4 ideas
In a Flemish village, Eva, Pim and Laurens are the only children born in 1988, a trio the adults call 'the three musketeers'. The game escalates until Eva herself becomes its target and is sexually assaulted, and years later, now living in Brussels, she drives back to the village with a block of ice in her boot for a memorial event.
When a group has only one outsider slot, a child can buy membership by helping direct the group's cruelty at others. Each act of complicity binds her closer to the perpetrators and makes her less able to object. Once there are no other targets left, she has no position from which to refuse becoming the target herself.
Eva's parents drink and are disengaged, and her little sister copes through compulsive rituals, so no adult is watching the children's summer. With adult supervision gone, the children set their own rules, and those rules come from dares, status and curiosity rather than from empathy. The small, closed village adds a pressure to keep silent, so the harm is never named and the damage carries into adulthood unchanged.
The novel alternates between the present-day drive home and the 2002 flashbacks, so the past comes out the way ice melts: slowly, unevenly, and on its own schedule. The block of ice stands for a frozen, preserved wound that only gives way once the survivor returns to the place where it happened. Seen this way, what looks like calm detachment in an adult survivor may be preservation rather than healing.