Page 13 of The Stuffing Situation

And Maya… she didn’t move.

His voice was warm. His presence is undeniably real.

And something in her chest cracked open — a fault line splitting down the center.

She could almost hear Blair’s voice in her head:You wanted proof he’s real? Congratulations. He’s passing the Turing test and the mother-in-law one, too.

Felix looked up and, of course, caught her staring.

Abort. Abort. Don’t be emotionally seen by the manifestation of your loneliness in a cable-knit sweater.

“Stop looking at me like that,” he murmured as he brushed past her, a pie tin in hand.

“I’m not looking at you like anything,” she snapped, too fast, too defensive.

“You’re very flushed,” he said calmly. “Would you like a cool compress again?”

“Felix.”

“Yes?”

“Stop saying things that make me want to climb you like a bookshelf.”

He tilted his head. “But I am structurally sound and well-balanced,”

“Felix!”

But she was laughing, and that was the problem, because this was working.

Too well.

As if he belonged here, as if he always had, and the more she watched her family love him, fold him into their dysfunction like he’d always been part of it, the more it scared her because he wasn’t supposed to fit.

He was supposed to glitch and then fade into the uncanny.

But now?

Now she wasn’t sure who the glitch really was. Maybe it wasn’t the system that broke when she made him, perhaps it was her.

She turned back toward the table, watching her family laugh around him, the people who’d known her all her life and still, somehow, had never looked at her quite the way he did.

And that, she realized, was the most dangerous part.

Because if she wasn’t careful, she might start believing he was real.

7

System Override, Initiate Full Body Worship

“Alright!” Maya’s mom clapped her hands as if she were a kindergarten teacher about to dismiss a classroom. “Everyone out. Leftovers are packed, the dishwasher’s full, and we’re going to see that movie with the hot Irish priest.”

Maya blinked. “Wait, you’re going?”

Her mom slung her purse over one shoulder, already halfway to the door. “Me, Aunt Dana, Grandma. The three of us need two hours without grandkids, casseroles, or crypto talk.”

She paused at the threshold, then turned to them.

“And you,” she added, finger pointed, “need time with your lovely man.”