“I see a Bible there. May I read something from it?”

  Ruth and Matteo’s mother stands up and takes it out and hands it over, her whole body shaking. The priest holds her hand and reads from the fifth chapter of Matthew’s gospel:

  Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.

  Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

  Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

  From further down the same page, the priest reads:

  A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.

  Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel,

  But on a candlestick;

  And it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

  Let your light so shine before men,

  That they may see your good works.

  Ruth and Matteo’s parents devote the rest of their lives to charitable work. They move to the other side of the world, work hard in poor villages, and build things for others. The largest of all is a children’s home. Every morning they wake up and think they can hear their own children laughing. Just for a moment.

  * * *

  The little house where Ruth and Matteo grew up stands empty for several years. But in the fullness of time it fills with people again. A young couple renovate it, plank by plank, until almost everything is new. Their twins play in the yard. The neighbors make small talk over the fence. Hockey pucks get fired at the wall.

  * * *

  Benji’s mom’s life goes on, arduous but uncompromising. It has to, the days don’t wait for us. She has grandchildren, that saves her, grandchildren don’t wait either. Birthdays and summer holidays and Christmas Eves and scrapes and gnat bites and giggling. Ice creams to be eaten; skates to be skated on; wonderful, magical adventures to be experienced. And eventually enough time has passed for it to hurt only almost all the time. She has endured. She can miss him without screaming every time. Hug without crying all the time. Laugh without always feeling guilty.

  Life goes on. It doesn’t give us any other choice.

  * * *

  Alicia has a bed she sleeps in, a place where she lives, but she’s hardly ever there. She is either at Sune’s or Adri’s. She grows up in three homes, one very bad one but two really great ones. Besides, she has the ice rink, people who love her, and a sport that worships her. Benji’s mom and sisters hug out all their grief for him until it becomes merely whispers of love for her. Like small diamonds made from coal.

  Alicia comes home to Sune one day with a puppy Adri has given her. The girl explains very firmly that it’s her dog, no one else’s, but that it has to live at Sune’s.

  “I have to go to school and I have to train! And I can’t leave the dog all on its own then! So you’re just going to have to help!” she declares.

  “I see. Yes, I see. Well, I suppose that’s what will have to happen,” the old man nods.

  “Can I have jam sandwiches?” Alicia asks.

  Of course she can. As many as she wants.

  * * *

  The Ovich sisters visit Benji’s grave every day. If he had been there, he would have said that they talk to him more now than they did when he was alive. Whenever they think that, they want to hit him, and that’s when they miss him most of all.

  They carry on running the Bearskin pub, even if everyone just calls it “Benji’s” these days. There’s no sign outside. There’s no need. They honor Ramona’s tradition of simple beer and bad food, at least to start with, then the food gradually gets better because Katia, unlike Ramona, knows how to use a cookbook. Gaby’s children do their homework in the bar, she worries about being a terrible mother half the time, but when they grow up they will tell her that they wouldn’t swap the way they were raised for anything. Their aunt Adri is mostly responsible for threatening to punch men in the face or actually punching men in the face, depending on the time of day. Teemu and a few of the other black jackets come in one day and offer the sisters a new billiard table that “fell off the back of a truck.” They carry it in and some of the biggest idiots in the Pack try to play a couple of times, but naturally they’re so hopeless that Adri contemplates burning the thing just to put an end to their torment. But then, early one afternoon when she’s on her own cleaning up in the bar, there’s a knock on the door. A group of young boys are standing outside, eager and naive, asking if they can play billiards for a while. She lets them in. They don’t go home until she drags them out. They come back the moment she opens the next day. She heats up microwave pizza for them and they play and play and get better and better. She wouldn’t be surprised if one of them ends up being world champion one day.

  * * *

  This is that sort of town, it really is.

  * * *

  It’s Ana’s birthday. She’s not expecting anyone to remember, but her dad is sober and has been up all night decorating the whole ground floor with balloons. The dogs have popped every single one. Ana has never felt so loved.

  The doorbell rings and Hannah is standing outside. Tess is waiting shyly a little way behind her. The van is parked by the fence.

  “This is for you,” Hannah says, with eyes she has to blink the tenderness out of.

  It’s a voucher for driving lessons. Ana laughs for a long time. Then Hannah asks if Ana and her dad would like to go on a “research trip,” so they do. Her dad hasn’t even forgotten to take his rifle out of the pickup. They drive several hours to a larger town. Far enough for there to be a college, but close enough for Ana, if she gets a driver’s license, to be able to live at home and commute to college. Hannah clears her throat and says:

  “This is… well… it’s a small college. Possibly not what everyone dreams of. Tess didn’t want to come here because the law course isn’t good enough, but maybe for you… well… I just mean: they have a course in midwifery here. You need to become a nurse first. But I can help you. I can… I want to help you. If you’d like that.”

  Tess stands beside them rolling her eyes at her mother. Ana doesn’t quite know what to say. She isn’t like Maya, she doesn’t know how to use words to get them to say what she wants. So she goes to the car and fetches a large envelope and hands it awkwardly to Hannah, looking everywhere except into her eyes.

