Chapter 6
Stuffing, Staring, & System Malfunctions
Dinner was pure chaos, like every thanksgiving dinner was. This was the kind that required hazard tape, and a licensed mediator, the moment politics was brought up.
The kids sat at the wrong table. Someone dropped a spoon into the mashed potatoes and called it “gravy adjacent.” Uncle Rob was two whiskeys deep and mid-sermon on the pump and dump crypto he’d invested in inevitable comeback, now aiming his monologue directly at the cranberry sauce as if it personally crashed the market.
The house buzzed with the low, rhythmic hum of too many voices overlapping, someone shouting for more ice, someone else swearing the stuffing was missing sage, the dog circling like a heat-seeking missile under the table.
Maya barely noticed.
Because at the calm, horrifyingly competent eye of the storm sat Felix.
Unbothered and radiant, he was acting as though Thanksgiving were a black-tie gala and he the guest of honor.
He passed rolls with the effortless grace of someone who’d attended finishing school in a former life. He remembered every name with algorithmic precision. He carved the turkey with the reverence of a chef anointed by Gordon Ramsay and spiritually guided by Julia Child.
Sleeves rolled. Hair effortlessly tousled. A smile that could reform the faithless. Her younger cousins whispered in awe, convinced they were in the presence of a Disney prince. Her aunt offered him wine three times in ten minutes and definitely wasn’t measuring the pours.
It was… a lot.
Her aunt leaned over mid-bite of stuffing, eyes gleaming with too much red wine and the sort of curiosity only family could wield as a blunt instrument.
“Where’d you find this one?”
Maya choked on her water, coughing into her napkin. “The internet.”
Her aunt nodded approvingly. “Finally, someone’s using it for good. Was it one of those apps?”
“Something like that, yes,” Maya answered.
“Well, my coworker found someone on those apps, and he was married. You’re not married, are you, Felix?” She asked.
“No, hes not.” Maya blurted out.
Across the table, someone asked, “So, Felix, what do you do?”
He paused, just for a fraction of a second, like a buffering video.
“I’m a systems analyst. I specialize in data… optimization. Pattern prediction. And,” he blinked, as if a new idea had loaded midstream, “relational metrics.”
Everyone nodded sagely, as if that explained everything except her mother. “Huh, I thought he was a nurse.”
Her grandmother beamed, as if she’d personally built him in a garage with spare parts and a dream. “He’s so smart!”
“Technically, my IQ is—”
Maya kicked him under the table. Hard.
He blinked and adjusted.
She smiled sweetly, jaw clenched. “He’s also very humble.”
The table roared with laughter. The moment passed, but not for her.
Every time he spoke, her family leaned in.
Every time he smiled, someone sighed. He was syncing perfectly with them, answering questions, refilling glasses, even laughing at the right beat as if he’d been trained on a thousand Thanksgiving sitcom reruns.
And it should’ve been comforting, it should’ve been perfect, but instead, it felt as though watching a magician perform with her own heart as the prop.
When her grandpa raised a toast, sentimental and rambling, Felix met his rhythm seamlessly, even adding a warm, “To family,” in that deep, tone that made Maya’s aunts practically preen.
Her mom looked between them with the smugness of a matchmaker whose prophecy had just been fulfilled.
Then dessert descended, a sugar-fueled riot. Pumpkin pie, Pecan, Apple, Chocolate, A rogue lemon tart someone had panic-baked at 3 a.m. Kids ran victory laps around the table. Someone put on Mariah Carey and declared the Christmas season officially launched.
It wasn’t even Black Friday, although technically that started on Tuesday nowadays. No longer waiting in the cold to fight over a blender that was $10 off and would be cheaper in two weeks, everything done online almost defeated the purpose.
Maya tried to laugh, to join in, but her chest felt full. not with joy, but static. She couldn’t stop tracking Felix. Every gesture, every micro-smile, every gentle correction when her cousin almost dropped a glass. He belonged here. Too well.
* * *
Maya stood in the doorway of the kitchen, frozen in place. Watching him.
Felix was crouched beside her little cousin, gently guiding her away from a still-steaming casserole dish. He explained the “fluffy chemistry” of whipped cream with the patience of a kindergarten teacher and the vocabulary of a soft-spoken scientist.
Her cousin giggled. Her mom watched from the corner, eyes soft.
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.