Hold Her Heart (Words of the Heart) Read Online Free PDF Page A

small table sat between them. A plant and a teacup with small purple flowers sat on it. On the other side of the porch was a swing. It faced Ned’s old house.
    The only thing that separated me from the house proper was a screen door. Just one thin bit of screening between me and the woman who’d given birth to me and then had given me to my parents.
    I stood absorbing the fact that Piper George lived here, in this very normal-looking house in the middle of a normal middle class neighborhood, only three hours away from where I lived.
    I raised my hand to knock, but then I let it fall back to my side. I wasn’t ready. Though I wasn’t sure how anyone could be ready for a situation like this. Maybe I’d just go back next door and get Logan to tell me how he’d met Piper and Ned.
    Maybe I’d just get back in my car and—
    A woman with a robin’s-egg blue scarf tied over her hair came to the door. She looked pale and thin. Unnaturally thin. It was the type of thinness that didn’t speak of diets or nature, but rather it spoke of illness.
    No, not spoke—shouted.
    I’d looked up Piper George’s picture on the Internet. This was not how she’d looked. She’d had red hair, like mine. And she’d had an inviting smile. The type of smile that said, you can tell me your secrets and your hopes. You can tell me your dreams and your goals.
    She smiled now, and despite the difference between that photo and the woman standing in front of me, that smile was still the same.
    “Hi. Can I help you?” she asked.
    “I—” That’s all the further I got before I saw the first hint of recognition in her face. I answered her unasked question. “I’m Amanda.”
    I should have introduced myself as Siobhan Ahearn. But I knew that for her—for Piper—I’d always been Amanda. That one snippet from her journal and Ned’s letter said as much. But even without that, I’d have known as I read her dedications in book after book.
    I saw the tears form in her eyes, but she didn’t cry. Instead, she shot me a smile and said, “Of course you are.”
    She opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch next to me. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said softly.
    “I know,” I told her.
    She reached out and touched my cheek as if she needed to be sure I was real. “ We’ve been waiting for you.”
    I knew she meant her and Ned.
    “Come in,” she said.
    I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t breathe. I was afraid it would be worse inside, so I asked, “Could we go sit in your garden?”
    I’m not sure why I wanted to go there so badly, but Piper didn’t seem to mind.
    “Of course.”
    She led me off the porch and along the side of the house to a gate that opened into the garden. It had looked amazing from the window of Ned’s house, but that hadn’t come close to doing it justice.
    Patches of fall flowers dotted the ground. Some I recognized. Mums and some sort of daisy. But some I didn’t. There was a low plant covered in purple flowers and some tiny white flowers. A bush with bright red berries. And surrounding those islands of color, it was green. Green leaves on the trees and the bushes as well as the ground cover. It was a tired green that spoke of the end of the season. Some of it had already morphed into browns, oranges, and reds. Some would never change color but would simply give up and fall to the already leaf-ridden ground.
    “It’s like the fairy garden in Jenny Jangle and the Frisco Kid ,” I whispered. “It looked amazing from upstairs, but up close—”
    Piper interrupted. “Upstairs?”
    I realized I’d thrown Ned under the proverbial bus.
    “When were you in my house?” she asked.
    “Never,” I confessed. “I saw the garden from Ned’s house.”
    “Ned’s house?” she repeated, though she punctuated those two words with a question mark that said Ned was definitely going to hear about this.
    I pointed to the back window. “I’m staying there. Well, I was, but your friend Logan’s there,