Chapter 13
Grant didn’t sleep at all.
He lay in his bed and just stared at the ceiling, listening to the island around him.
He ran every version of every conversation through his head, like a crossword puzzle he just couldn’t solve.
The problem was that there was no clever clue or hidden theme or structural trick that would make the letters rearrange themselves into something that didn’t hurt.
The grid was broken.
He’d broken it himself, the way he broke everything in his life.
Not with force, but with absence, with the careful, systematic removal of himself from the things that mattered most.
Around four o’clock in the morning, he gave up on getting any sleep and went into the kitchen.
He made some coffee and sat at the table where he had designed the stay crossword and looked at the empty grid sheet that was still sitting there.
Pencil marks were faintly visible in the lamplight.
He had built that puzzle with so much care, chosen every word and every clue, like a small declaration disguised as a question.
And he had meant it. He had meant all of it. And then he had gone and done the opposite.
He thought about Owen.
Not the grief of losing him, not the absence, but the man himself, the way Owen had moved through the world, his arms open, his voice loud, using his heart first.
Owen, who had never once chosen the safe option.
Owen, who had driven three hours to a county fair one time just to wave crosswords in the air because his little brother was way too shy to talk to strangers.
And then Owen had died at thirty-eight years old.
In the three years since, Grant hadn’t lived at all.
He had existed.
He had maintained.
He had built his perfectly designed and perfectly controlled empty life and then called it peace.
Liza had walked into that life and made it so noisy and messy and full of things that he couldn’t control.
And he’d loved every minute of it. Been terrified of every minute, too.
And when that fear got too big, he’d done the only thing he ever knew how to do.
He’d run.
Not physically, of course.
Worse, he’d run while staying in the same room.
He’d locked the doors and shortened texts and canceled plans and then turned himself into a black square.
That void in the grid where no letters go, where there’s no meaning.
He picked up the stay crossword.
It was still on the table.
The photocopy of the one he’d given to Liza.
He traced the letters with his fingers.
S-T-A-Y.
Four letters.
The simplest word he’d ever put in a grid.
And the hardest one to mean.
He thought about what she’d said at the shop.
What if you don’t?
Words that had knocked the air out of him.
What if he didn’t lose her?
What if the thing he was running from was the one thing he could actually keep if he would just stand there long enough to let it happen?
At 5:30, the sky started to lighten.
Grant put on his shoes and went out.
Went to the only person on the island who just might understand.
Dawson was already sitting on his front porch.
Grant was starting to wonder if this man ever got any sleep.
“Pretty early,” Dawson said.
“Yeah, well, I messed up.”
“I know.”
Grant sat down in the rocking chair.
The ocean was dark. The sky was a gray-pink color.
He told Dawson everything.
The Meridian offer, the pulling away, the journalist, the confrontation, Liza’s face when she’d said, “It’s what you do.”
Dawson listened without interrupting, and when Grant finished, he looked at him.
“So, what do you want?”
“I want to fix it.”
“That’s not what I asked. I asked what you want.”
Grant pressed his hands together between his knees.
The answer was actually so simple, it almost embarrassed him.
This man who built fifteen-by-fifteen grids with interlocking themes and hidden messages couldn’t solve a puzzle that any child could see.
“I want to stay,” he said. “I want to stay here in Seagrove. I want my shop and the island and those stupid fairy lights and that cookie jar.” He stopped. His throat tightened. “I want Liza.”
Dawson nodded, like this was the answer he’d been waiting for.
“Then the deal is the easy part. You call up the publisher, and you say no. That’ll take you five minutes.
And Liza? Well, that might be a little harder, because she’s not a deal you can accept or decline.
She’s the person that you hurt. The only way to fix that is to stop hiding and let her see you.
All of you, even those scared parts you try to keep behind a wall. ”
Grant stared out at the ocean.
Pelicans had landed on the water and were bobbing in the swells.
“I don’t know how to do that in person,” he said. “You know, every time I try to say what I mean, the words just come out all jumbled and wrong. They come out too small, and she deserves something more than small.”
Dawson looked at him.
“You’re a man who builds puzzles for a living. You put words together better than anybody I’ve ever met.”
He paused.
“So write it down.”
Grant was quiet for a moment.
“What if a letter isn’t enough?”
“Well, it’s not about the letter being enough. It’s just about the letter being honest.”
