Chapter 10 #2
She had known her mother would say something like that.
She’d known that she would be kind.
But hearing it and knowing it were two different things.
They talked for about another twenty minutes.
Her mother cried.
Liza cried.
Then they laughed about a seagull stealing SuAnn’s pie.
Her mother asked about the bookstore, about Dixie.
And then, with the careful casualness that only mothers can manage…
“So, are you meeting anyone special down there?”
Liza smiled.
“Maybe.”
“Well, ‘maybe’ means yes. Tell me everything.”
“Not yet, Mom. I promise when there’s something to tell you, this time I will actually tell you.”
Her mother sighed.
“Fine, but I want details.”
When she hung up, the weight that had been sitting on her chest for the last few weeks was gone.
Not all of it, because sometimes weights don’t lift completely.
They just get a bit lighter.
But she could breathe in a way she hadn’t been able to. The air tasted sweet again, like salt and jasmine. Her mother had said she sounded like herself again.
And for the first time, Liza thought that might actually be true.
Julie stood in the doorway of the kitchen and watched as Francine made festival preparations with the efficiency of a woman who had once managed a five-star hotel.
Francine probably found the Inn at Seagrove to be quaint by comparison.
The guest rooms were ready, the breakfast menu for tomorrow was planned, even the extra chairs had already been delivered.
Francine had handled all of it while Julie was at the bookstore helping Liza set up for the scavenger hunt.
Julie was waiting for the panic to come, that familiar tightness in her chest that arrived when she wasn’t the one in control, but it never did.
Dawson appeared beside her.
He didn’t say a word.
He just put his arm around her shoulders and stood there as the two of them watched Francine tape a festival schedule to the front desk.
“See,” he said.
Julie leaned her head on his shoulder.
“Yeah, I see.”
She went to her laptop that night and wrote for two solid hours.
The words came the way they hadn’t in months.
She wasn’t trying to control the story anymore.
She was just following it.
And that felt like the difference between holding your breath and actually breathing.
It was almost 10 p.m. when Liza came downstairs.
Grant was sitting on the porch step between the shops. He was looking up at the fairy lights.
The square was empty.
Tomorrow it would be full of people and noise and children following clue cards to every corner of the island.
But tonight, right now, it was just the two of them, the sound of the ocean breathing off in the distance.
She sat down beside him, as close as she could, her shoulder against his, and he didn’t move.
“I told my mom,” she said.
He turned his head.
“Oh, about your job?”
“Yeah, everything, the panic attack, the lies, all of it.”
“How’d she take it?”
“She said that I don’t need to be impressive to be loved.” She smiled. “Moms are annoyingly wise sometimes.”
He nodded. “She’s right.”
They sat in the warm air, shoulder to shoulder, and watched the lights sway.
A gecko ran across the porch railing and then disappeared into the jasmine.
A porch light went off in the distance, and the sound of a screen door closing was the only thing Liza could hear.
She leaned into him slightly, just a gentle shift.
“This is the first place that’s felt like mine in such a long time,” she said.
Grant didn’t respond right away.
His jaw tightened a bit, the way it did when he was holding something back.
She’d been looking at him for weeks, so she knew exactly what it meant when his face looked that way.
But tonight, something finally gave.
Maybe it was the wine she could smell on her own breath.
Maybe it was the fairy lights.
Or maybe it was the fact that tomorrow was the festival and the world was going to get loud again.
He said very quietly, almost to himself, “When I look into your eyes, I know this is where I need to be.”
Liza suddenly went still.
The words settled over her like a warm blanket.
She didn’t look at him.
She was afraid that if she looked at him, the moment would shatter, that she had imagined it all and that he would retreat back behind his wall.
But she didn’t let him.
She reached down and found his hand between them on the step and laced her fingers through his.
He held on.
They sat there until the lights on the last house on the square went dark.
There was no kiss.
There was no need.
Some moments are complete just as they are.
Two people on a porch step with their fingers intertwined, the whole island asleep around them.
When she finally stood up to go inside, she squeezed his hand once before letting go.
“Tomorrow’s going to be a great day,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think it is.”
Liza went upstairs, but Grant stayed on the top step for a while longer, looking at the lights.
He held the ghost of her hand in his and thought about what Dawson had said about living safe versus living small.
His phone was in his pocket.
The publisher’s deadline was thirteen days away.
The woman upstairs had just leaned into him like they belonged together, and he had said something out loud that he’d only ever thought about in the dark.
And the world hadn’t ended because he said it.
He thought about the crossword he’d been building, the one with the hidden message, the one he’d been working on at his kitchen table in the wee hours of the morning while the island slept and his guard was down.
It was almost finished.
The theme answers were in place, and the connecting words were clean.
He had crafted the clues with such care that it went beyond craft.
Tomorrow at the festival, he was going to give it to her.
And the message encoded in the grid would say what he wasn’t sure he could say out loud.
Not yet.
Not with the publisher’s deadline hanging over him.
But tonight on the porch, he had said the one true thing.
And she had taken his hand.
And the world hadn’t ended.
Thirteen days.