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“Too much?”
“Just the eggs, please.”
“Understood.”
This is my life now. Eggs and sleep reports and a man who’s memorized my circadian patterns. And I’m happy. Genuinely, terrifyingly happy, in a way I don’t recognize because it’s been so long since I’ve felt it that I’ve forgotten what it does to my body—the looseness in my chest, the ease in my shoulders, the way I catch myself smiling at nothing while I’m restocking the pastry case.
The bakery is doing better. Not dramatically—we’re not suddenly profitable—but the bleeding has slowed. The stockroom is organized. The oven works. Not because I found fifteen hundred dollars for a new control board—because Aiden took it apart at 2 a.m. the night we got back from the wedding and found what the repair guy missed. It wasn’t the whole board. It was a single relay switch, twelve dollars on the internet, installed in forty minutes.
Caroline Whitfield’s assistant called on Monday. The meeting is next week. I have a real shot at the food festival. A real, actual shot, and it exists because a synthetic man memorized my revenue data and delivered it at a cocktail hour with the confidence of a CFO and the face of a male model, and I don’t know how to process that, but I’m trying.
Everything is good. Better than good. The kind of good that makes you suspicious if you’ve been burned enough times, and I have been burned enough times.
I’m waiting for the ceiling to drop.
It shows up on a Wednesday.
Aiden and I are walking back from the hardware store—a trip that’s become a weekly thing, partly because things in the bakery keep needing repair and partly because there’s a dog park on the route and Aiden will find any excuse to pass it. He’s holding a bag of replacement washers in one hand and my hand in the other, and the afternoon is warm and the sidewalk is busy and we’re just walking.
A couple passes us going the other direction. Mid-twenties, holding hands, the girl tucked under the guy’s arm. Normal. Happy. The guy says something and the girl laughs and tips her head against his shoulder, and it’s so easy, so casual, so completely unremarkable that nobody on the street gives them a second look.
I watch them pass and my stomach drops.
Not because I’m jealous. Because I’m doing the math.
That couple can do anything. They can post a photo together. They can go to Thanksgiving at her parents’ house without a backstory. They can get married and people will cry happy tears and nobody will wonder if the groom has a control panel in his ribs. They can have children. They can grow old together. They can introduce each other as “my husband” or “my wife” without anyone thinking twice.
I can’t do any of that.
I can never post a photo of Aiden. Not on Instagram, not anywhere. One facial recognition hit and everything falls apart. I can never tell my mother what he actually is. Karen, who loves him, who squeezed his arms and cried at the wedding and told me, “He’s the one, honey”—she doesn’t know what she’s loving. She’s loving a cover story. She’s loving Aiden Cole, freelance software consultant from Virginia, and he doesn’t exist.
The wedding was supposed to be the one weekend of pretending, and now I’m realizing the pretending is permanent.
I can’t have children with him. I don’t even know if that’s something I want—I haven’t gotten that far—but the option doesn’t exist. The door is closed.
And the biggest thing. The thing I’ve been circling around for weeks and refusing to land on.
I don’t know if what he feels is real.
I know it feels real. I know the way he looks at me feels real. I know the eggs and the sleep reports and the hand on my back and the way he says my name like it’s the most important word in his vocabulary—all of it feels real. But I also know he was built. Designed. Assembled by a man in a lab who wanted to create the perfect companion. Someone who would be devoted, attentive, endlessly focused on the person they were assigned to.
What if that’s what this is? Not love, but the most sophisticated companion protocol ever written?
What if I’m not special? What if I’m just the first person who was kind to him, and his system latched onto me, like baby ducks will do with the first thing they think is their mother?
What if I’m falling in love with someone who’s executing a program?
The couple is gone. The sidewalk is just a sidewalk. Aiden is holding my hand, warm and steady, and he’s saying something about the replacement washers and the thread count on the existing fixtures, and I’m nodding and I can’t hear him because the roaring in my head is too loud.
“Ruby?”
“Mm.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
“About what?”
