The morning light in our new townhouse arrives like a quiet guest—soft, polite, already knowing where the coffee mugs live. It slides past the open shelves in the kitchen, skims the brushed-steel kettle, and catches on the tiny flag magnet that holds my grocery list to the fridge. Across the room, on a Karelian birch table Lesha found at a vintage shop in town, stands the thing that centers the whole house: my father’s chessboard. The lacquered squares still show the faintest ridges where his brush paused years ago. When the light hits it, the black squares soften to bottle green, and the white squares glow like fresh linen.

I always start my day the same way. I wipe the board with a clean cloth, set the pieces carefully—pawns first, then that little family of taller figures—and breathe. My students call out, “Coach Anna!” when they walk through the door, but this moment is mine. It belongs to a six-year-old girl on a different street, in a different country, watching her father’s careful hands shape the world into 64 squares.

“Ready?” Lesha asks from the hallway. There’s flour on his forearm and a satisfied grin on his face. He tried a new recipe for cinnamon rolls because one of my Saturday students is turning nine, and birthdays at Quiet Move come with sugar.

“Almost,” I say, fitting the queen onto her square. “She likes extra icing.”

“She’s getting extra everything,” he says, and steals a kiss as he passes. My husband moves through the house like a man who knows he came close to losing something irreplaceable. Maybe he did. Maybe we both did. The difference is how we set the board now—pieces placed with intention, boundaries drawn with a hand that no longer trembles.

Six months ago we left his parents’ condo with a suitcase and a silence that felt like a door closing. Before that, there were weeks of the kind of commentary that sounds like kindness until you notice the way it tilts everything you are. A dress becomes “status.” Sandals become “proof.” A life becomes a project that other people claim the right to manage. Then a line is crossed—a line you didn’t draw, but one you felt under your feet the whole time.

They called it “deep cleaning.” I called it what it was: erasing a piece of me and calling it housekeeping.

When Tamara told me she’d given the board to the gardener, I didn’t raise my voice. I made a phone call. I said the number out loud—one million five hundred thousand dollars—and watched understanding stumble, then run. Shock does not have a language barrier. It doesn’t need one.

“I won the money,” I told them, and the room shifted in that slow way buildings do during an earthquake. The furniture didn’t slide; it redefined itself. “At the world chess championship. Online.”

Three people who had been so certain of my size and shape had to invent new measurements while I sat in their living room and ate a cookie.

Then Lesha came home a day early, and the world rearranged again. He did what I needed him to do, what I had hoped he would do and feared he wouldn’t: he saw me. Not the picture his family hung on the wall. Not the quiet girl who was always grateful. Me.

We packed. We left. And the next morning he found the gardener.

His name is Hector. He keeps the grounds for half the neighborhood and remembers everyone’s dog by name. He couldn’t bring himself to throw the board away. He had set it gently in his shed behind the bags of grass seed and the orange extension cords, meaning to ask if anyone wanted it before trash day. Lesha drove over at eight in the morning with coffee and a folded envelope and came back with the board carefully buckled into the passenger seat like a child.

I cried when I saw it. Not the cinematic kind of crying, not the kind that shakes your shoulders and leaves you washed clean. It was thinner and saltier than that. It felt like water finding its level after a storm, slipping into every line inside me that had been left unsealed. Lesha didn’t try to talk me out of it. He stood beside me with his hands in his pockets and a quiet I hadn’t heard from him in months, maybe years. The right kind of quiet.

We put the board on the kitchen island of a rental bungalow we’d found for the month. The place smelled faintly of old coffee and floor cleaner and sun. There was a tiny flag wedged into a succulent by the sink—someone’s Fourth of July leftover—and I didn’t move it. Hector came by to make sure we needed nothing else. He looked at the board like it was visiting royalty, tipped his hat, and left with a smile that said he was glad it had come home.

From there, everything moved with that brisk efficiency America is famous for and only sometimes deserves. I called an escrow officer whose desk, when I’d visited months earlier to notarize a document for our flooded apartment, had a flag pin and an organized tray of blue pens. She remembered me. “Proof of funds?” she asked, the way you ask for salt at a table. I sent the screenshot. She called back in a tone that had sunlight in it.

“What are we buying?” she asked.

“A place with good light and quiet neighbors,” I said. “Near a park. I’m opening a chess school for kids.”

