Page 51 of Piece By Piece

He walked back to his house through the dark streets of Seagrove, the air cool on his face and the stars thick and bright above the marsh.

Every house he passed was dark.

The whole island was asleep.

But he was wide awake.

Inside the inn, Julie was sitting at her laptop.

The cursor was moving quickly.

Words were appearing on the screen in an unhurried flow that she hadn’t felt in months.

Francine had handled all the evening check-ins.

The kitchen was clean as a whistle, and Dawson and Julie’s son, Dylan, was sound asleep.

For the first time in longer than Julie had wanted to admit, she was just writing, doing her thing, not managing, not multitasking, not even checking her phone.

Just writing.

The scene she was working on was about a woman standing at a window, watching someone she loved walk away and trying to decide whether she was brave enough to follow.

It wasn’t autobiographical, exactly, but the feeling was real. The particular ache of wanting to hold on and let go at the same time.

She wrote for two hours without stopping.

When she finally looked up, Dawson was in the doorway, looking at her with pride and relief.

“Had a good night?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said and smiled. “A really good night.”

Grant sat at his kitchen table at midnight. He had a fresh grid sheet in front of him and his trusty pencil.

The email from Meridian was open on his laptop across the room. The screen was dimmed but not dark.

He wasn’t looking at it. He refused to.

He was just going to look at the blank grid, which was the one place in the world where his mind made perfect sense.

He started with the theme answers.

In a standard crossword, the theme answers were the long entries, the fifteen-letter phrases that stretched across the grid and gave the puzzle a backbone.

And they were always connected by a hidden thread, a pattern the solver would discover while working through the puzzle.

When the theme clicked, everything would change. The random letters scattered around suddenly had a purpose. The grid stopped being just a collection of words and turned into a message.

He put four theme answers on the grid, each one carefully chosen.

When read in order, top to bottom, the first word of each answer spelled something.

But he wasn’t ready to share the message yet, and he didn’t know if he’d ever be ready.

The grid was taking shape, and the message was there, encoded in the architecture, just waiting for somebody to find it.

And he knew who it was for.