Page 45 of Piece By Piece

On Saturday, SuAnn called an emergency meeting regarding the pie-eating contest.

The emergency was that she had ordered sixty pies from three different bakeries, and none of them had actually confirmed their delivery dates.

She had also ordered folding tables from a rental company that may or may not still be in business, and she had printed hundreds of flyers with the wrong date on them.

Janine sat across from her mother at the bookstore table, pinching the bridge of her nose.

“Mama, the festival is in two weeks. We still have some time.”

“We do not have time. What we have is chaos, Janine, chaos.”

“Well, to be fair, you created the chaos.”

“That is beside the point.”

Liza tried to mediate from behind the counter, helping them sort out logistics with the demeanor of someone who had once managed a product launch with a six-figure budget and a team that couldn’t even agree on a font.

Compared to that, sixty pies and some misprinted flyers were nothing.

By the time SuAnn and Janine left, the flyers were corrected, the bakeries were called, and Janine had extracted a promise from her mother not to make any more decisions without consulting a second human being first.

SuAnn had agreed to this in the way that a child might agree to eat some vegetables.

There was no conviction in her voice.

That night, after the bookstore closed and Liza heated up some leftover soup, she sat on her bed with her laptop and did something she had been meaning to do for days.

She typed W. Elliott crossword creator into the search bar.

The results were thin.

There was a fan forum with a handful of devoted followers, a little Wikipedia page that said almost nothing, no photo, no real name, just a list of published works and the note that W. Elliott is believed to be a pseudonym.

There was a brief interview from six years ago in a puzzle magazine.

The creator had answered questions by email only and revealed absolutely nothing personal beyond a preference for symmetrical grids.

There was no face, no name, no location.

Liza scrolled through the fan forum.

People had posted their favorite W. Elliott puzzles, debated the clue quality, and occasionally wondered about the real identity.

One user had written, Whoever this person is, they see the world entirely differently than the rest of us. Every puzzle feels like a conversation with someone who understands how your brain is wired.

Her own father would have agreed with that.

She closed the laptop and stared at the ceiling.

Somewhere out there was a person who had given her father years of Saturday morning joy and never even known it.

A person hiding behind a pen name, making puzzles in private and sending them into the world.

And then she thought about Grant, about the way he hid behind his counter and crossed his arms, about the way he designed puzzles that made children’s faces light up and then deflected credit like it was something he needed to be embarrassed by.

CHAPTER 8

Grant woke up on Tuesday morning with a feeling he didn’t remember feeling before.