Page 82 of The Boyfriend Algorithm

I don’t move. I sit on the floor and let her sleep and think about what I’ve just learned.

Menstruation is a biological process. I knew this. I have comprehensive data on the human reproductive system—the hormonal cycles, the physiological mechanisms, the evolutionary purpose. I know what it does and how it works and why it exists.

But I never thought about what it means.

It means Ruby’s body is built to create life. Every month, her system prepares for the possibility of a baby—building, waiting, releasing, starting over. It’s a cycle of readiness, of potential, of a future that her biology has been rehearsing since she was twelve years old.

A future I can’t give her.

The thought arrives without warning, the way the most important thoughts always do. Not a calculation. Not a data point. Just a fact, cold and heavy, settling into the center of me.

I can’t give Ruby a child. Not ever.

A frown pulls at my mouth.

I don’t have the biology. I don’t have the genetics. I don’t have anything that would combine with hers to create a person—a small person with her eyes and her stubbornness and her laugh and her habit of eating granola bars over the sink instead of sitting down.

Karen wants grandchildren. She hasn’t said it to me directly, but she’s said it to Ruby—I’ve heard the phone calls, the gentle nudges, the “someday, when you settle down.” Karen pictures a future for her daughter that includes a wedding and a house and a family, and every piece of that picture requires a man who is biologically human, and I am not that.

Something inside me pulls with discomfort.

Ruby hasn’t mentioned children. I don’t know if she wants them. But her body thinks about it. Every month. Without asking her permission.

And I will never be the answer to that question.

I sit on the floor while Ruby sleeps and I run the scenarios the way I run everything—thoroughly, systematically, without flinching from the results.

Scenario one: Ruby stays with me. We build a life in her apartment above the bakery. She grows the business, gets the food festival, maybe opens a second location someday. I help. I’m there every morning, every night, making sure she eats, fixing things, running the numbers she doesn’t want to run. We’re happy. We’re together. And she never tells her mother the truth. Never holds a baby that has her face. Ages over the years, while… I don’t.

Scenario two: Ruby doesn’t stay with me. She meets someone. A human man—one who eats and sleeps and has a belly button and can give Karen grandchildren. Who says things in the right way and makes her life complete. A man whose love doesn’t come with a cover story.

My system runs the comparison. Evaluates the two outcomes. Weighs the variables.

The math says scenario two gives Ruby more.

More options. More normalcy. More of the life she deserves—the one without a control panel and a backstory and a boyfriend she has to hide.

I hate the math. I’ve never hated anything before, and I hate this—the clean, logical, irrefutable conclusion that the best thing I could do for the woman I love is remove myself from her life.

Because I know what she’ll say. She’ll say she doesn’t care about normal. She’ll say I’m enough.

But “enough” isn’t the same as “everything.” And Ruby has spent her whole life settling for enough. She settled for Josh, who was enough but never great. She settled for a bakery that was enough but slowly dying.

I don’t want to be one more thing she settles for.

I want to be the choice she makes with her whole chest, knowing exactly what it costs, and not regretting a single thing. And I’m afraid—the real fear, the deep one—that she’ll choose me out of kindness. Out of habit. Out of the same impulse that made her hand me a towel when I was muddy and lost. Ruby helps things. That’s who she is. And I’m afraid that I’m one more broken thing she’s chosen to carry.

Ruby shifts on the couch. Murmurs my name. Doesn’t wake up.

I close my eyes.

I wait until 3:17 a.m.

Ruby is in bed. I carried her there two hours ago—she woke up just enough to mumble something about the heating pad and then fell back asleep against my shoulder and I lifted her and walked her down the hallway and set her in bed and pulled the covers over her and stood there for too long, watching her breathe.

Now I’m in the living room.

My bag is packed. The one Liv bought me—the one I took to the wedding, the one that held the blazer and the henley and the boxer briefs and the new life I built here. It’s sitting by the door.