Sarah plopped down the edge of Chuck's bed. She had to admit that he had done a really nice job.

Unable to figure out anything over at Casey's, she had waited for Ellie to leave for the hospital and then searched Chuck's room for any clues about where he might be. As soon as she had walked in, it was obvious that he had covered his tracks. He was by no means a slob, but the room was immaculate. A thorough search confirmed his room was devoid of any clues – no receipts, no notes on scraps of paper, nothing. Hitting redial on his land-line phone called Information.

As she would expect, his computer was clean as well. She had expected the usual, like a clean browser cache, an emptied recycle bin, maybe even some new encryption. However, Chuck had done the right thing and erased his hard drive. It was possible NSA or CIA might be able to recover something, but since Chuck knew what he was doing, it was bound to be a time-consuming and fruitless effort.

The only useful thing she'd discovered was that Chuck hadn't left empty-handed. He had accumulated a number of spy gadgets and credentials during his various missions, and Sarah knew all the places he kept them. A cigar box under the bed, the hidden vault in the closet, a plastic bin with a few miscellaneous Stanford items concealing the equipment below – all had been emptied. She made a mental note to check if Chuck's falsified credentials had been used, but anyone who planned so meticulously wasn't likely to make that simple a mistake. If any of them were used, in all likelihood it would just be part of another false trail.

Twenty minutes in, Sarah had finished with his room, so she had expanded her search. A circuit of the apartment and a none-too-appetizing dumpster dive had dirtied her clothes and dampened her spirit. Nothing. There was nothing.

She looked around the room one last time. All of it fit. This was no panicked escape. Chuck had planned to run, probably as soon as he learned about the device in the watch, and had engineered an escape that had baffled two of the government's best. He had taken advantage of the distraction provided by Fulcrum to escape. He had sent Casey almost to the desert and now to Stanford, while Sarah had gotten a tour of Los Angeles just to end up in Chuck's room, wondering what to do next.

Unable to come up with an answer, she found herself staring at the picture of Chuck and her from the Halloween party. She was wearing the Princess Leia bikini she had the CIA make as an apology for giving him a fake picture of the two of them with a bug hidden in the back. I wanted to give you a new photo of us and I figured that it should be something real, she had told him. It had elicited one of his classic smiles, a smile so bright and genuine that it had drowned out everything else in the room.

Now he was gone, and it was hard to blame him. She had promised there was nothing in the watch. He had found the device, just as he had found the bug in the picture, and assumed that Sarah was the one who planted it. This time she wasn't going to get another chance.

Get up, the agent in her urged. He's gone and there's nothing here. You'll need to find him some other way. But she couldn't leave. Leaving without finding another clue meant accepting that he no longer trusted her. She had been so sure she would find something at the end of the trail he had left her.

Her hands couldn't stand to be idle, so they reached behind her head to undo the clasp of her necklace. She cradled the heart-shaped pendant between her thumbs and forefingers. The chain of necklace drooped towards the floor like the stem of a lifeless flower. She opened up the pendant to look at the picture she'd put there for their cover, a close-in shot of Chuck and Sarah, her arm around him, his cheek pressed against hers. After using her fingernail to scrape out the picture, she flipped it over to read his note. Three tiny little words, barely legible, plus an abbreviated signature.

"I trust you. -C"

She sucked in a breath as she stared at the words. Emotion began to take over. "Stay calm, Walker," she muttered. She ignored herself. The words grew blurry.

So many damn secrets. He had trusted her, and she had destroyed that trust. Maybe that was the message he had left her. Maybe the message was simply that his trust was gone, and so was he.

That would explain why Chuck would want her to go visit Jay, to be sure she knew that he had found the chip. That would explain why Chuck sent her to the beach, to remind her of how she once asked, almost demanded, that Chuck trust her. That would explain why Chuck sent her to Ellie, to remind her how they had invited her into their home, and exactly how Sarah had repaid that kindness.

She tilted her chin upwards in a vain effort to keep the tears from spilling. A pair of drops raced down opposite cheeks, alternately speeding up and slowing down, trailing over the curves of her cheeks to plummet off her jaw.

So many damn secrets. Chuck's secret was a sweet note in his gift to her. Her secret was not telling him about the device Casey planted in her gift to him, a lie of omission. She hadn't wanted Chuck to worry about Casey. She hadn't trusted Chuck could handle things.

She hadn't trusted him.

The tears were running freely now. So many damn secrets. She squeezed her eyes shut to try to stem the tide, but she couldn't escape her own guilt. Had he trusted her, he would have left some way for her to find him. Some message, some hint, something. But he very plainly, very obviously, very deliberately had left nothing for her. So what was left? "FIND Morgan + Ellie tell thm what they need to hear." Is that all there was?

She stared at the mental image of the message in her mind, her numb mind wandering over it.

"FIND Morgan + Ellie tell thm what they need to hear." Or, looking at just the capital letters, "FIND M+E."

"Find me."

A message within a message? Or just coincidence?

Her mind ranged out, questing, searching for more clues. It locked onto the message Morgan had sent, at Chuck's direction, from Chuck's phone. "Meet me." She had thought it was only about the obvious, and she had followed the phone trail to Morgan. It could mean more.

Her hope growing, she started remembering everything she could from the time she met Jay. She recounted her conversation with Morgan. He had said, "It's fine to have secrets, as long as there's a good reason for them. As long as we have each other's best interests at heart." Chuck's words, not Morgan's. Had Chuck planted those lines, hoping they would come out in the conversation? Could Chuck know that she hadn't planted the device?

'Find me'. 'Meet me'. She looked down at the pendant in her fingers. 'I trust you.'