  “It’s just a stupid thing. I made a Mother’s Day card every year at school after Mom left because all the other kids did, but I never had anyone to give mine to. But I thought, you help all mothers, so… fuck. Does that sound stupid or weird?”

  Hannah can’t get a single word out, so Tess has to step over and say:

  “No, Ana. It isn’t stupid. It’s lovely. You’re lovely!”

  Ana looks in one direction and Hannah looks in the other, and neither of them knows what to do with all the stuff you just carry around all your life without anyone seeing. There’s a hospital a stone’s throw from the college, and they’re both very relieved when someone over at the entrance suddenly starts shouting:

  “This needs to move! It’s blocking the ambulances!”

  It’s a nurse, not altogether unlike Hannah, angry as a whole hive of bees. Right in front of the entrance is a truck and trailer, it turns out that the man who drove it there had acute appendicitis the whole way. Getting a taxi was out of the question, of course, did they think he was made of money? But he wasn’t able to park the truck properly when he arrived and tumbled out of the cab, exhausted and in severe pain. So it’s been left there. The nurse is yelling at a security guard, who replies:

  “You think I can drive a truck? Are you mad? Who the hell can do that?”

  So Ana steps forward and says:

  “I can.”

  The guard, a man in his best years with his life’s worst hairline, turns around scornfully:

  “YOU can? A truck and trailer? YOU can drive that?”

  Ana merely shrugs her shoulders but her dad replies firmly behind her:

  “My daughter can drive anything, Give her the keys.”

  The guard just scratches his chin at first, then his jaw drops. Hannah and Tess stand and watch, neither of them has ever seen anyone reverse-park a truck and trailer before. When Ana jumps out the guard calls out a compliment that no one hears because his voice is drowned out by a roaring sound. A hacking, thunderous, whirring sound that fills the air and sends shock waves across the grass. Ana tilts her head back and looks up, then she runs over to Hannah and tugs at her arm and yells:

  “Hannah? What do I need to study to be able to drive one of THOSE?”

  Hannah looks up at the sky and smiles as her eyes follow the helicopter ambulance. It flies to those who need it, those who are injured and those who are crying for help, and those no one else can reach. It flies where no one else dare go. Right into fire, if necessary.

  * * *

  Maya sings for thousands of people in hundreds of arenas over the years when she’s grown up, but mostly she sings for herself and the best friends she had as a child. One day Ana takes her up in the helicopter, rising straight up into the sky. They take the girls with them, the girls they used to be, two laughing kids they wish they could go back in time and protect. They pick them up off the ground in the forest and hide them inside their jackets and the rotor blades spin and they fly far above the earth. High and free.

  Just one single time, ten years after the rape, Maya sees Kevin again. She’s just getting out of her tour bus in an arena parking lot, he’s just been shopping in a mall nearby with his wife. He’s reversing a rusty little car, and when he turns around he catches sight of Maya through the windshield. He’s put weight on, looks different now, softer, more uncertain. His wife is pregnant. She has her hand on his, and looks happy. He’s built a whole new life. Can he be allowed to do that?

  Maya fixes him with her gaze. He is so shocked that he stops the car abruptly. For Maya the incident only lasts a few seconds, but for him it never ends. Then she turns away and walks toward the arena she’s going to be singing in that evening. The bass player is waiting a short distance away.

  “Who was that?” he will ask.

  “No one,” she will reply, and mean it.

  She doesn’t forgive, doesn’t forget, but she doesn’t use violence just because she can. She doesn’t destroy Kevin’s life even though he deserves it. She spares him.

  But Kevin’s wife will ask him who that woman was. Kevin takes a series of terror-filled breaths, but eventually he is too weighed down to carry the lies, so he whispers the truth. Everything. The whole of the reality he has constructed since that night in Beartown collapses around him inside that car. He loses everything.

  Can he be forgiven? Can he be spared? Allowed to have a life?

  * * *

  That’s something for other people to argue about now. Maya is already flying high above it all.

  * * *

  Spring comes, and summer. It’s almost unbearable. But then autumn arrives, as brief as the blink of an eye, before winter finally hits us again. Life doesn’t go on, it starts again, everything is possible once more. Anything can happen, all the best and all the most beautiful and all the biggest adventures in the world.

  Early, early in the morning the caretaker opens the door to the ice rink and turns the lights on. Alicia looks so lonely and small as she skates out onto the ice, but she isn’t, she’s bigger than everyone and never alone again. She lies down in the center circle and looks up at the roof. When she closes her eyes and reaches out her fingers she hurts in so many places inside, but there and then she doesn’t feel anything, because Benji is lying beside her and soon a new hockey season will begin and everything can still be okay. Throughout the whole of her long career, in every ice rink and in every national game, she will do the same thing every time she gets scared or nervous: look up at the roof, reach out her hand, feel that he is there. Because Benjamin Ovich isn’t in a grave. Benjamin Ovich is at the game with his best friend.

