Ted Cruz and Ben Carson, two adult males who are running for president of the United States of America, haven’t been getting along very well lately. Carson has, of late, been accusing Cruz of “dirty tricks” on the campaign trail, including, but not limited to, telling supporters that Carson had dropped out of the race when he hadn’t. Cruz, for his part, has blamed the “misunderstanding” on CNN, who reported that Carson had returned to Florida during the Iowa caucus to pick up some fresh clothes, an act that Cruz claims led him to believe Carson was, in fact, returning to the Sunshine State to announce his removal from the race rather than to briefly weep into his pile of clean laundry. Carson replied by suggesting that Cruz fire his campaign staffers. Cruz has not done this.

Likely recognizing that this ongoing and patently insane argument would likely alienate voters on both sides, Cruz and Carson did what grown men do when faced with conflict: they held a secret meeting inside of a closet.

The Daily Beast reports that on Thursday night in South Carolina, ahead of the Conservative Review convention, Cruz and Carson “huddled” inside a storage closet so that they might work out their issues. The arch nemeses selected the storage closet because it was “neutral ground,” as are all storage closets, where conventional laws do not apply. The meeting lasted for nearly 25 minutes, with a Secret Service detail standing outside, at one point informing a Republican operative, “Yeah, they’re in that closet.”

The meeting did “not go well,” Carson communication strategist Jason Osborne told The Daily Beast.

Not only did the closet convention end with Carson concluding that the two would have to “agree to disagree”—the familiar death knell of once-happy couples across America—but it bumped into Carson’s speaking time at the convention, meaning that somehow, Cruz managed to completely screw Carson over yet again, this time under the guise of reconciliation. Moreover, Carson agreed to meet with Cruz only for five minutes, and only if their tiny tête–à–tête were to remain off the record. Which it clearly hasn’t.

And why, pray tell, is this Meeting of the Midnight Society now public knowledge? Because Ted Cruz, Carson’s campaign alleges, immediately told the media about the “secret” meeting in an ill-conceived attempt to look like a good guy. “We weren’t going to comment to the press on it, but it seems pretty clear that the other party involved had a different agenda,” Osborne said. “How else could we perceive that to be?”

Later that evening, after Carson spoke at the convention, he ran into Cruz again in the hallway and, in a bizarre twist, “Cruz didn’t even look at Carson,” according to the latter’s campaign. “There was a political play there and it didn’t work for them,” a Republican operative “close to the campaign” told The Daily Beast. “The meeting didn’t go as well as Cruz wanted it to go. Carson had a smile on his face and was looking right at him.”

But Ted Cruz would forever denounce “Plants vs. Zombies” before he admitted to the media that the meeting was anything less than a raging success. When asked how the meeting went, Rick Tyler, a spokesman for Cruz’s campaign, told The Daily Beast, “Yes, they had a good visit.”