Page 57 of Piece By Piece

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

Grant read it.

She watched as his eyes moved across the words.

Something shifted in his face, a fracture, a softening.

The kind of change that happens to someone when they realize their work meant something to even one person.

“His name was David,” she said. “David Forrester. He was a high school math teacher in Charleston. He coached the chess team and he grew the best tomatoes, according to him, but I thought they never turned out right. He did your crosswords every single Saturday morning for the last ten years of his life.”

Her voice cracked on the word life, just slightly.

“They made him so happy, Grant. You have no idea.”

He swallowed hard.

He was looking at the margin note like it was a personal letter addressed to him that had been lost in the mail for years.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I never… I used the pseudonym so I wouldn’t have to know. You know, so I could stay anonymous, a name and nothing else. People would solve the puzzles, and I never had to think about who they were or what it meant to them or whether they thought they were any good.”

“Why?”

“Well, because if it meant something, then that meant I had to care about it, too, and… caring about things…”

He stopped for a moment, the way he always did, with that particular stubbornness of a man who was keeping things together.

“Caring about things is what Owen did,” he finally said. “Owen cared about everything. And then he was gone, and all the things he cared about were just kind of there, just hanging out in the world without him here. And I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to build things that would outlast me and matter to people I’d never met because what’s the point if you’re not there to see it?”

Rain had started outside, light and gentle and tapping on the windows.

“The point,” she said, “is that my dad sat at a kitchen table every Saturday and he felt understood by a person he had never even met. The point is that the little boy at Books and Brains night solved a puzzle because you got down on his level and told him to listen to the pieces. The point is, Grant, that you made beautiful things and then you released them out into the world like a million butterflies, and they landed exactly where they were supposed to land.”

She took a breath and continued.

“You gave my father something, and you had no idea that you did it. And that’s not nothing, Grant. That’s everything.”

He stood there behind the counter, and she could see the fight slowly leaving him.

Not fighting against her.

He’d never really been fighting her in the first place, but he had been fighting himself.

He was fighting against that part of him that believed the safest thing was to stay invisible in the world, to keep his work at arm’s length and never let anyone close enough to make losing them feel unbearable.

She reached across the counter and picked up her father’s book. She held it against her chest, the way she had always held it. Like a shield or a prayer. The last physical object that still connected her to her favorite man in the world.

“Look, I’m not angry that you didn’t tell me,” she said. “I understand why you didn’t. But I need you to know that your work meant something. It wasn’t just a number on a download counter. It meant so much to a real person. To my dad.”

Dixie stood at the window of the bookstore.

She had come back just to pick up a sweater she’d left behind the register, and she had seen Liza walk into the puzzle shop carrying a book as if it were made of glass.

Being nosy, she had watched through the window for just a moment. Eventually, she had to move outside near a tree to see inside the puzzle shop.

She wouldn’t call it eavesdropping, just observing, the way she had been observing people in this town for decades.

Of course, she couldn’t hear anything they were saying, but she could see the way they were standing, Liza on one side of the counter, Grant on the other, the space between them charged with something.