Page 67 of Piece By Piece

CHAPTER 11

The morning of the festival, Liza’s eyes popped open at 5:30 a.m. without an alarm.

She lay in bed for a moment, listening to the island as it woke up around her.

Off in the distance, a rooster crowed.

She still didn’t have any idea whose rooster it was, but it definitely had very strong opinions about sunrise each day.

She could hear somebody unloading tables out on the square, and somewhere in the distance was a boat engine getting ready to head out of the marina.

She got up and made her coffee in the little kitchenette and stood on the balcony in her pajamas.

The square below was already half-transformed by that hour.

Banners hung from every lamppost, and little red flags marked the scavenger hunt stations.

The bakery had set out a table of free samples that was already drawing a crowd.

Today was the big day.

She’d planned events before, big, expensive ones, the kind that had spreadsheets and huge budgets and teams of people wearing headsets, but none of them had felt like this.

This event felt personal, like something she had built with her very own two hands, with help from a woman who called everyone sugar and a man who only talked in puzzles and half-smiles.

She got dressed and pulled her hair back, grabbed her clipboard, and went downstairs.

The bookstore smelled like the vanilla candle Dixie had lit the night before.

She said it was a good-luck tradition, although Liza suspected it was just because Dixie liked the smell and she loved having rituals.

Grant was already on the porch.

He was wearing a navy blue shirt she hadn’t seen before, and it looked like he’d gotten a haircut in the last couple of days, which she tried not to notice but immediately did.

He was arranging the final scavenger hunt pieces in paper bags with the precision of a man who was defusing a bomb.

“Good morning,” she said.

He looked up.

There was a softness on his face that she hadn’t seen there a month ago.

“Morning.”

“Nice shirt.”

“It’s a festival. I decided to make an effort.”

She smiled, and he almost smiled back.

The almost was still there, but it was getting smaller and smaller, the wall going down a little more each day, like a reflex he was slowly unlearning.

The festival opened officially at ten o’clock, but by 10:15, the scavenger hunt had a long line.

Kids and families came through the bookstore to pick up their first clue card.

Liza ran the starting station with the energy of somebody who had been born for this exact moment and this exact kind of chaos.