Page 73 of Piece By Piece

She noticed the change on Wednesday.

It was four days after the festival, four days after their moment on the marsh, four days after he had kissed her and said things that kept echoing through her mind like a song she couldn’t stop humming.

But on Wednesday, Grant was very different.

He was in the shop when she came by with iced coffee at three, same as always.

He took the cup and said thank you, answered her questions about the scavenger hunt debrief and the clue card reprints that several parents had requested.

He was polite and present and yet completely unreachable again.

It was like she was talking to him through glass.

She noticed it in some of the small things first.

He didn’t come out on the porch that evening.

He didn’t text her back for several hours.

And when he did, the message was four words.

Sorry, was working late.

He canceled their Thursday afternoon planning session with a one-line email saying something had come up. Reschedule?

No explanation.

No rescheduled time.

By Friday, the glass seemed thicker.

She brought cookies for the owl jar.

She’d started doing this, bringing them herself instead of waiting for him to fill it up. But this time she found the shop door locked at two o’clock in the afternoon.

The sign said open, but the door was locked.

She knocked, but there was no answer.

His car was still in the lot behind the building.

She stood on the sidewalk, looked at the locked door, and felt something cold settle in her bones.

Not anger, but something worse.

Something like dread.

The dread of watching someone you care about build a wall that you thought they had torn down.

She went back to the bookstore and tried to reorganize the romance section, but it didn’t need it.

Dixie watched her from the register but didn’t say anything, which was how Liza knew that Dixie had noticed too.

⸻

Grant sat in the back room with the door closed and the lights off.

He tried to make his brain do what it was built to do, solve the puzzle.