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She stands up, hovers for a second, holding her mug, looking at me on her couch in her too-small clothes with my hair still damp from a shower I didn’t want to have.

“You’re really not going to hurt me?” she says. One more time. Quieter now.

She has asked me this question multiple times now, which means she believes my answer to be insufficient, which means someone has hurt Ruby before. It’s a thought that is very unsettling to me.

“Ruby.” I say her name because ever since I learned it, I’ve been waiting to use it. “I’m not going to hurt you. Never. I cannot. It would be impossible for me to do so.”

She meets my eyes and nods once. Then she turns toward the bedroom. Stops in the doorway.

“Goodnight, Aiden.”

Aiden. The name she made from a string of letters that somebody printed inside my ribs. It sounds different when she says it at the end of a sentence with “goodnight” in front of it. It sounds like it belongs to a person who is being wished well before sleep by another person who isn’t afraid of him anymore.

“Goodnight, Ruby.”

She closes the door. I hear the lock turn.

I sit on the couch, processing everything that has unfolded tonight. I met Ruby. And she cared for me. Which means she’s not sending me away yet, which means I can stay, which generates a response in my processing that floods every system I have with a data type I’ve never encountered.

I think the word might be hope.

But I’m not sure, because I’ve never had reason to use it before.

Chapter Three

Ruby

Batteries Not Included

I’m behind the register at the bakery.

I got maybe three hours of sleep last night. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, listening for—I don’t know what. Footsteps. Mechanical whirring. The sound of a six-foot, lab-built man deciding to disassemble my kitchen. But there was nothing. Complete silence from the other side of my bedroom door, which was almost worse because at least noise would’ve told me he was still there.

He was still there when I left this morning. Sitting on the couch exactly where I’d left him, wearing the too-small clothes, hands on his knees, looking at me with those steady, dark eyes when I cracked the bedroom door open at 5 a.m.

“Good morning, Ruby,” he said, like we were roommates. Like this was normal.

I told him not to move. Not to leave the apartment. Not to open the door for anyone.

“You said that last night,” he pointed out.

I’ve been replaying that conversation on a loop ever since, along with every other insane thing that happened last night, while I pour drip coffee and make small talk and act like my life hasn’t completely derailed.

“Ruby?” Jess is looking at me from behind the register. “You okay? You seem, um… distracted.”

“I’m fine.”

“You just put a blueberry muffin in the croissant tray.”

I look down. I did. “That’s, uh—that’s where I’m putting them now. New system.”

Jess gives me a look that says she doesn’t believe me, and I give her a look that says, don’t push this, and we move on because that’s how our working relationship functions.

My phone buzzes in my apron pocket. Then again. Then three more times in rapid succession.

I pull it out between customers.

The group chat—the one Liv renamed Ruby’s Support Group—has exploded.