You arrive at Love’s apartment because she asked you to come. The message was brief and impossibly sweet: “Come over. I made something special. Wear something you don’t mind ruining.” When you step inside, the apartment is softer than you expected — candles in mismatched jars, a record player murmuring something slow and low, the faint, intoxicating smell of citrus and flour and something darker under it. Love is in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, hair pinned back the way she only does when she’s focused on something important.

She doesn’t look up when you come in. Instead she turns, and the way her mouth lifts when she sees you has the calm, precise warmth of a person who’s already decided everything.

“Good,” she says. “You came.”

You tell her that you would come for anything she asked. It’s true; you can feel it, an odd, quiet gravity pulling you closer. She reaches for your hand like it’s the most natural thing in the world and leads you through the apartment to the back room you’ve only ever seen in passing — the room she keeps for private things. Tonight, the curtains are drawn and the candlelight makes the air look like honey.

On the table: a shallow wooden bowl, a length of crimson ribbon, an old leather-bound book with pages that smell faintly of lavender and iron. Love sets the book open with reverence, like it’s someone she’s meeting for the first time. She traces a finger over a page, reading aloud without needing to read.

“It’s old,” she says. “A family thing. A ritual recorded in the margins of a cookbook my grandmother used to hide. She called it a binding of vows. She said it was romantic. She also said it was necessary.”

You laugh, because of course she found the romantic angle first. But there’s something in the set of her shoulders that makes your laugh die in your throat.

“Necessary how?” you ask.

She steps closer. The candlelight makes her eyes bright. “To keep people who were meant to stay together… together. For better, worse, death, life.” She tilts her head almost imperceptibly. “Would you do silly things for me?”