Page 48 of Piece By Piece

“It’s just puzzle theory, Liza.”

“No, it’s not. It’s like philosophy. Like, you’re talking about how you’re going to make someone feel something through that structure.”

She turned to look at him, and he realized their faces were closer than he’d thought.

He could see the gold flecks in her brown eyes and the faint freckles across the bridge of her nose that had darkened in the island sun.

“The best clues aren’t about tricking someone, are they?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “They’re about giving someone a path to the answer they already know.”

She held his gaze, and he could feel the warmth of her shoulder against his.

This was feeling very dangerous.

He looked back at the grid.

“You try. Pick a theme word.”

She wrote something in the center row.

He leaned over and read it.

Seagrove.

He nodded. “That’s a good start. Okay, so now you need crossing words. Like, every letter in Seagrove has to connect to a down answer. So the S word going down starts with an S, and the E needs one starting with an E, and so on.”

She chewed on the end of the pencil, a habit that definitely made him wince, and started filling in the words.

She was actually way faster than he expected.

Her vocabulary was strong, which made sense given that she was working at the bookstore and probably had an interest in literature.

She also seemed to have a marketer’s instinct for language.

She gravitated toward words that felt good in the mouth, words with texture and weight.

“Sunrise for the S,” she said. “Edge for the E. What about A?”

“Anchor.”

She looked at him.

“That’s actually a great one.”

“Well, it’s the right one. There’s always a right one. You just have to be patient enough to find it.”

She held his gaze for slightly longer than the conversation required and then went back to the grid.

They worked together in silence, but it didn’t feel like the silence Grant was used to, the one that felt like loneliness.

This silence was productive.

It was the sound of two people making something together, their hands moving across the same piece of paper and their thoughts running in parallel.

When they finished the rough draft, she sat back and looked at it.

“It’s like building a little world,” she said. “Every word has to hold up the ones around it.”