matter, but that didn’t make it minor to him.
Acknowledging that, she headed back to work. But it stewed away inside her brain and heart until the next morning, when she walked past his room as usual, but no light was on under his closed door. She quickly slipped down the hallway, wondering if he’d had a bad night, and maybe he didn’t sleep, or if he was finally sleeping through the night. Either way the next morning and the one after that were the same thing, and, by then, she knew that he was avoiding her.
She groaned at that. Because she really, really cared about him. Yet she also could see that he wouldn’t be an easy person to be around.
As she was leaving for a couple hours on her own time, she saw Robin outside with the horses. She walked over and said, “Hi, how are you doing?”
“Good,” she said. “Iain is coming by this weekend for a visit. That’ll be nice.”
“Good,” she said. “Maybe you can get your brother to see him. He’s pretty cranky and miserable these days.”
Robin shot a sideways look. “You two seem pretty close.”
“Well, we were,” Ilse said sadly. “Until he had the fall a few days ago. And now it’s like he’s shutting me out.” At that, she laughed. “Look at me. I’m making a big deal out of nothing. It’s just that every morning I’ve been stopping by his room to see if he’s awake, as he’s been waking early, and then I come back with coffee and spend a few minutes with him,” she said. “And I really liked that time with him, and I think he did too. But the last three mornings, his light hasn’t been on, and either he’s been sleeping or pretending to be asleep.”
“Interesting,” Robin murmured. “He’s not an easy person to get along with.”
“Yeah,” Ilse said. “I noticed.”
She laughed. “He wasn’t always like this,” she said, “but our mother died when we were young, and then our father ended up with a new wife. As soon as Keith turned sixteen, our father showed him the door and told him that he was a man now, and he could get out on his own.”
Ilse looked at her in shock.
Robin nodded. “I was pretty upset and screamed about it all, but I got backhanded for my trouble. His new wife was pregnant, and he wanted to have his new family, not his old family. As it was, Keith had a friend. The guy had a room over his garage with a little kitchenette. Keith moved in there, and I don’t think he and our father ever spoke again. I went back and forth constantly between my home and Keith’s apartment. And then he joined the military, and I basically moved into the same little room he had just vacated.
“I had just turned sixteen then, and, although my father told me that I had a room at his house until I was eighteen, I was thumbing my nose at him, telling him that I didn’t want it. If Keith couldn’t stay, I wasn’t staying either.” She laughed. “Looking back now, I guess I was pretty stubborn and stuck-up, but I was hurting because my brother had been taken from me in a way that I hadn’t been ready for yet.”
“That adds some understanding as to why your brother is so dark.”
“He was always pretty moody after our mother’s death. He was very close to her,” she said. “Our father didn’t have an easy way of handling it. He pretty well ignored us, went out, got drunk all the time, and partied. And the next thing we know, he’s bringing home a new wife.”
“Ooh, ouch,” Ilse said. She just couldn’t imagine how much trauma that would have caused for a young man. “At least in the military he would have ended up with a family of his own,” she said. “That should have helped.”
“I think it did help a lot,” she said. “When I saw him afterward, he seemed more settled. Happier somehow. As if he’d found something that he’d been missing. Of course that just made me feel like he didn’t want me either. Because, if he’d found something, and it wasn’t me, then it was something else.” Robin chuckled. “But I was more adjusted than he was, and that made life none too easy either.”
“Of course not,” she said. “Still, I hurt for your whole family. What about your father now? Do you have anything to do