Sanjay had taken her to a New Year’s Eve party at his friend Monica Del Mar’s apartment in SoHo. Also in the photography program, Monica was a tall brunette with attention-grabbing piercings. She bragged, a lot. Gemma had always found her irritating but it didn’t matter—she’d be with Sanjay, and wherever they went it felt like they were in their own little universe. They’d been together for over a half a year, and for the first time, Gemma was in a relationship with someone who was her best friend. They had passion without drama—something she previously believed to be impossible.

Monica Del Mar lived in a loft on Greene Street. Her parents got the apartment through an artist’s grant back in the 1970s, a time when artists could actually afford to live in SoHo. The space was cavernous, with big pillars the only dividing marks in the open living space.

The party had a DJ table and serve-yourself bar filled with bottles and bottles of vodka and tequila and trays of Jell-O shots. The latter, ultimately, did her in. Gemma did a few, felt nothing, and then within ten minutes was wasted. That’s when she saw Noam.

Sophomore year, Noam Levy had been the only classmate who shared her nearly obsessive interest in metalwork. Gemma had originally enrolled in NYSD planning to focus on gemology. It was, after all, her namesake. But she soon found herself just as enthralled with metals. There was something endlessly fascinating about the way metal and its alloys behaved, and how she could manipulate that behavior to create something new. And really, what was a stone without the setting? For Gemma, the ring itself—be it gold or platinum, silver or bronze, pure or plated—was as interesting as the gem it framed. The first time she made a necklace chain from scratch, a basic loop-in-loop, she felt like she’d invented the wheel.

Gemma and Noam could talk for hours about the science behind metalwork, how heat from the torch forced the crystals of metal to move apart. He was a master at forging; in his hands, a hammer was as precise an instrument as a scalpel. His hands were equally skilled on her body. They had sex more than once in a studio after hours, their bodies connecting wordlessly and perfectly, like a well-orchestrated solder.

But a few months into their relationship, Noam changed. He stayed up all night creating intricate metal sculptures that he was convinced would be displayed at the Whitney Biennial. He didn’t go to class and they stopped having sex. After not hearing from him for a few days, she went to his apartment and learned from his roommate that Noam’s mother checked him in to a psychiatric hospital. He was bipolar and had stopped taking his meds.