Chapter 9 #2
“Well, because if it meant something, then that meant I had to care about it, too, and… caring about things…”
He stopped for a moment, the way he always did, with that particular stubbornness of a man who was keeping things together.
“Caring about things is what Owen did,” he finally said.
“Owen cared about everything. And then he was gone, and all the things he cared about were just kind of there, just hanging out in the world without him here. And I didn’t want that.
I didn’t want to build things that would outlast me and matter to people I’d never met because what’s the point if you’re not there to see it? ”
Rain had started outside, light and gentle and tapping on the windows.
“The point,” she said, “is that my dad sat at a kitchen table every Saturday and he felt understood by a person he had never even met. The point is that the little boy at Books and Brains night solved a puzzle because you got down on his level and told him to listen to the pieces. The point is, Grant, that you made beautiful things and then you released them out into the world like a million butterflies, and they landed exactly where they were supposed to land.”
She took a breath and continued.
“You gave my father something, and you had no idea that you did it. And that’s not nothing, Grant. That’s everything.”
He stood there behind the counter, and she could see the fight slowly leaving him.
Not fighting against her.
He’d never really been fighting her in the first place, but he had been fighting himself.
He was fighting against that part of him that believed the safest thing was to stay invisible in the world, to keep his work at arm’s length and never let anyone close enough to make losing them feel unbearable.
She reached across the counter and picked up her father’s book. She held it against her chest, the way she had always held it. Like a shield or a prayer. The last physical object that still connected her to her favorite man in the world.
“Look, I’m not angry that you didn’t tell me,” she said. “I understand why you didn’t. But I need you to know that your work meant something. It wasn’t just a number on a download counter. It meant so much to a real person. To my dad.”
Dixie stood at the window of the bookstore.
She had come back just to pick up a sweater she’d left behind the register, and she had seen Liza walk into the puzzle shop carrying a book as if it were made of glass.
Being nosy, she had watched through the window for just a moment. Eventually, she had to move outside near a tree to see inside the puzzle shop.
She wouldn’t call it eavesdropping, just observing, the way she had been observing people in this town for decades.
Of course, she couldn’t hear anything they were saying, but she could see the way they were standing, Liza on one side of the counter, Grant on the other, the space between them charged with something.
She pretended to read a book.
She hoped that they believed her.
She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out the notebook paper with the three bachelor names and looked at them for a long moment.
Then she folded it up, walked over to the trash can, and dropped it in.
She picked up her phone and called Julie.
“I think the puzzle guy might not be hopeless after all.”
“Oh, well, it’s about time,” Julie said. “What happened?”
“Well, I don’t exactly know the details, but I sure know the look. And honey, that girl is not going to need my list anymore. She looks kind of like you looked when you met Dawson.”
She hung up, went inside to get her sweater, and then left through the back door without making a sound.
Some moments just didn’t need a witness.
They just needed to be allowed to happen.
On her way to her car, she paused for a moment and looked up at the fairy lights between the shops.
They swayed gently in the breeze, connecting the two buildings the way only certain people do.
Dixie smiled to herself and drove home.
Grant walked her home.
Of course, it was only next door, about twenty steps, thirty if you counted the three stairs up onto the bookstore porch at the back, but he walked her there anyway.
The rain had stopped, the square was empty, but the fairy lights were on.
Neither of them spoke.
There was just nothing left to say that words could handle.
The important things had already been said, and what remained was the feeling of having been honest with someone.
They reached the bottom of the stairs, the same stairs where he’d almost reached for her hand during the storm.
That same narrow stairwell, the same dim light, the same two people standing a little closer than was necessary.
Liza turned back on the second step.
Their eyes were almost level, but he didn’t almost reach this time.
He actually took her hand, simply and directly, the way you would reach for something that you’ve decided you’re allowed to hold.
His fingers laced through hers.
His palm was warm and steady.
His grip was the kind that said, I’m here, without saying any words at all.
She held on.
They stood there for a moment, fingers interlocked, with the fairy lights making patterns on the wall beside them.
His pulse beat against her wrist, or maybe it was her own.
She couldn’t tell where one of them ended and the other began.
For once, she didn’t really need to.
They knew.
Neither of them spoke.
The island just hummed around them, the crickets, the ocean, the distant sound of a boat creaking in the marina.
The world was full of sound, and still the quiet between them was the loudest thing of all.
He squeezed her hand once.
She squeezed back.
Then he let it go gently and stepped back.
“Good night, Liza.”
“Good night, Grant.”
She went upstairs, and he went home.
Neither of them would sleep for a very long time. Moments like this were too full for sleeping.
Liza lay in her bed and held her father’s book and thought about the man who had created the puzzles inside of it.
The man who had been twenty feet away this entire time.
The man who had just held her hand at the bottom of the stairs like it was the bravest thing he’d ever done.
And maybe it was.
She pressed the book to her chest and whispered into the dark.
“He was right here all along, Dad. Can you believe it? He was right here.”