“Your belt and your cookies.” Jasper handed her a prettily packaged little bag of Zoise cookies. “Share only with those you trust.”

And he winked at her, a conspiratorial twist to the way he was smiling.

“Take a place on the mat. You’ve earned it.” Jasper gestured to Elise, who gave Daisy a fresh brew with a kiss on the forehead. After just one sip, Daisy felt the warmth of confidence flow through her body. Today she would master the Nodding Dog.

She would honor her position as a Cyan Sister.

Over uneaten paninis (Vectra had declared hers inedible after the first bite, and Esther talked too much to manage more than three mouthfuls), Esther learned that the harder one tried to impress Vectra Featherstone, the less she liked you.

The conversation had taken a swerve toward disastrous when she’d told Vectra that her piece they were critiquing in Creative Writing that week was “an inspired exercise in manipulating clichés into tortured falsehoods.” Vectra had rolled her eyes and uncrossed her legs as if about to leave.

“Actually, I wrote the whole thing using predictive text, so, like, you’re really just complimenting an algorithm.”

Panicked, Esther’s response was, “Well, that algorithm writes better prose than me!” Followed by a bit of borderline hysterical laughter and a not-entirely untrue, “Everything I write ends up like catharsis through public humiliation.”

For the first time since they’d sat down, Vectra’s interest shifted from their surroundings to Esther as she leaned forward and said, “Cathartic how?”

And so began the debasement. Esther’s attempt at long-distance love (“So you were the chump?!”) to the ill-considered one-nighter (“What? Him with the baseball caps? How drunk were you, Grooty?”). Somehow it all came pouring out, Vectra’s watchful silence and dry interventions the perfect receptacle for all of Esther’s romantic woes. All the things she’d held back from anyone else, for fear they were already bored of hearing about it, but Vectra was new, and the more Esther talked down her terrible choices, the more Vectra warmed to her company.

Well, thawed, might have been more accurate, as if her affection had been taken out of the freezer to defrost in the fridge.

Eventually, a congealed panini and two cups of coffee later, Vectra actually laughed, revealing rows of such perfect little white teeth that it seemed a shame she so rarely showed them off in a smile.

Esther couldn’t have felt a greater sense of achievement if she’d rewritten The Canterbury Tales in dactylic hexameter.