Page 6 of In Love With Mr. Wrong

I turn to face him fully. “I’m not trying to clean it. I’m trying to understand it. There’s something wrong. The match outputs from last night don’t align with the models. We’re getting edge-case anomalies that weren’t there before.”

Grayson folds his arms. “Maybe the problem isn’t sabotage. Maybe it’s the system itself. Maybe you built something too perfect for real people.”

“Don’t do that.” My voice sharpens. “Don’t act like I haven’t considered that. But you didn’t see what I saw in those test runs. You didn’t live in that data for three years. This isn’t a misfire. It’s interference.”

His eyes narrow. “You’re serious. You think someone’s tampering with it.”

“I know someone is.” I walk across the room, grabbing my tablet from the console table. I bring up the match logs, flipping it toward him. “Look at the timestamp pattern. The last two updates were pushed from an unauthorized node, on our internal server.”

He stares at it, jaw clenched. But instead of being alarmed, he just shakes his head.

“You’re spiraling,” he says.

“I’m analyzing.”

“No, you’re clinging to the one thing you think can’t fail you. And maybe that’s the problem. You trust the algorithm more than you trust people.”

I blink, stunned.

His voice softens. “Including me.”

A beat passes. Then another. I set the tablet down like it’s suddenly too heavy to hold. “You think I’m paranoid.”

“I think you’re scared. And when you get scared, you hide behind control. Behind code.”

The words land like a blow I wasn’t braced for.

But I don’t break. I just straighten. “And you? You hide behind ideals. You think love should be messy and poetic and unplanned. But maybe it doesn’t have to be chaos to be real.”

He walks to the windows now, mirroring where I stood earlier. “Maybe. Or maybe you can’t calculate your way through a world that was never meant to be clean.”

Silence stretches between us like wire, tight and dangerous. We stand there, in opposite corners of the same room, both holding truths that won’t bend to meet in the middle.

When he finally turns to face me, his eyes are unreadable. “So what now?”

I want to tell him everything. That I’m scared too. That I hate this space growing between us, the way our words now land like loaded questions instead of lifelines. But I don’t say any of that. I don’t know how. So instead, I go with instinct.

“We keep going,” I say, my voice quiet but certain. “We protect what we’ve built. But we do it carefully. Intentionally.”

He nods once, the movement small but resolute. “Uneasy truce, then?”

I nod back, mirroring him. “Uneasy truce.”

But even as I say it, I feel the distance settle between us like a third presence in the room. Something cracked between us, fine as hairline fractures, but no less dangerous. The kind of damage you don’t see until it’s too late.

We move past each other with the kind of caution usually reserved for strangers or diplomats, aware that one wrong word could tip the whole night sideways. He disappears down the hall without another glance, and I stay where I am, watching the skyline blink against the dark. Not broken. Not yet. But close enough that I can feel the fault lines beneath my feet. And maybe that’s why I don’t sleep that night.

Because after Grayson retreats to the other side of the penthouse and I’m left alone with the city lights and a quiet I can’t ignore, I feel it in my bones, that tug of instinct, that whisper that won’t let go. If there’s even a chance the algorithm’s being manipulated, I need to find out who’s behind it.

I’ll pull the security logs. Reconstruct the source code from last week’s rollback. Cross-reference usage anomalies. I know the system better than anyone. If something’s been tampered with, I’ll find it. Because I didn’t buildPerfectly Matchedto be perfect, I built it to be honest. And if someone’s using it to lie, then I’ll uncover the truth. Even if it means uncovering something I don’t want to see.

6

GRAYSON

It’s just past three in the morning when I find her. The light from her office spills into the darkened hallway of the penthouse like a soft, digital glow. The rest of the world is silent. New York has finally gone still outside, its usual sirens and engines dulled into occasional murmurs against the glass. But inside? Inside it feels like the eye of a storm. Not calm. Just suspended.

I walk in barefoot, my black T-shirt rumpled, grey sweats hanging low on my hips. The marble floor is cool beneath my feet. I don’t say anything right away, I just watch her. Margot is curled over her desk, tablet in one hand, laptop open to a wall of code I can’t make sense of. She’s in one of my old hoodies now, navy, oversized, sleeves bunched up around her elbows. Her hair’s in a messy knot, her face bare and flushed from too much screen light and not enough sleep. But it’s her eyes that stop me. Sharp. Focused. On fire. She doesn’t hear me until I step closer.

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