Page 6 of Piece By Piece

Step three: Hold the item in your hand and think about where it belongs, and then place it exactly in that spot.

Step four: Do not second-guess yourself.

Step five: Repeat.

His plan was methodical and calm, the opposite of how most people unpacked. Most normal people would dump everything on the floor and then spend the next three weeks stepping over it while pretending it didn't exist.

He’d been at this since six o’clock in the morning, and The Puzzle Post was starting to look like a store.

The front room had two long display tables that he’d built himself from some reclaimed wood and iron pipe legs he’d found. One held rows of wooden tangram sets, each one in its own felt-lined box. The other held crossword anthologies arranged by difficulty, brain-teaser kits with hand-drawn instructions, and a small collection of mechanical puzzle boxes that he had imported from a craftsman in Vermont.

The walls of the shop were painted a deep navy blue. He’d also done that himself over three late nights with a roller and a podcast about the history of cryptography.

The shelves were white, clean-lined, and already half-filled with inventory.

In the back corner, he had set up a small table with two chairs and a lamp. This would be the spot where customers could sit and try out a puzzle before they bought it.

Everything had its place. That was the whole point.

Grant set down a box of wooden peg solitaire boards and stepped back to look at the room.

It was good, it was quiet, and it was his.

He’d spent the last three days getting the shop ready, and the work had been the kind he liked best: solitary, physical, and precise.

Sand this, paint that, measure twice, cut once, and he didn’t have to talk to anybody while he was doing it.

He had eaten takeout from a seafood place down the block every single night and fallen asleep on a small cot in the back room because the apartment that he’d rented two streets over still didn’t have a bed frame.

But he didn’t mind.

Grant had never been somebody who needed comfort. He just needed order. He needed quiet. He also needed the particular satisfaction of putting something exactly where it belonged and then knowing it wouldn’t move unless he was the one who moved it.

Seagrove Island had not been on his radar even six months ago.

He’d been living in a rented condo in Raleigh, North Carolina, staring at his laptop most days and going for long runs that didn’t tire him out the way he needed them to.

He’d sold Gridlock, his puzzle app, his accidental empire, about a year and a half earlier, and the money was just sitting in an account he barely touched.

Forty million downloads. A modest fortune in his bank account. A Wikipedia page that he’d never read and never intended to.

All of it under the name W. Elliott.

Nobody in Seagrove knew that name, and that was exactly the point.

Here, he was just Grant, the quiet guy who rented the space next to the bookstore and sold puzzles and brain games.

There would be no interviews, no profiles, no one asking him what was next. He’d had enough of thinking about what was next.

The final box was the one that he always chose to unpack last. It was smaller than the others and taped shut with packing tape that had been opened and resealed so many times that the edges were fraying.

He carried it into the back room, put it on the floor, and opened it carefully.

Inside, there was a framed photo, a pocket knife with a wooden handle, a baseball cap from some fishing tournament in the Outer Banks, and a dog-eared copy of The Big Book of Crosswords, Volume 1, the first collection that had ever published one of Grant’s puzzles.

The photo was of two boys on a dock, maybe around ten and twelve years old. The older one was in the middle of laughing and was holding up a fish, with one arm slung over the younger one’s shoulders. The younger one was trying to look serious but failing completely.

Owen and Grant, summer of 1998.