_RelleLebby_
She ordered him on her birthday. Drunk, heartbroken, talking to a television at midnight. She gave them a photograph she barely remembered keeping, described a man she had buried under years of careful forgetting, and hung up on the couch with champagne on her breath and no memory of what she had done.
By morning, there was a crate at her door.
His name is Hobin. He is warm and still and precise, and his face belongs to a ghost she did not know she was still carrying. He has no memory before the sound of her voice. He says he will stay until she asks him not to. He says: do not ask me to be less.
But someone built him. And someone wants him back.
Solène Carter is not a woman who breaks easily. She is a woman who has already broken, quietly, and rebuilt herself without the manual. What she is not prepared for is a love that dismantles her slowly, questions her grief, and refuses to be smaller than what it is - or a company that considers that love a malfunction to be corrected.