Chapter 12
Liza fell asleep that night with the crossword on the pillow beside her. She had smoothed it out flat and put it on the pillow next to her, right next to her father’s book.
She lay on her side, looking at the two of them in the moonlight streaming through the window, one old, one new, both made with the same hands. Her father’s favorite crossword creator. The man who had kissed her by the marsh, the man who had hidden the word STAY inside a grid like a love letter.
For the first time in months, she didn’t feel lost.
She actually felt found.
Across the square, in his small rented house, Grant lay awake, staring at the ceiling.
His phone glowed on the nightstand.
He could see the email from Meridian was still there.
The deadline was still ticking away.
Only a few days now.
He could still feel the warmth of her hand on his face and the curl of her fingers in his collar.
There was something devastating about being close to someone after years of keeping everyone in the world at arm’s length.
His phone buzzed.
There was a new email.
He glanced over at the subject line.
Final offer. Response required by month’s end.
He turned his phone face down on the nightstand and forced his eyes closed, but he didn’t sleep.
Not for a very long time.
She noticed the change on Wednesday.
It was four days after the festival, four days after their moment on the marsh, four days after he had kissed her and said things that kept echoing through her mind like a song she couldn’t stop humming.
But on Wednesday, Grant was very different.
He was in the shop when she came by with iced coffee at three, same as always.
He took the cup and said thank you, answered her questions about the scavenger hunt debrief and the clue card reprints that several parents had requested.
He was polite and present and yet completely unreachable again.
It was like she was talking to him through glass.
She noticed it in some of the small things first.
He didn’t come out on the porch that evening.
He didn’t text her back for several hours.
And when he did, the message was four words.
Sorry, was working late.
He canceled their Thursday afternoon planning session with a one-line email saying something had come up. Reschedule?
No explanation.
No rescheduled time.
By Friday, the glass seemed thicker.
She brought cookies for the owl jar.
She’d started doing this, bringing them herself instead of waiting for him to fill it up. But this time she found the shop door locked at two o’clock in the afternoon.
The sign said open, but the door was locked.
She knocked, but there was no answer.
His car was still in the lot behind the building.
She stood on the sidewalk, looked at the locked door, and felt something cold settle in her bones.
Not anger, but something worse.
Something like dread.
The dread of watching someone you care about build a wall that you thought they had torn down.
She went back to the bookstore and tried to reorganize the romance section, but it didn’t need it.
Dixie watched her from the register but didn’t say anything, which was how Liza knew that Dixie had noticed too.
?
Grant sat in the back room with the door closed and the lights off.
He tried to make his brain do what it was built to do, solve the puzzle.
The deadline was in a few days.
Jonathan Webb had sent a follow-up email again that morning.
Very professional, but firm and final.
The offer was structured.
The timeline was set, and the board needed an answer.
The money was significant.
The platform they wanted to build around the W. Elliott brand was ambitious and exactly the kind of thing Owen would have wanted for him.
Owen.
Everything always came back to Owen.
He opened the email for the umpteenth time and read it again.
Two-year creative residency, full creative control, Seattle headquarters, relocation required.
Relocation required.
Two words that meant leaving the shop, the island, the owl cookie jar, and the woman who had walked into his life like a force of nature.
He should tell her.
He knew he should tell her.
Every rational cell in his body said, tell her about the offer, have the conversation, figure it out together.
That’s what Liza would do.
Liza would have laid it all out on butcher paper with colored markers.
But Grant wasn’t Liza.
Grant was the man who solved things alone in the dark.
In silence.
He told himself he was protecting her, that he didn’t want to burden her with a decision that he hadn’t even made yet.
He told himself this was temporary, that he would figure it all out and then just explain it to her.
But the truth was uglier.
He was afraid.
Afraid that if he told her, she would ask him to stay.
Stay.
Afraid that he’d say yes.
Afraid that saying yes meant building something real that could be taken away in the way that Owen had been taken away.
The way that everything bright and good and loud had been taken away, leaving him again in nothing but quiet and puzzles.
So he pulled back, locked the door, and canceled his plans.
He did what he’d always done when the world got too close.
He disappeared.
