Page 8 of Piece By Piece

She put the plate on the counter and, without waiting for an invitation, looked around.

Her eyes went wide. Most puzzle stores, the few that still existed, looked like cluttered hobby shops or sad clearance aisles, but Grant’s looked like someone had designed it with intention.

“Wow,” she said. “This is actually gorgeous.”

She didn’t wait for a response. She just started moving through the shop the way people move through museums. Picking things up, touching them, turning them over, putting them back in different positions from where she’d found them.

He watched this with the quiet horror of someone watching a stranger rearrange their bookshelf.

She picked up a metal disentanglement puzzle and tried to pull the two pieces apart. They didn’t budge. So she tried again, even harder.

Grant winced. “You have to twist it, not pull it,” he said, reaching into the air and then putting his hands in his pockets.

“I’m a puller by nature.”

“Well, that explains a lot.”

She looked up at him, and he realized he’d accidentally said something that was close to funny. He hadn’t meant to.

She put the puzzle down, in the wrong spot, of course, and walked over to the crossword section.

“You have a whole wall of crosswords,” she said, running her fingers along the spines.

“Well, yeah, that’s what a crossword section usually looks like.”

“My dad would have camped out right in this corner and never left. You would have had to call the police to get him out of here. He was one of those people who did the crossword in pen because he said pencil was for people who didn’t believe in themselves.”

Grant had to admit that he almost smiled at that. Almost. He caught himself in time and rearranged his face into something more neutral.

“What are these?” she asked, holding up a wooden box with brass hinges.

“Puzzle box. You have to figure out a sequence of moves to open it.”

“Oh, like a combination lock?”

“More like a conversation. You have to listen to the box before it’ll open.”

She raised an eyebrow. “That’s either very deep or very weird.”

“Could be both.”

She grinned.

He didn’t.

But something in him shifted just slightly, like a drawer opening that he’d meant to keep closed.

She continued walking and found the tangram sets. As she sat down at the try-it table, she started rearranging the pieces.

“So,” she said, not even looking up, “I have an idea.”

“Oh, I’m sure you do.”

She ignored his tone.

“So I’m redesigning the children’s section over at the bookstore. You sell puzzles, and our shops share a wall. What if we decided to do a joint event? You know, like Books and Brains. Kids come for a reading challenge at the bookstore, and then maybe a puzzle challenge over here. We could do it on a weeknight and string some lights up between the shops. Make it a whole thing.”

She looked up, excitement on her face.