Untie My Heart follows a grieving mother and her traumatized five-year-old daughter as they begin rebuilding their lives and find comfort in the quiet patience and tenderness of a local contractor. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

This is a continuation of the Family Ties series that focuses on Noble, who was introduced in book two (Broken Ties). He had an interest in pursuing the heroine in that book, but opted to discontinue his pursuit when he discovered that his best friend was also interested. I wanted to give Noble his HEA, so I created this story for that purpose. 

Mesa carries both love and anger toward her late husband. Why was it important to portray grief as something so emotionally conflicted rather than straightforward?

There are several “stages” of grief, as any good therapist will tell you. Most people experience all of them at some point after losing someone they love. I wanted to give readers permission to explore those stages instead of trying to rush through them. Grief looks different to everyone. There is no right or wrong way to grieve. That’s what I was hoping to get across in this book. Mesa tries to rush the process by moving away and starting over, hoping everything will be better. But what she finds is that she can’t just change locations to avoid the true cycle of loss. She has to work through the different stages and emotions as they surface. 

The purple jellybeans become a surprisingly powerful symbol of trust and comfort. How did that small detail find its way into the story? 

That’s funny, actually. I had no intention of using them as symbols of anything. My husband is a huge jellybean fan. It’s his favorite candy. I really just wanted to work that love of jellybeans into a character somehow, and it seems Noble fit the bill. It was not an intentional choice to use candy as a bridge between Noble and Merrick. He first offered the candy as a way to connect with Merrick and try to calm her fear, and that just grew into something bigger. I didn’t even see the jellybeans as being symbolic until I read the reviews. 

What can we expect to see in the next installment of the Family Ties series?​

This is the last book in this series. At least for now. My brain is plotting another series down the road using the next generation of all the characters introduced in all three books in this series. So…there may be a book about Merrick, as an adult, at some point. We’ll see. Right now, I’m working on a different series: a romantic mystery series set in the fictitious town of Revelation, West Virginia.   

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