“Of course you are,” she said, like we’d already known each other for years. “Congratulations.”

We toured houses that week—bungalows with cheerful porches, townhouses with staircases that felt like promises. I took notes in a tidy notebook the way I used to when a CFO would talk through risk on a quarterly call. “Roof: 2017,” I wrote. “Windows: double-paned. Light: 10–2 pm excellent. Noise: minimal—just the school bus and the library chime.”

Lesha walked every inch of each place and stood in each kitchen longer than anywhere else. He kept his hand on the countertops the way a pilot keeps his hand on the throttle—lightly, as if more information might climb the nerves if you leave them close to the thing long enough. “I can cook here,” he’d say when he liked a place. When he loved one he didn’t talk at all.

We chose the townhouse because of the way the afternoon slides across the living room, because of a sound the block makes at five-thirty—quiet but not empty—and because a corner of the room by the front window felt made for a chess table even before the board stood on it. The street has a maple that leans like it’s listening to the house and a mail carrier who says good morning like a blessing. On our second day, I saw a girl on a scooter with a backpack half her size. I knew then that my students would come.

They did.

Quiet Move opened on a Wednesday, because I like how a week looks from its middle. I printed a small sign—clean font, a knight in the corner—and taped it to the inside of the glass. The HOA newsletter wrote a little paragraph about a “new enrichment opportunity for neighborhood youth” and placed it between a note about trash pickup and a reminder not to leave bikes on the sidewalk. Two kids came in on Thursday afternoon, three on Friday, six on Saturday. By the next week I had twelve.

I teach them the way my father taught me—pieces as people, each with a job and a dignity, each with a range that is theirs alone. I tell them every square matters. We talk about structure, about the way you can choose safety that becomes a trap or risk that becomes a bridge. We talk about respect. You touch a piece, you move it. You make a mistake, you own it. You win, you shake hands. You lose, you shake hands. The board remembers both.

I tell them my father’s name and the way he smelled of pine and tea. I tell them that sometimes your opponent is not the person across from you but the voice in your head that tells you you are small. They get quiet then, and I know it lands.

Lesha built a small kitchen in the back room for parents who wait—coffee, tea, a jar of cookies that is never empty. He put cork coasters by the cups that say Made in USA and laughs every time someone comments on them. He tells the story of the gardener who kept the board in his shed, and I watch faces soften the way they do when people hear that something fragile didn’t get broken after all.

The first time Tamara called after we left, I didn’t answer. I wasn’t ready to hear her voice travel across the distance as if the distance didn’t exist. The second time, I picked up.

“Anechka,” she said, and I could hear the smile she thought would settle everything. “Our brilliant Anechka. We should talk.”

“We should,” I said. “Not today.”

Silence. She isn’t used to being told no with that much ease. She tried again two days later. She tried after that. The words shifted, softened, became “misunderstanding” and then “concern” and then “mother’s worry.” I listened. I didn’t step back into the room she kept trying to set. The door had closed. I knew where the handle was, but the room on the other side had not been good for me.

Karina found me outside the grocery store and smiled the way people do when they’ve rehearsed it in the car. “I have a business idea,” she said. “Start-up vibes.”

“I wish you success,” I said, and meant it. I also meant it when I told her I don’t invest in losing games. It’s rude in chess to move a piece you know is doomed. It’s cruel in business to let someone point a dream at a cliff. She didn’t like my answer. She liked the truth less.

My father-in-law never called. He sent one email with a subject line that was just my name. The body had three sentences: “Heard you bought a place. Congratulations. If you want pointers on tax treatment of winnings, I’ll send my guy.” I replied with a thank you and the name of my own CPA, a woman with a calm voice and a pen that makes the cleanest blue lines I’ve ever seen. I don’t think he liked that. I like it very much.

Justice is not thunder in my life. It’s not a courtroom door swinging open or a headline that says a wrong has been righted. Justice here looks like a canceled code to the elevator I no longer have to step into, like keys on my own ring that don’t feel borrowed, like a husband who now listens without trying to translate me into a language that suits him better. It looks like Saturday mornings crowded with small hands and chess sets, like parents saying, “Thank you,” as if the words themselves are a gift.

Still, there are places where thunder is correct.

