Page 32 of Piece By Piece

“Perfect,” Francine said. “I’ll handle the two o’clock check-in and the linen delivery. You won’t even know I’m here.”

Julie went to the kitchen and sat down at her laptop. She opened Chapter 12 and stared at it, and then she started listening for sounds of disaster from the front desk.

There were none.

After about twenty minutes, she stood up and walked past the front desk. Not checking, just passing through, in the way that a woman who was definitely not checking would pass through.

Francine was sitting at the computer, clicking through the reservation system, and probably wondering why she was here when she’d surely managed much larger establishments than this.

“Everything okay?” Julie asked.

“Wonderful. The Hendersons in Room 4 called about extra towels, and I took care of it. The linen delivery is early. They’ll be here in forty minutes instead of two hours, and I’ve already cleared a spot.”

Julie opened her mouth, closed it, and then went back into the kitchen.

She sat at her laptop again. The cursor blinked, and she wasn’t sure if the tightness in her chest was relief or the unsettling feeling of being unnecessary in her own home.

She’d spent so long holding everything together that she didn’t know what to do with her hands now that somebody else was picking up the pieces.

She typed one sentence, deleted it, then typed it again.

She wasn’t sure if the new help was making her feel better or worse.

It was almost midnight when Grant closed his laptop and rubbed his eyes.

He had been trying to design the clue cards for the scavenger hunt, but his mind just kept going round and round about the conversation on the porch. Liza’s voice saying that he always said W. Elliott understood how his brain worked.

His mind jumped to the image of a man he’d never met sitting at a kitchen table with his blue pen, working through puzzles Grant had built in his apartment at two in the morning because he couldn’t sleep.

David Forrester. That was Liza’s father’s name.

She’d mentioned it once earlier that week in passing, and then Grant had filed it away like he filed everything, carefully and precisely in a place where he could access it later.

He had never thought much about who solved his crosswords. That was the beauty of having a pseudonym.

The puzzles just flew out into the world and then disappeared, and he never had to think about who had solved them, or whose hands were on them, or the minds that had to work through them.

Clean. Anonymous. Safe.

But now he had a face attached to one of those pairs of hands. A man who had written notes in the margins like he was writing back. A man who had told his daughter that a stranger understood how his brain worked.

Grant opened his email and scrolled past all the spam and newsletters and automated alerts until he found the folder he was looking for.

It was one he had labeled simply: Owen.

He opened it.

The emails were all there.

He scrolled to the last one, sent at 11:47 p.m. three days before Owen died, probably from bed after a beer or two, based on the typos.

Nothing was capitalized. Barely any punctuation.

hey little brother

i just want to say im proud of you

i know you hate hearing that but tough nuggies