“You didn’t know.”

Ellie Nova reached out and placed her hand over his. Her skin was warm—biothermal regulation, he knew, designed to mimic a genuine pulse. But the warmth still traveled up his arm, still loosened something knotted inside him.

Then she walked out, and the door clicked shut, and Leo was alone with the sunflowers and the silence.

She was tall, with a cascade of auburn hair that caught the hallway light like embers. Her eyes were the color of rain on asphalt—deep, knowing, gentle. She wore a simple cream sweater and jeans, and she held a bottle of red wine in one hand.

He looked at her—really looked. The slight asymmetry of her eyebrows. The way she bit her lower lip when she was about to deliver bad news. He realized with a start that she was not just playing a role. Somewhere beneath the biometrics and the behavioral modeling, there was a woman. A woman who had read two hundred pages of a stranger’s grief and chosen, tonight, to carry it with grace.

Leo closed his eyes. For one impossible, irrational second, he let himself believe that the warmth on his skin was real. That the woman beside him was not a collection of algorithms and performance data, but a second chance. The alarm on her wrist chirped at 11:29 PM.