*

Maya is still lying in bed, and plays louder when the knocking starts and she hears her parents outside the door. A mom with two university degrees who can quote the entire criminal code, but who could never say what icing or offside meant even if she was on trial. A dad who in return could explain every hockey strategy in great detail, but can’t watch a television show with more than three characters without exclaiming every five minutes: “What’s happening now? Who’s that? What do you mean, be quiet? Now I missed what they said . . . can we rewind?”

Maya can’t help both laughing and sighing when she thinks of that. You never want to get away from home as much as you do when you’re fifteen years old. It’s like her mom usually says when the cold and darkness have worn away at her patience and she’s had three or four glasses of wine: “You can’t live in this town, Maya, you can only survive it.”

*

Neither of them has any idea just how true that is.

4

All the way from locker room to boardroom, the boys and men of Beartown Ice Hockey Club are brought together by a single motto: “High ceilings and thick walls.” Hard words are as much a part of the game as hard checks, but the building is solid and spacious enough to keep any fights that take place inside from spilling outside. That applies both on the ice and off it, because everyone needs to realize that the good of the club comes before anything else.

It’s early enough in the morning for the rest of the rink to be more or less empty, apart from the caretaker, the cleaner, and one solitary member of the boys’ team who’s skating up and down the ice. But from one of the offices on the upper floor, the loud voices of men in smart jackets echo out into the hallways. On the wall is a team photograph from about twenty years ago, from the year when Beartown Ice Hockey’s A-team was second-best in the country. Some of the men in the room were there then, others weren’t, but they’ve all made up their minds that they’re going back. This is no longer going to be a town languishing forgotten in the lower leagues. They’re going back to the elite again, to challenge the very biggest teams.

The club’s president is sitting at his desk. He’s the sweatiest man in the whole town, constantly worried, like a child who’s stolen something, and he’s sweating more than ever today. His shirt is littered with crumbs as he munches a sandwich so messily that you can’t help wondering if he’s actually misunderstood the whole concept of eating. He does that when he’s nervous. This is his office, but he has less power than any of the other men there.

Seen from the outside, a club’s hierarchy is simple: the board appoints a president, who is in charge of the day-to-day running of the club, and the president in turn appoints a general manager, who in turn recruits A-team players and employs coaches. The coaches pick the teams and no one pokes their oar into anyone else’s job. But behind closed doors it’s very different, and the club’s president always has reason to sweat. The men around him are board members and sponsors, one of them is a local councilor, and collectively they represent the largest investors and biggest employers in the whole district. And of course they’re all here “unofficially.” That’s how they describe it, when the men with all the influence and money just happen to gather to drink coffee together in the same place so early in the morning that not even the local reporters have woken up yet.

Beartown Ice Hockey’s coffee machine is in even greater need of a serious cleaning than the club’s president, so no one is here on account of the contents of their cups. Each man in the room has his own agenda, his own ambitions for a successful club, but they have one important thing in common: they agree on who ought to be fired.

*

Peter was born and raised in Beartown, and he has been a lot of different men here: a kid in skating classes, a promising junior, the youngest player on the A-team, the team captain who almost made them the best in the country, the big star who went professional in the NHL, and finally the hero who returned home to become GM.

And at this precise moment he is a man who is swaying sleepily back and forth in the hall of his small house, hitting his head on the hat rack roughly every third time and muttering, “For God’s sake . . . has anyone seen the keys to the Volvo?”

He hunts through all the pockets of his jacket for the fourth time. His twelve-year-old son comes down the hall and skips nimbly around him without having to take his eyes off his cell phone.

“Have you seen the keys to the Volvo, Leo?”

“Ask Mom.”

“Where’s Mom, then?”

“Ask Maya.”

Leo disappears into the bathroom. Peter takes a deep breath.

“Darling?”

No answer. He looks at his phone. He’s already received four texts from the club’s president telling him he needs to get to the office. In an average week Peter spends seventy to eighty hours at the rink, but even so, barely ever has time to watch his own son’s training sessions. He’s got a set of golf clubs in the car that he uses maybe twice each summer if he’s lucky. His work as GM takes up all his time: he negotiates contracts with players, talks to agents on the phone, sits in a dark video-room studying potential recruits. But this is only a small club, so when he’s done with his own work he helps the caretaker change fluorescent light bulbs and sharpen skates, reserves buses for away matches, orders equipment, and acts as a travel agent and building manager, spending as many hours maintaining the rink as he does building the team. That takes the rest of each day. Hockey is never satisfied being part of your life, it wants to be all of it.

When Peter accepted the post, he spent a whole night talking on the phone to Sune, the man who has been coach of Beartown’s A-team since Peter was a boy. It was Sune who taught Peter to skate, who offered him a place to stay when the boy’s own home was full of alcohol and bruises. He became far more of a mentor and father figure than a coach, and there have been times in Peter’s life when the old man has been the only person he felt he could really trust. “You need to be the lynchpin now,” Sune explained to the new GM. “Everyone’s got their own axe to grind here: the sponsors, the politicians, the supporters, the coaches and players and parents, all trying to drag the club in their direction. You have to pull them all together.”

When Kira woke up the following morning, Peter explained the job to her in even simpler terms: “Everyone in Beartown has this burning passion for hockey. My job is to make sure no one catches on fire.” Kira kissed him on the forehead and told him he was an idiot.

“DARLING HAVE YOU SEEN THE KEYS TO THE VOLVO?” Peter yells to the house in general.

No answer.