Chapter 8
Grant woke up on Tuesday morning with a feeling he didn’t remember feeling before.
He was looking forward to the day.
It was so unfamiliar that he lay in his bed for a full minute, trying to examine it the way he would examine a puzzle with an error.
He turned it over in his mind, tested the thought, tried to figure out where it had come from and whether it was real.
He’d been in Seagrove for almost two months.
He’d opened his shop, made a few acquaintances, eaten more cookies than he had consumed in the previous ten years combined, most of them from a ceramic owl jar that had invaded his counter without permission.
But somewhere along the way, without his consent, a woman who talked too loud and moved too fast and rearranged his displays when she thought he wasn’t looking had become the first thing he thought about in the morning and the last thing he thought about at night.
This was a big problem.
He got up, made his bed with his normal hospital corners, brewed his coffee, and stood at the kitchen window of his small rented house two streets back from the square.
He couldn’t see his shop from here, but he could see the tops of the live oaks on the square and the edge of the church steeple.
If the wind was just right, he could even smell the salty sea air.
He drank his coffee black and tried to think about his inventory, about the shipment of puzzle boxes that would be arriving tomorrow, about the crossword anthology he was considering stocking from a small press in Vermont.
But instead, all he thought about was Liza’s face in the candlelight during the storm, about the way she had said, I’m thirty-two, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be.
She had more honesty than many people manage in a lifetime.
And then about the way she had said that she was done with Dixie’s list and looked at him like he might be part of the reason.
The feeling in his chest wasn’t new.
He remembered it from a long time ago, from before Owen, from before selling the app and dismantling his public life.
It was the feeling of actually wanting something.
Not a thing or an accomplishment, but a person.
The pull of wanting to be near someone and having no explanation for why.
It wasn’t rational, and Grant lived in the land of rational.
The last time he’d felt this hopeful, this exposed, Owen had been alive.
And that was the part that made his hands go still on his coffee cup.
Because the last time he’d built something that mattered, the world had taken the most important part of it away.
He put his cup down, put on his shoes, and walked to the shop.
He threw himself into the scavenger hunt clue cards with the focus of a man trying to outwork the feelings bubbling up inside.
He’d been drafting them for a while now, but he shifted to a different gear.
Each card was hand-illustrated, a small ink drawing of the Seagrove landmark where the clue would be hidden, and a puzzle printed just below in clean typography.
He had designed eight cards total, one for each stop, and each one was a small work of art.
The first card led kids from the bookstore to the bakery, which wasn’t very far, of course.
The clue card was a word scramble with a hidden letter.
The second one led from the bakery to the marina, which was a bit longer, and it had a number puzzle.
The third involved a rebus.
The fourth was a miniature crossword, just five across, five down, that he had spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to perfect.
Liza came in around three o’clock with iced coffees.
She put his on the counter.
She had learned he liked it with one sugar and no cream, which he hadn’t told her, but she had somehow figured out.
She walked over to the workbench where the clue cards were spread out and picked one up, then another, then the third.
She held them side by side.
Her mouth opened slightly, but she didn’t say anything for a long time.
“They’re not finished,” Grant said.
“These aren’t just puzzles.” She looked at him.
“These are like little gifts. I mean, each one of these is the kind of thing that kids will keep and cherish for a lifetime. I mean, this is the kind of thing a person puts in a box under their bed and finds twenty years later and then remembers the whole day. Why are there just clue cards?” She put them down carefully. “Who taught you to draw like this?”
“Nobody, I guess. I like precision, and drawing is just precision with a softer pencil.”
She shook her head. “You know, you always say everything that you do is just ordinary, and it’s not ordinary, Grant. It’s extraordinary. And the fact that you can’t see that is one of the most frustrating but endearing parts of you.”
He didn’t know what to do with the word endearing, so he just didn’t move.
“You wanna learn how to build a crossword?” he asked.
They sat together at the workbench, a blank grid between them, a pencil in Liza’s hand.
Grant’s hand was next to hers on the paper, close enough that their fingers almost touched when he reached across to point at a square.
