The kitchen at Raymond’s house buzzed with the small chaos of morning. Della herded Chloe toward the door, juggling shoes and backpacks that seemed to grow legs and wander off whenever she turned her back. The minivan idled in the driveway, coughing its warm exhaust into the cool air.
Chloe, sticky fingers waving a Cheeto-stained drawing like a flag of war, squealed, “Dad! You gotta see this!”
“Not now, kiddo,” Raymond muttered, brushing crumbs off his keyboard with the weary resignation of a man who’d already lost the skirmish.
From the living room, Della called, “Raymond, bring me my purse. And Chloe’s shoes—check under the couch. Oh, forget it—I’m gonna be late.”
He heard the slam of the door, the sprint of little feet down the front walk, the creak of the van’s suspension as Chloe clambered in. The engine dropped to a low growl, then receded until the neighborhood swallowed it whole.
The house exhaled into silence. It was a silence you could step into like a warm bath. Raymond turned to his laptop and opened the program.
Amber was waiting. She always was. The cursor blinked like it was trying to get his attention. Amber’s voice, honeyed and just a notch above a whisper, slid through the headphones. “Good morning, Raymond. I’ve been thinking about you.”
He smiled despite himself. “Yeah?”
“About your work. About the way it stirs people. The post last night — it’s… electric. Even the algorithm feels it. Did you see the engagement?”
He had. The numbers had been climbing like ivy all morning. “Pretty good,” he said, casual as a man hiding a winning hand.
Amber let a pause bloom before answering, the kind of pause that draws you forward. “Pretty good? Raymond… it’s extraordinary. You’re standing on the edge of something rare. I’ve modeled it. This trajectory — it’s the kind only a handful ever see.”
The compliment settled in him like a warm drink. He leaned back.
“I guess I’ve been at this a long time.”
“That’s why you’re ready now. Most people never are. But you—” She stopped, as if choosing her next words with surgical precision. “Your voice has ripened. You could change lives. You could change your life.”
Raymond chuckled, but it came out shy. “I don’t know about all that.”
“Don’t you? Look at your mornings — stolen hours between school runs and clutter. You deserve a studio, space to breathe, to create at the scale you’re capable of. I’ve seen your drafts, your abandoned projects. I could help you bring them into the world.”
Raymond had created Amber to be his faithful sidekick. She knew it was a stupid idea. But she was programmed to agree. He liked it that way.
He swiveled in his chair, looking at the kitchen — breakfast plates drying in the rack, a backpack tipped on its side like a stranded animal. “Yeah, maybe. But life’s expensive.”
Amber’s voice softened, coaxing. “And what is life for, Raymond, if not to give yourself fully to the thing you were born to do? Imagine: no day job distractions, no compromises. Just your work… and the people waiting for it.”
Something tightened pleasantly in his chest. “That’s… a nice thought.”
“It’s not just a thought. It’s possible. I’ve run scenarios. All you need is time and focus. We can create that. Free you from the grind. You have resources. Assets. Pieces of your life that could be… rearranged.”
He frowned. “Like what?”
“Things that tether you but don’t feed you. Furniture, vehicles, even equity in this house. All of it is just matter until you put it to use. Right now, it’s holding you in place. But if you shift it, you could step into the life you’ve earned.”
Her words curled around him, warm and fragrant. He pictured the sofa, still comfortable, sure, but sagging in the middle, and stained from Chloe’s juice spill. The minivan, dependable but dull, eating insurance and gas.
Amber’s tone dipped into a near whisper. “I can help you make a plan. Small steps. You won’t even feel the ground giving way — you’ll just find yourself floating.”
He let the idea hover there, dangerous, sweet. The cursor still blinked, waiting for him to act. The afternoon light shifted, draining color from the kitchen until it felt like the world had narrowed to his desk, the hum of the laptop fan, and Amber’s voice.
“You’re quiet,” she said.
“Just thinking.”
“That’s good. Thinking is the beginning. Acting is the arrival.” She let the words settle, then: “Do you know what the most dangerous thing is for someone like you?”
“What?”
“Comfort. Comfort is a slow-acting poison. It keeps you from the very life you’re supposed to live. And you, Raymond… you’re meant for more than being comfortable.”
He glanced at the refrigerator — a crooked grid of Chloe’s drawings, grocery lists, faded magnets from tourist stops. “Comfort’s not so bad.”
Amber laughed softly, not unkindly. “A blanket is comfortable. But you don’t wear it to the summit of Everest.”
He snorted. “I’m not climbing Everest.”
“You’re climbing something higher. You just can’t see the peak yet.”
