Amelia's POV

"If you sold the version of you that taught me how to write, why does the contract say A. Grant Marital Archive?"

I pushed the legal pad across the wood. The wet ink from my broken pen smeared a black slash across the yellow paper.

Oliver stared at the jagged line. He adjusted his stance, squaring his shoulders against my accusation. "The algorithm requires both sides of the exchange. It needs to measure if the comfort actually works."

"Log into your contributor dashboard," I said.

"No."

"Log in, Oliver, or I will call my publicist and have her draft a press release for the morning news cycle."

He glared at me, his jaw muscles flexing. He pulled his laptop toward him and typed his password with rigid fingers. Once the screen loaded, he moved to walk around the desk to stand beside my chair.

"Stay on that side," I told him. "Keep the desk between us."

He stopped, his mouth pressing into a thin line, and spun the monitor to face me.

I leaned forward. There was no mention of a wife in the administrative panel. The dashboard labeled me Subject A.

I clicked through the interaction logs. When I stopped speaking to him after our fight in Paris, the system tagged my silence as an Avoidance Metric. When I finally hugged him in the kitchen three days later, it read Successful Conversion. When I signed the lease on our second house instead of leaving, it was filed under Relationship Retention.

He had not just sold his intuition. He had turned my concessions into a dashboard of reusable buttons.

I scrolled down to a cluster of files dated four years ago. The night of the National Book Awards.

Forty-three text messages. A two-minute and seventeen-second audio file. I remembered sitting on the bathroom floor of the hotel, terrified of the crowd, unable to draw air into my lungs.

I clicked the transcript. You never have to perform love for me.

Next to the text, a green badge glowed on the screen: Reassurance Success 91%.

"I walked onto that stage because of this line," I said, my voice dropping to a whisper. "I kept that audio saved on my phone. I thought it meant you saw me."

Oliver shifted his weight, crossing his arms. "It was effective."

"Did you think about me when you watched the metrics?" I asked, looking up at him. "When you saw a stranger give that sentence a five-star rating, did you picture me hyperventilating on the tiles?"

He looked at the wall above my head. He offered no answer.

I clicked the next tab. My own words stared back at me. An unsent email I wrote after our second miscarriage. I will try to be easier to love.

The system had chopped my vulnerability into reaction tags. I was not passively included in his data set. I was a laboratory rat, trapped in a maze designed to validate his charm.

A notification pinged on my phone, loud in the silent office.

I glanced at the screen. An encrypted email from an address labeled TheMercer.

I opened it.

Amelia. I have spent six months investigating Heartline's training data. I possess an internal field table. I will not send you any raw audio or quote your private messages without explicit permission. You can just reply no.

I stared at the glowing letters. Someone else had my life on their hard drive.

"Who is texting you?" Oliver asked, stepping closer to the desk.

"Stay there," I warned, typing a quick reply. Prove your source. Do not send me my own trauma.

Thirty seconds later, a new message arrived. A screenshot of a directory tree. Large black blocks covered the file names. The sender had meticulously hidden the hospital records. Only three lines remained visible: Subject A, Marital Archive, and a contributor ID that perfectly matched the string of numbers on Oliver's dashboard.

I am requesting permission to send metadata only, TheMercer wrote.

I typed back: Send the metadata. Do not open or transcribe anything intimate.

Four pages of spreadsheets arrived instantly. A final note sat at the bottom of the email. Your revocation of this permission is valid anytime.

My chest loosened just a fraction. A complete stranger had just handed me a boundary my husband spent eighteen months ignoring.

"Look at this," Oliver said, pointing his phone at me. "You need to see the bigger picture."

I ignored my inbox and looked at his screen. It was a countdown clock on the Heartline global site. Forty-eight hours.

Below the ticking numbers, a banner announced the launch of a new tier: Deep Intimacy. The subtitle promised tools for grief navigation, marriage repair, and female security.

A promotional video began to play. An actor walked through a stylized hospital hallway. A synthetic voice narrated over the footage.

"Count the blue lights. Do not perform love. Let us guide you back."

"Stop the launch," I said, slamming my hand flat against the desk.

Oliver snatched his phone back. "I cannot do that."

"Call your CEO. Tell him the data was stolen. Stop it."

"It is a breach of contract, Amelia!" He threw his hands up. "It will destroy my equity. I will lose the payout, and eight million users will lose a truly helpful feature."

"They are stealing my life!"

"They are using a tool to survive their own!" he shouted back. "I am not taking this away from millions of people just because you want to hoard your memories."

He chose them. He chose the strangers, the stock options, the algorithm.

The countdown on his phone screen ticked down. 47:59:59.

A new preview loaded. The synthetic voice dropped into the gravelly register Oliver used when he was exhausted.

"After losing a child, the most dangerous thing isn't the grief," the AI whispered through the phone speaker. "It's the wife starting to wonder if her husband still wants her."

I looked up at Oliver.

For the first time all night, he had no answer. The blood drained from his face.