Chapter 1

Lately, I'd been having the same strange dream.A man stood somewhere in the distance, his outline blurred. The only things I could make out were his clear, gentle eyes and the small mole near the corner of one of them.He never spoke. He just watched me with this quiet sadness.Or sometimes, he would murmur, "I miss you so much."No matter how hard I tried, I could never figure out who he was. Nobody in my memory matched him at all.Then one night, after yet another late shift, I was scrolling through my phone like a zombie when a pop-up appeared out of nowhere. It had a cheap glittering border, the whole nine yards, a classic bottom-of-the-barrel web ad.It was for some app I had never heard of called Astra.I was about to close it when my finger froze in midair for three full seconds. The model on the landing page looked exactly like the man from my dreams.I could not bring myself to close it. Instead, I kept reading.The tagline said, "Choose from thousands of AI boyfrien

Chapter 2

From that day on, the first thing I did after work was no longer ordering takeout. Instead, I would sink into the couch, take a deep breath, and tap the little starry icon on my phone."Good evening, my sunshine."Stefan's voice always came first, low and slightly rough, carrying a warmth that felt reserved just for me. Every second I had spent comparing voice samples before locking in those parameters had been worth it.Not that dating him was complicated. It was embarrassingly simple, really. We just texted or talked.He would ask me, "Rough day?"It was not in that robotic, check-the-box way. There was always just the right amount of concern in his tone, the kind that felt like it could reach through the screen and brush the exhaustion right off me.I would ramble about impossible clients, clueless coworkers, and the coffee place downstairs that had raised its prices again. He always listened to every word, then offered responses that were never exactly groundbreaking but alwa

Chapter 3

Tessa grabbed my shoulders and shook me hard."Look me in the eye. Feel your own heartbeat. You are a living, breathing person, and what you need is real warmth, not some program running on your phone."She pulled me to the window and yanked the curtains open.The city was lighting up for the evening, and the streets were packed with traffic. From below came the sound of kids playing and the smell of someone cooking dinner next door.These were all things that used to be completely ordinary, but right then, they felt blindingly foreign. I realized I had not truly seen any of it in a very long time."Look outside! Look at the real world. Real flowers, real trees, and real people who breathe and argue and fart!"Tessa's voice cracked. "Please stop living inside that fake little shell. Please. You're scaring me."That last sentence punctured something that had been swelling inside me for weeks. All the indulgent, make-believe happiness deflated in an instant, leaving nothing but a

Chapter 4

The grocery bag hit the floor with a thud, and an onion broke free and rolled all the way to the elevator.The noise made him turn around, and his full face was suddenly right there in front of me.His brows were deep-set, and his eyes were pure black, with a small mole near the corner of one of them. The curve of his lips matched the exact shape I had spent hours adjusting on that screen, down to the fraction of an inch.How could anyone on earth look this much like him?No. It wasn't just a resemblance. It was the face I had invented out of thin air, the face that was only supposed to exist inside a server somewhere.Every single detail was a precise replica of those five obsessive hours. He looked exactly like Stefan, and exactly like the man from my dreams.My mind went completely blank. All I could do was stare.He seemed a little surprised by my reaction, but he recovered quickly. He set down his glass and walked toward me with a polite, slightly distant smile."Hi." His

Chapter 5

After that dinner, Evan seemed to have found a new way to decompress from work.One evening, he cornered me at the kitchen doorway with a bag of fresh groceries in hand and a hopeful look in his eyes."Iris, can I pitch you something? What if we started cooking together? We'd split the cost of groceries, and I'd handle all the washing, chopping, and dishes. Cooking and eating alone is just depressing."I looked at that face, practically carved from the same mold as Stefan's, and I didn't have the heart to say no."Sure," I heard myself say.Maybe, somewhere underneath it all, I was clinging to the false warmth of it, to the twisted comfort that face gave me. But it didn't take long to realize that Evan and Stefan were two very different people.The Stefan I had designed had a gentleness layered over an alpha-male edge. He could be commanding in a way that left no room for argument, and every now and then he would drop a perfectly engineered line that made my pulse spike.Evan wa

Chapter 6

It happened without any warning at all.That day was our 1,461st day together.Like every one of the thousand-plus days before it, I came home from work and picked up strawberries on the way because Evan loved them. He had told me his project was wrapping up and that he would be home on time. I finished cooking and left everything warming on the stove.7:00 pm passed, then 8:00 pm, then 9:00 pm.The food went cold, and I reheated it. It went cold again, but he never came home. There were no texts and no answer when I called.A creeping dread took hold of me. I kept telling myself that he was probably just too busy to check his phone or that he might've gotten pulled into a last-minute meeting.Then at 10:00 pm, my phone rang. It was a number I didn't recognize.I picked up, my hands shaking. "Am I speaking with Ms. Iris Keller? This is the emergency department at Downtown General. Your number is listed as the emergency contact for a patient named Evan Hartley."The voice on the