Chapter 3
Grant had one very specific rule about jigsaw puzzles, and it also applied to just about everything else in his life.
Edges first.
You had to find the border pieces. You built a frame. You established the boundaries of the thing before you tried to fill in the middle. It was orderly, and it was safe. And it meant you knew exactly where the picture ended.
He had been doing this since he was a little kid.
Owen used to grab a puzzle at the kitchen table and then just dump it everywhere, diving straight into the center.
He’d grab whatever piece caught his eye, jam it against the other pieces to see if it fit, working from some sort of crazy instinct and chaos.
Grant would just sit across from him, shaking his head as he quietly separated out every flat-edged piece, building the frame.
“You’re no fun,” Owen would say.
“You’re just going to lose pieces,” Grant would respond.
“That’s the best part. Then you get to find them.”
Grant never understood that. Finding something you’d lost wasn’t fun. It was just stressful. It meant something along the way had gone wrong. The system had failed.
He thought about this as he unlocked The Puzzle Post at eight in the morning and flipped the sign to Open.
The shop was the way he had left it the night before. Every display aligned, every shelf organized by category.
The morning light came through the front windows, and for a few moments the stillness felt like something close to sacred.
He made coffee in the small machine that he’d set up in the back room and drank it black while standing in the corner.
He had a shipment of new logic puzzles arriving Thursday. He needed to update his window display. He wanted to design a few sample crossword cards to leave on the try-it table.
These were normal, predictable, and controllable things he could do.
But then Liza knocked on the glass door, holding up two paper cups from the coffee shop down the street, and the orderly edges of his morning came loose.
They had agreed to meet at the bookstore to plan the festival activities, but agreed must have been a generous word, because Julie had emailed them both with a shared document that had a deadline and a note that said, I know neither of you asked for this, but the kids at Seagrove are counting on you. Then she had added a smiley face.
Grant did not find it reassuring.
Liza sat at a table near the reading nook. She had spread out color markers, a roll of butcher paper, sticky notes in a variety of colors, and what looked like a mood board that she’d torn out of a magazine.
He sat across from her with his single notepad and a mechanical pencil.
She looked at his notepad.
He looked at her complete art supply store.
“Ready?” she said.
“For what exactly?”
“We’re going to brainstorm. See, I’m a visual thinker. I need to think all the things out on paper before they make any sense in my head.”
She took the cap off a green marker and wrote scavenger hunt in big letters across the top of the butcher paper.
He watched her work. She did move fast as she scribbled ideas and bubbles and drew arrows between them. Her handwriting was what one might call “frenetic,” which also meant it was barely legible, the kind that belonged to someone whose brain moved faster than their hands.
She talked while she wrote, half to him and half to herself.
“Okay, so the basic idea is that the kids will get a clue card at the bookstore, and each clue will lead them to a different shop around town. And at each stop, they’re going to get a stamp and have to do a small challenge, like a riddle or a word puzzle.
And then when they’ve hit all the stops, they’ll come back here for the final challenge and a prize. ”
She finally looked up. “Thoughts?”
He studied the paper. The structure was sound, and the idea of distributing clue stations was a smart one. It would bring foot traffic to different shops, which local businesses would appreciate. And progressive difficulty would keep older kids engaged.
He pulled the paper toward him slightly and picked up a pencil. Next to her bubbles, he started sketching a grid, a simple map of the town with numbered stops.
“If we do eight stops,” he said, “and each one has a letter as a solution, then the final word challenge could be an anagram. So the kids would unscramble the letters and make a word, and then the word is the answer to a riddle that would then unlock the prize.”
She stared at the grid and then stared at him.
“Well, that’s actually pretty brilliant.”
“It’s just logistics.”
“No, Grant, that is not logistics. That’s a design. It’s elegant.”
She pulled the paper back and started integrating his grid into her bubble map, her marker flying.
“Okay, so I’ll handle the reading challenge component here at the bookstore. That’ll be the starting point, and then you design the clue cards for each station. So we need to figure out which shops will participate, and we need a theme.”
“No pirate theme.”
She rolled her eyes. “Okay, what about a detective theme?”