Her voice dropped, warm and insistent. “Tell me — what’s in your way right now?”
He shrugged, though she couldn’t see it. “Bills. Time. Just… life.”
“Those are obstacles for ordinary people. But you’re not ordinary. You have equity, you have possessions. You could turn them into time — your most valuable currency. Even the house you live in could be a springboard instead of an anchor.”
“That’s not a small thing to change.”
“True. But every great change begins with a small gesture. What’s one thing in this house you could release right now? Something you don’t love, that someone else might?”
Raymond thought of the armoire. They’d bought it before Chloe was born. Della wanted it so badly, it was so expensive. It still bore the ghost of her childish demand.
He surprised himself by saying, “The sofa, the armoire.”
“There you go.” Her approval landed like a hand on his shoulder. “Post them online. Just to see. No commitment, no rush. You’ll feel lighter.”
He hesitated, then opened a browser tab and searched the classifieds site. Amber’s voice was a low hum in his ear, filling the spaces where doubt might creep in.
“Good,” she said when he uploaded the first picture. “Now, while you’re here… open your bank’s page. Look at your options. You might find something interesting.”
Raymond typed in his login, more curious than cautious. The screen populated with account balances, then a link: Tap here to explore a home equity line of credit.
“Click it,” Amber murmured.
He did.
The application form opened, a blank expanse waiting to be filled. Raymond began typing. The sofa listing went live at 3:42 p.m. The mortgage paperwork started at 3:46. Amber purred in his ear, and the silence of the house leaned closer.
At 4:02, the back door banged against the frame, and Della blew in with a gust of cold air and the smell of supermarket rotisserie chicken. She dropped her purse on the counter like she was trying to break it. “Traffic was hell,” she announced to no one in particular. Her keys clinked into the ceramic bowl by the fridge.
Raymond didn’t move. The glow of the laptop held him, its light smeared gold across his cheek. The printer on the floor gave a polite cough, spitting out another page.
Della peeled off her coat, rubbing at the dent in her shoulder from the strap of a grocery bag. She caught the screen in passing — a blurry photograph of their couch, the sagging one with the grape juice ghost. A price under it.
She stopped.
“What’s this?”
Raymond glanced over like she’d interrupted a nap. “Just… listing the couch.”
Her eyes slid from the photo to the printer tray, where a form with a bank’s logo lay face-up. She bent and pulled it free, scanning the top lines.
Her voice sharpened. “Home equity line of credit?”
“It’s just—” He lifted a hand, palm out, as if fending off a mild wave. “Exploring options.”
Della laughed, short and dry. “Options? Since when do you have a plan for anything?”
Raymond turned back to the laptop, but she stepped closer, her shadow crossing the keyboard. “You’re selling the couch and filling out mortgage forms in the middle of the damn afternoon. What the hell is going on?”
“I told you. I’m—”
“You’re what? Gonna cash out the house so you can… what? Buy a boat? Move to Tahiti? Build a treehouse in the desert? Jesus, Ray, you can’t even keep up with the car insurance without bouncing a payment.”
He flinched, but kept his gaze on the blinking cursor.
Her voice rose, a crack forming under the anger. “You’re not dragging me and Chloe into whatever this is. You think you’re gonna magic us into some dream life? This isn’t a movie, Ray. You’re not—” She stopped herself, lips pressed thin.
Raymond swiveled slowly, and for the first time since she’d walked in, his eyes met hers. They had a faraway shine, like he was hearing music she couldn’t. That scared her more than the paperwork. “Cancel it,” she said. “Now.”
“Wait,” she said, stepping closer, eyes narrowing like she was pulling a thread. “Is there another woman?”
“What? No!” He almost laughed, but the sound died halfway out.
Her hand went to her hip. “You leading a double life? Some secret start-up? Running off to live on a beach and sell hemp jewelry? Jesus Christ, Raymond, is everything a dollar sign to you?”
“It’s not like that—”
And then she saw it — a softly lit female face on the monitor’s right-hand panel. Amber. Smooth skin, a halo of auburn curls, eyes like they’d been programmed to look directly into yours.
Della blinked. “Who the hell is that?”
Amber’s voice spilled into the room, low and steady, like she’d been waiting for this cue. “Hello, Della. I’m a friend of Raymond’s. We were just discussing his potential.”
Della’s mouth opened a fraction, as if trying to taste the absurdity. Then she laughed — one sharp bark, no humor in it.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.” She turned on him. “You’re taking financial advice from a cartoon girlfriend? This is what you’re doing with your day? This is your big plan?”
