“But what did you think of the game?” Defne insists, and something shifts in Nolan’s eyes, something that might be disappointment, displeasure, disenchantment. The feeling of falling morphs into an uglier, colder one.
“That I’d like to talk about with Mallory alone. Could we have some privacy?”
Defne snorts. “I’m not leaving you alone with her.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Not an answer.”
“She’s my responsibility.”
“She can speak for herself. And you realize we’ve been alone together before, right? On multiple occasions.”
“Not like that,” I hasten to say. “Not alone like that.” Everyone is giving me weird looks, and I don’t know why I’m blushing. Nolan should be the flustered one. That’s his job.
Defne looks at me. “Do you want to talk to Nolan, Mal? Just the two of you?”
No. Yes. No. “Yes.”
“I’ll walk her back to the hotel,” he says. “No need to stick around.”
It takes some shuffling, but we end up alone at the booth— us, Emil’s board, and six different flavors of waffle syrup. I look at the black queen again and wait for him to speak.
Maybe he’ll say that he was wrong about me, that I was never incredible, that he won’t be texting me advice anymore. I’m tempted to justify myself, to apologize, to say that I did my best, and if it’s not enough, well. This might not be the first time that I’m not enough, but it hurts just like all the others.
But he says nothing. His hand travels across the table, and I think he’ll cover the back of mine with his palm. Instead, he twines our fingers together.
A simple, loose touch. Barely a touch, really, but it warms me and grounds me, just enough to look up at him when he says, “Be my second.”
“I . . . what?”
“Be my second.”
“Nolan.” I shake my head, confused. “You have a million seconds, you can’t want me to— ”
“I have five. And I want you.”
My temples throb. “Why?”
“The World Championship is in February. I need to train to defeat Koch. I need you.”
“No.” Koch is not Nolan’s rival, he’s his enemy. I let down both of us by losing. “You don’t need me. You probably don’t even need to prep against Koch. I just lost to him, so I’m the last person you should— ”
“I didn’t see it, either.”
My breath catches.
“The queen. I watched the game, and I was as defenseless as you, Mallory. I . . .” He swallows. “I didn’t see it coming, and then I didn’t see a way out of it. I would have resigned, too.”
I exhale. “How is it possible? You beat him a few months ago.”
“I don’t know. It’s not unheard-of for players to improve years into their training and make big jumps. But this . . . this was a chess-engine- level move. Perfectly designed to disrupt every single action, every single initiative you had going on— and you were playing some fucking great chess. It was something a computer would come up with.” Nolan is distressed. I always thought of him as a hothead, but it’s the first time since we met that he seems genuinely upset about something. Genuinely insecure. “Mallory, if that’s the level he plays at, he’s going to win the World Championship.”
His fingers are still solid, still warm against mine.
“But I didn’t make it, either.”
“I know. But let’s figure it out together.” He leans forward, eyes burning into mine. “Be my second. Help me take that piece of shit down.”
“I . . . if I become your second, won’t I be training with you all the time? I’ll know everything. I’ll be so familiar with your style, you’ll have a hard time taking me by surprise again. If I become your second, I’ll know you.”
There is a beautiful, indecipherable half smile on his lips. “You think I don’t want you to know me?”
“Nolan . . .”
I overturn our hands and look down at his palm. It’s so much larger than mine. The lines and grooves, so deep. So easy to trace with my fingertips, to follow to the source.
I . . . I just don’t know. If it’s a bad idea. If I’m good enough. What this is, this luminous, tethering thing that always seems to pull me closer to Nolan. I don’t know if I can stand to be near him, and I don’t know if I can stand not to be.
I don’t know anything, but there’s something I need to ask.
“Nolan?”
“Hmm?”
“Why did you come to Vegas?”
His fingers tighten around mine. My heart cartwheels.
“Mallory. I came because you did.”
“— if you go rook g5— ”
“— then the bishop— ”
“— but that pawn— ”
“— in g7— ”
“— no, if you want to keep your king safe— ”
“— there’s this thing called castling that— ”
“Um . . . hey, guys?”
Nolan and I turn to Tanu with two aggressive, annoyed, simultaneous, “What?”
She leans in, hands on the doorframe, more skeptical than intimidated. Her hair is up in a messy bun, and an oversized koala onesie hangs from her tall frame. She’s wearing glasses, which means she took out her contacts for the day, which means that . . .
“It’s eleven forty. You’ve been in the same position since two and seem to be doing great, but in case you decide that the heroic feats of a midcentury Ukrainian Grandmaster are not nourishing enough, there’s chicken potpie in the fridge.”
Nolan scowls. “Why didn’t you guys call us for dinner?”
“We did. Three times. Each time, you both just grunted. I recorded it and mixed it with Dragostea for TikTok. Wanna see it?”
“Goodnight, Tanu,” he says. She knows him well enough to scurry away when he stands. “Let’s eat.”
“Wait.” I stop him with a tug of his shirt. “We need to finish this— ”
“You need to eat. Come on.”
When I told Darcy that I’d be spending part of December and January at Nolan’s house in upstate New York （yes, he owns one; yes, I did mutter “Eat the rich” when he informed me）， she gave me a skeptical look and asked, “Is it wise, to go to a cabin in the woods with the Kingkiller?” It’s been weeks, and I’m still not sure what the answer is. I sit on the kitchen counter and observe Nolan as he eats standing up, businesslike, brisk, as though shoveling coal into a furnace, mind clearly still on the game we were analyzing.
It’s awe inspiring, his discipline.
He wakes up earlier, falls asleep later, works harder than anyone I’ve ever seen. The rigors he puts himself through, the single-minded, indefatigable stubbornness as he stares at the engines, dissecting, retracing, combining, projecting. He’s tireless, unshakable. Driven in an indomitable, near-obsessive way. This iron-hard tenacity of his is an oddly attractive quality.
Not that he needs more of those.
He has five other seconds: Tanu and Emil, who are staying at the house, and three other male GMs in their thirties, experts on openings and pawn structure, who come and go a few times a week. Nolan trains with all of us— problems to solve, Koch games to analyze, his own old games to run through software and mine for weaknesses— but his time with the others seems almost like an afterthought. Brief interludes in the sea of his days, which are spent with me.