Chapter 1 #3
The walls of the shop were painted a deep navy blue. He’d also done that himself over three late nights with a roller and a podcast about the history of cryptography.
The shelves were white, clean-lined, and already half-filled with inventory.
In the back corner, he had set up a small table with two chairs and a lamp. This would be the spot where customers could sit and try out a puzzle before they bought it.
Everything had its place. That was the whole point.
Grant set down a box of wooden peg solitaire boards and stepped back to look at the room.
It was good, it was quiet, and it was his.
He’d spent the last three days getting the shop ready, and the work had been the kind he liked best: solitary, physical, and precise.
Sand this, paint that, measure twice, cut once, and he didn’t have to talk to anybody while he was doing it.
He had eaten takeout from a seafood place down the block every single night and fallen asleep on a small cot in the back room because the apartment that he’d rented two streets over still didn’t have a bed frame.
But he didn’t mind.
Grant had never been somebody who needed comfort. He just needed order. He needed quiet. He also needed the particular satisfaction of putting something exactly where it belonged and then knowing it wouldn’t move unless he was the one who moved it.
Seagrove Island had not been on his radar even six months ago.
He’d been living in a rented condo in Raleigh, North Carolina, staring at his laptop most days and going for long runs that didn’t tire him out the way he needed them to.
He’d sold Gridlock, his puzzle app, his accidental empire, about a year and a half earlier, and the money was just sitting in an account he barely touched.
Forty million downloads. A modest fortune in his bank account. A Wikipedia page that he’d never read and never intended to.
All of it under the name W. Elliott.
Nobody in Seagrove knew that name, and that was exactly the point.
Here, he was just Grant, the quiet guy who rented the space next to the bookstore and sold puzzles and brain games.
There would be no interviews, no profiles, no one asking him what was next. He’d had enough of thinking about what was next.
The final box was the one that he always chose to unpack last. It was smaller than the others and taped shut with packing tape that had been opened and resealed so many times that the edges were fraying.
He carried it into the back room, put it on the floor, and opened it carefully.
Inside, there was a framed photo, a pocket knife with a wooden handle, a baseball cap from some fishing tournament in the Outer Banks, and a dog-eared copy of The Big Book of Crosswords, Volume 1, the first collection that had ever published one of Grant’s puzzles.
The photo was of two boys on a dock, maybe around ten and twelve years old. The older one was in the middle of laughing and was holding up a fish, with one arm slung over the younger one’s shoulders. The younger one was trying to look serious but failing completely.
Owen and Grant, summer of 1998.
Owen had been the loud one. He was the one who walked into a room and made it feel warm just by being there. He would talk to strangers in checkout lines and remember the names of every waiter at every restaurant. He called Grant on the phone just to tell him a joke that he’d heard.
He was two years older and often felt more like a second father than a brother. He was the fun one, the one who said yes when everyone else said no.
He’d also been the one who had pushed Grant to share his puzzles with the world.
Grant had only been twenty-two when he created his first crossword, sitting at a card table in his studio apartment with graph paper and a mechanical pencil. He had shown it to Owen the next weekend, like it was a secret.
Owen had looked at it for maybe forty-five seconds and said, “You’re sending this somewhere.”
“It’s just a puzzle, man.”
“It’s not just a puzzle. This is the best puzzle I’ve ever seen, and you know I’ve done lots of puzzles while pretending to work. You’re sending it somewhere, and I’m going to stand over your shoulder while you do it.”
And he had.
Owen had been the one who found the publisher. Owen had been the one who suggested a pseudonym when Grant got too nervous about the attention. Owen had been the one who, many years later, convinced him to build Gridlock.
“You make the magic,” Owen always said. “I’ll make the noise.”
Three years ago, Owen’s heart stopped. Sudden cardiac arrest before he even made it to forty years old. No warning, no symptoms. He had just been hanging out at a cookout with friends, laughing at something someone said.
Then he was on the ground.
And then he was gone.
Grant had gotten the call while driving home from a meeting with a developer who wanted to license Gridlock for schools. He had to pull over on the side of the road and sit there for two hours.
He didn’t cry. He didn’t even call anybody. He just sat there with his engine running, trying to figure out how the world could keep moving when the one person who made it spin had stopped living.
Everything after that was just a blur. The funeral, the estate, the selling of the app because Grant just couldn’t look at it anymore without hearing Owen’s voice saying, “We did it, little brother.”
The slow dismantling of every part of his life that had required him to be visible and present.
He’d come to Seagrove to be invisible, to build something small and quiet that was entirely his own and something that didn’t need Owen’s noise to survive.
He placed the photo on the shelf in the back room next to the crossword book and straightened the frame with his thumb.
“Owen, you would hate this town,” he said quietly. “It’s way too slow for you.”
That wasn’t true, and he knew it.
Owen would have loved Seagrove. He would have been on a first-name basis with every single person on the island within a week.
The bell above the door rang at precisely 2:15 in the afternoon.
Grant looked up from the table he was arranging and saw the woman from the balcony. He recognized her even though they had never really met. He’d seen her last night, and he knew she’d waved in his direction. Of course, he hadn’t waved back because waving at strangers just wasn’t something he did.
She was carrying a plate of cookies covered with plastic wrap and smiling, having already decided their conversation would go well.
“Hi, I’m Liza. I’m staying next door, above the bookstore. I’m helping Dixie with the children’s section.” She held out the plate. “Dixie made these snickerdoodles. They are to die for. And she told me to tell you that if you don’t eat them this time, she’s going to take it personally.”
He looked at the plate, then at her.
“Grant.”
“Just Grant?”
“Just Grant.”
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.
Grant recognized that look. It was the look of somebody who had the entire event planned in their head and was just being polite by pretending to ask.
“No,” he said.
“No?”
“Look, I appreciate the thought, but I’m not looking for events or partnerships or any of that stuff. I’m not looking for… things,” he said, searching for the right word.
“Things?”