Kaori Saejima -2021- -

The apartment was silent save for the arrhythmic drip from a leak in the corner, where a red plastic basin collected rainwater. On the low table in front of her, beside the empty chessboard, lay a single white envelope. It had arrived that morning, slipped under the door by the landlady, who never looked Kaori in the eye.

For three years.

Someone had been listening to the game inside her head. Kaori Saejima -2021-

The rain had not stopped. It would not stop for three more days. The old prefectural library had been condemned in 2019—mold, structural decay, a stairwell that led nowhere. She knew because she had walked past it once, two years ago, on the anniversary of her mother's death. The gates were chained. The windows were boarded. A sign in faded red paint read: DANGER. KEEP OUT. The apartment was silent save for the arrhythmic

The Caretaker. She had invented that name. She had never spoken it aloud. Not to her therapists, not to the one ex-boyfriend who stayed long enough to learn her tics, not to the mirror on the nights she wept without sound. For three years

"You're not real," Kaori said. Her voice was a rasp she barely recognized. "I made you up."

The gold general from 2014. Her abandoned pawn. It sat in the center of the board's edge, placed precisely on the 8th square of the first rank, like a marker on a grave.