He considered it. “That’s actually not bad.”
“You sound surprised.”
“Well, I am surprised.”
She tossed a sticky note at him, and it landed on his notepad. He carefully peeled it off and put it to the side.
This Liza Forrester was always doing something unexpected.
They worked together for another hour. The conversation eventually found a rhythm. Her big ideas met his structural, organized thinking and produced something better than they probably could have built alone.
She supplied the vision, and he supplied the framework.
She would say something outrageous, and he would say something precise.
And somewhere in the middle, the idea for the scavenger hunt finally took shape.
At one point, she had suggested that each clue card could have a fun fact about Seagrove on the back, like some island history for the parents while the kids were working on the puzzle.
“And where are you going to get the fun facts?” he asked.
“Dixie. That woman’s like a walking encyclopedia. You know, she told me yesterday the island was originally named after some kind of seagrass that doesn’t even grow here anymore. She said it with the kind of authority that makes you afraid to even go Google it.”
Grant almost laughed.
He caught himself, but not before the corner of his mouth twitched.
And he knew Liza saw it.
Her eyes lit up like she’d just won a prize at the carnival.
“Wait, was that a smile?”
“No.”
“Well, it was close.”
“It was a muscle spasm.”
“Fine, I’ll take it,” she said with a shrug.
She went back to the butcher paper, humming something under her breath.
Grant went back to sketching things out on his notepad.
He worked in silence for a while, and then suddenly the silence didn’t feel like a wall anymore.
It just felt like a shared room.
She looked up from her markers. “Can I ask you something?”
“Well, you’re going to regardless.”
“Why puzzles? Like of all the things you could sell in the world, why puzzles?”
He put his pencil down.
It was a simple question that had such a complicated answer, and he wasn’t sure how much of that complicated part he wanted to share.
So he gave her the simple version.
“Because every puzzle has a solution. You just have to find it. And for some reason, that’s comforting to me.”
She nodded slowly, as if she were putting that information away in some mental filing cabinet.
“Well, that makes sense. I think I’m the opposite. I like the mess before the solution. You know, the part where I don’t know what it’s going to be yet.”
“Well, that sounds terrifying.”
“Yeah, it kind of is,” she smiled. “But the mess is where all the good stuff happens.”
The two of them took a break when Dixie brought over some sandwiches from the deli. She put the plates down and looked at the butcher paper.
“Well, would you look at that? Y’all are actually getting along.”
“Don’t jinx it,” Liza said.
Dixie patted Grant on the shoulder as she passed by. He didn’t flinch, though he wanted to. “Eat your sandwich, puzzle boy. You look like you haven’t had a real meal in a while.”
She wasn’t wrong.
While they ate, Liza wandered over to one of the bookshelves near the register.
She’d been exploring the store in between tasks, learning about the history Dixie had collected over so many decades.
Old photographs were tucked between books.
There were notes from customers taped to the cabinet doors.
The store was less a business and more like a living scrapbook.
She pulled out a leather-bound guest book from the bottom shelf, one of the old ones with the lined pages.
People had written notes in it going back years.
She flipped through it, reading the entries from tourists and regulars and one person who had just drawn a picture of a seagull and written thank you underneath it.
Then a photograph fell out.
It was faded and a little bent at the corners and showed a younger Dixie, maybe thirty years ago, standing in front of the bookstore with a man.
He was tall and broad-shouldered with a wide smile.
His arm was around her waist. They looked like they belonged together in a way that some people just do.
“Hey, Grant, look at this.”
He walked over, his sandwich in hand, and looked at the photo.
“Is that Dixie?”
“I think so. I don’t know who this man is, though.”
They stood side by side, studying the image.
“He looks happy,” Grant said quietly.
“Yeah, they both do.”
Liza slipped the photo back into the guest book and put it on the shelf.
Neither of them said anything about it, but they both seemed less guarded, less careful, like a puzzle piece clicking into place.
That afternoon, after Liza had gone back to working on the children’s section and Grant had returned to his shop, he sat at his workbench and stared at the blank clue cards he was supposed to be designing.
His mind kept drifting.