Page 16 of Piece By Piece

Grant had one very specific rule about jigsaw puzzles, and it also applied to just about everything else in his life.

Edges first.

You had to find the border pieces. You built a frame. You established the boundaries of the thing before you tried to fill in the middle. It was orderly, and it was safe. And it meant you knew exactly where the picture ended.

He had been doing this since he was a little kid. Owen used to grab a puzzle at the kitchen table and then just dump it everywhere, diving straight into the center. He’d grab whatever piece caught his eye, jam it against the other pieces to see if it fit, working from some sort of crazy instinct and chaos.

Grant would just sit across from him, shaking his head as he quietly separated out every flat-edged piece, building the frame.

“You’re no fun,” Owen would say.

“You’re just going to lose pieces,” Grant would respond.

“That’s the best part. Then you get to find them.”

Grant never understood that. Finding something you’d lost wasn’t fun. It was just stressful. It meant something along the way had gone wrong. The system had failed.

He thought about this as he unlocked The Puzzle Post at eight in the morning and flipped the sign to Open.

The shop was the way he had left it the night before. Every display aligned, every shelf organized by category.

The morning light came through the front windows, and for a few moments the stillness felt like something close to sacred.

He made coffee in the small machine that he’d set up in the back room and drank it black while standing in the corner.

He had a shipment of new logic puzzles arriving Thursday. He needed to update his window display. He wanted to design a few sample crossword cards to leave on the try-it table.

These were normal, predictable, and controllable things he could do.

But then Liza knocked on the glass door, holding up two paper cups from the coffee shop down the street, and the orderly edges of his morning came loose.

They had agreed to meet at the bookstore to plan the festival activities, but agreed must have been a generous word, because Julie had emailed them both with a shared document that had a deadline and a note that said, I know neither of you asked for this, but the kids at Seagrove are counting on you. Then she had added a smiley face.

Grant did not find it reassuring.

Liza sat at a table near the reading nook. She had spread out color markers, a roll of butcher paper, sticky notes in a variety of colors, and what looked like a mood board that she’d torn out of a magazine.

He sat across from her with his single notepad and a mechanical pencil.

She looked at his notepad.

He looked at her complete art supply store.

“Ready?” she said.

“For what exactly?”

“We’re going to brainstorm. See, I’m a visual thinker. I need to think all the things out on paper before they make any sense in my head.”

She took the cap off a green marker and wrote scavenger hunt in big letters across the top of the butcher paper.

He watched her work. She did move fast as she scribbled ideas and bubbles and drew arrows between them. Her handwriting was what one might call “frenetic,” which also meant it was barely legible, the kind that belonged to someone whose brain moved faster than their hands.

She talked while she wrote, half to him and half to herself.

“Okay, so the basic idea is that the kids will get a clue card at the bookstore, and each clue will lead them to a different shop around town. And at each stop, they’re going to get a stamp and have to do a small challenge, like a riddle or a word puzzle. And then when they’ve hit all the stops, they’ll come back here for the final challenge and a prize.”

She finally looked up. “Thoughts?”