“Okay, so the grid has to be symmetrical,” he started. “If you black out a square on the top left, you’re going to have to black out the corresponding square on the bottom right, like a mirror.”
“Why?”
“Well, because symmetry creates fairness. Every person solving a puzzle enters the puzzle from a different direction, so the grid should work no matter where you start.”
She blacked out a square in the upper left corner, and then he pointed to the lower right corner, so she blacked out that one to match.
They did this a few more times until the grid had a skeleton, an architecture of little black and white squares that looked like a tiny building.
“All right, now the words. You want your theme answers to be the longest ones. They’re like the spine of the puzzle, and everything else connects to them.”
“How do you pick a theme?”
“Well, it depends. Sometimes you can do wordplay or a hidden message or even just a feeling you’re trying to capture.”
“A feeling?”
He paused for a moment, the pencil hovering.
“The best puzzles aren’t the intellectual exercises. They’re the emotional ones. So you create a path for someone to walk through, and the destination feels like arriving somewhere, not just finishing something.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“That’s kind of beautiful.”
“It’s just puzzle theory, Liza.”
“No, it’s not. It’s like philosophy. Like, you’re talking about how you’re going to make someone feel something through that structure.”
She turned to look at him, and he realized their faces were closer than he’d thought.
He could see the gold flecks in her brown eyes and the faint freckles across the bridge of her nose that had darkened in the island sun.
“The best clues aren’t about tricking someone, are they?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “They’re about giving someone a path to the answer they already know.”
She held his gaze, and he could feel the warmth of her shoulder against his.
This was feeling very dangerous.
He looked back at the grid.
“You try. Pick a theme word.”
She wrote something in the center row.
He leaned over and read it.
Seagrove.
He nodded. “That’s a good start. Okay, so now you need crossing words. Like, every letter in Seagrove has to connect to a down answer. So the S word going down starts with an S, and the E needs one starting with an E, and so on.”
She chewed on the end of the pencil, a habit that definitely made him wince, and started filling in the words.
She was actually way faster than he expected.
Her vocabulary was strong, which made sense given that she was working at the bookstore and probably had an interest in literature.
She also seemed to have a marketer’s instinct for language.
She gravitated toward words that felt good in the mouth, words with texture and weight.
“Sunrise for the S,” she said. “Edge for the E. What about A?”
“Anchor.”
She looked at him.
“That’s actually a great one.”
“Well, it’s the right one. There’s always a right one. You just have to be patient enough to find it.”
She held his gaze for slightly longer than the conversation required and then went back to the grid.
They worked together in silence, but it didn’t feel like the silence Grant was used to, the one that felt like loneliness.
This silence was productive.
It was the sound of two people making something together, their hands moving across the same piece of paper and their thoughts running in parallel.
When they finished the rough draft, she sat back and looked at it.
“It’s like building a little world,” she said. “Every word has to hold up the ones around it.”
“Yeah. That’s exactly what it is.”
She smiled at him, a quiet smile like it was meant just for him, and it undid something in his chest that he’d been spending the last three years trying to keep shut.
Later that evening, Grant was alone in his shop and checked his email for the first time in three days.
Of course, there were the usual things. Newsletters from companies, a note from his accountant, a reminder about a subscription that he had forgotten to cancel.
But buried between a spam message and a shipping notification, there was an email from an address he recognized.
Jonathan Webb, CEO of Meridian Games, the man who had been trying to reach Grant, or actually trying to reach W. Elliott, for six months.
Grant looked at the subject line.
Formal acquisition proposal, W. Elliott brand and IP.
He opened it against his better judgment.
The email was what he expected, professional and direct.
Meridian Games wanted to acquire the W. Elliott brand, the back catalog, the name, the rights to any future puzzles under the pseudonym.
They wanted to build a digital platform around it. Puzzle apps, subscription crosswords, educational products.
The offer was generous, as expected. Not a retire-to-an-island kind of generous — he’d already done that on his own — but significant enough that his accountant would call it life-changing.
There was, of course, a catch.
It would require Grant to relocate to Seattle for at least two years to oversee the creative transition.