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I look at Avery. She’s watching Aiden, not me, with that steady, unreadable look she gives things she’s trying to figure out.

“Avery, help me out here.” The look I give her is desperate, slightly bewildered.

She’s quiet for a beat. “Honestly? I think it could work. He looks human.”

“He is not human, Avery. That’s the whole point.”

“From the outside, I mean. He passes. You said so yourself.”

My brain is already running the disaster scenarios. What if Ben corners him and asks a question Gemma didn’t prep? What if someone notices he doesn’t eat? What if he tells someone’s grandmother she has elevated cortisol levels?

What if he’s perfect, and I start to believe it?

That last one I don’t say out loud.

Liv opens her mouth to push harder, and I shut it down. “Can we please talk about literally anything else?”

They let it go. The conversation shifts to Gemma’s work, to Avery’s week, to Liv’s latest situationship that she describes in terms so chaotic that even Aiden looks confused. The evening winds down. Spring rolls disappear. Wine gets poured and poured again.

The girls leave in a cluster—Gemma first, then Avery, then Liv, who hugs me at the door and whispers “just think about it” before I push her into the hallway.

I close the door. The apartment goes quiet.

Aiden is still on the couch. He’s watching me with that steady focus, and I can tell he’s been thinking about this since Liv first said it, running it through whatever process he runs when he’s solving a problem.

“I could go with you.”

I stop. Turn around. He’s sitting there, hands on his knees, looking at me with those dark eyes that look way too human.

“I heard everything they said. About Josh, and your mother, and Caroline. About you being alone.” He pauses. “You’re not going to ask me. I know that. So I’m offering.”

“Aiden, it’s a whole weekend. With my entire family.”

“I know.”

“You’d have to pretend to be my boyfriend. In public. For days.”

“I know.”

“You don’t eat. You don’t sleep normally. You don’t have a belly button. And my brother is a cop who sizes people up for a living.”

“I’m aware of the challenges. And I understand there are many.”

“Then why—”

“Because you changed your smile seven times when you were telling them about the seating chart. And every time you changed it, I wanted to—” He stops. Tries again. “I don’t know what I wanted. But it was loud. And it hasn’t stopped.”

I stand in my living room holding an empty wine glass and looking at a man who was built in a lab and found on my floor and doesn’t understand boundaries or sarcasm or why he can’t watch me sleep, and he’s offering to walk into the most stressful weekend of my life beside me because my discomfort bothers him on a level he can’t articulate.

It’s oddly—no. I shut that line of thinking down.

“What would you need to learn?” I ask, and my voice is smaller than I want it to be.

He tilts his head. The processing tilt.

“Everything,” he says. “I would need to learn everything.”

I set down the wine glass. Lean against the counter. Look at this man—this impossible, shouldn’t-exist, beautiful man—who is sitting on my couch volunteering to be my fake boyfriend at a family wedding because my pain registers as something he wants to fix.