From the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a woman in a beige wool pantsuit wearing this retro chocolate brown cloche hat. She tiptoed into the church and sidled behind the bride and her father, carefully avoiding Megan Beadford’s train. After the woman slipped into an empty pew on the groom’s side, I realized she had not signed the bride’s book on the lectern.

Didn’t she know you had to sign in at weddings? Ordinarily this detail wouldn’t have bothered me, but I had been assigned to oversee that book, a small task I suppose Megan felt I could handle after so far failing at what she’d hired me to do. The bride had wanted her biological mother here today, but though I’d been successful with several other cases in my new profession as an adoption PI, I still had no decent leads on Megan’s background.

So why am I an adoption PI rather than the mean-street variety? Because some things change you forever, lead you down the road you’re supposed to take. The events of last summer did that for me even though they nearly shredded my heart. Those wounds make my ticker beat a little faster, a little harder, and a little more urgently now. It all started when my gardener was murdered. I’d wanted to find out why. One thing led to another, and in the end I discovered that my adoptive daddy lied to Kate and me about our biological parents up until the day he died, learned that our birth mother had been murdered when she’d tried desperately to find the twin baby girls (me and my sister) who had been stolen from her. My daddy didn’t do the stealing, but he didn’t ask enough questions about the babies he was adopting, either.