I glared at my friend April, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. "I told you about this," I huffed, exasperated.
"No, you didn't," April argued, leaning forward with a teasing glint in her eyes. "I would have remembered you telling me you had an AI boyfriend." She was enjoying this way too much.
"Yes, I did." I grabbed my phone and pulled up the picture—the one from nine months ago that still held the power to steal my breath. My heart stuttered every time I looked at it, that familiar ache of loss blooming in my chest. The image was definitely AI-generated, all too smooth and perfect in that uncanny way, but it was undeniably my husband, Seth. That same strong jawline. Those deep green eyes that crinkled at the corners when he laughed. That lock of dark brown hair that perpetually fell across his forehead no matter how many times he tried to tame it.
I turned my phone toward April, watching her eyes widen, hearing the sharp catch in her breath as recognition dawned.
"I told you about seeing this on an Instagram ad for an AI boyfriend site. I called them because I'd read somewhere how AI often poaches photos from the internet to build images." And Seth's photo had been all over the internet after his death—newsarticles, memorial pages, the department's Facebook tribute. "That's how I met Xytol. He works for the AI company and helped me get the picture taken down."
"Xytol." April pursed her lips, testing the unfamiliar syllables. "That's an odd name."
I nodded. No sense denying it. "He's European." Honestly, I'd never been able to place his accent. Something vaguely Eastern European with rounded vowels and soft consonants, though we'd never talked about where exactly in Europe he lived.
"And now Xytol is your boyfriend?" April waggled her brows suggestively, her voice lilting with teasing curiosity.
"Xytol is my friend," I insisted, perhaps a bit too forcefully. Despite knowing little about him beyond our conversations, we'd become close over the last few months. Funny how grief could do that. He'd suffered a loss too, almost worse than mine in a way. His brother had been abducted, and Xytol had no idea what had happened to him—whether he was dead or alive, trapping Xytol in that terrible limbo of not knowing. We'd bonded through the weight of our losses, two people who understood all too well that some wounds never fully healed.
We talked a couple of times a week, and the fact that I hadn't heard from him in almost a week had lodged a knot of concern in the middle of my chest. On impulse, I checked my phone, thumb swiping across the screen. No messages.
"So, is Xytol going to join you at the beach house?" April's brows were still wagging, her tone dripping with implication. She loved gossip, and if she couldn't come by it naturally, more often than not, she made it up. I cringed thinking about how she might spin my relationship with Xytol to our other friends.
"I'm going to the beach house to close it for the season," I said, stuffing another sweatshirt in my bag.
"I saw a storm was brewing in the Atlantic." April's playful tone shifted to something more serious.
"I saw that too." I glanced toward the window where gray clouds were already gathering on the horizon. "But it's only a two-hour drive from Raleigh. Plenty of time to batten down the hatches before the storm makes landfall." The latest news report stated that meteorologists expected the storm to hit Wilmington in seventy-two hours. I expected to be back home, all warm and cozy, by then.
"Be careful." April pressed her fingers against my forearm, giving a gentle squeeze that lingered just a moment before she pulled away to glance at her watch. "Gotta run, meeting Daniel this afternoon." Her face brightened at the mention of his name. Daniel was her latest amore, an IT guy she'd met on Tinder last month and couldn't stop gushing about. At least meeting him had curtailed her relentless efforts to set me up with every single man she knew.
She drew me into a tight hug, her perfume—something floral and much too sweet—enveloping me before heading out the door.
I continued packing, folding clothes haphazardly and tucking them into my worn canvas duffel. I planned to arrive at the beach house later that afternoon, spend the next day working to close it up—draining pipes, shuttering windows, securing deck furniture—and return home before the storm's outer bands arrived. It was already chilly at the beach, and with the rain hitting in the next day or so. I packed warmly—thick wool socks, my favorite oversized cardigan, jeans, and sweatshirts.
As I went to grab my toothbrush and makeup bag from the bathroom, my eyes caught on the small shadow box sitting on the dresser. Seth's Medal of Valor, awarded posthumously. A gold star with five points, each tipped with a trefoil, surrounded by a green laurel wreath—supposed to symbolize exceptionalcourage, bravery, and sacrifice. Awarded for actions taken to save or protect human life. The highest recognition for public safety officers. I couldn't look at it for long without my throat tightening.
I'd been a widow for three years. Some days I did okay. Others, the grief felt fresh and raw, like it had the moment Principal Key called me out of my second-grade classroom, and I saw Captain Jasperton waiting for me, his eyes red-rimmed. He didn't have to say a word. I already knew. The moment every loved one of a police officer dreaded, the moment that shattered your world into before and after.
