“I forgive you, Harrison,” I whispered into the wind.

“Rest now.

The game is over.”

I chose those last words on purpose, and I want to explain them, because they were not only a goodbye to a chess partner.

The game is over meant something specific to me, sitting there in the dusk.

For forty-five years, without fully knowing it, I had been playing a game against a ghost, the ghost of the father who died in an industrial accident, the story my grandmother gave me to explain the hole in my life.

I had built my whole self around that absence, around being the girl whose father died, the orphan of the state, the woman alone.