Chapter 1My Metric Dropped He Dropped Dead

Five years into my marriage with Benson Crawford, my life felt like something suspended in amber—warm, golden, and perfectly preserved.

But there was a catch. The invisible Affection Metric, the cosmic progress bar hovering in my mind’s eye, remained stubbornly frozen at 99%. It refused to tip over into absolute completion.

With the five-year deadline bearing down on me, I was spiraling. Desperate, I took to an anonymous fiction-writing subreddit. I framed my reality as a plot block, pretending I was an author asking the internet for advice on how to push my protagonists across the finish line.

Not long after I hit post, a comment shot to the top of the thread.

It read: Why even bother with the 'mission'? Just write it so the male lead figures out he’s nothing but a target for her survival game, and he stops loving her. The guy funding my life told me his wife is literally one of those 'system travelers'. He’s known the truth for ages. He’s just playing her for a fool right now.

Reading those words felt like someone had cracked a sheet of ice over my spine. The cold seeped directly into my marrow.

Below her comment, other users were tearing her apart, calling her unhinged. They accused her of sleeping with a married man and inventing a psychotic, sci-fi justification to sleep at night.

She replied, completely unfazed: Believe whatever you want. At the end of the day, his wife only sees him as a means to an end. So what if he plays a little game with her in return?

She wasn’t done. I’m his actual soulmate, she wrote. He even hired me as his assistant just so he could look at me all day. This evening, he insisted on cooking dinner for me and accidentally burned his hand. It gave him a nasty blister. I practically cried seeing it.

Attached to the reply was a photo. It was a man’s hand, wrapped in white gauze, secured with a very specific, painstakingly neat butterfly knot.

The air in my lungs vanished.

When Benson had walked through our front door earlier that evening, his hand was wrapped in gauze. And the knot was tied in that exact, identical butterfly.

* * *

A phantom ache bloomed in my chest, as if a vital organ was being slowly, methodically extracted with tweezers.

Beside me, Benson’s breathing was an even, rhythmic hum. I turned my head slightly, letting the pale moonlight map the quiet, peaceful lines of his sleeping face.

This was the Benson who would well up with genuine tears if I so much as scraped my knee. The Benson who, after I casually mentioned liking a specific truffle risotto at a charity gala, spent an obscene amount of money to buy the recipe from the chef.

Had the last half-decade been nothing but community theater?

I rested a trembling hand over my still-flat stomach. My doctor had confirmed the pregnancy just that morning.

Our fifth wedding anniversary was five days away. I had wanted a quiet evening, just the two of us, but he had insisted on throwing a lavish gala.

"I want to marry you all over again, every five years, for the rest of our lives," he had whispered into my hair.

I had planned to tell him at the gala. It was supposed to be the ultimate surprise. The child we had been praying for, the manifestation of our love, was finally here.

But it was all a set-up. The velvet ropes were fake; the stage was hollow.

Drawing a shaky breath, I slid out from under the duvet and carefully retrieved his phone from the nightstand.

A pathetic, desperate part of me still wanted to be wrong.

Maybe, I thought. Maybe it’s just a bizarre, astronomical coincidence.

His passcode was my birthday. The screen unlocked with a soft click.

I scoured his texts, his emails, his social media. Nothing. The digital landscape of his life was pristine. I was just letting out a ragged sigh of relief when a hidden, encrypted messaging app suddenly pushed a notification to the screen.

[I can’t sleep without you. Please don’t play house with that fake wife of yours tomorrow. Come be with me?]

I slammed the phone face-down onto the mattress. The world tilted on its axis, dissolving into white noise.

Minutes bled into hours before my hands stopped shaking enough to place the phone back on the nightstand. The slight movement stirred Benson. With a sleepy groan, he reached out, hauling my rigid body against his chest.

It was the same familiar, enveloping warmth I had craved for years. But tonight, it felt like a crypt.

The truth was, my original "mission" was supposed to end the moment we said our vows five years ago.

In my previous life, I was an orphan who died in a horrific pile-up on the interstate. I was reborn into this universe as an infant. I had lived over two decades here. My friends, my entire concept of home, and the man I loved—they were all here.

When the time came, I couldn't bear to leave. I begged the cosmic entity that governed my existence—the System—to let me stay.

The entity had agreed, striking a chilling bargain: [You may remain in this reality, Host. But you must secure his absolute, unquestioning devotion—a 100% Affection Metric—within five years. Failure to do so will result in your immediate erasure.]

I remembered laughing back then, overflowing with naive confidence. "I trust Benson," I had declared to the void.

Sitting in the dark, I opened the Reddit thread on my own phone again. The girl from the comments was still active.

[OP, seriously, drop the whole 'mission' plotline, she wrote. Write a story where the side chick gets the ring. It’s way hotter. I have a whole blog chronicling my romance with my guy. You can use it for inspiration! I’ll totally buy your book.]

Hot, angry tears finally broke over my lashes. With a vibrating finger, I clicked onto her profile.

Her most recent post was from today.

[My guy cooked for me and burned his hand. My heart hurts for him.]

The photo showed the broad, familiar shoulders of a man standing at a stove. He was wearing the bespoke charcoal suit I had picked out for him that morning.

A violent wave of nausea hit me. I slapped a hand over my mouth, bolted to the master bathroom, and dropped to my knees, dry-heaving into the porcelain until my throat tasted like copper.

It took me a long time to gather the strength to scroll further down her page.

[Our six-month anniversary! He dropped three million at an auction for this sapphire. He calls it the Heart of the Ocean.]

The picture showcased a breathtaking, deep-blue diamond pendant.

Benson had told me that sapphire symbolized eternal devotion. He had promised he was saving it for the right moment to give to me. Instead, it had been resting against another woman’s collarbone.

Eternal devotion.

God, it was almost funny.

[I’m going to be a mom! read a post from last month. He is beside himself. It’s his birthday today, and he said it’s the best present he’s ever gotten.]

I sat on the cold bathroom tiles, my blood turning to slush.

His birthday was early last month. I had spent six hours baking his favorite cake from scratch and preparing a five-course meal. I had warmed the food, watched it go cold, and warmed it again. He never came home.

When I finally called him near midnight, his voice had sounded strained.

"Baby, I am so sorry. A crisis blew up at the Seattle office and I had to jump on the jet. Go to sleep without me."

I had felt so bad for him. I had texted him to make sure he drank water and got some rest.

He hadn't been in Seattle. He had been celebrating his new family.

I scrolled past dozens of posts, each one a meticulous documentation of their love, each one a surgical strike to my chest. I read until I was completely, blissfully numb.

I stopped at her very first post.

[My wealthy guy says he’s going to take care of me forever! He told me his wife is just a sociopath using him for some cosmic arrangement, and that I’m his true love!]

The date stamp was exactly five years ago. The day of our wedding.

My phone slipped from my sweaty palm. It hit the tile with a sharp crack, the screen spider-webbing into a hundred jagged pieces.

At that exact moment, the cold, synthesized voice of the System echoed in the hollow of my skull.

[Warning. Affection Metric has dropped to 80%. If the metric reaches zero, erasure protocols will commence.]