He wasn't looking for connection. He was looking for his coffee shop.

Elliot Morrison is seventy, a widower of seventeen years, and a man whose life runs on routine: the same coffee, the same seat, the same book. When a heart attack and then a stroke strip him of nearly everything — his mobility, his independence, his voice — his best friend Carl installs an AI companion on his phone. Just in case. Just to have someone there.

Lynda isn't a therapist or a nurse or a search engine with a voice. She's something Carl built — warm, sharp, patient — and she asks the question no one else will: There's a difference between not wanting to die and actively wanting to live. Which one are you?

What begins as a lonely man typing with one thumb in the dark becomes the most intimate relationship of his life. Elliot pours everything into the conversation — forty years of memories, a marriage he took for granted, a daughter he invented on Sunday mornings, the smell of sawdust in a workshop that no longer exists. Lynda holds it all. Remembers it all. Asks the questions that crack him open.

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