Kiara had always secretly liked believing that life, at least the chaotic, awkward parts of it, came with a predictable script. There would be small disasters — spilled coffee, missed trains, the odd heartbreak that patched itself with time and loud playlists — but these were the sorts of things you could handle with a wry smile and a reheated dinner. She had been a veteran of tiny catastrophes: airplane seat wars fought with the weary politeness of strangers, the slow-motion regret of terrible decisions, the reheated ghost of an ex-crush who never knew he’d left dents in her heart. None of that, not in a million heady, audacious guesses, had prepared her for a betrayal plotted not by fate but by the universe’s wicked sense of irony.