Page 29 of Piece By Piece

The owl looked back with its huge unblinking eyes as if it was daring him to move it.

So he left it.

Three days later, without telling anybody, he filled it with shortbread cookies from the bakery.

A customer noticed it within an hour.

“Oh, this is adorable. Can I have one?”

“Of course,” Grant said with a nod.

The woman took the cookie, bought a puzzle box, and then told two friends about the charming little shop with the owl cookie jar on the counter.

He refilled it every three days after that.

Of course, he never mentioned any of this to Liza.

But every time she came into the shop and looked at the counter and saw the lid slightly open with crumbs on the rim, she smiled.

And he pretended not to notice.

Liza and Grant had fallen into a routine.

Every day around three o’clock, when all the shops were slow and the heat was at its worst, Liza would walk over to The Puzzle Post with two iced coffees. They would work on festival planning. Sometimes they sat at his little table, and sometimes they sat on the porch between the shops, the fairy lights swaying in whatever breeze the island could manage that day.

It was during one of these sessions, a week after Books and Brains, that the conversation moved away from logistics and toward something more personal.

They had been talking about the order of the scavenger hunt stops. Grant wanted to put the hardest clue in the middle, and Liza wanted to build difficulty gradually.

Then she suddenly stopped in the middle of a sentence and started laughing.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing. It’s just, well, you and I are arguing about clue placement, and it’s one of the most weirdly specific things I’ve ever enjoyed.”

He didn’t respond, because responding would have meant acknowledging that he was kind of enjoying it too, and he didn’t want to say that out loud.

She took a sip of coffee and leaned back in her chair.

“My dad would have been all over this. This scavenger hunt, all the clue cards. He was one of those people who turned everything into a game. I remember when I was little, he would hide notes around the house for me to find. You know, little riddles that would lead to the next one. The final clue always led to something good, like a new book or a candy bar. And one time, a kitten.”

“A kitten?”

“Yeah. And my mother was not asked about it.”

Grant almost smiled.

He found himself doing that more often around her. Almost smiling.

The muscles were there. He just hadn’t used them in a while.

“Every Saturday morning,” she said, “he’d sit at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and his blue pen, and he would do his crossword. Always blue ink. He said pencil was for people who didn’t believe in themselves. He would read the clues out loud to our dog, who obviously didn’t care or understand, but Dad said that she was a good listener.”

She was smiling.

But it was the kind of smile that was both beautiful and brutal, all wrapped up in how much she missed her dad.

“He had a favorite crossword creator,” she continued. “Some guy named W. Elliott. And he was obsessed. He would get a new book of W. Elliott crosswords and then just ration them, one a week, so they would last. And he wrote these little notes in the margins, like conversations with someone who could never write back.”