The library was a room of unsurpassed beauty. As far as a personal library went, it was beyond luxurious. The room had originally been a ballroom. The owner of the house before Uncle Clement had been another relative. They had bookshelves attached to every wall in every corridor in the house. It made moving furniture in and out a nightmare. Annaliese and Trip both remembered the way the house had looked in those days. Sometimes a person had to turn sideways to get down a hallway.

When Uncle Clement inherited the house, the first thing he did was acknowledge that he did not need a ballroom. He purchased uniform shelving, had all the mismatched bookcases removed from the house and all the books properly stored in two lines of bookcases in the ballroom and leaning against all four walls. When all the books were moved into the new library, there was still shelf space for new books. Soon that was no longer true and more bookcases were brought in because the house was just made to be read in.

Of the many beautiful features of the library, one of them was a small table intended only for playing chess. The pieces and the board were wooden. It looked ordinary enough unless you knew that it held a secret. The secret of the chess set was that every single one of the pieces had a hole drilled in the bottom. The tube created inside was the perfect size for hiding a tiny roll of paper.

A thousand games could be played with a chess set that had a message hidden inside each piece. Sometimes the game contained commands like dares, sometimes clues, and sometimes questions. Trip said he didn’t know what was written inside the pieces, and he didn’t. He flipped over a black pawn to make sure there was still a roll of paper inside before pulling out the chair in front of the white pieces for Annaliese.

She believed him, that he didn’t know what was inside, and sat down. She had long learned that it didn’t matter what was written inside. You could ignore what was written on the papers and ask whatever you wanted.

He sat down and looked at her gravely. “Begin.”

She picked up her pawn and moved it forward one square.

***

“I miss playing chess with you,” Trip said as their game wore on. No one had shed blood yet and both sets of pieces had strayed far into the no man’s land in the middle of the board.

“Are you going easy on me?” she asked suspiciously.

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“I hoped you were going easy on me,” he retorted.

She huffed and killed one of his pawns with her bishop. She unrolled the scroll that had been placed inside his dead pawn. It read, ‘Do you like carrot cake?’ She wasn’t asking him a dumb question. She knew everything about him, even whether or not he liked carrot cake.

Instead, she made up her own question and tried to place it on the same maturity level so it didn’t seem out of place when he read a question from her side. “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked.

“Is that what it says?” he asked, reaching for the paper in her hand.

“Don’t you trust me?” she asked coyly, like a little girl. Then, she rolled over her tongue and became a sharp woman. “Or do you not want to answer the question?” She did not show him the paper. She rolled it up and stuffed it back in the pawn.

“No. I don’t have a girlfriend,” he said flatly and offered no further information before moving a pawn to threaten her bishop in retaliation.

His answer did not satisfy her. It was too childish a question after all.

Three moves later, Trip killed her knight. He opened the paper hidden inside. It wasn’t even a question. It was more like a fortune cookie. It said, ‘Make plans for further education.’ It was impossible for him to say those words to her. Instead, he pretended to read a dare instead. “Let your hair down.”

Annaliese’s hair was tied up in a French twist, but familiar with this game, she didn’t hesitate to do as she was told. If she wanted answers to her questions, she had to play by the rules of the game. She deposited her elastic and thirteen bobby pins into the tray where they were the dead pieces were stored.

Trip felt the tension in his shoulders ease as soon as he saw her hair fall over her shoulders. He remembered her as a little girl with flyaway whisps, as a teenager who couldn’t quite bring herself to use as much product as it took to achieve perfect smoothness. Seeing the destruction of her French twist gave him a lift.

Maybe everything would be all right.

Annaliese always lost her knight first when she played chess. It didn’t matter who she was playing. She was better with her bishops and took another pawn.

She opened the paper. It read, ‘Wonder not. All will be revealed.’ She did her best to hide an exasperated pant before she asked cleanly, “What did you think of me the first time you saw me?”

“Probably nothing,” Trip answered. “I don’t think I even remember the first time I saw you. I was a child.”

The disappointment Annaliese felt at his statement was so palpable it surprised her. What he said was perfectly reasonable. They were three or four years old when they met. Still, she must care a lot about what Trip thought to be hurt by his honest reflection. She thought it was a bad sign for their conversation if he didn’t try to make something up, even if only to please her. Had he fallen to his knees in the entryway for nothing?

“However,” he continued. “I always thought the days when you were here, in the library, were the nicest.”

She smiled. That did feel like a hopeful place to start.