Sune is embarrassed at being so transparent. “I want to ask for something else. Not for the club, just for me. There’s a little girl named Alicia. She’s four and a half, lives over in—”

“I know who the little lass is,” Ramona says gloomily, not because she knows the girl but because all the local bar owners know the adults who live in the same house.

“Can you help me keep an eye on her?”

Ramona pours more whisky. “Are you sure you’re not here to charm me into bed? You’re doing better now than you ever used to.”

Sune smiles. “I’d have a heart attack before you had time to undo your bra, but thanks for the offer.”

Ramona drinks. Then she says unhappily, “I don’t speak for anyone in this town, Sune. But Peter’s my boy, too. So tell him to remember who stood up for Beartown, for his own sake. No matter what this new sponsor demands.”

Sune nods. He knows she means the Pack’s standing area in the rink. This is a hard town to keep secrets in.

“I’ll do my best,” he says.

It won’t be enough.

* * *

Peter stops outside Leo’s room. The boy is twelve years old, almost a teenager. Peter thinks back to when he was born, that shattering moment when he heard his son cry for the first time. When he was allowed to pick up that fragile naked body, support the little head, with its scrunched-up eyes and plaintive cries . . . and when the wailing stopped. The first time Peter realized that the tiny person was sleeping soundly in his arms. What are we prepared to do for our children at that moment? What aren’t we prepared to do?

But the years whistle past. Fathers need to live in the moment; general managers are never allowed to. Fathers need to seize the day, because childhoods are like soap bubbles; you get only a few seconds to enjoy them. But general managers need to think about the next game, the next season, onward, forward, upward.

Peter is standing with two sticks in one hand and a tennis ball in the other. Leo used to drive him crazy asking him to go and play in the driveway. “Dad, can you move the car? Dad, can we play? Dad? Just a little while! First to five goals!” Peter would be sitting with the remote in his hand, watching a recording of a game or struggling with a stack of files and a pocket calculator, working on the budget, and would reply, “You need to do your homework first.” After his homework was done, it was too late. “Tomorrow,” the father would promise. “Okay,” the son would reply. Men are busy, but boys don’t stop growing. Sons want their fathers’ attention until the precise moment when fathers want their sons’. From then on we’re all doomed to wish that we’d fallen asleep beside them more often, while their head could still fit on our chest. That we’d spent more time sitting on the floor while they were playing. Hugged them while they still let us.

Peter knocks on Leo’s door now, and the twelve-year-old replies without opening it. “Mmm?”

“I’ve . . . moved the car out of the driveway,” the father says hopefully.

“Oh?”

“Yes . . . I thought maybe you might like . . . might like a game?”

He’s clutching the tennis ball so hard that the sweat from his hand is leaving marks in the green fabric covering. Leo’s reply is merciless: “I have to do my homework, Dad. Tomorrow, maybe!”

Peter almost opens the door and asks him again. But instead he puts the sticks back into the cupboard. Then he sits down on the sofa on his own with the ball in his hand and falls asleep there.

* * *

Kira closes the lid of her laptop. Looks into Leo’s room. He pretends to be asleep; she pretends to believe him. She walks past the living room, puts a blanket over Peter, then stops as if to brush some hair from his forehead. But doesn’t.

She sits on her own on the steps in front of the house, looking at the same stars she could have looked at from anywhere in the world. At work today her colleague gave her an envelope, sent by an older woman whom both Kira and her colleague had idolized for several years, a director and investment genius who had changed direction and set up a big charitable foundation fronted by artists and actors and backed by multiple millions. Kira and her colleague met the woman at a conference last year, they managed to attract her attention, and when they parted the woman gave Kira her business card and said, “I’m always looking for smart people with a bit of fire inside them. Get in touch if you ever need a job.” Kira didn’t really take the offer seriously, perhaps didn’t dare to, and let it remain a vague little dream. But the envelope today contained an invitation to a large conference that the woman’s foundation is organizing in a couple weeks’ time, in Canada.

