Hold Her Heart (Words of the Heart) by Holly Jacobs Read Free Book Online Page B

you to come on your own.”
    “But if I can help her?” I asked.
    Fiona scoffed and sounded decades older than she was. “One of the first things you need to know about our mom is she’ll help anyone she can, but she would never ask for help for herself.”
    Logan nodded his agreement.
    “I’ll see you at five. Both of you ,” Fiona warned Logan, and then she scampered back out of the house as quickly as she had come.
    “Fi’s right. Ms. Piper would do whatever it took to help someone. But asking for help? She’s not very good at that.”
    I suddenly didn’t want to learn more about Piper George. A woman who’d given me up for adoption. A woman who was a nurse, a writer, an altruistic do-gooder, a mother, a wife. A woman who was battling cancer. A woman who knew I might be able to help but didn’t want to bother me.
    “I’m going to go get the rest of my stuff out of the car and then go upstairs until dinner, if you don’t mind.”
    “I don’t mind at all,” he said.
    I started to leave the room then Logan called, “Siobhan, you should call someone.”
    “Who?” I asked.
    He shrugged. “I don’t know. A family member, some friend. Just someone. This is a lot to take on. A lot to deal with.”
    I nodded, but I wasn’t sure I was going to take his advice. I mean, how could I explain what was going on to someone else when I wasn’t sure I could articulate it to myself? Meeting Piper and knowing she’d never forgotten me felt good. But meeting her and seeing her with Fiona made me miss my mother more than ever.
    And though I knew it was crazy, it still made me feel guilty.

Chapter Three
    “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” Belle told her mother.
    “But you can judge a girl by her holey jeans. Go change,” her mother insisted. Her mother wore an expression that brooked no arguments.
    It looked like Belle was going out to dinner, and her holey jeans were not.
    —Beautiful Belle , by Pip
    I don’t own many dresses— any dresses, to be honest. Most of my business meetings are on Skype. All that’s really required for that is a halfway decent shirt and a scarf. I have half a dozen scarves in a variety of colors. My style mantra is, you can’t go wrong with a scarf .
    Jaylin does not share my casual dress style. When we were college roommates, she was forever trying to dress me up like some doll. I normally balked at her attempts, but today I would give anything if she were here in Erie instead of Asheville. She’d know what to wear to a first meal with your biological mother.
    Or what not to wear.
    It seemed as if I had more nots than possibilities in my suitcases.
    I’d brought one carry-on and one bigger suitcase with me. I thought I had plenty of clothes to last me however long I stayed in Erie. They were all casual. And I’d only packed one scarf. It was a black-and-brown patterned one. I hadn’t really thought my packing through.
    There was a knock on my door.
    “Siobhan? Is everything okay?” Logan called.
    “I don’t have anything nice to wear.”
    Okay, that was a whine. I know it was a whine, but I couldn’t help it. I was nervous. Piper had seemed nice enough. So had Ned and Fiona. Still, I couldn’t shake the butterflies that were cartwheeling around in my stomach.
    “Wear whatever you’re comfortable in,” Logan called through the door. “Ms. Pip won’t care. I swear; she doesn’t own jeans without holes in the knees.”
    I tried to remember what she had been wearing earlier. I couldn’t. I remembered the scarf around her head—it was robin’s-egg blue. And I remembered how gaunt her face looked, but I couldn’t remember her clothes.
    Thinking of Piper’s scarf, I dropped my own back on the pile. I wasn’t going to wear one tonight, I decided.
    I looked down at my jeans. At least they didn’t have holes in the knees, though my favorite pair in the pile of clothing on the bed did. And the white T-shirt and black cardie were dressy enough. I slipped my feet