Hold Her Heart (Words of the Heart) by Holly Jacobs Page A

him.
    She led me down a narrow hall to a bedroom door.
    “My room,” Fiona said, opening it with a flourish.
    There was a huge stuffed horse in one corner, a dollhouse in another, bunk beds, and a dresser that looked as if a rainbow had exploded on it. Every available section of wall space was covered with bookshelves. “This is amazing.”
    I walked closer and noticed that the horse was wearing a cardboard horn. “Flo likes to disguise herself as a unicorn,” Fiona said with a laugh. “When Mom’s Fi Fly Flo hit its third month on the bestseller’s list, her publisher sent her the horse.”
    “I didn’t read that one. I reread all the ones I had, but I know she’s written a lot since I outgrew them. I plan on buying them.”
    “Oh, don’t do that,” Fiona said with a laugh. “Mom gets author copies. She’s got a ton in the attic. She gives them away for fundraising auctions all the time. Once she even let a fundraiser auction her off. Well, a date with her. It was a girl from Meadville who won. Mom took her out to lunch. Anyway, you don’t have to buy ’em. She’ll give you any of the new ones. I get copies of all of them.” She led me to one of the shelves that was filled with Pip books. The other shelves were filled with books by a lot of authors I recognized. Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Madeleine L’Engle. C. S. Lewis. Laura Ingalls Wilder.
    I picked up William McCleery’s Wolf Story . “I’ve never met anyone else who read this. I loved it when I was a kid. My mom read it to me so many times.”
    “Mom read it to me, too. She loves books. She used to be the kindergarten story lady at the school across the street. She did it the year I was in kindergarten but stopped after that.”
    “Why did she stop?” I asked.
    “Because she was sick,” Fiona answered sadly.
    What might that have been like? To grow up with a mother who was so sick? To have the specter of death always lurking in the background?
    It was hard enough to walk into that situation for me as an adult, but for a little girl?
    I reached out and patted Fiona’s shoulder. What I really wanted to do was hug her and tell her everything would be all right, but I wasn’t sure that was true.
    “Dinner,” Ned called from downstairs.
    “I’m sorry,” I said to Fiona. I didn’t know what else to say to this girl who was my sister and yet also a stranger. I gave her shoulder another squeeze for good measure before she led me to the dining room.
    Ned was putting serving plates on the table, and Piper was sitting next to Logan, listening to whatever he was saying, and smiling. But her smile seemed thin, like a veneer. As if she were physically forcing her lips into that upturned position. She was wearing a purple scarf over her head and looked even paler than she had that afternoon.
    “Piper, are you okay?” I asked.
    She turned that smile on me, and it was even more apparent that she was forcing it. “I’m fine. I’m just so glad you’re here and that Logan’s home.”
    “I was telling her about our introduction,” Logan said in a chipper—too chipper—voice. “And assuring Ms. Pip that you are a much more preferable roommate than the last batch. One we called Pen. Short for Pigpen, which is exactly what he smelled like.”
    “Ew,” Fiona said as she dropped into a chair across from Logan.
    Piper patted the vacant chair next to her, and I obligingly sat down as well.
    Logan didn’t miss a beat. “Yeah, ew. I got a shower maybe once a week, but I washed. Water was scarce and hot water unheard of, but you could still wash. Pen claimed he couldn’t stand the cold water. He also claimed he didn’t smell. He was wrong. One day it had to have been over a hundred with ninety percent humidity. The smell got so bad that we moved his bed into the yard while he slept—on it.”
    “Nuh-uh,” Fiona said.
    “Honest to Pete.” Logan held up his fingers in a scouting sign. “We moved his mosquito netting, too, so it was all good. The