In the quiet hollows of a dying Appalachian town, a guarded nurse and a grieving teacher must decide if a second chance at love is worth the risk.

After losing her fiancé in the Great War, nurse Bethany Astor swore she’d never risk her heart again. But when the Red Cross sends her to the struggling mountain town of Laurel Ridge, Tennessee, she meets a schoolteacher whose pain mirrors her own. As she uses her skills to heal his injured leg, Bethany discovers that keeping her walls intact might be harder than she ever imagined.

Dylan Harper’s leg injury kept him from the battlefield, but his emotional wounds run deeper. Haunted by a tragic accident that claimed a young student’s life, he’s learned that loving someone means risking devastating loss. When Bethany arrives in town with her gentle spirit and healing touch, she awakens feelings he thought long buried—and terrifies him with their intensity.

As Laurel Ridge fights for survival, Bethany and Dylan must confront the ghosts of their past before they can embrace a future together. With both their hearts scarred by loss, will they find the courage to choose love over fear before time runs out?

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About the Author

Lauralyn Keller loves to combine history and romance in stories that touch the heart. She lives in beautiful Colorado and is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers. When she’s not writing, she enjoys cooking, hiking, and reading.

More from Lauralyn

This story started as fanfiction.

I love the show When Calls the Heart. Janette Oke was one of my favorite authors as a teenager, so I was thrilled when Hallmark turned her books into a series. Back in season 6, I hardcore shipped Nathan with Elizabeth almost as soon as he joined the cast. The potential for a relationship between them sparked my creativity, and soon I was writing fanfiction for them. At first, it was all a continuation of the show itself—where I hoped it would go, how I could see the characters behaving, what situations they might find themselves in. Then 2020 hit, and the pandemic shut everything down. My fanfiction became more hypothetical, taking characters from the show and placing them in completely different times and places. I wrote three or four full-length novels that bore very little resemblance to the show—some historical, some contemporary—driven by my love of those characters and, more importantly, my love of storytelling.

Healing Hearts was one of those stories.

I wondered what would happen if I took Nathan, Elizabeth, and a few other characters and put them in a small French town immediately after World War II. Their jobs changed. Their motivations changed. Their circumstances changed. Before I knew it, the only things When Calls the Heart and Healing Hearts really had in common were the names of the characters.

Sure, some themes remained—love after loss, rising above difficult circumstances, and finding hope in the midst of hardship. But those are themes that belong to historical fiction as much as they belong to any particular story.

Several years later, I remembered that fanfic and how much fun it had been to write. I wondered if I could tinker with it and turn it into a real novel. I started changing names, places, and circumstances, expecting to end up with essentially a fanfiction rewrite. Instead, I ended up with a completely different story.

That story became The Teacher’s Mending Heart—the story of Bethany and Dylan, a nurse and a teacher in small-town Appalachia in the aftermath of the Great War.

And then things took a personal turn.

I’m a teacher, so my own job was the inspiration for Dylan’s. And the heartbreak he experiences is the same heartbreak I experienced: the loss of a student. Writing Dylan’s journey to healing became a form of healing for me.

I didn’t set out to write through my own feelings of pain and all the what-ifs that come with loss. But as Dylan’s story progressed, those feelings flowed out through him. Grief is hard. It’s something most of us have wrestled with in one form or another, and I think stories can sometimes help us process the things we don’t have words for ourselves. My prayer is that by reading Dylan and Bethany’s stories of healing after loss, some readers might find the same comfort I found in writing them

On a lighter note, Bethany’s character was inspired in part by my sister. Bethany is a nurse, but her specialty is massage therapy, which happens to be my sister’s specialty as well. A lot of Bethany’s phrases or actions as a masseuse came directly from my sister. That was fun to write, and I might have chuckled a time or two mimicking my sister’s mannerisms. I don’t know a whole lot about massage personally, but having a research aide close by and in person was very helpful!

This story ended up being the most personal I’ve written yet. It certainly wasn’t intended that way—after all, it started as fanfiction! But perhaps that’s part of the beauty of writing. Sometimes a story takes you somewhere you never expected to go. The Teacher’s Mending Heart is close to my heart because of that journey, and I hope Dylan and Bethany’s story blesses you in some way.

Giveaway

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