Pad, short for Padawan—Jude’s choice of name, not mine—was a fourteen-month-old golden retriever and quicker on the uptake than any other dog we’d trained. Jude and Free were holding out hope that Cady—Jude’s mother and my foster mother—would keep our star pupil, but every time I took Pad out, I could feel her energy, her determination. She needed to run, to track, to find.

She needed more than we could give her.

“I am not Cady’s favorite person at the moment,” Free admitted, “on account of the fact that we had a fundamental disagreement.”

Free was as prone to disagreement as Jude was to optimism. She was the most stubborn person I’d ever met—and the woman who’d raised me was number two. Jude insisted that crossing horns was their way of expressing affection.

“Was this disagreement about the fact that you haven’t been to school in over a week?” I asked Free.

Free shrugged. She was infamous in the Chester Falls public school system for two things: her perfect test scores and her less-than-perfect attendance. Free had a system. She aced every single test given during the semester, then skipped finals altogether, ultimately pulling home C’s in every class. Free’s parents, when this was first brought to their attention, had declared that they “respected their daughter’s individuality and right to make her own decisions.”

Cady, needless to say, did not. Our property backed up to the Morrows’, and Free had spent as much time at our place growing up as she had at her own. Cady didn’t treat her any differently than she treated Jude and me—and that meant that she and Free had their share of fundamental disagreements.

“You could just ask the teachers to let you take makeup tests,” I pointed out. “Then you wouldn’t need to ask me whether or not Cady was selling Pad to an army search and rescue unit. You could ask her yourself.”

Free did not dignify that comment with a response. Instead, she nodded her head toward Jude. “It appears our boy has drawn the attention of some unsavory types.”

It took me two seconds to analyze the situation. Jude was standing in the midst of three very large, very angry townies. And being Jude, he appeared to be challenging them to a dance-off.

I pushed off the truck and headed for trouble. Free followed at a lazy pace.

“I assure you, gentlemen, proving yourselves to be better dancers than me would stick it to me far worse than any act of physical violence possibly could.” My foster brother offered his would-be assailants a conspiratorial smile. “I’m not saying that I’m the second coming of Fred Astaire, but I’m also not denying it.”