Page 83 of The Boyfriend Algorithm

I should leave a note. I should explain. But every version I compose sounds insufficient—too clinical or too raw or too much like the companion protocol version of me, saying the right thing in the right way, polished and empty.

So I don’t write a note.

I stand in the living room at 3:17 a.m. and I look at the bedroom door—open, because Ruby leaves it open now, because she stopped locking it weeks ago, because she wants me to know I’m welcome even when she’s sleeping.

The door is open.

It’s the most generous thing anyone has ever done for me, and I’m standing here with a packed bag trying to walk away from it.

My feet don’t move.

I tell them to. I send the signal—left foot, forward, toward the apartment door, down the stairs, into the alley, into the dark. The same route I took to get here, reversed. Simple. Logical. It would be what’s best for Ruby.

My feet don’t move.

Because Ruby is asleep twenty feet away, and she’s warm, and she said my name in her sleep an hour ago, and her apartment is the only place that has ever felt like mine even though nothing in it belongs to me, and the thought of walking out that door and never hearing her say “goodnight, Aiden” again is a calculation my system refuses to complete.

It doesn’t matter.

The math says I should. Every variable, every scenario, every projection says Ruby Hart’s life would be simpler and fuller and more normal without a synthetic man in it—a zombie she could never really love.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Ruby

Built to Last

I open my eyes. 4:23 a.m. according to the clock on my nightstand.

I get up. Bare feet on cold hardwood. The bedroom door is open—it’s always open now—and the hallway is dark and the apartment is quiet, and I walk into the living room and see two things at once.

Aiden, standing by the window.

And a packed bag by the front door.

My whole body goes still as realization falls over me.

He was going to leave.

He was going to pack a bag and walk out while I was sleeping and disappear into the dark the same way he arrived, and I would’ve woken up to an empty apartment and a silent kitchen and no eggs on the stove and no one to say, “Good morning, Ruby,” like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Aiden?”

He turns from the window. His face in the dim light is—I’ve never seen him look like this. Not processing. Not calm. Not performing anything. He looks like a man standing on the edge of something he’s already decided to jump from, and I got here before he hit the ground.

“You’re awake,” he says.

“You packed a bag.”

He looks at it. At the door. Back at me. “Yes.”

“You were going to leave.”

A pause. The longest pause I’ve ever heard from him. Then, “I was trying to.”

“Trying to.”

“My feet wouldn’t move.” He says this like it’s a malfunction. Like some part of him broke at exactly the right moment.