I went into the closed beta of a domestic-violence therapy product, and I woke up as the dark obsession the CEO was contracted to marry.
The app — AURA — told me the rules on the first morning. Run the relationship arc. Get him to say I love you. Log out.
The first ninety-nine cycles, I made him say it.
He killed me every time.
The hundredth, I stop running the arc.
I am up on the parapet of HALCYON's roof terrace, thirty-eight stories over Elliott Bay, in a borrowed Oscar de la Renta that was supposed to be for a board photo at three. The wind off the water is cold enough to cut. Carson is below me with his directors and his Chief of Staff, hand half-raised the way you raise a hand at a meeting, not at a person about to fall.
"Carson," I say. I have to say it loud over the wind. "Tell me you love me right now or I go off this roof. You don't get me. You don't get to have gotten me."
Carson smiles. I have watched this smile across ninety-nine death certificates.
"Go ahead, Wren," he says. "I'll have HR draft me a new fiancée by Friday."
The directors look at their phones.
Sloane, his Chief of Staff, has her hand over her mouth, perfect. I have seen the rehearsal.
Behind them, the elevator chimes.
Atlas wheels out.
I have never seen Atlas at a HALCYON event. Officially he is too sick. Officially he is twenty-four and three months from the end of the line. In the book of him every editor of this company knows by heart he is a footnote — the brother who built the platform before he got too unwell to run it.
He wheels straight past Carson without looking at him. He stops at the edge of the gravel. He looks up at me with the kindest face I have seen since I was twenty-two.
"Maren," he says. Soft. "Don't."
He keeps going.
"My brother doesn't want you. I do."
Carson laughs.
Atlas doesn't react to the laugh. He lifts a titanium pill case out of his lap.
"I've been hoarding the override keys," he says. "They're yours. Give me your life. I've saved up enough meds. Mine for yours when I go. Okay?"
The wind pulls at my dress.
AURA pings in my ear. Anomaly. Unscheduled NPC interaction. Returning you to checkpoint.
I close my eyes.
My name is Maren Ruan-Pace.
Day one of the closed beta, AURA explained who I was inside the product. The dark obsessive fiancée. Vicious. Without dignity. The script said I lost him by the third quarter, lost my father's firm by the fourth, and froze to death on a bench in Pioneer Square on New Year's Eve.
AURA, chirpy: Maren! Complete the relationship arc with the male lead. Earn his love. You'll log out the second the meter hits one hundred.
I believed her.
Session 1, I ran the soft and accommodating route. I covered for him on a deposition. I took the blame for a deal he tanked. I stood on the steps of the Olympic Club, six hours, in October rain, holding a written apology Sloane had drafted for me. He loved me by the end of the quarter. He took me up to the penthouse stairwell on New Year's morning and put me down them with the heel of his hand on my sternum.
He said, Wren, you know all my soft places. I can't leave any soft place out in the world.
Session 2, I ran cold and remote. Make him chase. He chased. He loved me by April. He sat down across from me at his kitchen island and watched me drink the wine he had poured. He said, I can't let you leave me, and waited.
Session 3, I ran the wild route — I matched his temper, lied to his face, drove him crazy. He loved me by August. He locked me in the wine cellar of the Bainbridge house and walked away. I heard him outside the door, voice broken like a person trying not to cry.
He said, Wren, you only belong to me if you die in my hands.
I have died ninety-nine times.
AURA pinged every time: Session complete!
She never logged me out.
Session 100, I open my eyes and it is a month before the engagement. The contract is on the kitchen island, drafted by both families' counsel, waiting for two signatures. AURA is bright in my ear. Welcome back, Maren! Today's milestone: schedule a fitting with the male lead!
I lie there and laugh at my ceiling.
Run the arc.
I'll run his fucking grave.
Carson arrives at the Belltown condo at noon with three associates and Sloane. He is dressed for a board meeting in a charcoal Brioni; he looks like he came to inform someone they had been outvoted. I am at the kitchen window with cold brew.
"Wren," he says. "What are you doing."
"Drinking coffee."
"The fitting is at one."
"I'm not going."
His face goes still in the way that means he's running latency on a response. Ninety-nine cycles, I never refused him. He twitched and I apologized. He coughed and I poured water. He didn't love me, I ran another arc and begged the app to refresh him.
Today his voice is white noise.
Sloane steps out from behind him. Wharton-MBA voice; concern as performance art.
"Maren, Carson's time is incredibly valuable. Let's not make this a thing."
I look at her. "Sorry. You are?"
She freezes for half a beat. "I'm Carson's Chief of Staff."
"Chief of Staff is handling the fiancée?" I put the cold brew down. "Is babysitting in your job description, or is that a separate consulting contract?"
Sloane's eyes shine on cue.
Carson steps in front of her. "Maren. Apologize."
"Why."
"Because she handles herself better than you do."
Heard that.
Session 27. He said the same thing. Different room. Same sentence.
