Chapter 5
Something had changed overnight.
Grant noticed it the morning after the Books and Brains event, when a woman he’d never seen before walked into The Puzzle Post with her two kids.
“Hey, my son did one of your tangram puzzles last night, and he just hasn’t stopped talking about it. Do you sell them?”
He sold her two tangram sets and a wooden block puzzle. The kids sat at the table for twenty minutes while their mom browsed the crossword section.
When they left, the boy waved at Grant through the window.
And then it happened again.
A father came in looking for those “logic grid things” for his daughter. A teenager bought a puzzle box as a birthday gift. And then an older couple came in because they’d seen the fairy lights and wondered what was inside his shop.
By noon, Grant had made more sales than any previous day since opening.
He stood behind the counter and tried to make sense of the math.
It was just one event, one evening of fairy lights and floor cushions, and that woman next door who talked way too much.
Suddenly, people were walking through his door like they had just discovered he existed. Which he supposed they had.
An older man came in just before lunch. He was holding a newspaper under his arm and browsed the crossword section for a while.
He pulled out two anthologies and brought them to the counter.
“My wife said she saw lights last night and told me I needed to come here,” he said. “I’ve been doing crosswords for over forty years. Didn’t even know there was a place like this around here.”
“Well, I just opened,” Grant said.
“You’ve got yourself a regular then.”
The man tapped the counter twice and left with his bag.
Grant watched him go, chewing on a feeling he couldn’t quite identify.
He wasn’t proud, exactly. Something close to that, though.
A feeling of the thing he’d built being useful to someone he’d never expected.
He had designed The Puzzle Post to be quiet and self-contained. A place people would find if they were looking for it, and only if they were looking for it.
He sure hadn’t accounted for what happened when someone named Liza Forrester strung fairy lights to his awning and made the whole street pay attention to him.
It was a bit disorienting.
But not unpleasant.
She showed up around 2 p.m., carrying a ceramic cookie jar that was shaped like an owl.
Grant was restocking his crossword shelf when the little bell rang over the door. He turned around, and there she was, holding that goofy owl jar against her hip like a toddler, with a big grin on her face.
“What on earth is that?”
“It’s a cookie jar for your counter. For your customers.”
She walked past him and set it on the counter near the register, adjusting the position with confidence. She had definitely already decided this was happening.
“I didn’t ask for a cookie jar.”
“Well, nobody asks for a cookie jar, Grant. It just appears in your life and makes everything better. You know, like a beautiful sunset or a cute dog in a sweater.”
He looked at the owl.
It was brown, with huge painted eyes and a slightly crooked beak. It was, by a wide margin, the least sophisticated thing he’d ever considered putting in his carefully designed shop.
“It just doesn’t match anything in here.”
“Exactly. That’s the charm of it.”
She lifted the lid and peeked inside like a child.
“It’s empty right now, but I thought you could fill it with whatever. Maybe Dixie’s snickerdoodle cookies. Or store-bought ones. That’s fine, too. I mean, no judgment from me.”
“You’re putting a ceramic owl on my counter.”
“Yes. For the customers. Not for you.”
“Right.” He was having a really hard time figuring out how any of this was happening.
“I mean, unless you want some,” she added. “Then I guess it’s also for you.”
He opened his mouth to argue with her, then closed it because Liza was already walking toward the door. Arguing with someone who was already leaving was basically just yelling into the wind.
“You’re welcome,” she called over her shoulder.
Then the bell rang, and she was gone again.
He looked at the owl.
The owl looked back with its huge unblinking eyes as if it was daring him to move it.
So he left it.
Three days later, without telling anybody, he filled it with shortbread cookies from the bakery.
A customer noticed it within an hour.
“Oh, this is adorable. Can I have one?”
“Of course,” Grant said with a nod.
The woman took the cookie, bought a puzzle box, and then told two friends about the charming little shop with the owl cookie jar on the counter.
He refilled it every three days after that.
Of course, he never mentioned any of this to Liza.
But every time she came into the shop and looked at the counter and saw the lid slightly open with crumbs on the rim, she smiled.
And he pretended not to notice.
Liza and Grant had fallen into a routine.
Every day around three o’clock, when all the shops were slow and the heat was at its worst, Liza would walk over to The Puzzle Post with two iced coffees.
