The Cedar Ridge Blades by Willa Creighton

Nell Fenwick opens Rink Road Coffee at five in the morning and closes it at four in the afternoon and raises her five-year-old daughter alone in between. She spent three years building a careful life after her husband died, and the life is good. She does not need it to be bigger. She is almost sure. Hollis Vance came to Cedar Ridge to be quiet. He was an NHL player once, before a shoulder injury ended his career at twenty-nine and sent him to an ECHL captaincy in a small Vermont mill town. He has built a porch on a cabin by a cold pond and told himself that is enough. It is easier to believe on the mornings he is not sitting at the far counter of Rink Road Coffee watching Nell Fenwick work. Then on the first Tuesday of October, her five-year-old daughter hands him a paper snowflake — and the counting stops. What follows is six months of cold Vermont mornings and second mugs and late-season hockey and the slow, honest work of letting yourself be loved. A warm, closed-door hockey romance about two people who got very good at being alone, and what happens when a small girl in a red coat decides they should be together. Set in Cedar Ridge, Vermont — a town where the rink saved the economy, the general store owner remembers everything, and the coffee shop counter has a maple knot that looks like a heart if you tilt your head just right.

The Cedar Ridge Blades

The Coffee Shop on Rink Road