“So funny. I know you don’t care about stuff like that. But I do.”

“I remember.” Back in high school, borrowing clothes from each other’s closets, fixing each other’s hair for prom. Okay, sometimes Meg loaned me her clothes. She declared she wouldn’t be seen dead in mine. And after that time I singed her hair with the straightening wand, she refused to let me near her head.

“Maybe you should get John to take you out,” I suggested idly. Not that there was anyplace to go in Bunyan. Not like New York. “Like a date night.”

“Maybe. Usually we just collapse on the couch and watch This Is Us. Well, I watch. He sleeps. He works so hard.”

“So do you,” I pointed out.

“Anyway, I’ve never left the kids with a babysitter.”

“Okay.” I took another sip of wine. But it seemed a shame my pretty, sociable sister couldn’t get dressed up and go out for one night. “I bet Momma would watch them if you asked her.”

“I can’t. She’s still having that back pain. Especially at night. And now that her legs are bothering her—”

I set down my glass. “What back pain?”

“Didn’t she tell you?”

“No, she never said a word.” And neither did you. “How long has this been going on?”

“I guess . . . Three weeks?”

“Three weeks,” I repeated, stunned. Stung. Yes, I had sworn never to return to Bunyan. But Meg always kept me in touch. “Has she been to see a doctor?”

“Dr. Bangs.” Who had been our family doctor since before I was born. “He wants her to get an MRI.”

Wait. What? “Is she going to be all right?”

“She says she’s fine.”

“Right. And if she chopped off her arm, she’d tell you she had a hangnail,” I said. This past summer, when she’d gashed her shin almost to the bone on portable paddock fencing, she’d bandaged it up herself and gone back to herding goats.

“Don’t worry,” my sister said in her warm, reassuring Meg way. “I’m here.”

I felt a wave of love along with the teensiest surge of guilt. She was the best sister. The model daughter. “Never a minute’s trouble,” Aunt Phee liked to say. Usually with a glance at me. Not like that one, her look implied.

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

“You want to come home?”

“Ha-ha,” I said.

Bunyan, North Carolina, could have been the setting for a Lifetime channel movie or a romance novel. Stuck in the middle of miles of farmland, past hand-lettered signs offering pine straw delivery and tarot readings, the small town clung to the bank of the Cape Fear River like a patch of daylilies, sturdy and bright. The lampposts all had flags, the front porches all had rockers and deep eaves. There was a bandstand on the river walk and a farmers’ market on Saturdays. The main street boasted a library, a bank, a struggling art gallery, and three churches. A jumble of storefronts sold postcards and ice cream and secondhand clothes, bait and paint and appliances. It was the kind of place you wanted to raise a family in or move to in retirement. A good place to come from.