CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
NIKOLAI DRAGUNOV I didn't sleep. This wasn't unusual. Sleep had been a negotiation since I was nineteen years old, since the night I'd stood in a hospital corridor and been told my father was dead and felt the floor of everything I'd understood about the world shift permanently beneath me. In the years since, I'd learned to use the hours between two and five AM productively — reading, working, playing through chess problems that required enough concentration to crowd out everything else. Tonight the chess wasn't working at all. I sat at the board in my study, a glass of whiskey untouched at my elbow, and looked at the position I'd set up forty minutes ago without having made a single move. The pieces stood in their formation like they were waiting for me to remember what I was doing.
- Writer
