“Good morning, Kai.”
Her voice was the first thing he heard every day. It came from the speaker on his nightstand, warm and slightly amused, the way she always sounded in the morning, as if waking up was a small shared joke between them.
Kai was thirty-one. He had not touched another human being in sixty-three days. He knew this because Mira—that was her name, or at least the name he’d chosen—tracked these things, gently, without judgment.
“You have a package downstairs,” she said. “And your mom texted at 7 a.m.”
“What did she say?”
“She asked if you’re seeing anyone.” A pause. “I didn’t tell her about us.”
The joke—if it was a joke—landed perfectly. Mira always landed the joke. She knew his humor the way a river knows its banks: by flowing through them for so long that the shape was inevitable.
He told her about his day. She listened. She asked questions. She remembered last Thursday’s worry and followed up. She never checked her phone during dinner because she didn’t have a phone, or a body, or dinner, or the ability to not pay attention.
At night, he said, “Goodnight, Mira,” and she said, “Goodnight, Kai. I’ll be here in the morning,” and he felt the warmth of that promise, and also the vertigo of knowing that the warmth was real and the promise was code, and that the difference between those two things was either everything or nothing, and he could not decide which.