So here I was. Prepared to see if the old spark might still be there.

I parked my rental car with the heavily tinted windows across the street from her address and waited, praying her neighbors wouldn’t notice and call the police. She lived in a nice subdivision near Chicago comprised of newer homes. The kind of subdivision families lived in, not normally a place where singles lived. I ignored that red flag. She probably rented a room with a few other women, or maybe she was a nanny. The Caro I knew had ambitions. She was going places. Her life was completely mapped out, while I’d just stumbled through life with only one goal in mind—playing professional hockey.

Hours later, I’d consumed most of my sandwich and soda with no sign of Caro. I was ready to give up when the front door opened. An average-sized guy walked out holding the hand of a little girl with blonde curls. I wasn’t good at judging kids’ ages, but she couldn’t be more than a few years old.

This had to be the wrong address.

I was about to turn the key in the ignition when the door opened again. A beautiful blonde woman hurried out the door, chasing a little boy, who barreled toward the man. The man picked him up and spun him around, while the woman smiled up at them. I heard their laughter through my rolled-up windows.

Pain slammed into me harder than a sucker punch by the best enforcer in the league. Agony burned through my veins to every part of my body until the anguish was so great I went numb. I didn’t know how my lungs continued to breathe in the air around me or how my heart managed to keep pumping. Surely, it’d formed multiple cracks in the last several seconds.

My strong reaction caught me off guard. Yeah, what we’d had had been fucking hot, and I’d like a do-over on ending it, but to have it affect me like this? I shook off the unwelcome emotions and denied their existence. Ours had been a young love, nothing more.

I stared, willing my mind to make sense of what I was seeing, to tell me this wasn’t her but an apparition. No matter how hard I tried to convince myself this woman wasn’t Caroline Jones, I knew the truth. I knew her smile, her laugh, the way the sun glinted off her golden hair, the way she tilted her head when she was listening intently. I knew the way her body moved with the grace of a gazelle. Yeah, I knew it all.

And there was one more thing I knew.

This guy had Caro and his kids, while I had hockey.

I’m not sure which one of us was luckier.

Chapter One

New Beginnings

~~Caroline~~

He might not have been the love of my life, but I loved him.

And now he was gone.

Mark was buried in a hole, and I was left to raise six-year-old twins on my own.