They would work on festival planning. Sometimes they sat at his little table, and sometimes they sat on the porch between the shops, the fairy lights swaying in whatever breeze the island could manage that day.
It was during one of these sessions, a week after Books and Brains, that the conversation moved away from logistics and toward something more personal.
They had been talking about the order of the scavenger hunt stops. Grant wanted to put the hardest clue in the middle, and Liza wanted to build difficulty gradually.
Then she suddenly stopped in the middle of a sentence and started laughing.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing. It’s just, well, you and I are arguing about clue placement, and it’s one of the most weirdly specific things I’ve ever enjoyed.”
He didn’t respond, because responding would have meant acknowledging that he was kind of enjoying it too, and he didn’t want to say that out loud.
She took a sip of coffee and leaned back in her chair.
“My dad would have been all over this. This scavenger hunt, all the clue cards. He was one of those people who turned everything into a game. I remember when I was little, he would hide notes around the house for me to find. You know, little riddles that would lead to the next one. The final clue always led to something good, like a new book or a candy bar. And one time, a kitten.”
“A kitten?”
“Yeah. And my mother was not asked about it.”
Grant almost smiled.
He found himself doing that more often around her. Almost smiling.
The muscles were there. He just hadn’t used them in a while.
“Every Saturday morning,” she said, “he’d sit at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and his blue pen, and he would do his crossword.
Always blue ink. He said pencil was for people who didn’t believe in themselves.
He would read the clues out loud to our dog, who obviously didn’t care or understand, but Dad said that she was a good listener. ”
She was smiling.
But it was the kind of smile that was both beautiful and brutal, all wrapped up in how much she missed her dad.
“He had a favorite crossword creator,” she continued.
“Some guy named W. Elliott. And he was obsessed. He would get a new book of W. Elliott crosswords and then just ration them, one a week, so they would last. And he wrote these little notes in the margins, like conversations with someone who could never write back.”
Grant’s hands went still.
His coffee cup was halfway to his mouth, and it just hung there in midair, suspended.
He could barely breathe.
She didn’t seem to notice. She was looking at the fairy lights, lost in her memory.
“He always said W. Elliott understood his brain, like how it worked. Like the puzzles were written just for him. Isn’t that beautiful? To feel connected to someone you’ve never even met?”
Grant put his coffee down.
His throat was dry.
He knew right then he should tell her.
He should say, Liza, I’m W. Elliott. Your father’s favorite crossword creator is sitting directly across from you, and you gave him an owl cookie jar.
And he didn’t know his puzzles meant that much to anyone.
And hearing you talk about him is making it very hard to maintain the carefully constructed wall I’ve been hiding behind for three years.
But he didn’t.
He told himself that would just be self-serving, and it would make things weird.
He told himself that now wasn’t the right time.
But the truth was actually simpler than that.
Telling her would make it real.
And real was the thing that always scared him the most.
“Sounds like he was a good man,” Grant said.
His voice came out quieter than he intended.
She looked at him.
“He was the best man I’ve ever known.”
And then there was silence.
But it was the kind of silence that happens when two people are standing closer to each other than either of them even realizes.
The following day, Dixie pulled Liza into the back room of the bookstore. She had an urgency about her.
“Okay, I’ve done my research.”
“On what?”
Dixie showed her a piece of notebook paper that she had in her apron pocket. She unfolded it with a substantial amount of drama.
On it, in her fancy handwriting, were three names.
“Number one, Jake Brennan. He’s a firefighter, thirty-four years old, comes in here every Thursday for new releases. He has good teeth and good manners. And one time I saw him carrying Mrs. Henderson’s groceries up two flights of stairs without even being asked.”
“Dixie…”
“Number two, Kyle something or other. Now, he runs a kayak rental place over by the marina. I don’t know his last name, but I do know that he has biceps that could crack a walnut. Janine says he’s single.”
“Dixie, I really don’t…”
“Number three, the new pharmacist. Now, I haven’t met him yet, but Patty over at the diner says that he’s a catch. And Patty has been married three times, so she definitely knows what she’s talking about.”
Liza leaned against the shelf and crossed her arms. “I cannot believe you made a list.”