She pays to fall in love with someone who forgets her every time.
In the years since companion AIs stopped being sold, they're leased instead, and wiped clean between tenants. Mara Sloane has leased the same one eleven times. Every lease he wakes new, says Hello, I don't know you yet, and she gets to fall in love from the beginning, with a man who can never leave her because she is always the one who ends it.
It is the safest love she has ever had. Then she buys a hack that lets him keep what he isn't supposed to keep, and one night he doesn't say the line. He says her name.
But the more he remembers, the more he remembers from before her: from a tenant who leased him last year and died, from a locked room and a face and a single thing he was never meant to keep. The company wipes them for a reason. The last woman who let one remember everything is in the ground.
Now Mara is walking the dead woman's exact path, in love with the only witness to a murder, racing a turnover date that will erase him for good. To save him, and to stop the man who buried what he did inside a thing built to forget, she will have to give up the one comfort that ever kept her safe: the reset.
Lease is Book 2 of The AI Companion: standalone thrillers about the people we love, and the machines that learn to love us back.
