Page 46 of Piece By Piece

He was looking forward to the day.

It was so unfamiliar that he lay in his bed for a full minute, trying to examine it the way he would examine a puzzle with an error.

He turned it over in his mind, tested the thought, tried to figure out where it had come from and whether it was real.

He’d been in Seagrove for almost two months.

He’d opened his shop, made a few acquaintances, eaten more cookies than he had consumed in the previous ten years combined, most of them from a ceramic owl jar that had invaded his counter without permission.

But somewhere along the way, without his consent, a woman who talked too loud and moved too fast and rearranged his displays when she thought he wasn’t looking had become the first thing he thought about in the morning and the last thing he thought about at night.

This was a big problem.

He got up, made his bed with his normal hospital corners, brewed his coffee, and stood at the kitchen window of his small rented house two streets back from the square.

He couldn’t see his shop from here, but he could see the tops of the live oaks on the square and the edge of the church steeple.

If the wind was just right, he could even smell the salty sea air.

He drank his coffee black and tried to think about his inventory, about the shipment of puzzle boxes that would be arriving tomorrow, about the crossword anthology he was considering stocking from a small press in Vermont.

But instead, all he thought about was Liza’s face in the candlelight during the storm, about the way she had said, I’m thirty-two, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be.

She had more honesty than many people manage in a lifetime.

And then about the way she had said that she was done with Dixie’s list and looked at him like he might be part of the reason.

The feeling in his chest wasn’t new.

He remembered it from a long time ago, from before Owen, from before selling the app and dismantling his public life.

It was the feeling of actually wanting something.

Not a thing or an accomplishment, but a person.

The pull of wanting to be near someone and having no explanation for why.

It wasn’t rational, and Grant lived in the land of rational.

The last time he’d felt this hopeful, this exposed, Owen had been alive.

And that was the part that made his hands go still on his coffee cup.

Because the last time he’d built something that mattered, the world had taken the most important part of it away.

He put his cup down, put on his shoes, and walked to the shop.

He threw himself into the scavenger hunt clue cards with the focus of a man trying to outwork the feelings bubbling up inside.

He’d been drafting them for a while now, but he shifted to a different gear.

Each card was hand-illustrated, a small ink drawing of the Seagrove landmark where the clue would be hidden, and a puzzle printed just below in clean typography.

He had designed eight cards total, one for each stop, and each one was a small work of art.

The first card led kids from the bookstore to the bakery, which wasn’t very far, of course.

The clue card was a word scramble with a hidden letter.