On Saturday morning, Liza’s phone rang.
She didn’t recognize the number.
She was sitting at the bookstore counter, helping a customer find a birthday gift, so she let it go to voicemail.
When the customer left, she listened to the message.
“Hi, this is Rachel Dalton. I’m a reporter with Puzzling Games Weekly, working on a story about the Meridian Games acquisition of the W. Elliott brand, and I understand the creator has been living on Seagrove Island. I’d love to chat with you if you have a few minutes. My number is…”
Liza lowered the phone.
Acquisition.
She replayed the message over and over, listening to the words again.
Meridian Games, acquisition of the W. Elliott brand.
She heard the creator has been living on Seagrove Island.
She set the phone on the counter and pressed her palms flat against it the same way she had the time she figured out Grant was W. Elliott.
But that day had been a wonder.
This was something else.
This was the sickening drop of understanding that he had been keeping something from her.
She picked up the phone and called the reporter back.
The conversation was brief.
Rachel was polite and thorough.
She explained that Meridian Games, a Seattle-based publisher, had made a formal offer to acquire the W. Elliott intellectual property.
The deal included a two-year creative residency in Seattle.
The board was expecting a response very soon, by the end of the month.
“We think the creator might be a man named Grant Whitmore,” Rachel said. “We know he’s operating a puzzle shop on Seagrove. Can you confirm?”
Liza’s voice was steady, surprising her, because nothing else in her body was.
“I’m not going to confirm or deny anything about someone else’s private life. That’s his business.”
“Of course, but if you have any comment about this acquisition…”
“I don’t.”
She hung up and sat behind the counter of the empty bookstore.
The room felt so very still.
She stared at the wall between the two shops, the same wall she’d pressed her hand against, listening to his music.
The same wall where she’d heard him moving behind it, rearranging his careful life.
A few inches of plaster separating two people who had spent weeks learning to be honest with each other.
Except, as it appeared now, one of them hadn’t been.
He’d known.
He had known about this.
The offer. Seattle. The deadline.
He’d known, and he hadn’t told her.
He had kissed her at the marsh and hidden the word STAY in the crossword and said, “You are the first thing I think of in the morning.”
And the whole time there was an email in his inbox asking him to leave, giving him a way out.
The hurt wasn’t that he had an opportunity.
She knew about ambition.
She knew about career decisions and hard choices.
The hurt was about him leaving without telling her.
The hurt was the silence, the locked door, the four-word text messages, the way that he was withdrawing and disappearing instead of staying.
And he just continued to stand on the other side of the invisible glass.
Liza walked to his shop.
The door was unlocked this time.
The bell chimed.
Grant was behind the counter.
When he saw her face, he seemed to know.
She could see it, that recognition, the way he was bracing himself, the way his whole body went still, like an animal that knew it had been spotted by a predator.
“A reporter called me,” she said.
She kept her voice as controlled as possible, flat even.
“Rachel, with Puzzling Games Weekly. She wanted to talk about the Meridian Games acquisition of the W. Elliott brand.”
Grant closed his eyes, as if to wish it all away.
“Seattle, Grant. A two-year residency and your end-of-the-month deadline.”
Her voice cracked on the word deadline, just slightly.
“When were you going to tell me?”
He finally opened his eyes.
“Liza…”
“When? After you had already decided? After you had packed up all your things, or what? You were just going to disappear, the way you disappeared this week?”
She was shaking now.
“You kissed me. You gave me a crossword that said stay, and the whole time, you weren’t planning to. You had one foot out the door.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is that simple. You had information that affected both of us, and you kept it to yourself. That’s not at all complicated. That’s just hiding. And I now realize it’s just what you do.”
She could see the words land like a slap.
His jaw tightened, and his knuckles went white.
“You don’t understand,” he said.
“Okay, then help me understand.”
He was quiet for a very long time.
The shop was so silent except for the hum of the overhead light.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he said finally.
“I don’t know how to want something this much and not be absolutely terrified of losing it.
Every time I get close to something good, my brain tells me, oh, this is how it starts.
This is how it’s going to break you. This is how it starts, and then it gets taken away, and I’m standing in an empty room wondering what I did wrong. ”