Chapter 9
On Tuesday afternoon, Liza was doing what she always did when her brain felt like it was too full and about to explode.
She was reorganizing.
The bookstore’s back storage room had become her big project this week.
She dared not mention it to Julie, who also had worked at the bookstore for a long time, because Julie would come over and try to fix everything, and she was covered up in her own demanding schedule.
Liza was on her knees looking through the bottom shelf when she found a crossword anthology.
It was a slim paperback, The W. Elliott Collection, Volume 3, and it had been tucked between water-damaged romance novels and a guide to birdwatching in the Lowcountry.
She almost put it aside without a second look, but the name on the cover stopped her.
W. Elliott.
She pulled it out and sat back on her heels. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about W. Elliott since her late-night Google search.
The anonymous puzzle creator her father had loved, the one who understood how his brain had worked, was overtaking her mind, too.
But she had found almost nothing online.
No name, no face.
Just the puzzles.
How could somebody stay so anonymous in a world where privacy was almost impossible?
She flipped through the anthology.
As usual, the crosswords were beautifully constructed.
Clean grids.
Elegant clue structure.
Themes that revealed themselves slowly.
She had seen enough of Grant’s work by now to recognize a good puzzle design, and this was exceptional.
Something was nagging at her.
There was a feeling in the back of her mind, like a word on the tip of her tongue.
She looked at the first puzzle and studied the clue structure and the way the theme answers were placed.
There was a certain rhythm to the difficulty curve, easy clues at the edges, harder ones in the center.
She had seen this before.
She set the book down and went up to the front of the store.
On the counter next to the register, she saw a stack of Grant’s scavenger hunt clue cards.
She’d been looking for errors in them, trying to find one so she could point it out to Grant and feel satisfied.
She picked one up, the miniature crossword card, the one with five across and five down, and took it back to the storage room.
She held the clue card next to the anthology.
She started looking at the grid layouts, the clue phrasing, the way that both puzzles used the same distinctive technique.
Her hands started to shake.
She pulled out her phone and opened the fan forum she’d bookmarked and scrolled to a thread where somebody had analyzed Elliott’s clue-writing style.
They had identified signature patterns.
A preference for misdirection through double definitions.
A habit of using six-letter fills with uncommon letter combinations.
One commenter even called it the “Elliott turn.”
She looked at Grant’s clue card.
The Elliott turn was right there, staring her in the face, sticking out its tongue.
She sat on the floor in the storage room with the anthology in one hand and the clue card in the other.
The room seemed to tilt under her.
She said his name out loud, just once, just to hear how it would sound in this new context.
Grant.
That quiet man who liked silence.
That puzzle genius who hid behind the counter and crossed his arms.
The man who’d taught that shy boy to listen to the tangram pieces and who had filled the cookie jar in secret.
Who played his sad classical music at midnight.
The man her father had spent ten years writing margin notes to.
She walked upstairs.
She wasn’t running exactly, but she was moving with the focused urgency of someone chasing an answer she already had, racing it before her emotions could catch up.
The crossword books were on her nightstand, as they always were.
She grabbed the one on the top, the one that had all of her father’s margin notes, the one she’d been sleeping next to since she arrived in Seagrove, and she carried it back downstairs.
She sat at the table near the reading nook and opened up the anthology, set out the clue card, and then laid her father’s book side by side with the other two.
Three puzzles.
Three sources.
One creator.
The clue structure was identical.
The grid architecture was the same.
Even the voice behind the clues was unmistakable once you knew what to listen for.
Grant Whitmore was W. Elliott.
There was no way around it.
The man next door.
The man who had sat across from her on the porch and listened to her talk about her father’s crossword habit without ever saying a word, without admitting a thing.
The man who’d gone still when she mentioned the name W. Elliott, whose coffee cup froze in midair.
But she hadn’t thought anything of it.
The man who’d said, he sounds like he was a good man, in a voice that came from somewhere way deeper than politeness.
She now realized.
He’d known.
He had known who he was to her father.
And then he had said nothing.
Liza pressed her palms against the table and breathed. Her eyes stung, and her chest pulled tight.
She wasn’t angry. She didn’t even feel betrayed.