Dawson leaned back in his chair.
“When I hurt Julie, and trust me, I’ve done that more than once, the thing that fixed it was never the grand gesture.
It was just telling the truth. Not the ‘I’m sorry, I was wrong,’ but ‘I’m sorry I did this specific thing, and here’s why I’m sorry, and here’s what I’m going to do differently next time.
’ Be specific. That’s what people need.”
Grant nodded. Specifics. He understood that. Precision was his native language.
“And one more thing,” Dawson said. “Don’t deliver it yourself. You need to give her space to read it without feeling like she has to respond immediately.”
Grant stood up.
“Thank you, man.”
“Don’t thank me. Just don’t make me have to do this again.”
He called Jonathan Webb at 9 a.m., which was six in the morning Seattle time and probably a little too early.
Grant didn’t care about being polite anymore.
He just wanted to be clear.
Jonathan picked up on the fourth ring, his voice groggy.
“Grant?”
“I’m not taking the deal.”
There was a long pause.
“Grant, at least hear me out.”
“I’ve heard you out. The offer is generous. The platform is impressive, and I’m very flattered that you think the W. Elliott brand is worth building around, but the answer is a firm no.”
“Can I ask why?”
Grant looked out the window of his shop.
The square was completely quiet.
The fairy lights were off because they only came on at dusk.
“Because I spent three years running from things that matter, and I just found the place where I want to stop running.”
Jonathan was quiet for a long moment.
“Well, I suppose that’s either very brave or very foolish.”
“Probably a little bit of both.”
“The offer stays open for thirty days if you change your mind.”
“I won’t.”
He hung up.
The weight of the decision should have felt enormous, but instead he felt like he had set down something he’d been carrying for far too long.
His arms even felt lighter.
His chest felt more open.
He looked at Owen’s photo on the shelf, with his tiny fish and enormous grin.
“I’m staying,” he said out loud. “I’m staying, and I’m going to try to stop being an idiot. I know you’d have something to say about that.”
The photo didn’t answer, but Grant could have sworn his grin got wider.
He sat down at his workbench, pulled out a clean sheet of paper, and picked up his pen.
Not a pencil.
A pen.
Blue ink.
And he started writing.
Grant wrote it by hand because he felt like some things just shouldn’t be typed.
The pen was blue. He’d bought it at the pharmacy. It was nothing special, just the kind of disposable ballpoint that came in those packs of ten.
He thought about her father’s blue pen, the one he used for crosswords. It wasn’t an accidental choice because nothing Grant did was accidental.
He wrote slowly, each word placed with the same care he gave to filling a crossword grid.
He crossed out three openings before he found the right one.
Liza,
I am so not good at this.
I think you know that. You’ve known since day one when you brought cookies to my door and I couldn’t even say thank you without making it awkward.
I’m a man who’s better with grids than with people. And I’ve spent the majority of my life believing that was a feature and not a flaw.
I was wrong about that, turns out.
I was wrong about a lot of things.
I should have told you about the Meridian offer the day it arrived.
I should have sat on that porch with you and laid it all out the way you lay things out, you know, with markers and sticky notes and way too much energy, but also the absolute faith that talking about a problem is always better than hiding from it.
I should have trusted you the way you trusted me when you told me about the panic attack.
You gave me the truth in the dark during a storm.
And instead, I repaid that by locking my door.
I am so very sorry.
Not the kind of sorry that’s trying to fix something so that I can feel better about it, but the kind of sorry that sits with what I did and doesn’t look away from it.
Here is the truth, all of it, the unvarnished truth.
I turned the deal down this morning, not because of you. I need you to really understand that.
I turned it down because I finally figured out that the life I was designing for myself was missing the most important piece, the piece that would make it work, the piece that had to be there in order for me to have the life I wanted.
No acquisition offer in the world was going to fill that space.
I don’t want Seattle. I don’t want a platform.
I want a little puzzle shop on a small Lowcountry island with an owl cookie jar on my counter and fairy lights connecting my building to the building next door.
I want a porch step to sit on at ten o’clock at night and look up into the dark Lowcountry sky.
I want iced coffee at three.
I want to argue about where to put a clue with someone whose handwriting I can’t read and whose brain moves so fast it makes mine feel like it’s standing still.
I associate all beautiful things with you.