Before We Came

Before We Came opens Sloane St. James's Lakes Hockey series. Birdie's world is upended when she learns the woman who raised her was not her biological mother, and that she was taken from her real family as a young child. Now facing the family who never stopped looking for her, she has to reckon with a new brother, a new identity, and a past she doesn't fully remember.

Complicating the reunion is Lonan Burke, her brother's best friend and a star NHL defenseman for the Minnesota Lakes — the same boy who gave Birdie her first kiss just before she vanished, and who has carried a private, unresolved feeling for her ever since. As Birdie tries to make sense of her new family, she and Lonan are pushed into close, unavoidable proximity.

This is an explicit hockey romance combining a brother's-best-friend and second-chance framework with a suspense subplot around Birdie's disappearance and true identity.