Chapter 11
She lay in bed for a moment, listening to the island as it woke up around her.
Off in the distance, a rooster crowed.
She still didn’t have any idea whose rooster it was, but it definitely had very strong opinions about sunrise each day.
She could hear somebody unloading tables out on the square, and somewhere in the distance was a boat engine getting ready to head out of the marina.
She got up and made her coffee in the little kitchenette and stood on the balcony in her pajamas.
The square below was already half-transformed by that hour.
Banners hung from every lamppost, and little red flags marked the scavenger hunt stations.
The bakery had set out a table of free samples that was already drawing a crowd.
Today was the big day.
She’d planned events before, big, expensive ones, the kind that had spreadsheets and huge budgets and teams of people wearing headsets, but none of them had felt like this.
This event felt personal, like something she had built with her very own two hands, with help from a woman who called everyone sugar and a man who only talked in puzzles and half-smiles.
She got dressed and pulled her hair back, grabbed her clipboard, and went downstairs.
The bookstore smelled like the vanilla candle Dixie had lit the night before.
She said it was a good-luck tradition, although Liza suspected it was just because Dixie liked the smell and she loved having rituals.
Grant was already on the porch.
He was wearing a navy blue shirt she hadn’t seen before, and it looked like he’d gotten a haircut in the last couple of days, which she tried not to notice but immediately did.
He was arranging the final scavenger hunt pieces in paper bags with the precision of a man who was defusing a bomb.
“Good morning,” she said.
He looked up.
There was a softness on his face that she hadn’t seen there a month ago.
“Morning.”
“Nice shirt.”
“It’s a festival. I decided to make an effort.”
She smiled, and he almost smiled back.
The almost was still there, but it was getting smaller and smaller, the wall going down a little more each day, like a reflex he was slowly unlearning.
The festival opened officially at ten o’clock, but by 10:15, the scavenger hunt had a long line.
Kids and families came through the bookstore to pick up their first clue card.
Liza ran the starting station with the energy of somebody who had been born for this exact moment and this exact kind of chaos.
She handed out stamps, explained the rules, and cheered on kids like they were running a marathon.
Each clue led to a different shop or landmark.
At the bakery, kids solved a word scramble and they got a cookie.
At the marina, they worked through a number puzzle and earned a sticker.
At the old church, there was a rebus that required them to sound out syllables.
At each stop, a shop owner or volunteer would wait with a stamp and a smile.
Grant’s clue cards were the star of the whole thing.
Parents kept stopping to admire the hand-drawn illustrations.
A mother took photos of every card and then posted them to social media.
A grandfather sat on a bench and looked at the miniature crossword himself, ignoring his granddaughter’s pleas to keep moving along.
A pair of twins argued over the rebus so loudly that their father had to separate them onto different teams.
Vivi had put herself in the position of unofficial scavenger hunt ambassador, running between the stations and reporting back to Liza with breathless updates.
“The church ran out of stickers, but I found more in the box under the table. Also, I saw a kid try to eat one of the clue cards.”
“Eat it?”
“I think he thought the treasure map was real and the X marked where the snacks were, but I told him to go over to the bakery.”
“Vivi, you’re a natural crisis manager.”
“I know,” she said, batting her eyelashes.
The final station was The Puzzle Post, where kids presented their completed cards and then did one last brain teaser.
It was a simple anagram built from the letters they’d collected at each stop.
The answer was the word Seagrove.
When they solved it, Grant gave them their prize bag and then just said, “Good job.”
Two words, but he did look each child in the eye every time he said it.
Liza watched from the bookstore doorway.
The line of kids grew and grew.
She knew some of them had to have come from out of town.
She watched Grant crouch down for the smaller ones and lean across the counter for the taller ones.
She watched him patiently explain the anagram to a boy who was very frustrated.
This was the thing she’d been looking for when she quit her job and drove to an island she barely remembered.
Not a title, not a salary, not even a five-year plan.
Just this feeling of building something real with other people who cared about it.
The feeling of her work mattering to someone that she could actually see.
SuAnn’s pie-eating contest started, and it was a huge disaster in every measurable way. It was also the highlight of the entire festival.
The setup alone was quite a spectacle.
SuAnn had grabbed the largest table in the square and lined up twenty-five pies—blueberry, key lime, cherry, pecan, and one that she said was a mystery flavor, but Janine later confirmed was just the one the seagull had partially destroyed, since reassembled and replated.
Twelve contestants sat down, and most of them were locals who had been talked into it through a combination of SuAnn’s enthusiasm and immense pressure.
The rules were simple. Just eat as much pie as you could in three minutes with no hands.
The winner got a trophy that SuAnn had ordered from the internet and which, upon closer inspection, was actually a bowling trophy that had had the plaque replaced by a label that said “Pie Champion.”
The starting whistle blew, and twelve faces plunged into the pies.
It was glorious and disgusting.
It was everything a small-town pie-eating contest should be.
Blueberry filling went everywhere - on shirts, faces, the tablecloths, and, in one memorable instance, someone’s hair.
The crowd cheered. Kids screamed.
A tourist recorded it on her phone and then put it on social media, muttering, “This is incredible,” to nobody in particular.
SuAnn stood at the end of the table like a referee, shouting encouragement.
“You keep going, Roger! You’re almost at that crust! Patty, you gotta use that chin of yours. Your chin!”
At the two-minute mark, a man Liza didn’t recognize stood up and said he was finished, promptly knocking over an entire cherry pie onto SuAnn’s shoes.
SuAnn looked down at her feet, then looked at the crowd and said, “Well, at least it’s not the key lime, because that would stain.”
