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Everything Comes Back: A Novel
She walked away from tennis at twenty-four. Twelve years later, on a Tuesday night at a small padel club in north Raleigh, she meets the man who walked away from the same sport at the same age.
He is there to buy her building.
Tess Halloran has run the women's program at Koffman's for three years. The wrist that ended her shot at the pro circuit is officially the reason she stopped playing, but the wrist is not the only reason, and she has not, in twelve years, said the rest of it out loud.
Marc Villar is good at his job. He works for a private equity group out of New York that buys padel clubs and consolidates them into a brand. He has closed nine of these. He has not, in eleven years at the firm, met an operator on the ground he couldn't sign up, buy out, or work around.
He has also, fourteen years ago at twenty-four, torn an Achilles in Córdoba on a wet clay court he had no business playing on. He has not told anyone the real version of that story. He has, in the years since, become a man who does not commit the kill.
Across the net on a Tuesday, Tess plays him without knowing who he is. He offers her a gracious replay at the end of the match. She refuses, in front of strangers, and walks off without learning his name.
He learns hers from a memo.
She has rules about not dating men who complicate her professional life. He has rules about closing the deal clean and going home. By the end of the first week, both of them are on the wrong side of their rules and neither of them has admitted it out loud.
What follows is twelve days, two board meetings, one sold ring, two whispered words in a parking lot, one point that comes back off the back glass with her own pace on it, and one match that ends with the wrong team winning and the right team telling the story for the rest of their lives.
Everything Comes Back is a contemporary novel about a burned-out athlete, the man trying to buy her last good place, and a sport where nothing you thought was dead stays that way.
For readers of Emily Henry's Happy Place, Sarah Dessen's Someone Like You, and the late-night confessional register of Andre Agassi's Open.
Dual POV. Closed-to-barely-open door. North Carolina spring, late April through early June.
He is there to buy her building.
Tess Halloran has run the women's program at Koffman's for three years. The wrist that ended her shot at the pro circuit is officially the reason she stopped playing, but the wrist is not the only reason, and she has not, in twelve years, said the rest of it out loud.
Marc Villar is good at his job. He works for a private equity group out of New York that buys padel clubs and consolidates them into a brand. He has closed nine of these. He has not, in eleven years at the firm, met an operator on the ground he couldn't sign up, buy out, or work around.
He has also, fourteen years ago at twenty-four, torn an Achilles in Córdoba on a wet clay court he had no business playing on. He has not told anyone the real version of that story. He has, in the years since, become a man who does not commit the kill.
Across the net on a Tuesday, Tess plays him without knowing who he is. He offers her a gracious replay at the end of the match. She refuses, in front of strangers, and walks off without learning his name.
He learns hers from a memo.
She has rules about not dating men who complicate her professional life. He has rules about closing the deal clean and going home. By the end of the first week, both of them are on the wrong side of their rules and neither of them has admitted it out loud.
What follows is twelve days, two board meetings, one sold ring, two whispered words in a parking lot, one point that comes back off the back glass with her own pace on it, and one match that ends with the wrong team winning and the right team telling the story for the rest of their lives.
Everything Comes Back is a contemporary novel about a burned-out athlete, the man trying to buy her last good place, and a sport where nothing you thought was dead stays that way.
For readers of Emily Henry's Happy Place, Sarah Dessen's Someone Like You, and the late-night confessional register of Andre Agassi's Open.
Dual POV. Closed-to-barely-open door. North Carolina spring, late April through early June.
302 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 30, 2026
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