Lars stared at her. “How can you be sure?”

Anja tapped the faded cover of the standard. “Because forty years ago, a committee of Dutch, Japanese, and Norwegian engineers argued about every single variable. They built a system that works even when everything else is broken. This paper isn’t just a rulebook. It’s a guarantee.”

At midnight, Lars brought her coffee. “It’s impossible,” he said.

She wrote the number on the last page of her PDF printout, signed it, and handed it to Lars. “The ship is safe to tow. Not an ounce more than eight thousand tonnes.”

Not for the formulas. For the lesson: some truths are heavy, measured in millimeters of draft, and they only hold when you trust the standard.