It was something bigger and much harder to name.
She understood why he hadn’t told her. She understood hiding.
She’d been doing it herself for months, from her mother, from herself, from the version of her life that had fallen apart in a panic attack at her desk.
Grant wasn’t hiding because he was a cruel man. He was hiding because he was terrified.
She knew, with the certainty of somebody who had been afraid in exactly the same way, that hiding had not protected him from anything.
It had just made him feel lonelier.
She picked up her father’s book and opened it to the page with the margin note.
The blue ink.
The steady handwriting.
The words she’d read a hundred times.
This creator is a genius. I’d love to meet him someday.
Her father had never gotten to meet him.
Never would.
But she had.
He had been twenty feet away this whole time.
She didn’t storm in, although she kind of wanted to. It felt perfectly dramatic.
But that was the last thing she would remember later when she replayed this moment in her mind.
And she would replay it many times in the weeks and months that followed.
She didn’t burst through the door the way she burst through every door on a typical day.
She didn’t even arrive with a speech or a plan or the overwhelming energy that was her default setting.
She walked in quietly, which was very unusual for Liza.
The bell above the door chimed one time.
Grant was at the workbench, hand-lettering a clue card.
He looked up and smiled.
It was an actual smile.
She’d noticed them appearing more and more over the last few weeks.
They were rare enough to notice.
And they were still cautious enough that they broke her heart a little.
“Hey,” he said.
She was holding the book against her chest, her father’s book, the one with the margin notes and the blue ink.
She walked to the counter and put it between them.
Then she set the W. Elliott anthology next to it, and then the scavenger hunt clue card.
Grant looked at the three items, his hand still holding the pen, and went very still.
“You’re W. Elliott,” she said as calmly as she could.
It wasn’t even a question.
Her voice was steady.
She knew what she was saying was true.
Grant set the pen down.
He didn’t look away from her, and he didn’t deny it.
His face did something she’d never seen before.
It was like a wall coming down.
And not even partway, not a crack, but all of it.
And what was underneath was not the careful, guarded man she’d been getting to know for weeks.
It was somebody who seemed raw and exposed and tired of hiding.
The relief was almost physical.
“Yes,” he said.
One word.
No explanation.
No defense.
Just the truth laid on the counter between them.
Liza let out a breath.
Her eyes moved from his face to the framed crossword on the wall near the register, the one she’d noticed on her first visit, the one about which she’d said, whoever made this is really good, all while the man who made it stood three feet away and said nothing.
“The crossword on the wall,” she said.
“Mine.”
“The app, Gridlock?”
“Mine.”
“Forty million downloads?”
He nodded.
She pressed her hands on the counter and closed her eyes.
When she opened them, they were brighter.
“I told you my father’s favorite crossword creator was W. Elliott. I said that to your face, and you just sat there like you were oblivious to it.”
“I know.”
“And your coffee cup stopped in midair. I remember that. I thought you were just being polite. And maybe a little dramatic.”
“Yeah. I was trying not to fall apart.”
That phrase stopped her.
The honesty of it.
The unguarded way that Grant almost never was.
She had come in here carrying the weight of this discovery.
But he’d met her with something heavier.
The weight of a man having been discovered.
She opened her father’s book to the page that she had marked with her thumb, the margin note.
She turned it toward Grant so he could read it.
This creator is a genius. I’d love to meet him someday.
Grant read it.
She watched as his eyes moved across the words.
Something shifted in his face, a fracture, a softening.
The kind of change that happens to someone when they realize their work meant something to even one person.
“His name was David,” she said. “David Forrester. He was a high school math teacher in Charleston. He coached the chess team and he grew the best tomatoes, according to him, but I thought they never turned out right. He did your crosswords every single Saturday morning for the last ten years of his life.”
Her voice cracked on the word life, just slightly.
“They made him so happy, Grant. You have no idea.”
He swallowed hard.
He was looking at the margin note like it was a personal letter addressed to him that had been lost in the mail for years.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “I never… I used the pseudonym so I wouldn’t have to know. You know, so I could stay anonymous, a name and nothing else. People would solve the puzzles, and I never had to think about who they were or what it meant to them or whether they thought they were any good.”
“Why?”