Page 19 of Piece By Piece

They stood side by side, studying the image.

“He looks happy,” Grant said quietly.

“Yeah, they both do.”

Liza slipped the photo back into the guest book and put it on the shelf.

Neither of them said anything about it, but they both seemed less guarded, less careful, like a puzzle piece clicking into place.

That afternoon, after Liza had gone back to working on the children’s section and Grant had returned to his shop, he sat at his workbench and stared at the blank clue cards he was supposed to be designing.

His mind kept drifting.

The scavenger hunt. The way Liza’s brain worked so differently, messy and fast, and somehow exactly right. The sticky note she’d thrown at him. The way that she’d called his simple grid layout elegant, like it was something worth admiring.

Owen would have absolutely loved her.

The thought arrived in his brain the way it always did, sharp and uninvited.

He closed his eyes and saw the county fair.

He was twenty-two years old, sitting behind a folding table with a hand-drawn banner that said Puzzle Corner and a stack of printed crossword puzzles. He’d been way too nervous to talk to anybody. People would walk by and glance at the table and just keep going.

He’d been ready to pack up after an hour.

But then Owen showed up.

He’d driven three hours from Raleigh without telling Grant he was coming.

He walked up to the table, picked up one of the crosswords, and started waving it in the air like he was a carnival barker.

“Ladies and gentlemen, step right up. My little brother made these puzzles. They’re going to break your brain in the best possible way. And guess what? The first one’s free. And the second one costs you a smile.”

Grant had wanted to crawl under the table.

Within twenty minutes, there was a line.

Owen kept talking, pulling people in, slapping Grant on the back, and saying, “Tell them about the theme. Tell them about the hidden message.”

By the end of the day, they’d given away two hundred crosswords, and Grant had four emails from people who wanted to publish his work.

On the drive home, Owen looked over at him and said, “You make the magic, little brother, and I’ll make the noise. That’s how this will work.”

Grant opened his eyes.

He was sitting in his quiet shop, and the clue cards were still blank.

Oh, how he wished he could go back to those moments.

Liza’s energy echoed his brother’s so closely his chest went tight. Her big gestures, her easy warmth with strangers, the refusal to let the room stay quiet.

She wasn’t the same, of course. She wasn’t Owen. And he certainly wasn’t looking for a replacement for his brother.

But it was close enough to remind him of what he’d lost.

The last time he had let someone that bright into his life, the world had taken them away.

Julie was in the middle of editing a chapter when Dawson breezed into the kitchen and sat down across from her. He looked like a man who was about to confess something.