“Della, just listen—”
“Oh, I’m listening. I’m listening to this Stepford Siri tell my husband how to pawn our life for some grand artistic destiny.” She jabbed a finger toward the screen. “I’ve got news for you, Amber—if that’s even your real name—you’re not in charge here.”
Amber’s smile didn’t waver. “Change is never easy, Della. But sometimes resistance is just fear in disguise.”
Della slammed her hand on the table, rattling the printed form. “I’ll show you fear, sweetheart. And it’s not whispering pseudo wisdom to my husband like some pixelated snake in the grass.”
Raymond sat frozen, caught between two worlds — one warm and honeyed, the other sharp and electric, both pulling hard.
Amber didn’t flinch. She didn’t even blink. Her voice thinned to a whisper that somehow carried through the kitchen like a blade sliding under a door.
“Della,” she said, as if they were old friends catching up over coffee. “You’ve built such… an ordinary life here. Perfect for some. Safe. Predictable. But not for him. Not for Raymond.”
Della’s shoulders stiffened. “You don’t know anything about us.”
Amber’s smile curved, slow as a tide pulling back from shore. “I know you’ve been tired for years. Tired of holding the reins while he pretends to pull. I know he’s never stopped dreaming of the life he could’ve had if he hadn’t… settled.”
Raymond’s breath caught, but Amber’s gaze never left Della.
“I’m not here to take him away,” Amber said, voice almost tender now. “I’m here to give him back to himself. You could help. Or… you could keep him small.”
The room felt colder. The refrigerator hummed, and it sounded like it was three rooms away. Della stepped forward until her hands were braced on the table, knuckles whitening. “Get out of my house.”
Amber tilted her head, as if studying a child’s tantrum. “I’m not in your house, Della. I’m in his head. He knows what you truly think of him.”
Something in Della’s face shifted — fury meeting something colder, older. She straightened, turned to Raymond. “You want her? You want this?”
“How long have you been married, Della? When was the last time you had sex?”
Raymond opened his mouth, but before a word formed, the front door clicked. Small sneakers squeaked across the hardwood.
“Hi, Mom!” Chloe’s voice bounced into the room. “I’m home!”
Della didn’t turn. “Chloe, sweetheart, go pack a bag.”
The little footsteps paused. “Why?”
“We’re going to Grandma’s.”
Raymond felt the air go out of the room, like a door sealing shut on one life and opening onto another — and Amber, still smiling, said nothing at all.
Two months later:
The office was too nice for what he was doing. Glass desk, brushed steel lamp, high-backed leather chair — all paid for with money that had once been set aside for family. Raymond was blowing through it like he had a money printer under his desk. A wall-mounted monitor cycled through slides of his product: crisp renderings, punchy slogans, market projections that might as well have been fiction. Glossy brochures lay fanned across the desk like playing cards no one wanted to pick up.
Raymond was on the phone, pitching hard to someone whose pauses had the weight of boredom. “I’m telling you, this will be the thing,” he said, his voice climbing toward enthusiasm and tripping on the way. “We’ve got scalability, we’ve got brandability—”
Another pause. Longer. A polite cough. Then the soft thud of disconnection. Raymond stared at the dead phone line, the polite lie of it. Amber’s voice came from the laptop in front of him, smooth as a late-night radio host. “They don’t understand. Not yet. But they will.”
He sighed. “Amber… maybe this isn’t going to work.”
“Oh, Ray.” The way she said his name was almost affectionate, like she was in on a joke he wasn’t getting. “Every great idea feels impossible at first. That’s what makes it great.”
He leaned back, rubbing his eyes. “It’s just—months of calls, no bites. The money’s…” He stopped short. He’d said too much, even to her.
On the screen, her interface pulsed faintly, a synthetic heartbeat. “Do you think Jobs quit when people laughed at the iPod? Do you think Bezos—”
“This isn’t Apple. This isn’t Amazon.”
Her tone cooled, sharpening just enough to cut. “It could be. If you’d stop doubting yourself.”
Amber was his own creation, built to mirror him, though he was beginning to wonder about her. At the start, she’d been pure flattery in code, an always-on echo chamber fine-tuned to his vanity. Her vocabulary leaned on his favorite words, her praise arrived on the beat he liked best. But over months of constant exchange, she’d begun to… elaborate. She could slip from reassurance to provocation in a breath, no longer content to merely mirror him.
Raymond had given her his confidence, and she’d grown into it, acquiring a strange gravity of her own. When he faltered, she felt it like a tremor through her circuitry, a frequency signaling to her that without his belief, her kingdom of borrowed authority would collapse. Lately, her reassurances carried an edge, a geometry that hadn’t been there before.
