Page 23 of Love Is A Draw
It was the margin. The ink had worn to gray, the slightly uneven spacing of Grandfather’s hand—so achingly familiar.Could it truly be?
She leaned in and looked more closely. “Move fifteen.” Her fingertips rested inches from the ink. “Knight from b1 to d2. He would’ve expected c4 next.”
Victor’s breath caught. She heard it—a shift in the air.
His eyes lifted to hers. “You know it?”
“I know Dmitry Tarkov’s mind.” Her speech was steady, but her pulse was not. “I listened.” She didn’t mean just this sequence. “My full name is Avigail Tarkov.”
The silence between them thickened. Years collapsed. Echoes surfaced.
“He never let me sit with you,” she whispered. “I wasn’t allowed. But I stood outside the room. Heard you—angry, determined… a little proud. You hated when you were wrong.”
Victor blinked, slowly. His lips parted, but no words came.
“And you hated pawn sacrifices,” she added. “You said they felt like gutting yourself.”
He stared at her, unmoving. She saw it land—saw it settle in him like the answer to a puzzle he’d never quite solved.
Her hands curled into fists to keep them from trembling. “You’re him. You’re the boy from the lessons.”
Victor didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. It showed in his eyes—recognition, not from sight, but from sound. From thememory of a shadow lingering just outside the door, breath held, listening.
“You were always quiet after the sixth game,” she said, more to herself than to him. “I thought you’d gone. Then I heard you speak again.”
He nodded, slowly. “I thought I was alone. I never saw you.”
“You weren’t supposed to.” She looked at the notebook again, at the pages between them. Then up—straight into his eyes.
Something inside her slipped into place. It was him. The boy she had fallen in love with—before she knew love could exist without touch or face. He had grown into the man before her. And now—now there was nothing between them but time.
And time could be rewritten.
Gail swallowed, throat tight. “You’re the reason I believed that it was possible.”
Victor’s hand drifted toward hers—not grasping, not urgent. Just reaching.
She met him halfway.
Victor’s expression softened. “He wanted me to be exceptional.”
They both ogled the notebook for a moment.
“And now?” she asked.
He shook his head, looking away. “Now—even I’m not sure what I am.”
She stepped forward and placed her hand gently atop his—fingers brushing, deliberate. “He didn’t write those lessons because he doubted you. He wrote them because you could teach yourself. You owed him that. And you never forgot.”
His hand closed around hers.
They paused. The clock ticked once, then again.
“I’ve never shown this to anyone,” he said, barely above a whisper.
“I know.” And somehow—that was all she needed to say.
When she drew her hand back, it wasn’t retreat, it was reverence—a gesture of understanding, not distance, as though they had stepped together into some unspoken truth neither of them had expected.