The crowd lost it.
By the end, SuAnn had blueberry filling in her hair, cherry juice on her dress, and tears streaming down her face from laughing.
Or maybe she was just overwhelmed.
The scholarship fund had raised more in that afternoon than the original goal for the entire summer.
Janine stood next to her mother, taking photos and shaking her head, smiling the smile of a daughter who was exasperated and proud.
The Seagrove Scholars scholarship was announced at 3:30 on a little stage that someone had built from shipping pallets and then covered with a tablecloth.
SuAnn stepped up to the microphone.
She had changed her shoes but not her dress, so she still looked like she had been in battle with a pie.
Janine stood beside her and held a folder with the scholarship details.
“You know, when Janine and I started talking about this,” SuAnn said, her voice quieter and steadier now, “we just wanted to help one child. One child who needed books or school supplies and someone to say, hey, we believe in you, because that’s really all a scholarship is.
It’s a group of people saying, we see you, and we think you’re worth investing in.
Thank you to the community, to the bookstore, to The Puzzle Post, and every person who ate a pie or bought a book or solved a clue today.
We’re going to have enough to fund the first Seagrove Scholars award, and we’re going to keep going. ”
The crowd applauded.
It wasn’t a big crowd, maybe eighty people plus some kids, but the applause was genuine and the kind that comes from people who live in a place together and care about each other.
Dixie was sitting in the front row in a folding chair with her braced wrist on one knee.
She’d been there all day watching everything—the scavenger hunt, the heckling of the pie contestants—and greeting every person who walked past her like they were a long-lost relative.
The bookstore had been closed for regular business during the festival, which was the first time in anyone’s memory that Dixie had closed on a Saturday.
“It’ll hold. The books will survive without me,” she had said that morning. “This is more important. Community. The scholarship.”
She’d caught Liza’s eye across the crowd and nodded one time.
And then she turned to Julie, who stood beside Dawson at the edge of the group, Dylan between them, and said something that made Julie laugh.
“This is what the island is for,” Dixie said, loud enough for the people around her to hear. “Bringing people together when they need each other and when they don’t.”
Julie leaned into Dawson, and he put his arm around her.
Somewhere out in the crowd, there was a child who laughed, that full kind of belly laugh that only children can manage, and the sound carried across the square like a bell.
The festival finished up around five o’clock as families drifted toward the beach.
Volunteers started breaking down tables, and the square took on that end-of-day light that turned everything soft and gold.
Liza was folding tablecloths when Grant appeared beside her.
He didn’t say a word. He just took the other end of the cloth and helped her fold.
“Walk with me?” he asked.
She put the cloth on the table and followed him.
They walked all the way to the marsh at the edge of town.
The water crept through the grass in silver threads as the sun was low, and the whole world was golden.
The air smelled like salt and warm earth.
Grant stopped at the wooden railing that overlooked the water.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
“I made something for you.”
He handed it to her.
It was a crossword, hand-drawn on graph paper, with the clues written in with his precise handwriting.
It was small, maybe ten by ten, with four long theme answers running across the center.
She unfolded it and leaned against the railing.
He watched her, his hands in his pockets, with the tension of a man who had just handed someone the most important thing he’d ever made.
She started solving.
The first words came quickly.
Ocean, books, light, island.
She smiled at each one, recognizing Seagrove in all the answers.
The clues were elegant and personal.
Place where the fairy lights survived the storm, eight letters. Sidewalk.
Sound that travels through shared walls, five letters. Music.
Then she reached the theme answers.
There were four long phrases stacked in the center of the grid.
She solved them one at a time, her pencil slowing as the meaning started to come into focus.
The first letter of each theme answer, read top to bottom, would spell a single word.
STAY.
She stared at it.
The pencil shook a bit in her hand.
She read it again to make sure she wasn’t imagining it.
But the letters were laid out right before her.
He hadn’t written her a note.
He hadn’t given a speech.
He had built a crossword and hidden the only word that mattered inside of it.
She looked up at him.
The light was now hitting his face.
For once, there was no wall, no half-smile, no keeping her at a safe distance.
He was just there, waiting.
“Stay,” she whispered.
“Stay,” he said.
She stepped forward, and he didn’t step back.
She reached up and put her hand on the side of his face. His skin was warm from the sun and rough along the jaw.
He closed his eyes at the touch, like nothing had happened to him this way in a very long time.
When he opened his eyes, she was right there.
He kissed her.
It was soft and uncertain, the kind of kiss that arrives at the end of a long, slow sentence.
It was something they’d been building toward since the day she’d walked into his shop with a plate of cookies and a plan he hadn’t asked for.
His hand came up to the small of her back. Her fingers curled around the collar of his navy blue shirt. And the marsh stretched out behind them as an egret took flight.
When they pulled apart, she was smiling.
“For the record,” she said, “that was worth the slow burn.”
He almost laughed.
No, not almost.
He actually laughed, something that sounded like relief, like a man who might have been holding his breath for three years and finally let it go.
They stood at the marsh railing for a long time, not talking, just standing there, her head tilted toward his shoulder, his hand resting on the railing next to hers, their pinkies overlapping.
“For the record,” he said, so quietly she almost didn’t hear it, “you are the first thing I think of in the morning and the last thing I think of at night. And of course, you’re all in between.”
He paused.
“Is that enough?”
She turned her head and looked at him.
His face was serious, a Grant kind of serious, which meant he was laying himself open and bracing for what she would say.
She laced her fingers through his.
“It’s more than enough.”
They walked back to the square as the last light of the day faded, side by side.