The Coach's Enemy

The budget news is bad and Nate can take it. *No travel tournament. No new helmets. And they're cutting the assistant coach line item by fifteen percent.* The other news is the one Celia braces herself for. She picks up her coffee, takes a sip, sets it back down on the floor. Then she says the name. Leo Vasquez has been hired by Essex, two weeks ago, and is coming back to the valley. A former Essex player who went pro for a few seasons, then blew a knee in the ECHL, then spent six years turning a losing juniors program in Massachusetts into a state contender. *He's got a state championship on his resume. You don't.* Nate does not have one. Nate has a rink he grew up in, a photograph on a shelf of two brothers in front of it, and a senior year he does not talk about. He has his younger brother Matteo living in his house and playing on his team and shooting left, the way their father did. And he has a first game already circled. *The first game of the season is against Essex. November fifteenth. Home ice.* What Nate does not know is that Matteo found the other coach's videos and reached out first, set the whole thing in motion without telling him, and that the meeting he walks into is his own brother's idea. What neither of them sees is Tristan Farrow, Nate's assistant coach, who is polite about everything, who has been telling Matteo that scouts would notice him, and who happens to be Alistair Farrow's nephew. Alistair sits on the Essex Eagles board and likes to keep an eye on things. A grainy video starts circulating. A folder ends up in front of a board that has already decided what it thinks. So the enemy across the ice turns out to be the only person in the county who is not working an angle, and the thing that costs Nate his job is not losing a hockey game. A closed-door enemies-to-lovers hockey romance about a small rink town, a decade-old rivalry between two coaches, a teenage brother who deserves better than either of them managed, and an overtime goal that settles nothing except who is standing at the bench afterwards.