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His smile came through in his words, and I was pretty sure it matched mine.“Now this time really tell me. What’s up?”

“Bravo found my grandmother,” I revealed, then pressed my lips into a tight line.

Charles sucked air in through his teeth.“Never a dull moment, huh?”

I smiled and shook my head even though he couldn’t see the gesture. Talking to him was just natural like that. It never felt like there was any distance between us when we chatted about our days. “Nope.”

“So when are we going to meet her? I am invited, right?”

I let out a giant sigh of relief.“Yes, please come with me,” I said so fast all my words ran into each other.

“Darling, you couldn’t keep me away. I want to be there for my fianc?e whenever and however I can. By the way, you’re my fianc?e.”

I smiled to myself. Oh, how I wished I could give him a giant hug of gratitude just then.“I love you, fianc?,” I said, twirling my hair like a giggling schoolgirl.

“Uh-oh,” Charles said and then let out a rolling groan. “Just got an urgent email. Gotta go, but I’ll call you when I take lunch. I can’t wait to hear all the sordid details. Bye. Love you.”

Well, there was a pretty major thing decided at least. I probably should have asked Charles first, considering I’d just agreed to be his partner in life. It was hard to break nearly thirty years of seeing Nan as my main partner and confidant, but I guess that was part of growing up. Growing. Changing.

I just hoped things wouldn’t change too much.

3

I spent the rest of that week trying on various outfits and attempting a cool new style with my hair. I’d only get one chance to make a first impression on my grandmother, and I really wanted her to like me.

It was silly, but a small part of me thought that if I nailed my outward appearance, I could tip the scales in my favor. After all, I knew next to nothing about this woman. Only that the grandpa I hadn’t known deemed her an unfit mother decades ago, and that the seagulls had hinted she might have strange abilities like mine. But how would I even be able to determine that? It’s not like I could come right out and ask her such a bizarre question. All that hard work I was doing to look good would go—whoosh—right down the drain.

As it turned out, Charles had a busy week at work but was putting in early mornings and long nights at the office so he could leave a couple hours early on Friday. Together, we would head to Katahdin and this cute little bed-and-breakfast we had decided to book based on the online reviews.

Nan made a full-time job of avoiding me. Rather than joining me for morning coffee, she’d brew a pot and leave it on the counter so that I could heat it up in the microwave myself. Each day she had a different reason for being gone, but I knew they were all excuses.

I couldn’t wait to punctuate this chapter of our lives with a big, fat period. We both needed to meet my missing grandmother and be done with it. The unknown that would come from this relationship had lingered over our heads for far too long.

With no new P.I. cases coming my way and every possible combination of clothing exhausted, I was quickly running out of ways to keep my hands and mind occupied. I attempted to lose myself in my favorite book series. But my brain was too busy with all its myriad questions to focus on the words before me.

I checked social media, even my long since defunct MySpace account. Yes, I was that desperate for ways to keep myself busy.

I just wanted to get this whole thing over with, but I also knew I wasn’t strong enough to go on this crazy adventure by myself.

It was at that point a most excellent thought occurred to me. I could enlist the help of someone else to research my grandmother while I waited for my chance to go meet her in person. I had this thought on Wednesday—two days before Charles and I were scheduled to leave and three days before we’d actually get the chance to meet my grandmother, provided everything went well.

I had to do something to pass the long, anguish-filled hours, or I’d have found my grandmother but lost my mind.

Which brought me back to my would-be helper. She traveled a lot, but she was also the only person I knew with ties to the Katahdin area. And so I gave Sharon a call.

Sharon and her cat Chessy traveled up and down the coast in a luxury RV funded by their upcoming reality show. The cat was the real apple of the producer’s eye, but he and his human came as a package deal.

When I first met Sharon at the RV park just last weekend, I’d mistakenly assumed she was a killer. Hey, sometimes that happened in my line of work.

Once I figured out that she was just a busybody without a single mean bone in said body, I actually grew to like her a lot. She’d been kind and welcoming to Charles, Octo-Cat, and me when no one else at the campsite had taken any efforts to get to know us. That made her good people in my book.