Little Lies

Lavender Waters and Kodiak Bowman grow up bound together after a childhood scare: a near-abduction their hockey-playing families never fully discuss. Kody appoints himself her protector. For years the two are inseparable, until well-meaning parents decide they need distance and pull them apart.

Kody deals with the separation by becoming someone else. He says the words that will hurt Lavender most and drive her away for good, then spends years alone with what he did. Lavender starts college in Chicago and moves onto his street without knowing it. The two are forced back into daily contact, carrying anxiety, old guilt, and a version of events neither has told the other.

Chapters alternate between that childhood and the present in dual first-person narration, tracing fifteen years of a friendship broken on purpose and pieced back together slowly. It opens the Lies, Hearts and Truths series, a spin-off that follows the grown children of the couples from Helena Hunting's Pucked and All In novels.

This is a slow burn. The anxiety and PTSD both characters carry are given real weight, and the pull between them builds through proximity and old history before it turns physical. Intimacy, when it arrives, stays tender and understated rather than explicit.