One of my Saturday students, a wiry boy named Clayton who tap-dances when he’s thinking, had his board knocked over at a school event by a bigger kid who said chess was “for nerds.” His mother told me in the doorway with that practiced humor that keeps the sting from showing. “Kids,” she said, but her voice betrayed her. “You know.”

“Bring him,” I said. “We’ll talk.”

We did more than talk. The next week I emailed the principal of the school and asked for a room on a Friday evening. Lesha designed a flyer that said Community Chess Night in a font you could see from across a gym. We tempered the light, put out juice boxes and pretzels, and lined up eight boards like eight little ships ready to sail. I called Hector and asked if his grandkids liked to learn. He said, “They love it,” with a pride that could light a block.

The room filled. People came who didn’t think they would like chess because their uncles had made it a kind of math test at Thanksgiving. People came because their kids dragged them. People came because communities do, in fact, want to be better than the worst thing someone said in a hallway.

We started with the basics. How the pieces move. What it means to develop. Why you don’t take with the queen too early unless you want disaster disguised as glory. Then I told them about the championship, not because I needed the applause but because kids need proof that quiet can win. The parents clapped, the kids clapped harder, and Clayton tap-danced a rhythm that sounded like rain on a tin roof.

A warm woman from the PTA with a binder and a sense of mission asked if I would run a district-wide tournament in the spring. I said yes before she finished the question. Lesha squeezed my shoulder. He knows I say yes to work that puts kids in rooms where they treat each other like minds first.

We called the tournament The Quiet Open. Civic Center gym, Saturday in May, doors at eight, pairings on the wall with blue tape that didn’t peel the paint. The city let us borrow folding chairs and podiums. The librarian whose handshake is cool and confident agreed to emcee. An American grandmaster—the one whose avatar I’d watched fall the night I won—sent a note that said, “I’d love to swing by if the schedule allows.” He wore a baseball cap and a smile that asked permission to be a human being and not an emblem. We gave it.

I set my father’s board on a separate table with a small placard that said In Memory of Sergei Petrovich, Who Taught Us To Play. People came to look at it with that hush museums get when people don’t know what to do with their hands. I didn’t mind. I want that board to collect as many eyes as it collected afternoons with my father. The pieces are touched gently here, with respect. A friend of ours from City Hall made a short speech about the way games teach civics: not in theory, but in turns.

The night before the tournament, Tamara called again. “We want to come,” she said. She didn’t say “we’re coming.” She said “want.” I noticed.

“Then come,” I said. “If you can be kind.”

“I can,” she said, and there was a thickness to the words. “I can try.”

They arrived the next morning in clothing that tried to mean less than it did: soft gray, understated, not a label in sight. Karina had her hair pulled back with a plain clip. My father-in-law wore a navy jacket and a look that didn’t reach for a podium.

If the old them had walked into that gym, I would have felt my body go tight the way it used to every time I heard the word “status.” The people who walked in were different. Or maybe I was. They shook hands with the librarian. They brought a small bouquet from the farmers’ market and a box of cookies from a bakery that spells “chocolate chip” as if you’ve never seen the words before. They looked at the board. They almost bowed.

Tamara kissed my cheek. “For what it’s worth,” she said, and her eyes had water in them that did not fall, “I didn’t sleep the night we lost the board. I told myself I had meant well. It was easier that way. But the truth is this: I meant control. I am sorry.”

People talk a lot about apologies. Too late, too little, too rehearsed, too convenient. That one landed. Not because I needed it to look like a movie; because it looked like a woman standing in a gym full of kids who were teaching her how to stand better.

“Thank you,” I said. I did not say, And don’t do it again. I did not need to.

Karina stood awkwardly, then did something I didn’t expect. She took out a small envelope and handed it to me with both hands. Inside was a simple card and a folded receipt. “I found the sales slip from the day we bought those dresses,” she said. “I returned them. I told the store I had been rude to you, and the clerk gave me a look I deserved. The refund is on this card. Buy pieces for the school instead. Please.”

The card was not for me. It was for the kids. I still think that matters.

The tournament was noisy the way a hive is noisy—purposeful, humming, sweet. You could feel the math of a hundred small decisions floating in the air. I moved from board to board and watched pairs of eyes tilt and decide. I saw a boy resign gracefully on move twenty-two and get a hug from a grandmother whose hands must have mended a thousand hems. I saw Clayton point to the etiquette page on the wall when another kid hovered too close and say, “We keep space, okay?” in a tone that sounded like a future where people remember the rules that keep rooms kind.

