Page 90 of Piece By Piece

Porch.

Island.

Each word was a piece of their story.

The theme answers, read in order, spelled a single word.

OURS.

She set the pencil down and looked at the grid and then at him, smiling.

“Ours,” she said.

“Ours,” he confirmed.

Not his shop or her bookstore.

Not his silence and her noise.

Not two separate lives running parallel on opposite sides of a wall.

But ours.

The shared thing.

Something they had built together.

She folded the crossword and put it into her pocket.

“I’m keeping this one, too.”

“I figured you would.”

“You know, you’re going to run out of crosswords eventually.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t.”

He was certain and steady, and it made her eyes sting for the tenth time that morning.

She was going to have to invest in waterproof mascara if she planned on keeping Grant Whitmore around.

And she definitely planned on keeping Grant Whitmore around.

Dixie called a meeting that afternoon.

Of course, it wasn’t a formal meeting because Dixie didn’t do anything formal.

She made some sweet tea, put out a plate of cookies, and arranged four chairs around the reading nook table.

Then she waited for the people she’d invited to show up.

Liza, Grant, and Julie.

When they were all seated, Dixie stood at the head of the table with her wrist braced and her reading glasses on.

“All right,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about something.”

“Oh, good Lord, that’s never a small thing for you,” Julie said.