Read The Heart of a Girl (2) for Free Online Page A

and said there was a change of plans. He’d gone back to Brad’s and apparently some of their other work friends stopped by with pizza. I didn’t mind. I hadn’t actually started cooking anything anyway.
                  The anxiety started to hit around six. This wasn’t like every other Sunday of summer. This was the last Sunday of summer. Tomorrow school officially began again. I’d have to wait until the end of the day before I could find out about any upcoming assignments, but still. It meant there was a change coming, more things added to my ‘to-do’ list. I wasn’t looking forward to that.
                  I was pretty sure Scott had gotten home sometime that weekend but refrained from calling his house or cell phone to find out. I told myself he’d contact me when he wanted to, if he ever wanted to. We’d gotten back on good terms before he left but he hadn’t been around when Harper was born and I had no idea where we really stood. If you were friends before you were anything else, then broke up, could you ever really go back to being just friends? I had no idea and no one to really ask about it.
                  Mason called earlier in the day to let me know he’d heard from our dad again and had a set time to pick him up, but I hadn’t asked what time and told myself I didn’t care. My dad being back in town was meaningless and I wasn’t going to let myself worry about it. The more I thought about it, the more unlikely it seemed that Hannah would be with him and she was the only one I really considered family anymore. Just her and Mason and of course Harper and Adam, but that went without saying.
                  As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I kind of liked having the day to myself, with Adam gone. Spending the entire day together, just the two of us. Giggling turned out to be her newest development, and she seemed to enjoy doing it. No matter what I did to her, she responded with a giggle whether it was a tickle, a touch, or a kiss. It warmed my heart in ways I never imagined possible.
                  “Are you going to stick with me when you get a little older, or are you going to be a Daddy’s girl?” I asked her around seven, after her bath as I was dressing her in her pajamas. She giggled in response, so I took that to mean she was going to stick by me.
                  I scooped her up and took her over to her rocking chair, sitting and rocking slowly, murmuring little things to her. I could feel her relax in my arms, her eyes growing heavy as I whispered. I wondered if my voice was always familiar to her, if she knew it before she had been born. It was a pretty amazing thing if you ever sat down and really thought about it, the bond between mother and child. She was the only person in the world that knew what I was really like on the inside. I’d carried her within my own body for close to a year and for that time period we were one and the same. I couldn’t imagine any other relationship being quite so intimate.
                  “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” I whispered to her and meant it. It wasn’t the first time I’d come to that realization. As stressful as the first few weeks of her life had been for me, I think I’d felt it the first time I held her in my arms. All the hardships, all the struggle, anything we would have to face in the future was all worth it.
                  Someone began knocking on the door close to eight and I cringed inwardly at the sound. It was probably Julia, coming to check up on me. I hadn’t really seen much of her all weekend or all week, for that matter. I felt bad about it, but sometimes I just felt a need to put a little bit of a distance between us. She meant well, but she was too full of helpful suggestions on how to take care of Harper. I hadn’t thought of a nice way yet of telling her that some things I just