Although a few people around town thought Eli had used his influence as sheriff to keep his errant nephew out of jail, the truth was, he hadn’t.
Sara, the kind of mother every kid should be lucky enough to have, had gotten her son into therapy right away, and kept him there. He’d been grounded for months, banned from playing his beloved video games, lost the use of his tablet entirely, and allowed to use his phone only when absolutely necessary.
Now, his grades were up, he was talking about college again, and his therapist whom he was still seeing, said he was back on track.
While he wasn’t about to bend the law for his nephew’s sake—or anyone else’s—Eli would do everything he could to keep the kid from turning to the dark side, for Sara more than for Eric.
Eli loved his sister; she and the kids were the only real relatives he had left, since his and Sara’s parents had died in an accident nearly a decade back.
Sara and Eli had been typical siblings before the tragedy, young adults, busy with their own lives, going their own ways, but they’d grown close afterward. Sara, being a single mother on a tight budget, had started worrying about Eli then, fretting over his tendency to throw himself into his job—he’d been a deputy then, and a junior one at that—forgetting to eat right, get enough sleep, etc.
She’d driven him a little crazy, actually, but, in terms of family, she and the kids had been all he had.
He’d grown to love, appreciate, and admire his sister, and he hoped the feeling was mutual.
Sara was beautiful, with a fine mind, bookish and artistic, sensitive and shy.
Eli, on the other hand, was more outgoing, and while he’d certainly missed his mom and dad, he hadn’t taken the loss quite as hard as Sara had. She was two years older than he was, and something of a homebody, even as a child.
Growing up, Eli had spent practically every spare moment with Cord and J.P., fishing and hunting, bucking hay bales, digging post holes, riding horses, herding cattle. Thanks to the Hollisters, Cord’s grandparents, and J.P.’s happily married folks and older sisters, he’d been almost as much a part of those families as he was of his own.
Being who she was, Sara had longed for a home and family of her own. After a year of college, she’d hitched herself to Zach Worth, a crap stain of a human being, and Eric and Hayley had come along quickly. Too quickly for Zach; he’d bailed when the kids were toddlers, gotten himself a Mexican divorce and has never been seen or heard from again.
Sara, though unhappy, had admitted, albeit reluctantly, that she hoped Zach stayed gone for good, and that was a sentiment Eli and most of their mutual friends had heartily agreed with.
Even now, more than a decade later, Sara was still gun-shy when it came to men. She said she didn’t trust herself not to pick another loser, just like Zach, and if she woke up one morning married to a man like that, well, she’d go batshit crazy, that’s all.
So she kept her head down, raising the kids, maintaining her modest little house across the street from the First Baptist Church and posing as a mild-mannered daycare worker by day and plugging away at her home computer in secret every night, after Eric and Hayley were in bed, spinning yarns.
She wrote thrillers set in the West, under the name Luke Cantrell. Probably no more than half a dozen people knew that, even now that she’d been able to give up her daycare job, and Sara was fine with that. Her first book had been a hit of sorts and she was nearly finished with her second.
While her publishers would have preferred that she drop the anonymity and actively publicize her work, Sara refused. She reasoned that the reception book one had received in the marketplace might have been a fluke, and if the next turned out to be a flop, well, she didn’t want everybody in town feeling sorry for her.
If she failed, she’d fail privately.
Eli didn’t think she had anything to worry about on that score.
On another, he wished she hadn’t summarily written off the entire male gender, in terms of love and romance. She had a lot of living to do yet, and Eric and Hayley were growing up fast—one of these days they’d be off to college, landing jobs and getting married, and she’d be on her own. The fictional cowboy detective wasn’t going to warm her bed, laugh with her or hold her when she cried.
Realizing what a hypocrite he was being, Eli laughed and thrust a hand through his snow-dampened hair. At least Sara had been married once—he’d never gotten past the hot-and-heavy stage with any of the many women he’d been out with.
His longest relationship, with a kindergarten teacher named Penny, had lasted six months. Penny had given him an ultimatum one fine day: propose to me, damn it, or I’m leaving town for good.
School was out the next day, and by then, Penny had accepted a job in Omaha. She left the Creek in her pickup truck, tooting her horn as she passed Eli’s country mailbox and hauling everything she owned behind her in a rented trailer.
Like just about every other hometown woman he’d dated, Penny had accused Eli of being hung up on Reba Shannon, even though, by then, Reba had been long gone and good riddance to her.
Had he still cared for Reba back then?
No.
She’d screwed him over and nearly tanked his friendship with Cord and J.P. once and for all, and he hadn’t missed her.
Who he should have been missing was Brynne Bailey, but he hadn’t had the God-given sense to do that. Oh, he’d thought of her often, and wondered how she was doing, first in Chicago, where she’d gone to college, and then in Boston, doing whatever she’d done there.
Since she’d come back to the Creek and taken over Bailey’s though, she’d been on his mind with some regularity.
He thought back to that afternoon, when he’d finally gotten up the nerve to make a move, however tentative.
She’d been polite enough. Even asked him to stop in at her New Year’s Eve party, as a “friend.”
For all that, the message had been clear enough.
Don’t call me, Eli, I’ll call you. Not.
He’d deserved to be shot down, no doubt about it.
He’d hurt her, way back in high school, and been too much of an idiot to realize it.
Even now, Brynne was clearly wary of him.
And she’d relegated him politely but firmly to the friend-zone.
What was the point?
He’d be just another fool, standing around and hoping the next year would be better than the last one—or, at least, no worse.
Barely able to make out the shape of his mailbox, just up the road a way, Eli flipped the turn signal switch, even though there wasn’t another car in sight, coming or going.
It was habit.
Laura had passed this way with the plow, since the left-hand side of the road was relatively bare, but there was a two-foot berm blocking his dirt driveway, which was under about ten inches of snow as it was.