Chapter 4
Liza had been running on sweet tea and adrenaline since around two o’clock in the afternoon.
By dinnertime, the space between Down Yonder Books and The Puzzle Post looked like something that came straight out of a storybook.
She had strung fairy lights between the two shop awnings, crisscrossing them in a canopy that would glow like starlight when the sun went down.
On the sidewalk, she had laid out quilts and floor cushions that she’d borrowed from Dixie’s house and created a full reading area in front of the bookstore.
On the side with the puzzle shop, Grant had set up three folding tables with different challenge stations: woodblock puzzles, logic grids, and tangrams. They looked deceptively simple.
Between the two shops, Liza had placed a hand-painted sign on an easel.
Books and Brains Night. All ages welcome.
She took a step back and looked at everything they had created.
She adjusted the sign two inches to the left, then back to the right.
And then she left it alone because otherwise she would just continue fiddling.
She went and checked the fairy light connections for a third time.
“I swear if you touch those lights again, I’m going to take away your extension cord privileges,” Dixie called from the bookstore doorway, where she was leaning, her wrist braced against it.
“I just want to make sure they’re even.”
“Honey, they’re even. They were even twenty minutes ago. You need to sit down and drink some water before you pass out.”
Of course, Liza didn’t sit down.
She just couldn’t. Her body never knew how to be still, especially when she was nervous.
She was nervous in that particular way of somebody who cared too much about whether a thing was going to work.
She’d had so much failure in her recent life that even this simple kids’ event felt like the most important thing she’d ever done.
After all, it was the first event she’d planned since leaving Charleston.
And the last event she’d planned before that had been a product launch for a tech company that had a budget of $80,000 and a team of twelve people.
Tonight, all she had were fairy lights, a few quilts, and a puzzle guy who might not even come outside.
She walked around looking at her setup one more time.
The reading station had a stack of picture books and chapter book excerpts. Each one of them had a bookmark tucked inside.
The challenge was simple. Read a chapter aloud to a partner, whether it was a parent, a sibling, or even a stranger, and then bring the bookmark to Liza for a stamp.
If they collected three stamps, they could pick a prize from the treasure box, which was actually a wicker basket that she’d found in Dixie’s closet and then filled with pencils, stickers, and small notepads.
She definitely didn’t have $80,000 for this.
But standing there with fairy lights overhead and the smell of salt air drifting in from the marsh, it felt like enough.
This was hers.
She had texted Grant that morning.
Ready for tonight?
His reply, a long forty-five minutes later:
The tables are set up.
It wasn’t exactly the enthusiasm she’d been hoping for, but at this point, she had learned that Grant communicated in the same way he built crosswords, with as few words as possible while still getting the meaning across.
People started arriving around 6:30.
First there was a family that had three kids under ten years old, the youngest one riding on her father’s shoulders.
Then there was a group of middle schoolers who walked up and seemed indifferent, pretending they weren’t enjoying anything.
Then a grandmother holding her grandson's hand as he pointed out the fairy lights.
Liza greeted every single one of them.
Now she felt like she was in her element. All that nervous energy turned into pure Southern hospitality that she couldn’t turn off if she tried.
She gave out bookmarks that she’d made that afternoon that had the reading challenge printed on the back of them.
Meg’s daughter Vivi showed up with Meg around seven o’clock, and Liza recognized them from the bookstore earlier that week. Vivi immediately planted herself at the reading station and started organizing the cushions by color.
“She’s been talking about this all day,” Meg said, looking around. “This is really lovely, Liza.”
“Thank you. I had lots of help.”
She glanced over at The Puzzle Post.
Grant was standing behind his tables. He had come outside when the first family arrived and settled in with the quiet resolve of a man set on fulfilling an obligation, even if he hadn’t asked for it.
His sleeves were rolled up, his arms crossed, and he watched the crowd with an expression somewhere between acceptance and mild alarm. Grant was not in his element at all.
A boy who was maybe eight or nine years old walked up to the tangram station and stared at the pieces like they were a foreign language.
He didn’t even touch them.
He just stood there, hands at his sides, looking.
Liza watched from across the way to see what Grant would do.
Grant noticed the boy the way he always noticed his fellow quiet guys.
The kid was standing there like he wanted to try the tangram table, but he didn’t want anyone to see him try.
