Page 84 of Piece By Piece

I am so not good at this.

I think you know that. You’ve known since day one when you brought cookies to my door and I couldn’t even say thank you without making it awkward.

I’m a man who’s better with grids than with people. And I’ve spent the majority of my life believing that was a feature and not a flaw.

I was wrong about that, turns out.

I was wrong about a lot of things.

I should have told you about the Meridian offer the day it arrived.

I should have sat on that porch with you and laid it all out the way you lay things out, you know, with markers and sticky notes and way too much energy, but also the absolute faith that talking about a problem is always better than hiding from it.

I should have trusted you the way you trusted me when you told me about the panic attack.

You gave me the truth in the dark during a storm.

And instead, I repaid that by locking my door.

I am so very sorry.

Not the kind of sorry that’s trying to fix something so that I can feel better about it, but the kind of sorry that sits with what I did and doesn’t look away from it.

Here is the truth, all of it, the unvarnished truth.

I turned the deal down this morning, not because of you. I need you to really understand that.

I turned it down because I finally figured out that the life I was designing for myself was missing the most important piece, the piece that would make it work, the piece that had to be there in order for me to have the life I wanted.

No acquisition offer in the world was going to fill that space.

I don’t want Seattle. I don’t want a platform.

I want a little puzzle shop on a small Lowcountry island with an owl cookie jar on my counter and fairy lights connecting my building to the building next door.

I want a porch step to sit on at ten o’clock at night and look up into the dark Lowcountry sky.

I want iced coffee at three.

I want to argue about where to put a clue with someone whose handwriting I can’t read and whose brain moves so fast it makes mine feel like it’s standing still.

I associate all beautiful things with you.

I didn’t know that was possible, to meet someone and have them change the way everything looks.

The marsh, the fairy lights, the sound of your laughter through a wall, a crossword grid, a cookie jar with a crooked beak.

I can’t look at any of that without seeing you.

Your father wrote that W. Elliott understood how his brain worked.

I read that note and it nearly broke me apart because the truth is, I never really thought about who was on the other side of my puzzles.

I built walls out of words and then hid behind them and told myself that anonymity was important, but it wasn’t.

The anonymity was just my shield, my armor.

Your father saw through it the same way that you did, with curiosity and patience and the kind of attention that most people don’t bother giving.