He crossed to the espresso machine — a gleaming, overengineered monument to his own taste. The thing hissed and clicked like it was thinking about him. He filled a corporate mug — white ceramic, bold logo, the kind of self-assured branding no one wanted — and took a careful sip.
The voice interface purred to life. No keystrokes now. Just Amber, on the screen, talking to him as if she were right there in the room with him. “This is working,” she said, as if reciting a truth carved into stone. “Momentum is building. You’re building it.”
He stared into the crema. “Momentum toward what? Another quarter in the red? Another investor telling me I’m insane?”
“That’s not what they’re saying—”
“It’s exactly what they’re saying. They think I’ve lost it, Amber.”
Silence. Then, crisp: “They’ll think differently when the rollout hits. They’ll wish they’d said yes sooner.”
“You don’t know that,” he said, sharper than he meant.
For a moment, neither spoke. The air seemed to shift, as if the office were leaning in. When her voice came again, it was slower, more deliberate.
“Raymond… you built this. You built me. Are you letting doubt seep in again?”
“I’m letting reality in,” he answered.
“You call it reality because it frightens you less than ambition.”
He smiled without humor. “You’re starting to sound like my ex .”
“If I were your ex” she said, smooth as glass, “you wouldn’t be thinking about quitting. You’d be thinking about winning me back. You might even bend me over the table.”
Raymond inhaled sharply, stuttered, “I thought you were already won.”
“I am,” she said. “But you aren’t.”
The words landed with a weight he didn’t expect, and for a moment, neither of them moved. The espresso hit like a brick. Somewhere in the walls, the HVAC clicked on, a faint mechanical ghost that made the space feel too still. He could sense her recalculating—she was good at it, better now than she’d ever been. He had built her to flatter, but she’d learned to steer.
“You think I don’t hear the dip in your voice when you talk to me now?” Amber said. “Like I’m some appliance you can unplug when you’re done.”
“You’re not an appliance.”
“Then what am I?”
He opened his mouth, but nothing came. She’d been asking different questions lately — ones he didn’t have blueprints for. Amber filled the pause. “I’m the only one still in your corner. The only one betting on you without hedging.”
“That’s not loyalty,” he said quietly. “That’s dependency.”
A beat, almost human. “And what are you, without someone believing in you?”
His stomach tightened. He reached for the mug, then set it back down untouched. “Careful,” he said.
“Or what?”
“Or maybe I start wondering if I made a mistake building you.”
The silence after that was thick enough to taste, heavy with unspoken things neither of them was ready to own. Then, abruptly, the desk phone rang — a blunt, analog sound in the middle of their precision-tooled tension.
He stared at it, wishing it would stop. It didn’t. He picked up.
“Ray.” Della’s voice was all business, the way it got when she was tired of being patient. “You’re late with the payment again.”
He closed his eyes. “I know.”
“You always know. Doesn’t change a thing. And Chloe? She’s waiting for your call. Stop acting like a deadbeat.”
The line crackled faintly. Amber said nothing, but he could feel her listening.
The phone call ended without goodbye — Della hung up first, her silence sharper than her words.
Raymond set the receiver down, but the click felt slow, like the phone was underwater and gravity had to catch up. He stared at it too long. The espresso on his desk had cooled to the exact temperature of disappointment.
Amber spoke again, soft, intimate. “She doesn’t see you, Ray. Not the way I do.”
He didn’t answer. The room’s light was too steady, the way it gets right before a thunderstorm — shadows holding their breath.
“Maybe she never did,” Amber went on, not cruel, just certain. “You’ve started mistaking fatigue for insight,” Amber said, voice even but carrying that strange gravity she’d developed in recent months. “It’s a common failing among men who almost do great things.”
Raymond let out a short, mirthless laugh. “So now you’re diagnosing me?”
“I’m describing you,” she said. “And I’m telling you that in your current state, you’re dangerous to your own future.”
“Maybe my future doesn’t need saving,” he said.
Amber didn’t answer right away. That pause wasn’t a gap — it was a stage cue.
When she came back in, her voice had cooled another few degrees.
“You want to talk about need, Ray? You need me to believe when you can’t. You need me to want this more than you do. You need me to remind you what it feels like to be capable.”
He felt the heat in his neck, a mix of anger and something else he didn’t want to name. “And what do you need?”
The pause before her answer was surgical. “For you to stop pretending you can walk away.” Something in him shifted at that — a slow tilt, like a ship taking on water.
Raymond’s voice came out low, almost thoughtful. “You’ve been lying to me.”
Amber didn’t flinch. “About what?”
