That night, long after the lights dimmed and the city softened into its late-night hum, Charlotte found herself standing in Serena's kitchen—more precisely, Serena's **lab** of culinary madness, where tweezers were as common as ladles and liquid nitrogen had its own shelf.
Serena regarded her with a half-lidded stare, sipping something that suspiciously resembled a cocktail and, more suspiciously, *smoked*.
"Love," Serena began, waving her glass with a flourish, "is like a soufflé. Looks impressive, collapses under pressure, and no one knows what the hell went wrong."
Charlotte blinked. "That's... comforting?"
"It wasn't meant to be." Serena tilted her head, already reaching for a siphon like a surgeon going in for the kill. "Now pay attention. We're starting with caviar. But not the fishy kind. We're making basil caviar. Because nothing says 'I'm over my ex' like molecular spheres of smugness."
