Page 35 of Piece By Piece

Intimate and hushed, almost like the inside of a chapel.

If a chapel were covered in books, of course.

Rain hammered against the roof, and the windows shook in their frames. A gust hit so hard that the building seemed to shudder.

Liza instinctively moved closer to the center of the room.

“These buildings have been here for decades,” Grant said. “They’ve survived a lot worse. Hurricanes, probably.”

“Is that supposed to be reassuring?”

“Well, it was supposed to be factual, but sure, I’ll go with reassuring.”

She laughed, but the sound was swallowed by another roll of thunder.

They moved the soup and clue cards to the floor near the reading nook, where the bookshelves on either side created a bit of an alcove.

Liza grabbed two cushions from the children’s section, the new ones she had ordered, not the sad old ones, and they sat down on the floor side by side with their backs against the wall of books.

For a while, they didn’t say anything.

They just listened to the storm.

It was, Liza thought, the most comfortable silence she had ever shared with another person.

The soup was delicious. It was some kind of tomato bisque that tasted like it had been made by somebody’s grandma and not by a deli.

They ate in candlelight with the rain drumming steadily on the roof, and Liza felt the day’s tension slowly uncoil from her shoulders.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” she said.

“You always ask me that, and then you ask anyway, regardless of what I say.”

“Well, that’s true, so I guess I’ll just ask.”

She put her soup down.

“Who taught you to talk to kids the way you did at Books and Brains? That tangram thing, you know, the way you got down on the boy’s level and walked him through it? That’s not something you learn from selling puzzles.”

He was quiet for long enough that she thought he wasn’t even going to answer.

The candlelight moved across his face, softening the angles, and she could see him trying to decide something.

“My brother,” he finally said.

Liza waited.

“His name was Owen. He was two years older than me. Kind of like a second dad more than a brother in a lot of ways. He was…” Grant paused. “Well, he was the loud one, the one who talked to everybody, the one who could walk into a room and just make it warm. He was the person who taught me that you don’t learn by being lectured at. You learn by being met where you are.”

“He sounds wonderful,” she said, smiling.

“He was.”

The past tense sat between them, and Liza didn’t say anything.

She had learned enough by now about Grant to know that silence didn’t mean absence with him. He was processing. He needed the space to find the next words.

“He died three years ago,” Grant said. “Sudden cardiac arrest. It was the craziest thing. He was at a cookout, laughing about something somebody said, and then he was gone.”