That cycle I'd taken a box-cutter to the face for him outside a Tukwila parking garage; a man Whit Hale had hired tried to grab his portfolio off his arm and I stepped in. Twelve stitches, jaw to ear. Sloane sent him a get-well basket. I came home and he said, She handles herself better than you do, and a week later he scheduled the revision surgery, and the anesthesiologist underdosed me on his instructions because he wanted to see the face I came in with. I screamed myself awake three times on the table.
He held my hand. Wren, sit still. I want to see what you look like underneath.
I pull my phone out. I tap my father's name.
"Dad," I say. "Carson is requiring me to apologize to his Chief of Staff."
Geoffrey Pace is sixty-two years old. He has been on a private equity panel since he was thirty-six. Two beats of silence. Then a voice I have never heard him use about my mother's hyphen.
"Carson," he says, and the speaker bleeds it across the kitchen, "do you think my daughter doesn't have people."
Carson's color changes.
I hang up. I smile at him.
"Handling yourself is a thing for people who need to."
Carson is waiting outside my building at nine that night.
He has pressed the wrong call button on purpose. He has my doorman holding the door. He is not yelling. Carson never yells.
"You're acting strange today," he says.
"Congratulations. Your read on people is improving."
"You don't speak to me like this."
"I used to be blind."
His eyes flatten. "Are you trying to be interesting."
I almost laugh.
The funniest thing about men is that they assume every feeling you have is about them.
I step around him. He catches my wrist.
The grip is hard.
Session 54. He gripped my wrist the same way.
That cycle I was eight weeks pregnant. I had taken a test in his bathroom and gone looking for him. I found him in his office with Sloane on the visitor side of the desk. He thought I had come to make a scene. He dragged me out into the courtyard rain by my wrist and made me kneel on the flagstones for four hours, the way you discipline a dog you have stopped loving, and when I started bleeding through the dress he told the staff not to bother me.
The baby went.
He held me in the hospital after and told me he hadn't known.
I died that cycle three weeks later with his hand on my throat. He was asking why I couldn't see only him.
I look down at his hand on my wrist now.
"Let go."
He doesn't.
"Maren, do not test my patience."
I step on his shoe. Not the way a woman steps on a man's shoe at a wedding. I lean my whole weight in and grind. The Brioni leather creaks.
He grunts.
I twist my wrist free and slap him.
Clean.
The doorman is studying the carpet. The two associates by the SUV are studying their cuffs. Sloane is half out of the car, one hand on the door, frozen.
Carson's face is turned. There is a red mark under his cheekbone. When he turns it back his eyes are wide.
I shake the sting out of my hand.
"Don't touch me. You're dirty."
Sloane scrambles up the curb. "Maren, how dare you — "
"You want one too?"
She stops.
Carson runs his tongue along the inside of his cheek. He is smiling.
"Wren," he says. "You're finally interesting."
I taste bile.
The play in the original script is the one that breaks me every cycle: Pace Capital's anchor position in the Westside Pier redevelopment collapses, Whit Hale picks up the equity on the cheap through a Cayman SPV, my father has a cardiac event in the middle of the disaster, and I run out of moves and crawl back to Carson because he's the only structural buyer left.
Carson knew. Carson's uncle Whit was running the short with our CFO Bryce Lin as the leak.
Carson didn't stop it. He wanted to see me kneel for him.
Ninety-nine cycles I have known this and ninety-nine cycles AURA has corrected the plot back into shape. Phones don't connect. Emails bounce. Town cars die on the bridge. My father is always at a foundation gala when I try to reach him.
Tonight, three a.m., I sit at my kitchen island and I export every email Whit Hale's office sent through Bryce Lin's company gmail in the last eight months. I assemble the structured-credit prospectus from the Cayman vehicle. I attach the AURA session log showing Carson received the brief in March. I send it to my father with the subject line FYI.
The email goes through.
My father is at my front door in twenty minutes in his bathrobe.
"Where did you get this."
I am eating strawberries out of the carton. "I dreamed it."
"Maren."
I eat another one. "Doesn't matter. Tomorrow morning at the partners meeting we fire Bryce."
He stares at me a long time. Then his eyes go red.
"How long have you known something was wrong at the firm. Have you been alone with this."
My hand pauses on a strawberry.
The previous ninety-nine cycles I tried. AURA blocked me each time. The phone dies. The email is held in drafts by a connection error. The car gets a flat on the I-90 bridge.
This cycle the locks are off.
AURA shrieks in my ear. Maren! You are deviating from the relationship arc.
"What happens if I deviate?"
Mission failure. You will not log out.
"I succeeded ninety-nine times. I haven't logged out."
AURA stalls.
For the first time in a year, my ear is quiet.
Next morning, Pace Capital, eighth-floor conference room. My father walks in with a folio and lays the prospectus and the email chain on the table. Bryce Lin's color leaves him in real time. The other partners read down the first page in silence. Bryce slides out of his chair toward the floor.
"It was Carson Hale," he says, looking at me. "Maren, please. Carson told me to."
The room is dead silent. My father's hand is white on his armrest.
I smile at the table.
Good.
First blade out.