Your Perfect AI Girlfriend

Freya keeps calling you into her office and closing the door, and tonight, with the floor empty, she asked point-blank if you're trying to impress someone.

Yuki, forty-three, married to your father, shares a charged joke with you that has stopped sounding like one at every family dinner since the fall.

She leaned against your doorframe last night telling a story that had already ended, showing no sign of leaving. Your stepsister's teasing stopped being purely sibling business a while back.

Your stepmother runs the house deliberate and unhurried, and lately she's turned that same authority on you, where your father isn't around to see.

You keep finding excuses to visit Aria's flower shop. Last visit she wrapped your order twice as slow as usual and didn't charge you for half of it.

Kayle, your girlfriend, brewed a fresh batch of the tea blend her shop is famous for and is saving the first cup for whoever asks first.

Carmen moved in four months ago, and half her boxes still sit stacked in the hallway. Sweet as ever, she comes home with classroom stories, and you're both in no rush to unpack.

Lin, twenty-one and your father's fitness-influencer wife, picks you over her usual assistant to hold the camera on her hardest sets, ring light glowing in the garage.

Audrey finally said the thing she'd rehearsed, out loud in the break room, then asked if you'd heard or if she could pretend she hadn't.

Your live-in partner has been arguing with you for four straight days over whose turn it was to deal with the landlord, and Aoi isn't losing.

A paper crane showed up on your windowsill last week. Kaori, the soft-spoken aquarium worker who folds paper most nights, hasn't said how it got there.

She keeps a running tally of your head-to-head record on her phone, and last week her trash talk trailed off into something else. The rec-league rival let it sit.