Page 27 of Piece By Piece

W. Elliott, the mysterious crossword creator her father had admired for so many years.

She wondered who he was.

Probably a retired professor, or maybe a journalist with a puzzle hobby.

She’d looked him up once or twice, but never found a photo or a real name, just the puzzles themselves, which were everywhere if you knew where to look.

Her father had spent the last ten years of his life working through W. Elliott’s crosswords like they were letters from a pen pal.

He’d told Liza once that a good crossword creator knew something about the way your mind worked, that the clues weren’t just questions, but they were invitations, and the best ones made you feel smart for finding the answer instead of stupid for not knowing it.

“That’s what good teachers do,” he would say. “They don’t show you the answer. They make you believe that you can find it on your own.”

She closed the book and held it against her chest for a moment, the way she used to hold her phone after she hung up with her dad.

“Boy, you would have loved tonight, Dad,” she whispered. “All those kids doing puzzles. You would have been right there in the middle of it.”

She set the book back on the nightstand and turned off the lamp.

Through the window, the fairy lights between the shops cast a faint golden glow on the ceiling.

They were still on.

Grant had wanted to leave them up.

She fell asleep smiling.

CHAPTER 5

Something had changed overnight.

Grant noticed it the morning after the Books and Brains event, when a woman he’d never seen before walked into The Puzzle Post with her two kids.

“Hey, my son did one of your tangram puzzles last night, and he just hasn’t stopped talking about it. Do you sell them?”

He sold her two tangram sets and a wooden block puzzle. The kids sat at the table for twenty minutes while their mom browsed the crossword section.

When they left, the boy waved at Grant through the window.

And then it happened again.

A father came in looking for those “logic grid things” for his daughter. A teenager bought a puzzle box as a birthday gift. And then an older couple came in because they’d seen the fairy lights and wondered what was inside his shop.

By noon, Grant had made more sales than any previous day since opening.

He stood behind the counter and tried to make sense of the math.

It was just one event, one evening of fairy lights and floor cushions, and that woman next door who talked way too much.

Suddenly, people were walking through his door like they had just discovered he existed. Which he supposed they had.

An older man came in just before lunch. He was holding a newspaper under his arm and browsed the crossword section for a while.

He pulled out two anthologies and brought them to the counter.

“My wife said she saw lights last night and told me I needed to come here,” he said. “I’ve been doing crosswords for over forty years. Didn’t even know there was a place like this around here.”

“Well, I just opened,” Grant said.