Page 54 of Piece By Piece

Three sources.

One creator.

The clue structure was identical.

The grid architecture was the same.

Even the voice behind the clues was unmistakable once you knew what to listen for.

Grant Whitmore was W. Elliott.

There was no way around it.

The man next door.

The man who had sat across from her on the porch and listened to her talk about her father’s crossword habit without ever saying a word, without admitting a thing.

The man who’d gone still when she mentioned the name W. Elliott, whose coffee cup froze in midair.

But she hadn’t thought anything of it.

The man who’d said, he sounds like he was a good man, in a voice that came from somewhere way deeper than politeness.

She now realized.

He’d known.

He had known who he was to her father.

And then he had said nothing.

Liza pressed her palms against the table and breathed. Her eyes stung, and her chest pulled tight.

She wasn’t angry. She didn’t even feel betrayed.

It was something bigger and much harder to name.

She understood why he hadn’t told her. She understood hiding.

She’d been doing it herself for months, from her mother, from herself, from the version of her life that had fallen apart in a panic attack at her desk.

Grant wasn’t hiding because he was a cruel man. He was hiding because he was terrified.

She knew, with the certainty of somebody who had been afraid in exactly the same way, that hiding had not protected him from anything.

It had just made him feel lonelier.

She picked up her father’s book and opened it to the page with the margin note.

The blue ink.

The steady handwriting.

The words she’d read a hundred times.

This creator is a genius. I’d love to meet him someday.

Her father had never gotten to meet him.