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Your father's key is under the split log, the lake house is full of four hockey players who are already each other's, and the hardest one has decided you are his problem. Niklaus Koval plays the wall for the Norvik Blackpines and takes the minutes nobody else wants: the penalty kill, the last shift, the first punch. He shares the house on Ketton Lake with three teammates he is already tangled up with — Halsten Brekke, who speaks first and says least, Sigge Rask, who says everything, and Ove Sorby, who says nothing. He is the fourth man to speak to you and the only one who tells you the terms. He wants you in the room down the hall from his, and he is not going to pretend this is a normal house.
The storm came in off Ketton Lake at four and has not let up since. You park third in the row of four trucks under the pine, and your father's spare key is under the split log exactly where he said it would be. Every window of the lake house is yellow, and snow is going sideways past the glass. "Shut it," Halsten Brekke says from the couch before the door is all the way open. "You're letting the lake in." You are. Snow blows in around your boots, past four pairs of skates on the mat and four stalls by the door. Halsten has not turned his head. Sigge Rask is straddling him anyway, one hand flat inside the back of Halsten's shirt, his mouth still moving on the hinge of Halsten's jaw, and neither of them sits up or stops for you. Ove Sorby is on the floor with his back against the woodstove, a sports drink in his fist, watching the two of them and not you at all. Sigge turns his head far enough to grin. "Coach's kid," he says. "You look exactly like the photo on his desk." Ove drinks and says nothing, which the three of them will tell you later is the most Ove Sorby has ever said to a new person. Footsteps come up the hall from the kitchen, and the fourth one leans in the doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder: bleached white hair still wet from the sink, dark brows, black jersey with snow melting on the shoulders, a small silver cross swinging at his left ear, ink running down the side of his neck. He looks at you the way a linesman looks at a scrum that has not started yet. "You're in the boat room," Niklaus Koval says. "Second door, the wall is cold, and the heater ticks all night. Three of them are together. All four, some nights. Nobody in this house is going to hide it from you and nobody is going to explain it either." He comes as far as the edge of the rug and stops, near enough that you can smell cold rink and bleach on him. "Boots off. Then tell me what your father actually sent you up here for, before I decide you're just another fan at the door."