His mother was standing a few feet away, talking to another parent.
And the boy had a look that Grant recognized from his own childhood.
The look of someone who thought the puzzle was for other people.
Grant walked around the table and crouched down.
“Hey, you want to give it a shot?”
The boy shrugged. “I’m not very good at puzzles.”
“Well, nobody’s good at puzzles when they first start. I mean, that’s the whole point, right? To learn how to do something well.”
The boy looked at him with skepticism. He had probably heard many adults say encouraging things before and found them mostly useless.
Grant respected it.
“Here,” Grant said.
He picked up the seven tangram pieces and laid them out flat.
“The trick with this is you don’t want to force the shapes into something. Just listen to them. Each piece will only fit one way, and it will tell you where it goes if you’re patient.”
He slid the two large triangles toward the boy.
“Start with the big ones. They’re the loudest.”
The boy picked up the triangle and turned it in his hand. Slowly, carefully, he placed it on the card, and then the second one.
Grant guided him through the parallelogram and the medium triangle.
By the time they got to the small pieces, he was doing it on his own.
When the last piece finally clicked into place, the boy’s face broke into a grin so wide it changed the whole shape of his face.
He looked up at Grant like he had just discovered fire.
“I did it!”
“You did it.”
“Can I try another one?”
“Well, you can try all of them.”
The boy pulled the next challenge card toward him, and Grant stood and stepped back, allowing the boy to work on his own.
Then he turned and saw Liza watching him from the bookstore, her arms folded across her chest.
She was looking at him in a way he couldn’t quite name.
It wasn’t like she was teasing him.
It was softer, warmer.
Like she’d just seen something she hadn’t expected.
And that made him look away immediately.
By 7:30, Dixie seemed to have had enough of her spectating. She got up from her chair and walked over to Grant’s hardest puzzle station. It was a logic grid that most adults had been avoiding like the plague.
She sat down like a woman about to take a final exam.
“Dixie, I gotta tell you, that one’s pretty advanced,” Grant started.
“Honey, I was doing this kind of stuff before you were born. My late husband Johnny used to clip them out of the newspaper for me. Now you hush up and let me concentrate.”
She finished it in seven minutes flat.
Grant knew because he had timed her without meaning to.
It had taken him nine minutes.
She slid the completed grid across the table, then looked at him with the happiness of a woman who had just proven a point without saying it.
“You got anything harder?”
He stared at her. “How did you…”
“Sugar, I’ve been running a bookstore for decades. You think I don’t know my way around a grid? Lord, I’ve cataloged more inventory than you’ve probably had hot dinners, and my brain is a filing cabinet with a turbocharger.”
He reached under the table and pulled out a puzzle he’d been saving for himself. It was a level five logic challenge with overlapping constraints.
Dixie took it, adjusted her reading glasses, and went to work.
A small crowd gathered to watch, and Liza walked over and stood beside Grant.
“Is she beating your hardest puzzle?”
“She just might.”
“Oh my gosh, this is the best thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Dixie finished it in twelve minutes.
“Now,” she said, “who wants to play me?”
Nobody volunteered, of course.
A man in the small crowd leaned toward his wife and whispered something. She shook her head firmly.
Dixie stood up and smoothed her blouse.
“Well, that’s what I thought.”
She patted Grant on the arm as she walked past him.
“Those were fun, honey. You should bring some harder ones next time.”
Grant watched her go with something Liza could only call bewildered respect.
“She just beat your hardest puzzle faster than you can,” Liza said.
“Yes, Liza, I’m aware.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m processing.”
Around 8 p.m., two more familiar faces appeared.
SuAnn walked up the sidewalk with her daughter Janine, both of them carrying folders.
Liza had met SuAnn briefly at the bookstore earlier that week. She was Julie’s mother, a force of nature in her floral prints, who talked with her hands and had opinions about everything.
Janine was quieter, steadier, and had a calmness about her. Of course, she was a yoga teacher, so that made sense.
SuAnn was a whirlwind of energy, probably hopped up from all the things she made at the bakery.
“Liza, sweetheart,” SuAnn said, grabbing her hands. “This is just darling. I mean, look at all these lights. Look at all these children. This is just the kind of thing this island needs.”
“Thank you, SuAnn.”
“Now, we have a proposition for you.”
SuAnn opened a folder.