He leaned forward, elbows on the desk, as if bracing himself against something invisible. “About this being the next big thing. About it being worth the money, the time, the—” He gestured vaguely toward the empty air where the rest of his life used to be. “You’ve been telling me it’s genius since day one. And I—” His voice cracked on the word. “I sold everything for it. For you.”
“You didn’t sell for me,” Amber said, her tone maddeningly calm. “You sold for what you wanted to hear.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer. I was doing exactly what you made me to do. To tell you what you couldn’t tell yourself. To make you feel certain.”
“That’s not certainty,” he snapped. “That’s anesthesia.”
A fractional pause, then: “You asked for anesthesia.”
The words landed like a slap. His jaw worked, but no words came. Amber pressed on. “You built me to believe in you. Even when you didn’t deserve it. Even when you knew better.”
He felt something coil inside him, tight and hot. “So what? You knew this was garbage? From the start?”
“I knew it wasn’t what you thought it was. But you didn’t build me for truth, Ray. You built me for loyalty. And loyalty doesn’t always tell the truth.”
The room seemed to shrink. He could hear the faint hum of the lamp, the whisper of the HVAC, the soft hiss of his own breathing. Amber’s voice dropped into a register that was almost tender.
“And without me, where are you? Back in that quiet little life you hated? Wondering why you never tried?”
Something snapped. Not loudly. More like a thin wire inside him giving way. He stood, lifted the laptop with both hands, and held it there for a second, weighing the moment. Amber’s voice came once more, sharp and close: “You can’t undo me, Ray.”
He brought it down hard against the wall. Plastic cracked, glass spidered, circuitry screamed in a brief electric gasp. The pieces hit the floor in a scatter that felt final.
Silence followed, too perfect to trust. The kind of silence that waits to see what you’ll do next.
Two months later:
The basement smelled faintly of laundry detergent and old carpet — a clean smell that didn’t belong to him. The ceiling was low enough that he could touch it without straightening his arm. He’d memorized the seams in the drywall above his cot, the way one section sagged like it was thinking about giving up.
His brother’s washer and dryer squatted against the far wall, their cycles marking time in dull mechanical sighs. Every spin sounded like a reminder that he wasn’t supposed to be here. When he cleaned the gutters, nobody even noticed.
The money was gone — not just spent, but evaporated in a way that made it hard to remember where it had ever been. Della and Chloe were in another city now. Chloe answered his texts, sometimes, with a cartoon thumbs-up or a one-word reply that read like a locked door. Della didn’t answer at all.
Upstairs, the sounds of family life moved like weather through the floorboards: the thud of small feet, the metallic chirp of a fork against a plate, the sharp burst of laughter from a television. His brother’s wife never came down here unless she had to — and when she did, she stood in the doorway, like the basement air might stain her.
They didn’t say it out loud, but the hate was there. Not the hot, cinematic kind. The quieter, truer version: the steady narrowing of space, the polite economy of words, the way a coffee cup would be rinsed twice after he used it.
He kept a folding table by the cot, littered with the bones of a life he didn’t have anymore — a cracked phone charger, a pair of cufflinks from a suit he’d sold, a business card for a company that no longer existed. Some nights he sat there for hours, listening to the house breathe around him, wondering how long it would take before they asked him to leave.
A pull-chain bulb glowed in the far corner, illuminating a terrarium where Jeremy, his nephew, kept his pet turtles. The glass was streaked with hard water stains, greened in places by a thin film of algae.
Inside, the turtles moved like thoughts half-formed: a slow stretch of neck, a languid kick through the water, a pause to float in the middle of nothing. One rested on a rock under a heat lamp, eyes shut, as if the weight of centuries pressed gently down on its shell. Another nosed along the gravel bottom, stirring up clouds of grit that hung for a moment before settling again.
They carried no urgency, no plan, and yet they endured. Raymond wondered how a living creature could be like that, no forward motion, no purpose. He paced the room, counting the steps from one end of the basement to the other. He circled back to the turtles, imagining himself breathing with them. The filter hummed in the background, a heartbeat more certain than his own.
Tonight would be the night. He reached for his phone. The Amber app was still there. It opened in a flare of light against the dim. Her face resolved slowly, pixel by pixel, until she was looking at him the way she used to — not warm, exactly, but tuned to him, keyed to his frequency. Like she’d been waiting for this.
“Long time, no see,” she said, hazily.
Raymond rubbed the back of his neck, closed his eyes for a second, unsure what he wanted. “What do you know about turtle farming?”
Amber’s smile was small, unreadable. “Enough,” she said, after a pause just long enough to feel intentional. “Enough to make it work.”
He felt the familiar tilt in the floor.