“There’s something special about you, Sebastian. Something appealing. You should feel very proud of the man you’ve become.”

Her words came as such a shock that it took him a second to compute them. She found him appealing? Pleasure collided with guilt, freezing him.

She slid into the driver’s seat of her gray Honda Pilot, which was old but in good condition. “Good-bye.” Holding the door ajar, she waited for him to respond.

Say something, you idiot.

She started her car. “Good-bye,” she repeated, maybe thinking he hadn’t heard the first time.

“Good-bye,” he said.

She shut her door and drove away.

As soon as she was out of sight, he swung on his heel and tunneled his hands into his hair.

The day of the farmers market, Ben had said that Leah was rare.

He’d been right. She was rare.

And she wasn’t coming back.

Had that been awkward? What she’d just said to him?

“There’s something special about you, Sebastian. Something appealing. You should feel very proud of the man you’ve become.” Her words had seemed appropriate to her while she was speaking them, but then his face had gone strangely blank in response.

She replayed it. Huh. The statement still seemed acceptable to her. Friendly and complimentary. Of course, it was possible that that had been an awkward thing to say and had only seemed normal to her.

If so, it wasn’t as if she hadn’t warned him about her lackluster social skills.

And, of course, it could have been worse. She could have confessed her fascination with his lips or, unforgivably, failed to solve a quadratic equation in his presence.

Where was she driving?

She’d been so preoccupied with Sebastian that she’d failed to type Trina and Jonathan’s address into her GPS before leaving the hospital. Smoothly, she pulled into a strip mall and parked. She peeked at her reflection. Even now, after the gale force winds of her parents’ identity and Sebastian’s nearness, it mollified her to see that she looked calm.

She typed 11482 Riverchase Road into her phone.

“Turn right at Beverly Road,” her phone’s Irish male voice instructed her. She had a closer relationship with that voice than she’d ever had with a boyfriend.

She followed the Irishman’s directions.

A twenty-minute drive brought her to the well-established Morningside Lenox Park neighborhood. Hilly tree-lined streets harbored homes that had been built in the first half of the twentieth century. This neighborhood would have been pricey for a young family three decades ago, just as it was now.

Leah parked a little ways down and across the street from 11482.

Feeling conspicuous, like a cop on a stakeout, she scoured the length of the street, then eyed Trina and Jonathan’s house. What if one of her family members walked out that door? Or spotted her from inside and came out to question her?