Page 1 of Home Ice Advantage

I. FALL

Chapter One

September

On the day of Ryan Sullivan’s forty-fifth birthday he discovered that his wife had gotten him a divorce.

Embarrassingly, it took him until the afternoon to realize it.

He had left early in the morning to get to the game with his peewee hockey team. That kept him occupied for a few hours. It was his first coaching position and he’d been taking itreallyseriously. Sure, it was only peewee, but eleven- and twelve-year-olds were a real handful on the best of days. To make matters worse, Ryan had been mediating a season-long dispute between the parents of his 1C and the parents of a kid who thoughthedeserved to be the 1C. He’d kept their ice time pretty even, but that didn’t matter to hockey parents who looked at the lines beforehand and kept track of matchups and deployments.

After the game, Paul, the father of Jaxon-the-2C, confronted Ryan outside of the locker room. Ryan had to talk the guy down, spinning a tale about PP1 time and reassuring him that really,no onewas scouting this early, and it truly was not a knock on Jaxon’s hockey skills that Wyatt had been taking more offensive-zone draws, but simply that Jaxon’s defensive responsibility was stunningly well-developed for his age and—well. At least Paul hadn’t punched the locker room wall this time.

Ryan had been so busy with the parents that by the time he got out to the parking lot, it was over an hour later than he normally would have been on his way home. He took a moment, alone in his car, to rub his eyes. When he was on the ice with the kids, he fucking loved every minute of it. He’d always considered himself a people person, but the parents...man, the parents were something else.

And holy shit, did Ryan know aboutparents. Ryan had four brothers who had all played pro hockey in some form or another, and their dad made Paul look like a family therapist in comparison.

By the time he had gotten out of the rink, stopped by Dunkin’ to get his third cup of coffee, braved the shitty weekend traffic on the way home and narrowly avoided getting sideswiped by some asshole doing 80 mph with nowhere to go, the headache was building up behind his eyes. The news radio was still talking about the fact that yesterday the Boston Beacons, who’d already fired their general manager in the offseason, had fired their head coach in the middle oftraining camp, which didn’t bode well for the season. If anything, the headache intensified.

It didn’t get any better when he actually got home.

He parked in front of the house the same way he always did because the garage was where he’d set up all of his hockey equipment and the skate-sharpening machine and you could only fit Shannon’s car in the other side anymore.

He keyed in the door code and the lock whirred uselessly in place.

Ryan frowned and tried it again. Another long, sad whirr. He waited for the lock mechanism to reset before trying again, slowly this time, to make sure he hadn’t typed it wrong.

The combination didn’t work.

Ryan tucked his coffee into his elbow as he shifted his bag around and fished for the cell phone in his pocket. “Shannon?”

“What do you want, Ryan?”

“Did you...change the locks?”

“What doyouthink?”

“It seems kinda like you changed the locks.”

“Really? Wow, look at the brain trust we got over here today.”

Ryan took the phone away from his ear and stared at it. This kind of venom in Shannon’s voice wasn’t entirely out of the blue, but he couldn’t figure out what he’d done today. “Shannon, why did you change the locks?”

“Why didn’t you stay at the rink so my fucking process server could find you?”

The pieces of the puzzle fit together with the sudden clarity of figuring out the right move on the ice ahead of anyone else. Except this time, he was trailing the play. “Shannon, are youdivorcingme?”

“No shit, Sherlock. I’ve only been trying to talk to you about it for the last goddamn month.”

Ryan stared at the phone again. “You have?”

Shannon hung up on him.

He thought, for a second, about all of the teammates and friends he’d known who had gotten divorced and how you probably weren’t supposed to lock your spouse out of the house without warning. He thought about equitable distribution and how humiliating it would feel, telling a judge,well, she locked me out, so...

He had never really wanted to move to New Hampshire in the first place, but it was close to Shannon’s family. The thing was, he’d never even been particularly fond of the house in the first place. It felt like more work than it had been worth, the constant negotiations with Shannon about how much of his awards and medals and memorabilia he could keep anywhere except the basement. About how much space in the garage he was allowed to use up for his workshop.

Maybe...he could just let her have the house.

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