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"Nico doesn't live there anymore, son." He says it gently. That's worse. "Nico lives in Duluth with your parents and does physio four days a week, and he's doing great, and he isn't coming back to that room. You know he isn't."

I look at the whiteboard. At the skull.

"You assigned me his integration," I say. "Fine. I'm integrating him. That doesn't mean he lives next to me."

"That's exactly what it means." Halvorsen puts his glasses back on. "You're running his integration, Dane. So integrate him. Move-in's Sunday. Make him feel welcome."

"Coach."

"That's all."

He shows up Sunday afternoon with a hockey bag, a duffel, and a black garbage bag full of what turns out to be bedding.

That's it. That's everything he owns that he brought to Minnesota.

The team house is a big ugly brick thing on Birch Street that the boosters bought in the nineties. Six of us live there: me, Jace, Wes Abernathy, Gunnar, and Kasper, who is our backup and who mostly lives in his room playing video games with the door shut. And now him.

Everyone happens to be in the kitchen when he comes in. Nobody planned it. Everybody just ended up there, leaning on counters, eating cereal at three in the afternoon, waiting to see.

He stops in the doorway with the garbage bag over his shoulder like a burglar.

"Hi, honeys," he says. "I'm home."

Gunnar snorts into his cereal.

"Upstairs," I say. "Second door on the left."

"Ooh. Upstairs. Fancy." He looks around the kitchen, at the dish rack, at the chore wheel on the fridge that Jace made with a paper plate and a brad. "Do I get a spot on the wheel? I'm good at dishes. I'm excellent at dishes. Ask anyone."

"Before you go up," I say.

The kitchen gets quiet in a way that means everybody's listening.

"House rules."

He sets the garbage bag down. He crosses his arms. He leans on the doorframe like he's settling in for a movie.

"Hit me."

"You're at the rink by five-thirty. Not six. Five-thirty. You put the pucks out and you fill my water bottles."

"You understand that's before dawn."

"On the ice, at the morning sessions, you say one word to me. Yes."

"What if I need to say ow?"

"Yes."

He blinks. "Okay, that's a little bit funny, I'll give you that one."

"And you eat when I say."

That one lands. I see it land. His smile doesn't move, but something behind it goes still, the same way it did at the boards the first morning.

"I'm sorry. I eat when you say."

"Team meals. House meals. You sit down, you wait. When I tell you to eat, you eat."