Shooting Space

Frankie Russo does not take the ball. She takes the room. Slide, set, strip the lane until the only place left is nowhere, then stand in nowhere with them and wait for the whistle. She is the loud one on the back line, mean as a snake, funny as hell, and the one want she lets herself have is gold in a building that has never hung a women's banner. This is the year. Everybody knows it. Nobody is allowed to say it.

Caleb Mercer is the oldest twenty-four-year-old in Connecticut: grad transfer, long pole, one season left, and a daughter named Hazel who negotiates pancakes like a hostage-taker. There is a version the building gets and a version the kid gets, and he keeps them in separate rooms on purpose. Wanting something that could leave is a luxury he priced out a long time ago. Then he clocks the senior cover defender running her slide package like a conductor, and the math he does instead of wanting starts to fail.

A dual-POV college lacrosse romance about shooting space, single-dad logistics, and learning that the lane you close on the field is not the same as the one you close on a life.