramona puts her hands down on the bar.

“Well?”

Tails clears his throat.

“How many sponsors does Beartown Ice Hockey have at the moment?”

Ramona coughs and pretends to count on her fingers.

“I reckon there’s a sum total of one right now.”

“Would you like some company?” he asks, his jaw tensing.

Ramona looks at him skeptically. Then turns her back on him and goes to serve another customer. When she comes back she fills two glasses, puts one in front of Tails, and downs the other herself.

“You’re a businessman, lad. Go and sponsor Hed instead; that’ll be good for your supermarket over there.”

“Hed Ice Hockey isn’t my club.”

She wrinkles her nose.

“I’m not sure you’ve got the money to rescue your club.”

He sucks his lips in, his eyes close, then open again, rather unhappily.

“I’m going to sell the store in Hed. Elisabeth is always complaining that I work too hard anyway.”