Since the astrologers have predicted that Leela's husband would die shortly after their wedding, Leela always knew that she would not be able to enjoy married life, and so finds joy only in her first love, which is mathematics itself. However, she becomes conflicted when she meets a Chinese man who is visiting her village. She begins to have feelings for him when she first sees him, but is completely won over by what he says when they first meet:

(As you may have noticed, this short story is formatted as if it were a poem, but it reads like prose.)

Gender equity in mathematics remains a theme throughout the story, including near the end when she wonders if future generations will recognize her mathematical contributions or if they will be attributed to her father. Furthermore, I learned a bit of mathematical history from it. For instance, I did not know that Hemachandra is credited with studying the sequence "0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8..." decades before Fibonacci.

I suppose one way to think about this story is that it is a sort of love triangle, with Leela, Xiang, and mathematics as the vertices. (At one point, Leela is also engaged to marry someone else. That subplot is the source of the story's title but is not nearly as important, especially to those focused on the mathematical aspects, so I still consider it a triangle and not a quadrilateral.)

The story's bittersweet ending is satisfying, and I encourage you to read it yourself. However, this story may not be very easy to find. As far as I know, it has only appeared in the anthology "All the Love Under the Vast Skies" (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2025).