It could all be coincidence. Her brain was working overtime to find something to prove that Chuck still trusted her. She could be seeing things where there was nothing to see.

There was only one way to know for sure. If he still trusted her, he would have left a way for her to find him, something only she could find.

Sarah straightened her back, stood and paced back and forth across the room. She started going through it all again. Chuck had left a trail for her, and her alone. The trail ended at the apartment. Ellie didn't have the clue. So, the clue must be in his room. But where? She'd already searched it top to bottom.

Think, Walker. She scanned the room again. On the surface, the room seemed like a dead end, but something sounded an off-key note. The clean-up was too perfect. Chuck had laid down false trail after false trail to keep Sarah and Casey running around, yet Chuck hadn't done that here.

Were she dealing with some cocky agent, she might have read the whole scene as some kind of mocking farewell. Want to know where I am? Call Information! But that wasn't Chuck. He wasn't the kind to trumpet his victories. So why did he leave no false trails here, the place where it would have been simplest to leave one?

She was hoping Chuck had sent her messages within the messages. Maybe the state of his room held a message. Maybe the message here was not to get distracted by anything unimportant like his computer. To look a little more carefully. To highlight something.

She took a careful look around the room and then closed her eyes, picturing the room as it usually sat. It was perfectly organized, with everything where it belonged – everything except the picture of her and Chuck. He used to keep it on his nightstand. He had left it on top of the low bookcase.

Her eyes popped open, centered on the picture. Only she would know about the picture's significance to the two of them. Only she would think to look there. And it wouldn't be the first time he'd left her a message behind a picture.

A large lump lodged at the base of her throat. Had she been staring at the clue's hiding spot and not realized it? Had she been that close to missing it?

A deep breath later, she crossed the room to retrieve the picture. She picked up the frame and took it back to the bed, laying it face down. Slowly, so very slowly, she twisted the tabs that held the cardboard backing in place and lifted it off.

Hidden behind the picture was an ivory-colored envelope, barely fitting inside the frame. Reaching down, clumsy fingers found purchase on the envelope and rescued it from its hiding spot. Her heart trembled.

A fingertip snaked under a gap in the sealed flap and tore the envelope open. Thumb and forefinger pulled out the contents, a simple birthday card, one that could no doubt be purchased at a thousand gift or grocery stores. The cover had a round cake with chocolate icing sitting on the table. "Happy Birthday!" was spelled out on the cake in bright pink frosting letters. A small, long-haired dog stood on a chair, front paws on the table, panting happily.

She had never seen anything quite so amazing.

She turned and collapsed next to the disassembled frame. She opened the card. Inside was a slip of paper and another picture of the cake, now on the floor, with the dog's black-and-white snout covered in frosting. A message read, "Sorry I messed up your birthday!" Underneath, he had signed the card, "Thank you … for everything. Chuck".

She touched his handwriting lovingly. He had figured out her riddle. He knew that yesterday was her birthday. Somehow, even that knowledge meant the world to Sarah.

Finding nothing else on the card, she went to the piece of paper. On it was a note scribbled in Chuck's sloppy cursive hand-writing.

Sarah-

An American can be only be asked to do so much for his country. However, now it falls to me to look out for myself for a change, as strange as that feels after having you watch over me for so long.

I can never, ever thank you enough for what you've done for me. You believed in me, even when I didn't. You pushed me to be so much more than I was. I doubt I would have survived six days without you there, let alone six months. So thank you. Thank you with every fiber of my being.

You know why I had to leave, Sarah. You were the one who always recognized the reality of the situation, who always said that you wanted to have what time we could have together. Unfortunately, our time seems to have run out.

I'm sorry that I had to leave like this. I hope you understand. Maybe we'll see each other again, and when we do, everything will have changed. Right now it seems like too much to hope for, but I like to believe that it will happen.

Chuck

p.s. Thank you for sharing something real with me. I hope you realize how much that truly means.

Sarah read the note four times, alternating from the sheer joy elicited by his words to the heart-rending sorrow of knowing that he was gone. Her lip quivered as she clutched at the note with both hands, as if tightening her grip on the edges would somehow give her a handhold to pull him back to her.

Why hadn't he asked her to go with him?

She let out a strangled laugh as soon as she posed herself the question. She had already given Chuck the answer a hundred times. The job came first.

As his handler, her job would require her to talk him down, assassination device or no. She could hear herself saying the words. Chuck, the CIA can take care of you. We're not going to let anything happen to you. It's best to stay where we can protect you, here on home turf. She was damn good at her job. It was the other thing that she wasn't always so good at.

Now that Fulcrum knew about the Buy More, Beckman and Graham would want Chuck secured. Had Chuck stayed, he'd probably be in a windowless van heading for an underground bunker of dubious safety at that very moment.

She ran her fingertips across the note, feeling the ridges where Chuck's pen had pressed letters into the paper. Her agent's mind, never at rest, scanned the letter again. The penmanship suggested haste, as if he'd composed the letter on the fly, but the words seemed carefully chosen, almost stilted. The note was bordering on too sweet, if that were possible, but she couldn't fault him for that. She grinned, picturing Casey's reaction if he ever read the message. He'd likely crumple it up and throw it in the nearest trash can.

Her smile fled. Maybe that was part of the point. If Casey ever searched Chuck's room, he could have found the note. He probably wouldn't bother with a full search, just as Sarah almost hadn't bothered, but why risk it?

All along, Chuck had left her messages within messages. Why not here, in some form only she could understand?

Sarah read the note again. She gasped.

She knew how to find Chuck.

Author's note – if you think you figured out what Sarah figured out, please let me know via message. I'm curious how difficult it was. Please do not put guesses into a comment, as I don't want anyone to spoil things for others.