“How recent?!” she demanded.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, typed in her iCloud credentials, which he still had from when she’d lost her phone six months ago and made him set up her new one, and navigated to the “Find My” app. Two green dots, side by side, pulsed on the map about twenty feet from where they stood.
He held out the screen. “Your AirPods are both outside, probably in your car.”
Emory’s expression curdled, going from confusion to embarrassment to a sharp, defensive anger in under three seconds. “Did you just track me without my permission?!”
He considered the question. “I tracked your AirPods. You asked me to help you find them.”
“That’s not the point!” she said, her voice rising in volume. “You can’t just go into people’s data!”
“I set up your password,” he said, flatly. “I told you to change it, you said you wanted to keep it because you always forget your passwords.”
“Fuck you, AJ. Can you hear yourself? I come over here because I lost something, and you violate my privacy.” She clapped her hands together in mock applause. “Bravo. You really know how to make a girl feel special.”
This was the part of the script where he was supposed to apologize or at least scramble together some kind of emotional auto-reply, but AJ had never been fluent in that dialect. He stood silent, letting her fill the void with her own fury. She didn’t disappoint.
“You know, for almost a year, I thought I could get you to open up. I thought I could be the one who made you…” She trailed off, searching for a word, then spat it out with disgust, “Normal.”
He didn’t take offense. He couldn’t. It would be the equivalent of being offended at unexpected data set—surprising, but ultimately just information.
She took a step toward him, her jaw clenched. “You’ve been home for two weeks, and you haven’t even texted me! And then, you didn’t even invite me to your mom’s wedding. Who does that? Who just...doesn’t even mention it? If you don’t take me to California, to your mom’s wedding with you, then we’re done. I’m serious. That’s it.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?” A tiny spark of hope flickered in her eye.
“Okay. We’re done.”
Her jaw dropped. “Are you fuckingserious?! Just like that?!”
“You gave me an ultimatum.”
“Haven’t you ever heard ofcompromise? That’s what people do in relationships.”
“We’re not in a relationship,” he clarified for the record. “We never were.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“How can you say that?”
“You’ve been seeing other men the entire time we’ve seen each other.”
Her jaw dropped, then closed, then dropped again. Maybe she didn’t know that he knew she’d been seeing other people. He didn’t care because they weren’t in a relationship.
For a moment, she stared at him, really stared, as if trying to see a soul through layers of cloudy glass. “Is that it? After everything…that’sallyou have to say to me?”
He nodded.
She shook her head, a furious laugh escaping her lips. “Unbelievable. You’re a robot, you know that? An actual fucking robot.”
He didn’t argue. He’d been called worse.
She spun on her heel, stomped down the hallway, and snatched her boots by the door. Her parting shot echoed with the satisfaction of a judge banging a gavel. “You’re going to die alone, AJ. I hope you know that.”
He didn’t flinch. If anything, the thought brought a muted relief. Alone was easy. Alone was predictable.