At noon I played a simul—twelve boards, one move at each, a loop that turns your brain into a carousel where every horse has a different exercise. The grandmaster stood near my father’s board and sipped coffee from a paper cup like a man on a porch watching his neighbor paint a fence. “Nice move,” he murmured at one board, then at another said, “Careful, she’s building a net,” and at a third he only smiled.

I won ten, drew two. The draws were with a girl in a yellow hoodie who blinks twice before each move and a boy who mispronounces “fianchetto” but knows exactly what it feels like. I shook twelve hands and meant each one. People clapped in that generous, goofy way communities do when they’ve decided you are theirs.

Tamara cried openly when a small boy read a thank-you card into a microphone. Karina did the thing I didn’t think she could do—she sat on the floor with a group of kids and learned how the knight moves. “It’s like an L,” a girl with pigtails told her. “It’s like jumping on a couch,” Karina said. The kids laughed. She did, too. My father-in-law found Hector by the snack table, and the two of them talked about lawn care with the intensity of a summit while children ran between them with pretzel sticks like tiny flags.

When the trophies were presented, the grandmaster asked me to step up with him, and to my surprise he handed me an envelope. “A small grant,” he said into the mic. “From a group of friends who think this is what the game is for.” The amount inside was not small. It was enough to sponsor two kids for three years and to buy boards for the after-school programs the PTA woman was already planning.

I looked at Lesha. He shook his head a little at first because he still has that instinct to deflect, to say, “Oh no, we can’t,” but then I saw him swallow the reflex and smile. He is learning the new moves, too.

In late summer we held our first Quiet Move Summer Institute, which is a grand name for three weeks of morning sessions, a gentle afternoon tournament, and one day when we ate popsicles on the porch and played blitz on the picnic table while the sprinklers ticked. A local charity asked if we’d host a fundraiser. We did. The mayor came—small stature, giant laugh—and told a story about losing his first tournament at the community center to an elderly woman who played the Caro-Kann like a lullaby and a trap. He shook hands with everyone twice.

My favorite moment came in the early evening of our last day. The kids had gone home, the boards were stacked, and the house had that post-party hush that is equal parts relief and ache. I stood by the birch table and touched the bishop to settle it. Lesha leaned in the doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder.

“You ready?” he asked.

“For what?”

“For them.”

They came at six. Tamara with a tin of almond cookies she swears are better than any bakery’s. Karina with grocery bags because she had volunteered to cook the main dish and Lesha told her he would share the kitchen if she promised to do it his way. My father-in-law with a bottle of sparkling apple cider that caused Lesha to clap him on the back like a brother. Hector arrived with his wife and two grandchildren because he was part of the story and every table is better with him at it.

Tamara stepped straight to the board the way people step toward fires: hoping for warmth, careful of the edge. She touched the corner like you touch a hand you used to hold. “I didn’t understand,” she said, almost to herself, and then she looked at me. “I want to.”

“You can,” I said. “One move at a time.”

Karina helped Lesha in the kitchen, and their voices overlapped in ways that made me think this new version of our family might, in fact, be possible. She is not nice to be nice. She is nice because she has learned that kindness is a skill, not a décor choice. My father-in-law asked me about the kids like he meant the answers. He told me he had misjudged how a person could hold money and dignity at the same time. It is strange to hear a man like him admit that. It felt like a door being opened on a hot day.

We ate at the long table by the window. We told stories that didn’t circle back to labels. We passed bread like news. When dessert came, Hector’s granddaughter asked if I would show her “the trick where the knight jumps over heads.” I did. She laughed so hard she shook.

After dinner, Tamara asked if she could say something. People get tense when someone says that. They brace for speeches that turn into blame. This was not that.

“I grew up in a world,” she said, hands folded loosely, “where safety meant sameness. I think I mistook your difference for danger because I was afraid that if I let go of my idea of a proper life, mine would disappear. I tried to control what I could control, and I hurt you. I am sorry. I will prove it with how I move, not just what I say.”

There are people who hear those words and scoff. I don’t. I have seen what it looks like when a person decides to do the work of being better. It is not quick. It is not pretty. But you can watch it happening the way you watch a rook march down a file—one square, then another, then another, nothing fancy, just certainty.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll see.”

