Page 10 of Piece By Piece

He tried to push it away. He was pretty good at pushing things away. He’d been doing it for years now, and it worked most of the time.

He walked into the back room and looked at the photo on the shelf. Owen, twelve years old, holding up that tiny fish like it was a trophy.

You’d have talked to her for an hour, Grant thought. You would have said yes to the event before she even finished her sentence, and you would have already eaten six cookies and asked for the recipe.

He went back to the front of the store and picked up one of the snickerdoodles, smelling it and turning it over in his hand before taking a bite.

It was good, he had to admit. Buttery and warm with just enough cinnamon, which was one of those things you could definitely overdo, but this cookie was perfect.

It was the kind of cookie someone made because they cared about the person eating it, even if that person was a stranger. A cookie filled with heart.

Man, he hated how good the cookie was.

Later that afternoon, Liza was organizing the picture book bin when Dixie came through the back door, looking like she had been in a fight with somebody and lost.

“What on earth happened to you?”

“Oh, nothing happened to me. I just tripped on a step stool, that’s all. Don’t look at me like I’m crazy.”

Liza did look at her like she was crazy.

Dixie’s right wrist was swollen, and she was holding it against her chest.

“Dixie, that’s swollen. You need to go see the doctor.”

“I’ve been on this earth for many decades, and I have never once needed a doctor to tell me something I didn’t already know.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, what do you already know?”

“That it hurts, and I’m already annoyed about it.”

Liza crossed her arms, and Dixie stared at her. It was a standoff between two stubborn women.

“Fine,” Dixie said. “I’ll go tomorrow, but only because Julie already called me twice about it, and I just can’t take another lecture from that woman. She’s worse than my own mother was, and my mother once grounded me for sneezing too loudly in church.”

Liza bit her lip to keep from laughing. “Do you want me to come with you?”

“No, I want you to stay right here and work on that sad little corner back there. It’s what brought you down here in the first place.”

Dixie stood in the doorway, leaning against it. “Did you take him those cookies?”

“I did. And, well, he said his name is Grant, and he does not want to collaborate on anything with me or anyone else.”

Dixie waved her hand dismissively. “Give it time, sugar. Nobody moves to a place like this because they want to be alone. They might think they want to be alone, but we always prove them wrong. They move here because they’re tired of being lonely, and they just don’t know the difference yet.”

She disappeared into the back, and Liza heard her open a cabinet, mutter something about ibuprofen, and then start humming a Dolly Parton song like she hadn’t just said the most insightful thing Liza had heard in quite a while.

Liza stood there for a moment, thinking about it.

Tired of being lonely, and they don’t know the difference yet.

She thought about the way that Grant had stood behind his counter. Not like he was completely unfriendly, but sort of protecting himself, like the shop wasn’t just a business, but a barricade in his life. A safe place. A place he controlled.

She’d known people like that before. She’d been someone like that at times in her own way, except her barricade had been spreadsheets and client decks and seventy-hour work weeks.

She looked at the wall that separated the bookstore from The Puzzle Post and wondered if Dixie might be right.

Through that wall, very faintly, she could hear something.