“Why is she inviting us to go? Does she want to use the firm?” Kira asked breathlessly.

Only then did she see the jealousy in her colleague’s eyes. Kira looked at the invitation again and realized that it mentioned only her name. Her colleague did her best to be proud but still sounded like a little girl who was about to lose her more talented friend to the big wide world: “She’s only asked you, Kira. She doesn’t want to use the firm. She wants to give you a job.”

* * *

Kira sits on the steps outside the house with the envelope in her hand, looking at the stars. They’re the same stars you can see from Canada. She moved there once so that Peter could play in the NHL, with the best in the world. She knows what he’d say if she says she wants to go to the conference. “Do you really have to go right now? There’s so much going on with the club, darling. Maybe next year?”

* * *

Kira will never be able to explain. Peter will never understand that she has her own NHL.

* * *

Ramona phones Teemu. They have a brief conversation because neither of them wants the other to hear their weakness. Ramona doesn’t say she wants Vidar to have a better life than Teemu’s, and Teemu doesn’t say he wants the same thing. Then Ramona asks Teemu for a favor, and she waits up until he phones her back to say that it’s done.

Teemu stands outside a small house in a different part of town until the lights go off in the children’s room. When he knows that only the adults are awake, he doesn’t ring the doorbell, he doesn’t knock on the door; they’ll never know how he got in. He just stands there in the kitchen while they reach for the kitchen counters to cling on to and try to catch the glasses their shaking hands have just knocked over. He sees that they know who he is, so all he has to do is pick up a hockey bag, drop it onto the table, then ask, “Does Alicia live here?”

The adults nod, terrified.

“From now on the kitty at the Bearskin pub will pay for all her hockey equipment each year for as long as she wants to play. I don’t know if she has any siblings in the house, but she’s got brothers now. And the next adult who hurts her will have to explain why to each and every one of us.”

He doesn’t need to wait for an answer. When he leaves the house, none of the people left behind dares to move for several minutes, but eventually the bag is carried up to Alicia’s room. The four-and-a-half-year-old is dreaming deeply about the sound of pucks hitting a wall, and for a long time she won’t have any bruises she doesn’t get on the ice. She will play hockey every day, and one day she will be the best.

* * *

The girl may be fast asleep tonight. But the bear inside her has just woken up.

25

“Mother’s Song”

William Lyt is like all other teenagers: permanently on the boundary between hubris and the abyss. There’s a girl he likes, she’s in the same class, back in the spring they were at a party and she kissed him on the cheek when she was drunk and he’s still dreaming about it. So when he’s standing by her locker today his facade crumbles and he asks, “Hi . . . look . . . would you . . . I mean . . . would you like to do something sometime? After school? You and . . . me?”

She looks at him with distaste. “Do something? With you?”

He clears his throat. “Yes?”

She snorts. “Ha! I’m from Beartown, and that means something to some of us! I hope Benji crushes you in the game!”

It isn’t until she’s walking off that Lyt sees she’s wearing a green T-shirt bearing the text BEARTOWN AGAINST THE REST. Her friends are wearing similar shirts. When they pass Lyt, one of them snarls, “Kevin Erdahl’s a rapist, and you’re no better!”

Lyt stands there, comprehensively flamed. All his life he’s tried to do the right thing. He’s attended every practice, loved his captain, obeyed his coach. He’s followed all the rules, done as he’s been told, swallowed his pride. Benji has done the exact opposite, always. And who’s the one everyone loves, in spite of all that?

* * *

How can William Lyt feel anything but hatred about this?

* * *

When he turns around, he sees Leo standing at the other end of the corridor. The twelve-year-old has just seen William Lyt’s weakest point, and the little bastard’s grin pierces the eighteen-year-old’s skin all over. William goes into a bathroom and punches his own thighs until tears spring to his eyes.

* * *