  In the stands sit the caretaker and Sune and Adri, and the whole rink smells of cherry blossom. It’s easy to love hockey then, because hockey isn’t the past, it isn’t yesterday, it’s always next. The next change of line, the next game, the next season, the next generation, the next magical moment when something we didn’t think was possible becomes a miracle. The next chance to fly up from your seat and yell with joy. Next.

  One day Alicia will be the best in the world. She comes from a town with grief in its heart and violence in the air, and she has “Ovich” on her back, she doesn’t skate onto the ice, she takes it by storm. Good luck trying to stop her.

  Every time she scores, all the people who have loved her leave the ground, and for a few blessed moments it feels like all the sacrifices were worthwhile. This is life. One day she will come back here and teach other kids how to skate. One day she will be the one who is Spider-Man and Wonder Woman.

  Her hundred years will be our very best, most loved, most told story. And that says a hell of a lot, because we’re a hockey town. We have nothing but stories here. But all our stories have really only been about one thing: ever since the very first, about a boy who made it all the way from here to the NHL and came back with his family, about his daughter who found the best friend in the world, about a terrible crime and love that was like organ donation. About tears and struggle, about hugs and laughter, about a stage and a guitar and thousands of people in the audience. About a boy who was born in a place that had never seen ice but who one day could move faster on skates than anyone else, about other children who became the best in other ways, about the boy who became a coach and the ones who became parents and the girl who flies a helicopter to save the whole world. About a young man who could never see himself as a hero but who died like one, who ran toward fire to save a child. About families and friends. About climbing trees and adventures. About a vast forest and two small towns and all the people here who are just trying to live their lives. Sit in a boat. Tell lies. Catch zero fish.

  All of this has been about the same thing: Alicia. Every person we have talked about, every story we’ve been told, every single one leads to her. This is where all the others end. This is where hers begins.

  * * *

  One day she will make us feel like winners again.

  * * *

  Because she’s the bear.

  * * *

  The bear from Beartown.

  Author’s Acknowledgments

  My wife and our children. You are my team, always, everywhere. It’s us against the rest. I love you. (Extra thanks to our crazy German shepherd, who in my darkest moments during the final edit reminded me that nothing is more important than going out to throw a ball in the park.) My publisher, Helena Ljungström, who has guided my wavering self-confidence through this with a sharp eye and immense calm, otherwise I would probably never have finished. My office colleague, Niklas Natt och Dag, because you are always, always there, your friendship has been the greatest privilege of my life. My extra editor, Vanja Vinter, who has been there all the way, thinking and having ideas and above all being passionate, I hope you know that you’ve been invaluable. My agent, Tor Jonasson, who always fights to get me enough space to be myself. My publicist, Marie Gyllenhammar, who understands that my family and I are vulnerable and human and always takes care of us.

  I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to those of you who, for various reasons, have asked not to be mentioned by name here. Thank you for having the strength to share your darkest stories with me. I hope I haven’t disappointed you.

  For everything related to hockey I want to thank John Lind first and foremost. Without your generosity with your time, thoughts, and contacts this really wouldn’t have been possible. Claes Elefalk, who not only answered questions but also proofread long sections. Tobias Stark, for all those long telephone calls. Anders Kallur and Johan Hemlin, for patiently answering my many stupid questions. Thanks too to Petter Carnbro, Erika Holst, Andreas Haara, Ulf Engman, Fredrik Glader, Johan Forsberg, and everyone else in Swedish hockey who explained, encouraged, and helped this project along the way. I hope you know that it has been, from start to finish, a declaration of love to the sport.

  Thank you A, who was the template for Hannah, and M, who was the same for Johnny. Thank you everyone at the Salomonsson Agency, who take my small ideas out into the world. Everyone at Atria and Simon & Schuster in the USA and Canada, who from the very first day have believed so much in these books. (Above all Peter Borland, Libby McGuire, Kevin Hanson, Ariele Fredman Stewart, Laurie Grassi, and Rita Sheridan, who have made North America into a second home for me and my family.) Alex Schulman, for long, long lunches and constantly breathtaking new ideas for what can be done with words. Marcus Leifby, for large milkshakes and expansive conversation. Isabel Boltenstern and Jonatan Lindquist, two of the very first people I spoke to about Beartown. Philip de Giorgio, for sugary buns and good conversation. Jakob Kakembo Andersson, for those long walks around the lakes.

  Negar and Daniel, for your friendship and for stepping up without a second thought when everything was at its messiest. Marysia, who is never more than a phone call away when we need help. Amad, for all the help with technology I don’t understand.

  Everyone at Forum, Bonnier, and Piratförlaget, who have been involved in this series of books in various ways (extra big thank-you to Håkan Rudels, Adam Dahlin, John Häggblom, and Sofia Brattselius-Thunfors).

  All the fantastic people who worked on the television series Beartown, but especially Bonnie Skoog and Mattias Arehn, who have fought passionately for this story when it lived on in another medium; and Peter Grönlund, it was a wonderful adventure to see you build an entire universe out of the town I dreamed up. (And extra high-fives also to Adam Torbjörnsson, Alexia af Kleen, Sophie Smirnakos, and Cecilia Imberg Karabollaj, who stitched everything together.)