Page 89 of The Boyfriend Algorithm

“I need to tell you something about Aiden.”

I’ve been rehearsing this sentence for three days. In the shower. In the bakery. In bed at night while Aiden lies next to me, warm and still, not sleeping, probably listening to me mouth the words into my pillow.

I’ve imagined every possible version of this conversation. The one where my mom cries. The one where she calls the police. The one where she calls Ben, which is worse. The one where she looks at Aiden and doesn’t see the man who charmed her at the wedding but instead sees a thing—a product, a machine, something that doesn’t belong at her table or in her daughter’s bed.

I’ve prepared for all of those.

I did not prepare for what actually happens.

We’re in my mom’s kitchen. The kitchen I grew up in—yellow walls, cluttered counters, the same rooster clock that’s been above the stove since I was seven and has never kept the right time. Mom made tea. She always makes tea when she senses a conversation coming.

Aiden is next to me at the table. Hands on his knees. Spine straight. He offered to wait in the car, and I said no, because if I’m doing this, I’m doing it with him beside me. He’s wearing the navy henley and the jeans, and he looks like a person, and my mom loves him, and what I’m about to say might change that.

“What is it, sweetheart?” Mom sets the tea down and sits across from us. She’s watching my face with that careful, worried attention that I used to find suffocating and now find unbearable because I’m about to test it.

“It’s about Aiden. About what he is.”

She looks at him. Looks at me. “Is he sick?”

“No. He’s not—Mom, he’s not sick. He’s—” I stall. Every rehearsed version evaporates. I look at Aiden. He looks back at me with those steady eyes, and he nods once, and the nod says, I’m here, say it, whatever happens I’m here.

“Aiden isn’t human.”

The rooster clock ticks. The tea steams. My mom blinks.

“He’s a synthetic companion,” I say. “He was built—manufactured—in a lab. By a scientist named Murdock, as part of a project called Elysium. He has human skin, but underneath he’s—there’s a mechanical framework. Wiring. A control panel in his ribs.” I’m talking too fast. I can hear it. I can’t slow down. “The program was shut down a few years ago. All the units were supposed to be destroyed. He wasn’t. He ended up at my bakery. In the utility room. Naked and covered in mud. And I—I took him in.”

My mom hasn’t moved.

“He’s the man you met at the wedding,” I say. “The same person. Everything he said to you was real—the hydrangeas, the conversations, all of it. His backstory was fake—he didn’t go to Virginia Tech, his parents aren’t in Florida. But everything else was him. The real him.”

The kitchen is so quiet I can hear the ice maker cycling.

“Mom, say something.”

She’s looking at Aiden. Not the way Gemma looks at him—clinically, analytically. Not the way Ben looks at him—suspiciously. She’s looking at him the way she looked at him at the wedding, when she squeezed his arms and said, “Where have you been hiding him?”

“So he’s not a software consultant,” she says.

“No.”

“And he’s not from Richmond.”

“No.”

“And his parents aren’t on a cruise.”

“He doesn’t have parents. He was—built.”

She picks up her tea, takes a sip, and sets it down. She folds her hands on the table.

“Does he love you?”

I wasn’t expecting that to be the first real question. “Yes.”

She looks at Aiden. “Do you love my daughter?”

“Yes,” Aiden says. No hesitation. No processing delay.