Page 36 of Piece By Piece

“Oh, Grant.”

“He was thirty-eight years old. No warning signs, no history. Doctors said it was just one of those things.”

He said one of those things like it was a phrase he’d heard a hundred times and still couldn’t make it fit.

“He was the one who pushed me to do everything I’ve done. All this, the puzzles, everything. He was my noise. When he was gone, I didn’t see the point of making noise of my own.”

The rain filled the silence.

A candle flickered, as if Owen were in the room with them.

Liza didn’t reach for him because she sensed that what he needed right now wasn’t someone to touch him.

It was just someone to witness what he was saying. Someone to hear the thing he’d been carrying and not try to fix it.

“He sounds like someone I would have liked,” she said softly.

He turned his head and looked at her. His eyes were dark in the candlelight, and there was something there she hadn’t seen before.

It wasn’t sadness exactly, but it was definitely adjacent to it. A place where grief starts to look less like a wall and more like a door he just hadn’t opened yet.

“He would have loved you,” Grant said.

The words had come out before he could stop them.

She could see that, the way his jaw tightened the second after he said it and his eyes shifted away like he’d accidentally handed her something breakable and was already regretting it.

But she didn’t make a big deal of it.

She just said, “Then I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet him.”

They sat there with that for a while, the occasional crack of thunder vibrating through the floor.

Liza pulled one of the cushions onto her lap and held it, not because she was cold, but because she needed something to do with her hands.

“He used to do this thing,” Grant said after a while. “Every time I finished a new puzzle, he would call me up. Didn’t matter what time it was, and he’d say, ‘Read me the clues.’ And I would, every single one of them, and he’d try to solve it over the phone.” Grant looked at the candle. “And he was horrible at crosswords. I mean, genuinely the most awful person I’ve ever seen at crosswords, but he never stopped trying.”

Liza smiled. “That says a lot about him.”

“It says everything about him.”

The storm was not letting up. If anything, it seemed to be getting worse.

The wind had changed directions and was now blasting rain against the side of the building in huge sheets.

A branch cracked somewhere outside and Liza flinched.

“Just a branch,” Grant said.

“I know. I’m not scared of storms.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them.

The candlelight made the bookstore feel like the rest of the world had washed away and this was all that was left.

Two people on the floor between the shelves, rain hammering against the roof.