Rewind It Back

**Author:** Liz Tomforde

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The weight of secrets carried alone, the way childhood love can survive six years of silence, and the courage required to rewind to the moment everything broke and choose differently.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who believe in second chances, who understand that the deepest loves are often the most complicated, and who want to watch two people find their way back to the home they were always meant to share.

Rio DeLuca is twenty-seven years old and plays defense for the Chicago Raptors, a professional hockey team that has given him everything he thought he wanted. He has money, a career, friends who feel like family, and a four-bedroom house in a quiet neighborhood that he bought when he was twenty-one. What he does not have is a second date. Not once in six years has a first date turned into a second. Every woman he meets is perfectly fine, perfectly pleasant, and perfectly wrong. He cannot find the spark, the ease, the sense of home he once knew. His friends are all paired off, building lives and families, while Rio sits in a house full of empty rooms, surrounded by space he never learned how to fill. Hallie Hart is twenty-five, working as a design intern at a Chicago firm while moonlighting as a bartender to keep her finances from collapsing. She has been in Chicago for six months and has successfully avoided the United Center, the Raptors, and everything connected to the man she once loved. She is exhausted, stretched thin, and carrying secrets that have weighed on her for years. When a blind date brings her to a hockey game and she finds herself staring through the glass at Rio DeLuca, the careful walls she built around her past begin to crack. This is a romance, but it is also a story about the stories we tell ourselves to survive. Rio has spent six years believing Hallie chose her family over him, that she walked away from what they had without looking back. Hallie has spent six years believing Rio abandoned her when she needed him most, that he chose his mother's version of events over the girl he claimed to love. Both of them are wrong, and both of them are right, and the truth sits in the space between their childhood homes, on a rooftop where two kids once shared mixtapes and moonlight. The novel moves between past and present, weaving memories of a Boston childhood with the awkward, charged reality of two adults trying to navigate a reunion neither expected. The tone is warm and witty, full of banter that…