By the third day, Lyra understood something had changed.
Not inside her. Around her.
People noticed.
It began small. The café manager asked her opinion on the playlist. A customer waited for her instead of switching lines. At the print shop, her supervisor used her name twice in one conversation, as if testing how it sounded.
She told herself it was coincidence.
But the city did not deal in coincidence.
Kade texted her every morning. Nothing dramatic. Simple observations. A photo of the skyline before sunrise. A line from a book he was reading. Once, just her name.
Lyra.
Seeing it lit up on her screen felt like a door opening somewhere she had sealed long ago.
They met again that evening, this time at his place. High above the city, glass walls framing a world she had only ever looked up at. She stood near the window, hands folded, feeling too small for the space.
"You don't have to be careful here," Kade said, watching her.
"I don't know how not to be," she replied.
He did not touch her right away. He let the silence stretch, respectful, patient. When he finally reached for her, it was slow, deliberate. Like he understood that trust was not something to rush.
Their kiss was soft, then deep, then unsteady. It felt like learning a language she had always known but never spoken aloud. When he pulled back, his forehead rested against hers.
"You do this to me," he murmured. "You make everything else fade."
She did not answer. She could not. The truth pressed too close to her chest.
Later, wrapped in the quiet of his apartment, she asked the question that had been sitting between them.
"Why me?"
He did not pretend not to understand. "Because you don't want anything from me," he said. "And because when I'm with you, I don't feel like an idea. I feel like a person."
That scared her more than his wealth ever could have.
The first crack appeared the following week.
She was leaving work when a black car idled at the curb. The window rolled down slowly, revealing a woman with sharp eyes and a perfectly composed smile.
"You must be Lyra," the woman said. "I'm Kade's mother."
Lyra's stomach tightened.
"I'd like to have a conversation," she continued. "Before this becomes something… inconvenient."
The word lingered long after the car pulled away.
That night, Kade did not answer his phone.
Lyra lay awake, staring at the ceiling, understanding something she should have known from the start.
She had not been chosen by him.
She had been activated.
And the city had noticed.