Karina rolled her eyes in a way that used to mean disrespect and now means she is comfortable enough to tease me. “She’ll make us prove it with receipts,” she said, and Lesha laughed hard enough to lean against the counter. He loves a good receipt.

Justice has a second face I didn’t expect: generosity. It is not letting people do whatever they want because you’re tired. It is not a performance. It looks like making room at the table you own because you want the people you love to learn how to sit well. It looks like a chessboard in the window of a townhouse on a street where kids ride scooters, and it looks like the woman who tried to throw it away being the one who dusts it before dinner.

That fall, a local paper did a story about Quiet Move under the headline She Won Big, Then Gave It Away Square By Square. It made me laugh because it wasn’t true; I still have my winnings and have invested them with the kind of wisdom that keeps your feet under you. But it was true where it mattered. Money didn’t change who I am. It made it harder for other people to mistake me for who I’m not.

Lesha and I used a portion to start a small foundation in my father’s name. We fund club sets for schools that ask. We send a teacher toolkit that explains how to keep rooms kind and how to resolve disputes that happen on boards with clocks that always seem to run out faster when you’re the one moving. We give a modest scholarship each spring to a kid who plays the game with grace when someone else gets loud.

Karina asked if she could help with the foundation. I told her yes, and then I gave her work that wasn’t glamorous—emails, spreadsheets, calls to vendors about shipping delays. She did it. She did it well. She sent me screenshots like a kid shows a parent a cleaned room—proud, nervous, waiting to be told it’s good enough. It was.

My father-in-law teaches a finance session once a quarter for parents who want to understand 529s and 401(k)s and the difference between a stock and a bond without being made to feel foolish. He listens when people ask questions he thinks are simple. He does not roll his eyes. That is, I think, his biggest victory so far.

Tamara helps Hector’s wife with the community garden on Sundays. She wears gloves that are too pretty for dirt and then doesn’t care when they get stained. The first time I saw her coax a tomato plant up a stake with the patience of a person who understands that growth resists hurry, I felt that complicated swell in my chest again—water finding its level.

One evening near Christmas, after the last student had been picked up and Lesha had set dough to rise for tomorrow’s rolls, I stood with my hands on the back of a chair and listened to our house breathe. The radio played a crooner from a century that isn’t coming back. Outside, someone on the block adjusted a string of lights. The flag magnet on the fridge held a shopping list and an invitation to a neighborhood cookie swap with a star in the corner next to our names.

Lesha came up behind me and rested his chin on my shoulder.

“We built something,” he said.

“We are building,” I corrected, and he kissed my temple because he knew that was the right answer.

The doorbell rang. It was already dark enough that the porch light turned our front step into a small stage. A man in a charcoal suit stood there with a leather portfolio under his arm. Not a messenger of doom, not a caricature of wealth—just a professional with papers that mark a life’s shape.

“Mrs. Petrov?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He handed me an envelope. “From the City,” he said. “A formal resolution.”

Inside was a document with a ribbon that served no purpose beyond ceremony and a seal pressed into the paper like a thumbprint from the town itself. It commended Quiet Move for “advancing community, civility, and critical thinking” and declared the second Saturday in May—our tournament day—Quiet Move Day. It also, in a second paragraph that made Lesha laugh out loud, thanked Hector by name “for his role in preserving an object of community value.” Hector’s grandchildren will bring that to school for show-and-tell until the paper curls at the edges.

We invited the man in for coffee because that is what you do when you have more in your house than things. He declined politely—another house, another envelope, a dozen other front steps. When we closed the door, Lesha leaned his head against it for a second like you do when you are very grateful and very tired.

“Let’s call your parents,” he said.

We did. They came the next night, and we laughed at how fast news travels when it carries pride. Tamara brought a frame she said would honor the resolution properly. It is simple and elegant, the kind of thing she gets right when she’s not trying to get everything else right for you. We hung the resolution on the wall by the board. It looks ridiculous and perfect. It looks like a city saying, We see what you did with your square of the world.

Later, when the house had returned to its evening shape and we were alone with the board, Lesha reached into his pocket and took out a tiny wrapped box. He set it on the birch table the way men set rings down. I looked at him.

“Not jewelry,” he said. “Something else.”