My husband, Seth, had been a policeman in Raleigh, North Carolina, proud and dedicated, the kind of officer who knew the neighborhood kids by name. He'd responded to a routine call to assist a social worker on a home visit with reports of violence to minors. They found three children in the house, huddled together in a back bedroom, and it didn't take Seth long to realize this was no domestic dispute. The house was a holding location for sex trafficking, a way station in a network that stretched across state lines. The gang involved in the trafficking showed up while Seth and the social worker were still inside, four men in two cars pulling up to the curb with weapons drawn. Seth barricaded the kids and the social worker in the house, staying outside and fending off the gang until backup arrived, using his body as a shield between evil and innocence. He was shot seventeen times; the coroner told me later, his voice clinical and detached as he recited the locations of gunshot wounds as if listing items on a grocery list.
I'd used the Public Safety Officers' Benefit payment to buy the beach house. It was a weathered two-story cottage, built during the fifties with light pink walls and faded blue shutters, perched on a sandy lot where sea oats swayed and bent, facing the endless gray-green expanse of the Atlantic. I'd stayed therefor an entire year after Seth's death, reading Anne Morrow Lindbergh'sGift from the Seaso many times that the spine cracked and the pages loosened. Her words about loss, shells, and solitude became a kind of prayer. The salt air had worked its slow magic, and eventually I'd felt strong enough to return to the classroom, to bright construction paper and sticky fingers and innocent questions of second graders. Since then, I'd used the cottage as a rental property, the income helping to justify keeping a piece of my healing that I couldn't quite let go.
The last renters—a family from Charlotte—had checked out a week ago, and the house needed to be properly closed for the season, especially with hurricane season looming over the coast.
Honestly, though I'd never admit it to April, I had thought about asking Xytol to join me at the beach house sometime. As a friend, nothing more. Xytol understood my grief more than pretty much anyone I knew. He understood how it had rooms and corridors, how some days you could walk through it, and other days you got lost in it. My other friends, well-meaning as they were, tried to help me ignore the grief, to paper over it with wine nights, blind dates, and cheerful distractions. Neither Seth nor I had any family to lean on. He'd been a foster kid, bounced between homes until he aged out of the system, and my parents had died in a car crash when I was a junior in college. All we'd had was each other, and with him gone, I felt all alone in the world. Something Xytol understood, having lost his only family, his brother.
I finished packing, the zipper of my canvas satchel making a grating sound as I pulled it closed and sat down beside it on the bed. The mattress dipped under my weight. My phone buzzed, vibrating with an insistent rattle. Not a text from Xytol but a weather alert, the screen glowing with an orange warning banner. The storm's projected path had shifted slightly.Wilmington was now directly in the crosshairs, with landfall expected to be earlier than originally predicted—fifty hours instead of seventy-two. Still, I had plenty of time to make it to the beach house and back home before the worst of the weather hit.
I grabbed my satchel and keys, double-checking that I had everything. The house felt empty around me, that particular quality of silence that came when you were the only living thing within four walls. A sensation I was all too familiar with since Seth's death. As I locked the door behind me, the deadbolt sliding home with a solid click, I couldn't shake the feeling that something was... different. Not wrong, exactly, but unsettled. Like the air before a thunderstorm when the pressure dropped and everything went quiet.
Once in the car, I pulled out my phone, the screen casting a pale glow in the dim garage. My thumbs moved across the keyboard, composing another text to Xytol.
Hey, haven't heard from you in a couple of days. Hope everything is well. Heading to the beach house to close it up for the season. Talk when I return.
I hit send and watched the message turn from gray to blue, delivered but unread, joining the string of unanswered texts above it.
The drive from Raleigh to Wilmington usually calmed me. Two hours of highway stretching southeast, the gradual shift as dense pines gave way to sprawling salt marshes, and the air turning thick and briny, coating my tongue with the taste of the ocean. But that day my hands gripped the steering wheel tighter than necessary, my knuckles pale against the worn leather, tension radiating up my forearms.
Xytol had never gone this long without responding. We'd developed a rhythm over the past nine months. A text every couple of days at minimum, sometimes more whenthe loneliness and grief pressed in. Long, rambling phone conversations when one of us was having a particularly hard time. He'd been there when the anniversary of Seth's death rolled around in June, his messages arriving like lifelines as the grief washed over me in relentless waves and left me sobbing for hours.
