RaeAnne Thayne - Willowleaf Lane

This was a sparsely populated area, just pockets of houses here and there. No developer had stepped in to make it a subdivision, probably because the cost of delivering water and other utilities to these houses was prohibitive.

For the life of her, she couldn’t imagine why Dylan wanted to live in the tall timbers, isolated and alone. After fifteen minutes, she turned onto his driveway and finally parked in front of his small log home. Though the inside had nice amenities, with a well-outfitted kitchen and comfortable bathroom and bedroom, the outside looked more like a backwoods shack, complete with chickens pecking the gravel. For all she knew, Dylan had a moonshine still in the barn.

True to form, when she pulled up, Dylan was sitting on the porch, his feet resting on the railing. Beside him lounged his big black and tan coonhound, Tucker, who had lived with her and Pop during Dylan’s deployments and the long months of his recovery.

Tucker lifted his head when she drove to a stop, then rested it on his paws again, apparently disinterested.

Dylan didn’t look any more enthusiastic at her visit. He watched her step down from her SUV out of hooded eyes, and she didn’t miss the way he set a bottle of whiskey on a little table beside him.

Though it was hard—so hard—she pasted on a smile as she approached the porch. “Hey, there.”

She could tell instantly this wasn’t one of his good days. His mouth tightened from what she guessed was pain, and he glowered at her. Hurt pinched just under her breastbone at his deliberate lack of welcome.

Why couldn’t he let her in a little? Before his injury, she would have said she and Dylan had been close. Though he was four years older, the same as Spence, he had been her closest sibling in age. As children, he had always been patient and sweet to her, far more than most older brothers would have been to pesky little sisters. As adults, their relationship had shifted to good friends. She sent him care packages every week he was deployed and he emailed her funny little stories about interesting things he saw or whatever military experiences he was free to share, which weren’t that many.

Since he had been wounded, he had closed in around himself, shutting her out just like everybody else.

She walked up the porch with one hand clutching the handles of the brown paper bag with Center of Hope Café printed on the side. Though he was still handsome, like all her brothers, with chiseled features, full lips and the blue eyes they shared, he looked as if he hadn’t shaved in a few days and his eye patch gave him a dark, menacing air, despite the weight he had lost.

He wasn’t wearing his prosthetic, she saw, and the stump of his arm just below his elbow looked red and scarred.

“What brings you up this way?” he asked, his voice more of a growl.

No Hello, no friendly How’s my baby sister? Terse and trenchant. That’s about the best she could get out of him these days.

She leaned in and kissed his cheek just under the eye patch, catching a strong whiff of booze that broke her heart.

“Brought you some of Pop’s food. I figured it might hit the spot. Have you had anything today but Johnnie Walker?”

He eased away from her and rested his remaining hand—the one she was quite sure wanted to reach for the bottle—on his thigh. “I made a grilled cheese sandwich at lunch.”

Did you eat any of it, though? She bit her tongue to keep from asking the question. “Do you care if I put these in the refrigerator?” she asked instead.

He gestured to the door, and she pulled open the screen and walked inside.

One might have expected the inside to reflect the same general air of neglect the house showed on the outside. Instead, it was almost freakishly neat, with no dirty dishes in the sink, no scatter of magazines or junk mail on the countertop.

To her, it always seemed like an empty vacation rental, as if nobody really lived here to give it heart. The house seemed bleak and unhappy to her and she couldn’t understand how he could tolerate it for more than a minute.

She opened the steel late-model refrigerator and found only two twelve-packs of Budweiser, a small brick of cheese that had something growing on one corner and a half-gallon milk container with barely a splash left.

She put the food containers away, her own hunger completely forgotten.

“Do you need me to go grocery shopping for you again?” she asked when she returned to the porch.

“Shopping is one of the few things I can manage. I can still push a cart with one hand.”

She frowned. “Then why don’t you have anything in the refrigerator except beer and what I brought you from Pop?”

“I just haven’t had time. I’ll get to it.”

“I don’t mind,” she offered again. At least if she went shopping, she could be certain he had a few more fruits and vegetables in the refrigerator and a little less alcohol. “I know you don’t like going into town.”

He made a face. “I don’t like going to the doctor as well, but sometimes you can’t avoid it.”

Except he didn’t do that as often as he should, either. She again clamped down on the words, knowing he wouldn’t welcome them.

Since he had been back in Hope’s Crossing, she had tried nagging, cajoling and bribery to convince him he had to take better care of himself. What was the point of going through the months of medical treatment that had saved his life after his injury and the resulting infections if he was only going to waste it sitting around here?

Nothing appeared to work. If anything, he was only digging in his heels harder.

She had never told him that his near brush with death had been her own impetus for change.

She could remember sitting by his bedside right after he had been flown stateside from Germany. At the time, she had weighed more than two hundred pounds and had felt nauseous and exhausted from the long day of travel and the poor food choices she had made on the airplane.

He had been in and out of consciousness and not really aware of her and Pop sitting there beside him, both of them scared to their bones that he wouldn’t make it through the evening.

It had been a long night of prayer and reflection. As she watched her brother cling to life, she had thought about the years of diets she had tried, the weight she would lose and then regain, the frustrating, demoralizing cycle she couldn’t seem to shake.

She had just about accepted she would spend the rest of her life in that state. But now her brother had nearly died in service for his country. He was fighting to survive, barely hanging on, each moment a hard, painful slog.

Meanwhile, she was slowly killing herself, fighting high blood pressure and prediabetes at not even thirty years old. She had been alone and fat and miserable.

It had been an epiphany, a realization that she couldn’t keep going on that cycle. She had made a vow that this time would be different. She owed it to herself and she owed it to her brother to show a tiny measure of the same courage and strength he had.

The irony was, right now, she felt better about herself than since she was a young girl. She looked better, she was stronger, she was certainly healthier and no longer needed any medication. Through a healthy diet and an intense exercise regimen, she had lost almost half her body weight.

Dylan, meanwhile, had won the fight to stay alive, at least physically, but the emotional toll his injuries and new limitations had taken on a once-tough, vibrant soldier had been brutal.

He was broody and angry and she knew she couldn’t fix this for him, no matter how many grocery bags or plates of food she brought over.

“Want me to heat something up for you?” she asked him now.

“No. I’ll grab something later.”