Page 33 of Piece By Piece

the app is gonna be huge and youre gonna wanna freak out about it

and thats ok

just dont disappear into one of those puzzle rooms you like to go into and forget to live

stop hiding behind the puzzles man

one day youre going to meet somebody who solves you

and then when that happens you better not run

love you,

o

Grant read it twice, then a third time.

He’d memorized it years ago, of course, but reading the actual words with Owen’s sloppy punctuation and stubborn lowercase, the love you, o at the end, it still felt like he was pressing on a bruise that would never go away.

One day you’re going to meet somebody who solves you.

He thought about Liza on the porch, laughing about the kitten her father had smuggled home.

He thought about the cookie jar sitting on his counter.

The owl with the big eyes.

He thought about the way she’d asked, “Why does everything have to be silent?”

And the way the question had stayed with him for days, not because she was accusing him of anything, but because she was genuinely curious about it.

She actually wanted to know.

He closed the laptop.

He never deleted the email.

He would never, ever do that.

CHAPTER 6

The sky had been threatening all day.

Liza had looked at it that morning when she stepped onto the balcony with her coffee. The air felt heavy, and clouds had started stacking on the horizon like big gray bricks.

By lunchtime, the wind had picked up, and it was pulling at the awnings on the square, sending a stack of flyers from the deli skidding across the sidewalk like stones across a pond.

Dixie had gone home early. Said her wrist was bothering her because of the weather coming in, though she’d never admit that it was just the wrist injury and had nothing to do with the weather.

“I’m not afraid of a little rain,” she said on her way out. “I mean, I don’t want to be here if the power goes out because the last time I was in the building during a blackout, I tripped over that stupid beanbag chair and said words that would have gotten me banned from church.”

Liza was well aware that Dixie had Parkinson’s disease and that sometimes her symptoms were worse than others.

She didn’t want to talk about it. Dixie rarely mentioned it. She acted as though it didn’t exist at all.

Her medications were helping her quite a bit, from what Liza could tell, but she still had a tremor in her right hand that would come and go depending on the time of day and when she had last taken her medicine.

In case of a blackout, she’d left Liza with the keys and strict instructions to lock it up if it got too bad.