Slow Fires: A Small-Town Hockey Romance

She catalogues the past for a living. She's never known what to do with her own.Nora Whitfield keeps things. She's an archivist, and keeping is also her instinct - the safest way, she's come to understand, to love something without risking much.When a box of wartime letters surfaces in a collection she's cataloguing at a local hockey club, the first one begins: I am going to say the true thing rather than the sensible thing, because you are too far away for sensible to be of any use to either of us.Nora has always been rather good at the sensible thing.Over a winter of careful mornings, she finds herself in the orbit of Cole Callahan: the club's reserved, steady defenseman, who turns the heater on before she arrives, leaves her book recommendations, and means what he says.In archival science there's a phenomenon called slow fires: documents that don't burn but deteriorate from within, quietly destroying themselves through inaction while no one intervenes.Nora knows exactly what that looks like on paper.She's about to find out what it looks like in a life.A tender, slow-burn small-town hockey romance about the difference between keeping something safe and letting it live - for readers who love quiet heroes, watchful heroines, and love stories that arrive slowly and stay.