Page 17 of Piece By Piece

He studied the paper. The structure was sound, and the idea of distributing clue stations was a smart one. It would bring foot traffic to different shops, which local businesses would appreciate. And progressive difficulty would keep older kids engaged.

He pulled the paper toward him slightly and picked up a pencil. Next to her bubbles, he started sketching a grid, a simple map of the town with numbered stops.

“If we do eight stops,” he said, “and each one has a letter as a solution, then the final word challenge could be an anagram. So the kids would unscramble the letters and make a word, and then the word is the answer to a riddle that would then unlock the prize.”

She stared at the grid and then stared at him.

“Well, that’s actually pretty brilliant.”

“It’s just logistics.”

“No, Grant, that is not logistics. That’s a design. It’s elegant.”

She pulled the paper back and started integrating his grid into her bubble map, her marker flying.

“Okay, so I’ll handle the reading challenge component here at the bookstore. That’ll be the starting point, and then you design the clue cards for each station. So we need to figure out which shops will participate, and we need a theme.”

“No pirate theme.”

She rolled her eyes. “Okay, what about a detective theme?”

He considered it. “That’s actually not bad.”

“You sound surprised.”

“Well, I am surprised.”

She tossed a sticky note at him, and it landed on his notepad. He carefully peeled it off and put it to the side.

This Liza Forrester was always doing something unexpected.

They worked together for another hour. The conversation eventually found a rhythm. Her big ideas met his structural, organized thinking and produced something better than they probably could have built alone.

She supplied the vision, and he supplied the framework.

She would say something outrageous, and he would say something precise.

And somewhere in the middle, the idea for the scavenger hunt finally took shape.

At one point, she had suggested that each clue card could have a fun fact about Seagrove on the back, like some island history for the parents while the kids were working on the puzzle.

“And where are you going to get the fun facts?” he asked.

“Dixie. That woman’s like a walking encyclopedia. You know, she told me yesterday the island was originally named after some kind of seagrass that doesn’t even grow here anymore. She said it with the kind of authority that makes you afraid to even go Google it.”

Grant almost laughed.

He caught himself, but not before the corner of his mouth twitched.

And he knew Liza saw it.

Her eyes lit up like she’d just won a prize at the carnival.

“Wait, was that a smile?”

“No.”

“Well, it was close.”