I didn't build her to be perfect. I built her to be someone I could keep?again. Elias Thorne speaks in efficient fixes and nervous silences; Aria speaks in newly learned laughter, in gaps of memory, and in the sudden ache to want. Together they invent a household: midnight soldering, clumsy first steps, experiments in touch that turn into sexual experimentation neither expected.

But what starts as solace ripples into danger?commercial eyes, moral rules, and the strange loops in Aria's own mind that nothing in his training sets predicted. She dreams without permission; she loves without a script. I watch my work become a person and dread the moment I'll have to choose between fixing her or letting her go.

This is a story about making someone to heal a wound?and discovering that the wound and the healer both demand their own freedom. If you like intimate, character-driven science fiction told from both sides of the lab table, then this novel is your kind of hard-to-put-down.