Building walls so well that you almost believe in them yourself is a particular kind of achievement. The humor that functions as deflection. The competence that functions as distance. The careful construction of a life that leaves no visible gaps, that presents a surface so polished that the people who know you well would not know you were lonely if you did not occasionally let them see it. And then the man who walks into that life and refuses to respect the surface.
Phoebe Somerville inherits a professional football team she did not ask for and has absolutely no framework for. Dan Calebow is the coach — competent, direct, entirely unimpressed by the defenses she runs because he has spent his career reading exactly that kind of thing. Susan Elizabeth Phillips places them in professional conflict from the first scene, and uses the sports context brilliantly: Dan sees Phoebe the way a good coach sees a player who is performing below their actual capacity. He identifies the gap between what she presents and what she is. And he is not interested in the presentation.
Phillips’s heroines are armored in ways that feel true rather than contrived — the armor has a history, a logic, a reason. The humor is genuinely funny because it is doing real work, not just providing levity. And the love interest’s ability to see through the defense without requiring her to dismantle it in advance — to love what is underneath the armor while the armor is still in place — is a very specific thing that Phillips delivers with unusual skill. Dan does not demand she stop defending herself. He simply makes the defenses unnecessary, one scene at a time.
Phillips’s comedic timing translates brilliantly to audio — this one will make you laugh out loud in public and then be slightly embarrassed about it, which is the correct response. The balance of funny and genuinely affecting is difficult to achieve and she achieves it consistently across the Chicago Stars series.
The Chicago Stars series rewards reading across the full team roster — each book follows a different player or figure in the organization, and the world Phillips built deepens with accumulation. And if the guarded or closed-off heroine, loved by someone who sees past the guard, is the emotional architecture you want more of, there is a whole tradition of it in contemporary romance.
She had a very good plan. She had, in fact, spent years constructing a plan so good that it had started to feel like a personality. He was better than the plan. The realization of that — that something could be better than the plan — is the whole of the story. It Had to Be You delivers it with warmth, precision, and considerable humor.