Nessa Calder

Sports Romance

After the Match

Nessa Calder

Physiotherapist and single mother Aoife Byrne has built a careful life around work, community and her fierce nine-year-old daughter. When football star Eoin Daly returns home for a testimonial season, the boy she once loved walks back into the leisure centre carrying an injured knee, a changed life and the history neither of them has quite buried. As school visits, family loyalties and the pressure of public attention pull them closer, Aoife and Eoin must decide whether a second chance can be built from something quieter than grand gestures: trust, ordinary reliability, and the courage to stay after the match is over.

Sports Romance

Bylines and Sidelines

Nessa Calder

Rain stitched the evening into something close and salt-tanged, and Sive Ní Chathasaigh stood with her back to the chain-link, watching cones go down in perfect rows. Her girls trotted out in twos and threes, chatter bouncing; hurleys tapped like impatient metronomes against shins. The floodlights kept their own weather—moths, tiny halos, a hard white sheen on wet grass.

Sports Romance / Community Wedding Romance

County and Wedding

Nessa Calder

Claddaghmore Gaels sequence

A wedding brings the Claddaghmore community together with all the old loyalties, sporting rivalries and romantic complications that follow. County and Wedding is warm, lively and rooted in people who know one another too well.