Chapter 4 #2
“Janine and I are starting a scholarship fund, Seagrove Scholars. We want to use some of the proceeds from summer bookstore sales and bakery sales and do some events at The Puzzle Post to help fund it.”
Janine stepped forward.
“It would just be a small scholarship, you know, enough to cover textbooks or some school supplies for a local student every year. We’re still working out the details, but we’ve already talked to a few business owners about participating.”
“I suggested a pie-eating contest as a fundraiser,” SuAnn added. “Nothing brings the community together like some competitive eating.”
Janine gave her mother a look and then rolled her eyes.
Liza’s marketing brain latched on immediately.
“Well, that’s a wonderful idea. I mean, we could tie it into the festival, make the scavenger hunt entry fee a suggested donation, run a fundraiser alongside it. I could even design the materials.”
SuAnn smiled.
Grant, who had been listening from behind his table, said nothing, but Liza saw him write something on his notepad.
She craned her neck to read it.
Scholarship logistics. Talk to Liza tomorrow.
She didn’t say anything to him, but she definitely noticed.
The crowd finally thinned out around 8:30. Parents took their kids to their cars, and the middle schoolers left, seeming a little less indifferent than how they had arrived. Two of them took tangram sets they’d bought from Grant.
Dixie went home victorious, of course. SuAnn and Janine had left with a plan and a timeline for the scholarship program.
Liza began folding the quilts. The fairy lights were still on, and crickets had taken over the evening soundtrack around the town square.
She stacked the cushions and carried them inside and then came back out for the easel.
Grant was wiping down his tables. He looked to be working the same way he always did, methodically, thoroughly. He had already packed up the puzzle stations into their bins and was breaking down the folding tables.
Julie had stopped by earlier in the evening, but just long enough to take a quick look around. She gave Liza a thumbs-up before rushing back to the inn. She had that look again, the one Liza was starting to recognize as that of a woman who needed to be in ten places at once.
She carried the last quilt inside and came back out to find Grant standing on the sidewalk, looking up at the fairy lights.
“I guess we should probably take those down,” she said.
“Well, we could leave them.”
She turned to look at him. He was staring up at the lights with his hands in his pockets, and his face had lost some of the careful neutrality he usually wore. He looked almost relaxed, like he was present in the moment.
“Do you want to leave them up? I mean, they look nice. If we’re going to do it again, it’s just less work.”
She smiled. “If? Does that mean you’re willing to do another Books and Brains night?”
He picked up the last folding table and tucked it under his arm. “It wasn’t terrible.”
Liza laughed.
For Grant, she was learning, it wasn’t terrible was actually similar to a standing ovation.
“Thanks for showing up tonight. And I really mean that.”
He nodded. “That kid with the tangrams. Did you see his face when he finished?”
“I saw it.”
“His mom came up to me afterward and said he never finishes anything. He gets frustrated and quits. She was actually tearing up a little.” Grant said it like he was reporting the weather, but Liza could hear it underneath, the crack in that neutral tone, the way his voice got quieter instead of louder when something mattered.
“Well, you were really good with him,” she said. “The way you explained things and listened. Hey, that wasn’t just puzzle advice. That was life advice.”
He shifted the table under his arm. “I just told him what someone once told me.”
She wanted to ask who, but she didn’t.
He paused at the door to his shop.
“That’s why puzzles,” he said quietly.
Then he went inside.
She stood there for a moment in the glow of those fairy lights, the square empty and quiet.
And somehow she felt more alive than she had all day.
There was no way Liza was sleeping tonight.
Her brain was doing that thing where it stuck like a skipping record, replaying the evening, figuring out what worked, what she could change next time, and how to make the reading challenge more engaging for the older kids.
She changed into pajamas and sat on the bed with her laptop, typing notes.
After a little while, the words started to blur, so she set it aside.
She looked over at the crossword books on the nightstand. She picked up the one on top — the same one she'd been reading from since she arrived — and flipped to a new page.
Her father’s blue ink appeared in the margin, faded but steady.
She read his handwriting the way she always did, slowly, like she was getting to hear his voice again.
W. Elliott, if you’re out there, you are the only person who might understand how my brain works.
She’d read this note before.
Tonight it hit a little differently.
Tonight she’d watched a quiet man kneel down next to a nervous boy and say, Each piece only goes one way, and it’ll tell you where if you’re patient.
Tonight she’d heard Grant say, That’s why puzzles, like he was answering a question that went deeper than any of the ones she had asked.
She traced the letters with her fingertip.
W. Elliott, the mysterious crossword creator her father had admired for so many years.
She wondered who he was.
Probably a retired professor, or maybe a journalist with a puzzle hobby.
She’d looked him up once or twice, but never found a photo or a real name, just the puzzles themselves, which were everywhere if you knew where to look.
Her father had spent the last ten years of his life working through W. Elliott’s crosswords like they were letters from a pen pal.
He’d told Liza once that a good crossword creator knew something about the way your mind worked, that the clues weren’t just questions, but they were invitations, and the best ones made you feel smart for finding the answer instead of stupid for not knowing it.
“That’s what good teachers do,” he would say. “They don’t show you the answer. They make you believe that you can find it on your own.”
She closed the book and held it against her chest for a moment, the way she used to hold her phone after she hung up with her dad.
“Boy, you would have loved tonight, Dad,” she whispered. “All those kids doing puzzles. You would have been right there in the middle of it.”
She set the book back on the nightstand and turned off the lamp.
Through the window, the fairy lights between the shops cast a faint golden glow on the ceiling.
They were still on.
Grant had wanted to leave them up.
She fell asleep smiling.