Chapter 10
The day before the festival, the entire island smelled like fried dough.
Liza stood in the middle of the town square holding a clipboard and a sunburn that she hadn’t noticed until it was too late.
She hadn’t felt this kind of purpose since before her panic attack.
All around her, Seagrove was transforming.
Shop owners were hanging their banners.
Someone had set up a lemonade stand that seemed to already be doing a great business.
A man on a ladder was stringing flags between street lamps while his wife shouted directions from below.
He seemed to be completely ignoring her.
And Grant was standing beside her.
Not just metaphorically, but physically beside her, holding the other end of the scavenger hunt banner they were trying to hang between two posts without a ladder, which was going about as well as one could expect.
“Higher on your side,” she said.
“If I go any higher, I’m going to need a chiropractor.”
“Oh, good Lord, you’re six foot two. Use it.”
He stretched, secured the corner with a zip tie, and then stepped back.
The banner read, Seagrove Scavenger Hunt. Follow the clues in hand-lettered text that Liza had painted the night before, with Grant’s steady hand guiding hers when the S kept coming out wobbly.
Something had shifted between them since the reveal.
Not dramatically.
There was no grand declaration or defined label.
No conversation that started with, so what are we doing?
But the air between them had certainly changed.
All the sharp edges were gone.
The careful distance he’d maintained for weeks had narrowed into something that looked a little bit like closeness.
And the good thing was, neither of them was pretending it wasn’t happening.
They moved through the setup together with such ease that people started to notice.
Liza would start a sentence that Grant would finish.
She’d hand him a zip tie without looking, and he would take it without asking.
They weren’t a couple, at least not officially, but they moved around like one.
And Seagrove was a small island where people loved to talk.
At one point, she was standing on her toes trying to pin a clue card to a corkboard outside the bakery when Grant stepped up behind her and reached over to pin it himself.
For a second, they were standing very close, his arm over her shoulder, her back almost flat against his chest, and neither of them moved as fast as they should have.
The bakery owner, SuAnn, watched them through the window and then turned to a customer and said, “$10 says they’re together by the end of this festival.”
Meg’s daughter Vivi had appointed herself their assistant.
She ran between the shops delivering clue cards to each station, reporting back with updates.
“The bakery is ready, and the marina guy put his clue card upside down, but I fixed that. Also, there’s this dog on the beach who’s wearing a bandana, and I think we should invite him.”
Grant looked at Liza.
“She’s just like you.”
“She is not, but she might be running this town by next summer.”
Vivi beamed and sprinted off to check the next station.
Across the square, SuAnn’s pie-eating contest prep was reaching a level of chaos that could only be described as SuAnn-grade.
The pies had arrived early.
There were sixty of them in boxes stacked three high on folding tables, and these tables were definitely not designed for sixty pies stacked three high.
The tables bowed in the middle, like they were praying to stay together.
SuAnn stood in front of them with her hands on her hips and a look that said she was one small setback from having a complete meltdown.
“Janine! Janine! We need more tables!”
“We don’t need more tables, Mama. We need fewer pies. This is crazy.”
“You can’t have a pie-eating contest with fewer pies!” she said, throwing up her hands. “Well, that’s like having a wedding with fewer guests. It defeats the purpose. It needs to be a spectacle.”
Janine closed her eyes for a moment with the patience of a woman who’d been trying to manage her mother’s grand visions since childhood.
“The purpose is to raise money for the scholarship. We could have done that with thirty pies.”
“Thirty pies is a bake sale, Janine. This is a contest.”
A seagull landed on the end of the nearest table and looked at the key lime pie with clear intention.
SuAnn waved her arms.
“Shoo! Get away from here. That pie cost me $12.”
The seagull did not shoo.
It grabbed the edge of the pie tin with its beak and tried to drag the entire thing off the table in one smooth motion.
And then it did.
The pie hit the ground with a splat that would have been funny if SuAnn hadn’t looked like she was witnessing someone commit a felony.
“And it was one of the good ones. That bird just stole my pie!”
Janine picked up her phone and started taking pictures.
She was laughing so hard she couldn’t hold it steady.
“Mama, this is definitely going in the newsletter. It’s the best thing that’s happened all week.”
“It is not the best thing. This is a tragedy. We are down to fifty-nine pies!” SuAnn screeched.