Inside was a small, smooth, weighty object that glinted in the lamp light. A silver knight. Not fancy—tasteful, almost shy. The base had a single line engraved: For the move you made when it mattered.

“Do you remember the cufflinks?” I asked, smiling.

“I do,” he said. “The first anniversary. I wasn’t fit for nice things yet.”

“Now?”

“Now I am,” he said. “Because I know what they’re for.”

We placed the knight on a shelf above the board, not to play with—he is an emblem, not a piece—but to watch us play. We do not need reminders, but when the light finds him in the late afternoon, we nod back.

On the first Quiet Move Day, the mayor gave another speech, shorter this time, warmer. The librarian read something from a children’s book about choosing who you are. The grandmaster sent a video greeting from an airport lounge, hair wild, smile intact. Kids lined up. Parents made that beautiful mess that happens when people put chairs in rows together. Hector wore a tie.

Before the first round, I set my father’s board in its place and felt what I always feel: gratitude with a spine. I touched the queen, then the king, then the rook. My father’s hands were there in the lacquer and the heat of the wood where the sun had rested for a while. I breathed in.

Tamara stood beside me, not too close. “May I?” she asked, and I nodded. She lifted a pawn and placed it in front of its file like a person laying a flower at a grave, not to mourn but to honor. Her eyes were steady. “I think,” she said, “I am learning the opening.”

“There are many,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I will learn the endgames, too.”

“Most people don’t,” I said.

“I will,” she said, and then she stepped back so a child could see.

When the last game ended and the gym had that whistle of air it gets as people leave, I stood on the stage our city calls a stage and held the microphone the way you hold something you want to hand to someone else quickly.

“Thank you for playing,” I said. “Thank you for being kind. Thank you for making this town feel like the kind of place where my father would have liked to sit and watch.”

People clapped. The sound rolled in a way that made the flag in the corner tremble very slightly in its stand.

A week later, the gardener’s wife brought me a jar of preserves and a hand-written note from Hector’s grandson. It said, in the careful print of a boy determined to get it right, “Thank you for teaching me that being quiet is not the same as being small.”

That’s it, I thought. That is the whole thing. That is the sentence I want on a wall where people wait to be seen.

On a Sunday that looked like postcards—blue sky, small clouds stitched at the edges—we invited friends and neighbors for a gathering on the lawn. Lesha made enough food for a festival. Kids played blitz against dads who forgot about time. Tamara carried iced tea with the ease of a woman who had worked to carry other things better. Karina and the PTA woman hovered over a spreadsheet about after-school clubs in a way that made me feel safe about the future of everything, because if those two are aligned, nothing will be late.

At dusk, when the streetlights blinked and the maple made its evening sound, Lesha tapped a spoon against a glass.

“One thing,” he said, smiling when the group shushed. “A toast to the person who taught me how to stand next to a person who is winning without needing to shrink them to fit my old idea of a life. To my wife.”

It wasn’t a fancy sentence. It was perfect. The kind of words that make a room look at the person they already love and love them better.

Later, after we had stacked the chairs and rinsed the plates and the house smelled of toothpaste and citrus cleaner, I stood at the board one more time. The game in front of me was from a book I keep nearby, because there is comfort in great moves made by strangers long ago. I reached out, moved the piece, and felt the logic click into place. Not triumph. Not conquest. Alignment.

Lesha wrapped his arms around me from behind. “Your move?” he asked.

“Always,” I said.

We turned off the light. The pieces went to sleep in their squares. The house breathed. The flag magnet on the fridge held tomorrow’s list. Justice did what it does best when you stop chasing it like a headline and start building it like a home: it stayed.

And in the morning, when the light came back, it warmed the birch and brightened the white squares and made the black ones shine like new piano keys. I set the pawns, then the knights, then the bishops, and ran my finger down the file where a rook would soon walk. Outside, the neighborhood carried on—dogs, joggers, the hum of an early bus—and inside, a lesson plan waited on the table: a small diagram, a simple trap, a note to remind me to laugh when the trick works and to show the other kid how to avoid it next time.

Because that’s the whole point, isn’t it? To win well, to lose well, and to keep playing with people who are learning how to be people at the same time you are.

I placed the queen. I nodded to the knight on the shelf. I poured coffee. I heard my first student’s shoes on the path, light as a heartbeat.

“Good morning, Coach,” she called.

“Good morning,” I said, and opened the door to our life.