“Your move, Soldier.”
Miles groaned dramatically.
Ten feet away, I hid a laugh behind my coffee cup and went back to answering emails on my laptop.
At the time, I thought I was simply watching an elderly man teach my son chess.
I thought I was close enough to notice anything important.
I had no idea how much I was missing from only ten feet away.
—
Miles had loved chess since he was five.
I still couldn’t explain where the obsession came from.
His father had already disappeared from our lives by then—new city, new life, even a new phone number he never bothered giving us.
And chess certainly didn’t come from me.
Half the time, I still had to remind myself how the knight moved.
But something about the game seemed perfectly suited to Miles.
Every afternoon after school, other children raced toward the swings and slides.
Miles walked straight past them.
He headed for the concrete chess tables at the back of the park like an eighty-year-old man arriving for a business appointment.
I worked remotely, so eventually our routine formed around it.
School pickup.
The park.
Ninety minutes while Miles played and I worked.
Then dinner at home.
It wasn’t exciting, but it worked.
Miles was happy.
And when you have a quiet child who is genuinely happy doing something unusual, you learn not to question it too much.
The only problem was that nobody wanted to play with him.
The children his age thought chess was boring.
Adults occasionally sat across from him, deliberately made terrible moves, and allowed him to win.
Miles hated that.
“He let me win,” he would complain afterward.
“How do you know?”
“Because I made a bad move and he didn’t take my piece.”
So most days, Miles played against himself.
He would set up both sides, move to one chair, make a move, then walk around the table and become his own opponent.
Sometimes he even argued with himself.
It broke my heart a little.
But he seemed content.
Then Arthur appeared.
—
The first time I noticed him, he was sitting alone at one of the chess tables.
He wasn’t playing.
He simply stared at the empty board painted into the concrete, both hands resting over the top of his cane.
A paper cup of coffee sat beside him.
There was something extraordinarily peaceful about him.