Liza watched from across the square and felt something she hadn’t felt in a long time.
The joy of belonging in a place where a stolen pie was the biggest crisis of the day.
It was four in the afternoon when Grant’s phone rang.
He was in his shop, packing up the last of the scavenger hunt prizes into bags, small little tangram keychains that he’d ordered in bulk from overseas, when the screen lit up with a number he recognized.
Jonathan Webb, Meridian Games.
He stepped into the back room and closed the door behind him.
“Hey, Grant, hope you don’t mind me calling you directly.”
“How did you get this number?”
“Your former agent. He was a little concerned that you’re not taking this seriously.”
Grant leaned against the wall.
“I’ve read the proposal.”
“And?”
“And I’m thinking about it.”
“Listen, Grant, this is a once-in-a-career opportunity. We’re not just buying a brand.
We’re going to build a platform around your whole creative vision.
Puzzle labs, educational tools, subscriptions, and the W.
Elliott name has recognition that money can’t buy.
But we need you to come to Seattle. We need you here.
We need the mind behind the name or it just won’t work. ”
Grant looked through the doorway into his shop, at the owl cookie jar on the counter and the slightly crooked way it always was.
At the try-it table where that shy boy had solved his first tangram.
At the fairy lights that were visible through the front window, connecting his shop to the bookstore.
“I need more time,” he said.
“End of the month, man. That’s the best I can do. After that, the board’s going to move on.”
Grant hung up and stood in the back room for a long time, holding his phone and looking at Owen’s photo on the shelf beside him.
He felt the two halves of his life pressing up against each other.
The old one pulling him toward safety and anonymity, and the new one asking him to stay.
Seattle, two years.
He’d have an office with his name on the door, his real name attached to his pseudonym, his anonymity stripped away once and for all.
He would be W. Elliott in public.
He would do interviews and panels, have the kind of visibility his brother always wanted and that Grant had always run from.
Six months ago, he would have said no without even thinking about it.
The answer would have been automatic, the same way he would pull his hand back from a hot stove.
But six months ago, he hadn’t had a single reason to stay anywhere.
Liza’s voice drifted through the wall.
He could hear her laughing about something over at the bookstore.
He pressed his hand flat against the wall and listened, the way she had listened to his music through this same wall weeks ago and finally admitted it to him.
He thought, I wish I had known you all my life, so I wouldn’t have wasted so much time without you.
The thought arrived fully formed and clear as a crossword answer.
It shook him to his core, because it wasn’t just a feeling; it was a fact.
Every year before Seagrove, every month in all the other towns — he'd spent them building walls, selling apps, and hiding behind a pseudonym.
And it felt like he had spent all of it in the wrong room.
He pulled his hand away from the wall and went back to packing the prizes.
But the thought stayed firmly in his brain.
It wasn’t going anywhere.
Liza sat on the balcony that evening with a glass of wine and her phone in her hand.
She finally did the thing she’d been putting off for three months.
Her mother picked up on the second ring.
“Hi, honey. How’s the festival coming along?”
“Oh, it’s good. Everything’s set for tomorrow.”
“And the bookstore? Dixie’s wrist?”
“Getting better. Listen, Mom, I need to talk to you about something.”
There was a long pause.
It was the kind of pause mothers fill with every worst-case scenario at once.
“Okay, I’m listening.”
“I didn’t leave my job because of a pivot in my career. I left because I had a major panic attack. It was a really bad one. I was at my desk during a meeting; they had to call an ambulance.”
There was silence on the other end.
Liza gripped the phone, stared at the fairy lights, and just kept going before she lost her nerve.
“I’ve been lying to you about it because I was pretty ashamed.
I mean, I was supposed to have it all together.
I was supposed to be the one with a plan and the big title and a five-year outlook.
But instead, I just fell apart in front of twelve people and then walked out the next day. I didn’t know how to tell you.”
She heard her mother exhale.
“Oh, Liza,” she said very quietly.
“I know, I know. I just… I didn’t know how to say it.”
“I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me.”
“Because you were proud of me. Because you told your friends about my job. Because I didn’t want to be that daughter who couldn’t handle her career.”
Her mother was quiet for a long moment.
“Honey, you don’t have to be impressive to be loved. You never did. Not by me and not by anyone worth loving.”
Liza’s eyes filled up.