Page 87 of Piece By Piece

She opened it.

She stood there reading it, standing behind the counter in the middle of the afternoon.

She read it once quickly, and then again more slowly.

When she reached I associate all beautiful things with you, she put her hand over her mouth.

The words blurred.

She blinked and cleared her eyes and kept reading. Stopping wasn’t an option. Not now.

I can’t promise you that I won’t get scared again. I can’t promise you that I won’t try to hide.

She set the letter on the counter and put both of her palms flat against the wood.

Her eyes were wet.

Something in her chest that had been clenched for days was slowly unclenching.

Not all at once, but the way a fist opens when it finally decides it doesn’t need to be a fist anymore.

He had turned down the deal.

He had chosen the island and the shop and the porch step.

He’d written it in blue ink in careful handwriting and sent it through Dixie, probably because he didn’t want to pressure her.

And that, more than the letter, told her that he meant it.

That he had the patience and restraint to let her make her own decision.

When she finished, she held the letter against her chest the way that she had held her father’s crossword book.

She stood there for a long time.

And then, finally, Liza Forrester, who had come to the island broken and hiding and unsure of who she was, held the letter written in blue ink by a man who had finally decided to stop hiding too.

But she didn’t go to him, not immediately.

She needed a moment to breathe.

So she set the letter on her nightstand next to her father’s book and slept better than she had in days.

CHAPTER 14

Liza woke up to the sound of a rooster and that unmistakable smell of salty air.

She had made a decision.

The letter was on the nightstand, and her father’s crossword puzzle book was beside it.

Two sets of paper.

Two sets of handwriting.

And two men who understood the world through the structure and pattern and careful placement of words.

She’d lost one of them, and the other one was just two hundred yards away in a puzzle shop with his crooked owl on the counter, waiting to find out if he’d ruined everything.