Sarah trembled as Finch’s eyes met hers. She hadn’t given it much—or really any—thought before volunteering to help Finch find his true family and to put Eleanor’s guilt to rest. Her inner critic screamed in protest.

What am I doing? I don’t know the first thing about any of this! He probably doesn’t even want me around. It’s all in my head.

Finch took a step closer. “Why would you want to help me?”

She swallowed, tried to force a confidence she didn’t feel into her voice. It was too late to take her offer back now. “Not you. Eleanor. It’s obviously important if she went through all this effort to find you.”

Finch rolled his eyes and laughed bitterly. “I’m not really hard to find, though. Am I?”

Bile rose from Sarah’s stomach, but she swallowed it back down. Why had Finch’s attitude changed so significantly? One second he’d begged her to stay, and the next he seemed angry. She stared at him blankly, waiting for him to explain what she’d missed.

But he just shook his head and sighed. “Don’t you know who I am?” he asked with wide blue eyes as if there were some answer other than dreamy stranger, man she would dream about for days if not months to come.

“And I was worried I’d make it awkward,” Eleanor joked from her seat across the room. Sarah’s awkwardness seemed to put her at ease. Oh joy!

Lucky licked Sarah’s hand, then rubbed his nose between her slack arm and her hip so that she’d be forced to pet him. Forced to relax.

“You introduced yourself as Finch Jameson. I mean, the name sounds familiar, but I just figured it was because Finch was a trendy name these days.” She shrugged, having not thought anything of his familiar name or appearance before. But now she wondered whether their paths had in fact crossed before. Then again, how could she forget such a handsome face, such a kind—well, normally kind—smile?

“You don’t know me?” he asked in disbelief, his expression softening.

“I don’t know you,” she parroted with emphasis on each word.

“So you just want to help to be… what? Nice?” He laughed sarcastically, causing Sarah to question everything. How could she have misread the situation so entirely? Finch Jameson wasn’t a kind man, and he didn’t want her help.

She turned toward the door, running over every possible excuse in her head. Was it too late to get away?

“Oh, stop,” Eleanor interjected. “Not everyone has an ulterior motive these days. Nurse Campbell is a genuinely nice person. She puts up with my crap better than anyone else here, and you’d be lucky to have her at your side.”

At the mention of his name, Lucky sat and waited for a command.

“Okay,” Sarah said to the dog, releasing him from his hold. “Thank you, Eleanor,” she whispered to the old woman, who sat waiting with an expectant look on her face. It was the first time Sarah had ever heard her say anything nice about anyone. Normally Ms. Barton was quite conservative when it came to admitting she liked or enjoyed anything.

Punishment for a guilty conscience, perhaps?

“I could use the help,” Finch admitted at last. His smile finally returned. “Seeing as I have no idea where to get started.”

Sarah looked away as an intense new heat rose to the apples of her cheeks.

“I’m sorry about before. I’m not used to people being, well, real with me.” He laughed, though Sarah failed to understand whatever joke he’d made.

“One condition,” she said, eliciting a pair of bemused expressions from her companions. If she was really going to do this, to spend time with this man who was both handsome and confusing, then she needed her life line.

“Now there are conditions?” Finch asked with raised eyebrows.

“Just one: where I go, Lucky goes.”

Lucky perked up at the second mention of his name and trotted to Sarah’s side.

Finch frowned. “I’m not sure he—”

“That’s non-negotiable for me. I really want to help you both, but I need Lucky at my side in order to do that.”

“He agrees,” Eleanor answered for Finch.

“Okay, fine.” Finch let out a long, slow breath. A slight smile flashed across his face only to be replaced by a sudden look of consternation. “So you, me, and Scooby are going to solve a mystery, but where do we even start?”

Eleanor grabbed her cane and used it to pull her hunched form into a standing position. “That’s the easy part. You start at the beginning.”

Finch stared blankly ahead, waiting for an explanation.

Sarah had understood perfectly, though. “We need to go to the hospital where she was born,” she whispered.

Finch watched as Eleanor hobbled across the room with no obvious destination in mind. “Where are you going?” he asked as Sarah rushed to offer aid to the old woman.

“Isn’t that obvious?” Eleanor asked between soft grunts. “I’ve said what I needed to say, and now I’m going away.”

Lucky whined, his dark eyes shifting anxiously between the three people in search of answers.

Well, Finch didn’t have answers, and he felt like whining, too. “But you haven’t told us anything,” he said, chasing after Eleanor, which wasn’t hard to do given her intensely slow speed.

She sighed. “You know enough. Enough to get started, anyway.”

“No, I don’t. Tell me, where is the hospital?” Finch placed a hand on her shoulder, startling them both in the process.

Eleanor paused for a moment, thoughtful, before murmuring over her shoulder, “Fine. I’ll tell you this piece and that will be the end of this conversation. It’s the big one in San Francisco.”

