A week later, Ben—quiet, fond of crossword clues—knocked and offered soup. He wasn’t theatrical. He sat two meters away and laughed at phrases he found in the paper. They traded facts about the day with none of the dramatic arcs Mara had expected. And yet when she left to make tea, Ben reached across the couch and smoothed a wrinkle on her sleeve. It was an unplanned contact, not a measurement. It changed the metric more than any argument could.