The household's games have always had a second player. Howl sat on the jigsaws. Paradox went another way: she studied.
The book is a collection of chess problems — over a thousand of them, white to move and win. It lived on the couch for a season, and whenever it was open, she arrived, settled against the spine, and lowered her head onto the diagrams like a scholar who has been at it since dawn and needs a moment.
Her system
Her method was absorption in the most literal sense. Cheek on the page, one eye toward the diagrams, breathing slowly on fifteen hundred carefully numbered positions. Whether anything transferred is not for us to say. What we can report is that nobody who shared a house with her ever doubted she was several moves ahead.
The book still falls open to the pages she used. There is fur in the binding. It is not going anywhere.