Finch tried to be thankful for this one piece of information, but it was hard to be relieved when there was so much more that Eleanor wasn’t saying. He hoped his voice didn’t come across as irritated as he felt. “Well, that’s one thing out of a hundred we still need to know.”

Sarah drew close and put a hand on her forearm. “Just let her go for now,” she whispered.

But Finch was not to be deterred. Now that he’d been dragged into this, he needed to know what had really happened with his grandmother and what it would mean for him now.

A thought suddenly occurred to him. “When was my grandmother really born? Did she ever know her true birthday?”

Eleanor made no attempt to hide her annoyance. “If the answers were easy,” she hissed, “I would have told you by now. I’ve said what I can. The rest is up to you.”

“What? No. Is it because of the bad stuff you mentioned?”

Eleanor simply shook her head and kept walking.

“If it’s so bad, why didn’t you fix any of this earlier? Why leave it to me? Why say anything at all?”

Still no response.

“Hey, you can’t just walk away. I need answers!” he shouted as the old woman turned into the long corridor. Perhaps they were related after all. They both had a stubborn streak a mile wide and matching tempers, too.

The same orderly who’d originally led him to the room appeared and took Sarah’s place at Eleanor’s side.

“She needs rest now,” Sarah said with downcast eyes. “We need to respect that.”

“But did you not hear what I just heard? At the very best, this woman is a liar and at worst, a criminal. How can you just let her run away?”

“Run?” Sarah chuckled. “She’s hardly moving at a stroll, let alone a run. She says she gave us enough to get started, and I believe her.”

“How? How do you know any of this is true?”

Sarah looked pensive. “I don’t, not really. But I choose to believe her.”

“Why?”

“If we find out she’s lying, then we’ll have gone on a wild goose chase with all of this, maybe lose a few hours of our day. But if she’s telling the truth and we don’t believe her, then what? She’ll die never having closure, and you’ll never find your lost family.” Sarah clicked her tongue and Lucky trotted over to her side, placing his rump on the floor and his head between her hand and hip.

“I still don’t get why you want to help with this.”

“Honestly, it will be fun. Don’t you think?”

Finch cleared his throat before answering with, “None of this is fun.”

“Because you’re still in shock. It will wear off. Trust me.” She bent down and gave Lucky a kiss on his forehead. The dog lapped up her every attention.

“It sounds like you’ve done this before.”

“Maybe,” she said with a sad smile, leaving Finch to wonder what ghosts now floated across her mind, how many patients she had helped and then lost.

Finch forced a chuckle. Somehow they needed to clear the air here, make things less awkward between them. “Are you sure she’s not just senile?”

“That’s rather ageist of you,” Sarah answered with a small frown. “Why does everyone always assume the elderly are already half gone, that they’ve lost their minds? Actually, they know so much more than all the rest of us, have experienced so much more. It’s a terrible thing to say, especially about your own aunt.”

Well, that didn’t work. Finch needed to defend himself but wasn’t really sure how. He began to argue anyway. “But—”

Sarah cut him off with a laugh of her own. “Relax, I’m just giving you a hard time. But it is a pet peeve of mine. Look, you can live the rest of your life assuming everyone is lying or crazy, that everyone is out to get you, or you can choose to have faith in them. I will always choose to believe. It makes for a far less miserable life.”

Sarah’s choice of words didn’t escape him. How could such a sweet-seeming woman be so discontented with her life? “Less miserable? As opposed to happy?”

“Yeah.” She twisted her fingers in Lucky’s fur, refusing to meet his eyes.

Neither said anything as they stood together in the bleached-out hallway.

He had three choices then. He could walk away from all of this, he could go after Eleanor, or he could take his chances with Sarah. He chose the only option that had any silver lining at all. Time with a beautiful, kind woman wouldn’t be so bad—no matter what they found. Right?

“Okay,” Finch said at last. “I choose to believe, too. Whether or not any of this is true, I still don’t know. But I’m ready to go find out.”

Sarah shook her head and chuckled. “It doesn’t sound like you believe yet, but I’m glad you’re willing to try.”

“What do we do next? Can I take you to dinner?”

Sarah chewed her lower lip for a few seconds before answering with an emphatic no. “Not dinner. I’d have to keep Lucky at home, and part of our agreement was that where I go, he goes. So how about the dog park? At five? We can make our plans there.”

Winning Sarah over would not be easy. Maybe it wouldn’t even be possible, but Finch wanted to try. He reached out his hand to shake on the deal. “Okay, the dog park it is then.”

“Thanks, I’ll meet you there.” Sarah brushed a strand of hair behind her ear, then clicked her tongue and took off down the hall with Lucky trailing at her side.

Oh, what a day this had turned out to be.

And it wasn’t even close to over yet…