Page 14 of Piece By Piece

Liza didn’t respond.

She went back to measuring the wall, stretching the tape measure from one corner to the other, trying not to think about the way that Grant had looked at her on the porch at the inn.

Spark wasn’t always loud.

Sometimes spark was that little thing you almost missed.

That evening, Liza sat cross-legged on her bed and called her mom.

Linda picked up on the second ring, the way she always did, like she’d been just sitting there right next to the phone, waiting for it to ring, which, knowing her mother, she probably had been.

“Hey, honey, how’s Dixie?”

“Oh, she’s good. She sprained her wrist, but you know how Dixie handles everything. Very loudly.”

Her mother laughed. “Well, that sounds about right. She’s been that way since we were in college. One time she got a splinter, and you would have thought she needed surgery.”

“Well, she asked me to stay on a little bit longer, you know, help with the store while she heals.”

There was a pause. It was just a little too long.

“How much longer?”

“A few weeks, maybe through the summer festival.”

Another long pause.

“Liza, what about your work? I thought you needed to start reaching out to agencies when you got back home.”

There it was, the question at the center of everything.

Her mother thought that she’d left her job voluntarily, like she was making a strategic pivot in her career. She didn’t know about the ambulance or the way Liza’s hands had shaken for three days afterward or the fact that she couldn’t even walk past a corporate office building without her heart rate spiking.

“I will, Mom. I just need a little bit more time.”

“Well, time is fine, honey. I just don’t want you hiding.”

The word landed harder than her mother probably intended.

Hiding.

Was that what she was doing? Was she hiding in a bookstore on a cute little Lowcountry island where nobody knew that she had failed professionally, while she ate cereal over a sink and measured walls for murals?

“I’m not hiding,” Liza said. The words came out a little sharper than she intended.

Her mother softened. “I know you’re not. I just miss you, and I do worry.”

“I know you do.”

They talked for another fifteen minutes about nothing really important. Her mother’s book club, the neighbor’s new fence that was way too high and way too ugly, whether Dixie still made the peach cobbler that was basically illegal.

By the time Liza hung up, she felt exhausted, but it was the particular type of exhaustion that came from loving someone you couldn’t be fully honest with.

She put the phone on the nightstand and stared up at the ceiling.

The weight of her lies sat on her chest like a sandbag.

She would tell her mom eventually, when she had something to replace it with, a new direction, a new plan, some kind of proof that her falling apart had led somewhere worth going.