The crisis came in December. A holiday party in a basement room strung with fairy lights. Someone put on a slow song. Chloe B, in a rare rupture of her own geometry, walked across the scuffed floor and stood in front of Paula.

They were not friends. Not enemies either. They were something more precise: a hypothesis and a proof.

The song ended. The lights flickered. And somewhere in the quiet after, the space between them—the long oak table, the unsolved equation, the storm—closed like a door that had only been waiting for someone brave enough to knock.