Page 21 of Piece By Piece

He kept working until the sky turned purple and street lamps flickered on.

Across the square, he saw a couple walking hand in hand toward the seafood restaurant. A kid rode by on a bicycle, hands in the air, the way kids do before they know better.

The bookstore lights were still on, and through the window he could see Liza moving around inside.

She was rearranging something.

In fact, she was always rearranging something.

If he wasn’t careful, she might just try to rearrange him.

He looked down at the crossword. His grid was taking shape. Clean, symmetrical, balanced.

Perfection.

He folded it and put it in his pocket, but he didn’t throw it away.

Owen’s voice floated through his head, the way it did sometimes at the end of the day, when the world had gotten quiet enough to hear the ghosts.

Stop hiding behind puzzles, little brother.

Grant went inside and locked the door.

But he left the porch light on.

CHAPTER 4

Liza had been running on sweet tea and adrenaline since around two o’clock in the afternoon.

By dinnertime, the space between Down Yonder Books and The Puzzle Post looked like something that came straight out of a storybook.

She had strung fairy lights between the two shop awnings, crisscrossing them in a canopy that would glow like starlight when the sun went down. On the sidewalk, she had laid out quilts and floor cushions that she’d borrowed from Dixie’s house and created a full reading area in front of the bookstore.

On the side with the puzzle shop, Grant had set up three folding tables with different challenge stations: woodblock puzzles, logic grids, and tangrams. They looked deceptively simple.

Between the two shops, Liza had placed a hand-painted sign on an easel.

Books and Brains Night. All ages welcome.

She took a step back and looked at everything they had created.

She adjusted the sign two inches to the left, then back to the right.

And then she left it alone because otherwise she would just continue fiddling.

She went and checked the fairy light connections for a third time.

“I swear if you touch those lights again, I’m going to take away your extension cord privileges,” Dixie called from the bookstore doorway, where she was leaning, her wrist braced against it.

“I just want to make sure they’re even.”

“Honey, they’re even. They were even twenty minutes ago. You need to sit down and drink some water before you pass out.”

Of course, Liza didn’t sit down.

She just couldn’t. Her body never knew how to be still, especially when she was nervous.

She was nervous in that particular way of somebody who cared too much about whether a thing was going to work.