Man Down

Nate Doherty has spent four years inside the cage. As Grafton's starting goalie he has built his whole identity around the crease: reading a shooter's hips, absorbing the hit, calling the slides for a young defense that lost its anchor when Jake Brennan graduated. His head coach is the man who drove to Canton and sat in a waiting room for three hours when Nate's dad had shoulder surgery, the man who talks to him in a language no one else in his life speaks. Nate owes him everything. Which is why wanting Callahan's daughter is the one shot he cannot stop.

Riley Callahan grew up in the building with her father's name on the hallway plaque. She taped her first ankle at sixteen, logged her clinical hours in his training room, and reads compensatory mechanics before the coaches do. She knows Nate's body the way she knows every athlete's. Clinically. Precisely. Professionally. Until her thumb finds the pulse at his wrist and it is faster than his breathing should allow, and the measured distance she has spent years building starts to give.

She has a Hopkins acceptance in her bag and a DPT program waiting in Baltimore. He has one last season in the crease and a secret to manage like a one-goal lead. A forbidden, slow-burn senior-year sports romance about the man who built the walls Nate lived inside, the woman who made him want to step out of them, and the cost of a thing that cannot stay hidden until June.