Zlata flinched. “You’re not a footnote. You’re the whole story I’m afraid to finish.”

“You chose the moon over me,” Alice said, standing in her empty apartment, the celebratory champagne flat and warm.

Zlata found her on the third-floor landing at 2 a.m.

They had never spoken beyond a nod in the mailroom. Until the leak.

“You didn’t write,” Alice said, voice breaking.

Zlata leaned closer. “No. Romance is when the postman gets lost in a snowstorm and has to stay the night with a stranger. The letter is just the excuse.”

Over the next weeks, the pipe became a running joke. Zlata started bringing Alice “field recordings”—a cassette of rain on a tin roof, a bread recipe from her grandmother in Lviv. In return, Alice lent Zlata her most annotated novels, margins filled with neat handwriting.